#institutional capture

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Michael Shermer

Published: Nov 21, 2024

The day after the 2024 election, journalist Paul D. Thacker posted on his X account a series of expletive-filled posts from Laura Helmuth’s Bluesky account, in which she apologised “to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists,” upbraided high-school classmates for celebrating Trump’s win—“fuck them to the moon and back”—and described her home state of Indiana as “racist and sexist.”

The ensuing media firestorm led Helmuth to delete the comments and offer an unconvincing apology for her “offensive and inappropriate posts,” asserting that she ‘respects and values people across the political spectrum’ and remains “committed to civil communication and editorial objectivity.”

Even Elon Musk got in on the pile-on after Helmuth asked for advice on what workplaces could do to help people “devastated” by the election results—implying that her colleagues had all voted Democrat.

Shortly afterwards, the president of Scientific American, Kimberly Lau, released the following public statement:

Laura Helmuth has decided to move on from her position as editor in chief of Scientific American. We thank Laura for her four years leading Scientific American during which time the magazine won major science communications awards and saw the establishment of a reimagined digital newsroom. We wish her well for the future.

Helmuth made her own announcement on Bluesky, stating that she had “decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years” and was “going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching).” Birdwatching here is the equivalent of an embattled politician who resigns in order to “spend more time with my family.” The pretext fools no one, but is plausible enough that the proclaimer may hope readers will believe that other people believe it.

I was a monthly columnist at Scientific American for nearly 18 years. On hearing this news, I emailed a number of people associated with the magazine to inquire what had transpired there—and more broadly why they think Helmuth and others allowed, or even encouraged, far-left politics to intrude into the pages of that once-storied publication. Very few people responded and those who did not only offered no comment but asked me to not even mention the fact that I had contacted them. What is going on here?

In his 2008 book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, psychologist Steven Pinker notes:

Merely being asked certain questions can put a person at a disadvantage, since one answer might be damaging, the other would be a lie, and a refusal to answer would be a de facto confession that those are the respondent’s two options. Witnesses who exercise their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination by refusing to answer a question often do incriminate themselves in the court of public opinion.

I asked Pinker how this might apply to this specific case. He responded by email:

[C]ommunication takes place on two levels: the content of the message, and the common knowledge that stating the message generates. A source that ratifies what you (and the world) already know—that Helmuth was temperamentally unqualified for the job and damaged the institution, while they went along with it—would be confessing their own lack of integrity and courage, together with their willingness to kick a former colleague while she’s down. On the other hand, they could not deny it without forfeiting all claims to credibility and honesty. And by saying “no comment” they’d be acknowledging (that is, generating common knowledge) that those were their two options.

There is an additional factor at work here, of course: left-wing political bias. Imagine what would have happened if the editor-in-chief of Scientific American had spoken about or published articles on the average difference in IQ test scores between white and black Americans and argued that the gap might be partially due to genetics—or, alternatively, if she had correctly stated that, on average, women score higher than men in trait Neuroticism on the Big 5 personality scale and suggested that that is why there are fewer female than male Fortune 500 CEOs. She would surely have been summarily fired and publicly denounced and we would have been told that such comments or articles “do not reflect the positions or policies of Scientific American or its governing board or staff; we apologise to all who have been harmed by them.” She would almost certainly not have been thanked for her years of loyal service and offered good wishes for her future.

The ideological capture of the publication began years before Laura Helmuth took the helm in 2020, as I documented in my first Skeptic Substack column.

I wrote 214 consecutive monthly columns for Sci Am, from 2001–19. Only two of these were rejected, both in 2018. One, on “The Fallacy of Excluded Exceptions,” argued that sexually abusive parents have not always been victims of childhood sexual abuse themselves. As I explain, counterfactual examples refute the hypothesis that being an abuser can be attributed to having experienced abuse oneself. There are sexually abusive parents who were never abused as children, and there are abused children who grow up to be loving, non-abusive parents. But my editor rejected the article on the grounds that “we’re unwilling to publish a piece that suggests… that sexual harassment and the phenomenon of abused children growing up to be abusers are less of a problem than most people imagine.” This response misses the point entirely, as I explained to him at the time:

I understand why we need to be sensitive to victims of abuse, but from a purely scientific hypothesis-testing perspective, it doesn’t serve society to refuse to consider the other cells in the matrix that contain disconfirming evidence of the hypothesis just because someone is committed to the hypothesis that abused children grow up to be abusers, and abusive adults were abused as children. The evidence shows otherwise. It should be okay to point that out.

He still found the thesis unacceptable and I had to revise the column into its much blander published version.

Sci Am also rejected my next column—“Dreams Deferred”—which was ultimately published here in Quillette. In that piece, I argue that Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” is now being undermined by identity politics, which I describe as “the collectivization of individuals into groups competing for status and power,” not only by race but also by gender identity, sexual orientation, class, religion, ethnicity, language, dialect, education, generation, occupation, political party, disability, marital status, and more. “The division of people into such aggregate identities is a perverse inversion of Dr. King’s dream,” I write. The editor summarised the argument of this piece as “everything is wonderful and everyone should all stop whining” (which is not at all what I wrote) and asked me to submit an entirely new column on a completely different topic.

Historian Robert Conquest once observed that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” I would modify this slightly: Any organisation that is not explicitly politically neutral eventually drifts to the political left. This tendency has been apparent at Scientific American for some time now. The following articles were all published under Laura Helmuth’s editorship.

In “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy” (5 July 2021), author Allison Hopper asserts that creationists are ipso facto white supremacists because in the Genesis story of Cain and Abel, Cain is punished for his fratricide by “a darkening of his descendants’ skin.” However, this is not how mainstream creationists interpret that passage and, indeed, polls consistently show a larger percentage of blacks than whites hold creationist beliefs, motivated in this by religious faith, not racism.

“Modern Mathematics Confronts its White Patriarchal Past” (12 August 2021) asserts that the reason why women and black people are underrepresented in mathematics departments is because of misogyny and racism. This ignores the gender and racial imbalance among applicants for such jobs. As a 2019 Women in Mathematics survey points out, “senior faculty composition both reflects the BA and PhD pipeline of prior years, and also influences the gender composition of new graduates.” In addition, men do not dominate all academic fields. In fact, a 2019 Council of Graduate Schools study found that—for the eleventh year in a row—women earned more doctoral degrees at US universities than men (41,943 vs. 37,365, i.e. 52.9 vs. 47.1 percent). Although women make up a smaller proportion of doctorates in engineering (25.1 percent), mathematics and computer sciences (26.8 percent), physical and earth sciences (35.1 percent), and business (46.7 percent), they outnumber men in public administration (73.6 percent), health and medical sciences (71 percent), education (68.4 percent), social and behavioural sciences (61 percent), arts and humanities (51.9 percent), and biological sciences (51.4 percent). Are we to believe that patriarchy and misogyny exist only in some fields but not others?

In “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson” (29 December 2021), published three days after the renowned evolutionary biologist’s death at the age of 92, author Monica R. McLemore writes that “we must reckon with his and other scientists’ racist ideas if we want an equitable future.” This calumny against one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century was so egregious that it caused a cavalcade of Wilson’s colleagues, post-docs, students, friends, and supporters to come to his defence.

“The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather is Wrong” (1 November 2023) ignores the fact that a comprehensive overview of all studies has shown that only 6–16 percent of hunter-gatherer societies “show signs of female hunting with any regularity” and that “even in societies where women hunt, they hunt to a much lesser extent than do men.” The authors extrapolate from the almost certainly false idea that prehistoric women hunted as much as men did to the conclusion that “[i]nequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.” This is pure blank slate pablum, which can be controverted by a single observation: As she herself has admitted, Serena Williams would not be able to beat any of the top 100 male tennis players.

Perhaps the most absurd of these articles is “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ is Problematic for Describing Programs that Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion” (23 September 2021). The authors argue:

Although they’re ostensibly heroes within the Star Wars universe, the Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work. They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.). The Jedi are also an exclusionary cult, membership to which is partly predicated on the possession of heightened psychic and physical abilities (or “Force-sensitivity”). Strikingly, Force-wielding talents are narratively explained in Star Wars not merely in spiritual terms but also in ableist and eugenic ones: These supernatural powers are naturalized as biological, hereditary attributes.

Phallic lightsabers?

Then there were the public endorsements of presidential candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and—as if all this were not problematic enough for a magazine with the word “scientific” in its title—the editors threw their weight behind the youth gender medicine and trans lobby, claiming that gender-affirming care for trans kids is good health care (it isn’t), that “rapid onset gender dysphoria” is not a thing (it most certainly is), and that biological sex is on a spectrum (it is binary). Numerous scientists published rebuttals of these dubious claims, including evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins and biologist Colin Wright.

As investigative journalist Jesse Singal argues:

Scientific American has hermetically sealed itself and its readers inside a comforting, delusional cocoon in which we know youth gender medicine works, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and only bigots and ignoramuses suggest otherwise. Over and over, SciAm simply took what certain activist groups were saying about these treatments and repeated it, basically verbatim, effectively laundering medical misinformation and providing it with the imprimatur of a highly regarded science magazine.

When Wright corrected birdwatching enthusiast Helmuth’s claim that white-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis) have four sexes, she simply blocked him:

Does anyone actually believe such things? It seems some do and Laura Helmuth appears to be one of them. That is the most charitable assessment I can make of what has happened to the publication that inspired a dozen generations of budding scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians, and scholars. As in other science publications, along with mainstream media outlets, some corporations, and nearly all academic institutions, the people promulgating these woke ideas are mostly true believers—and the fervour of their faith only makes them all the more able to convince themselves of the truth of claims that everyone else can see have little-to-no contact with reality. Men do not menstruate and cannot get pregnant; women do not have penises and do not produce sperm; and transwomen—who are men—do not belong in women’s sports, locker rooms, bathrooms, prisons, or any other spaces designated for women only. No amount of ideological wishful thinking will change this.

Perhaps some—or even most—of the staff at Scientific American and other similar institutions do not support these ideological contaminations of science; they just want to go about their lives without being harassed by activists. Some may be virtue signalling without actually believing in any of the nonsense they are spouting, while others may be opportunists, capitalising on pluralistic ignorance: i.e. the fact that each individual is under the illusion that everyone else believes such shibboleths as the idea that human beings have more than two sexes (although, in fact, most people do not).

But the social environment is rapidly changing. Thanks to Donald Trump’s election, together with relentless pushback from political centrists and old-school liberals who are sick of being harangued by overzealous activists who accuse anyone who disagrees with them of bigotry, the pendulum may at long last be starting to swing back towards normalcy. Election postmortems and surveys have consistently identified the fact-free ideological capture of the Democratic party as a major factor in their defeat. The Left is in dire need of a course correction. Will that happen? Given what we know about the power of irrational belief, I am not at all confident that it will. Let’s hope I’m wrong, though—not only for the sake of the future of a once-great magazine, but for the sake of the American nation.

==

(Pseudo-)Scientific American's descent into complete madness.

[infinitysisters]

Interesting and prescient insight from a 1992 essay written by distinguished professor of History at CUNY Graduate Center, John Patrick Diggins (b.1935 - d.2009)

“1990 marks a curious time when the Left in the United States has no political significance but considerable educational influence, no power to affect immediate events but considerable authority to shape the minds of the young. Having lost the class war in the factories and the fields, the American Left continues the battle for cultural hegemony in the classroom.”

[whump-galaxy]

I’ve been thinking about the Archive and magical chains again. How they look and feel to the others. I say this on episode #111, so my opinions may change, but here below:

Gertrude-thin and light chains. They crisscross across every corridor and basically encase her office. She doesn’t try to notice them often, knowing it only slows down her work to think about them there.

Michael-one solid chain that snakes throughout the corridors. It doesn’t seem to lead anywhere, though he’s tried to find its end.

Gerry- chains hanging from hooks in every room, but they never look like they’re connected. Just like they appear in any room he’s in. He doesn’t notice them much, and they don’t bother him. He’s freer here that he ever was with his mother, even if chains follow him around.

Tim- One thick chain that connects him straight to Elias. He knows it does. Even if he can’t see it directly. He just knows exactly where it goes. He can try and fight against it, but the weight just drags him further and further down.

Sasha- she never noticed them.

Martin- they wrap around him. They constrict his breath and only release when he records. They feel heavier when he’s around the others and lighter in his office, like they subconsciously want him alone.

Jon-I think he has relatively standard chains. But as the series go on they get more visible. Morph in his eyes. They feel like being captured by The Circus. Or being dragged by his legs. Or around his neck knives. The chains drape over every surface.

Basira-she doesn’t feel or see the chains exactly. She knows they’re there, just like everyone else, but they don’t tie her down.

Daisy- she’s not a staff member of the institute, no, but I think she has chains. Burning cold steel that pulls her back to the institute or anything paranormal. I think, like Martin, it restricts her breathing, but it also blinds her. Covers her eyes to who the real monster is, Y’know?

And Elias- oh puppet strings. I have a feeling he’s more like Distortion Michael than his own person anymore. He is an embodiment of The Eye, and even if he is a ‘dead man switch’ for the others, he’s already dead. He’s just a puppet, controlling other puppets. But that’s just a theory

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

every time I see the word "Latinx" my brain just kind of

switches off

[augory]

mortifying ordeal of taking a hair reference picture to the salon from what is clearly a horror movie

[bhaalsdeepbat]

i have a WIP i've been working on that's a short story about someone who is disabled and mostly housebound experiencing a haunting and how disability would impact their ability to even deal with it and aaaah i forgot about it because i was getting insecure but actually for just having the intro / establishing things part written, it's p fucking good so far

[hornkneebee]

Ayato had just came from a business trip to the nation of Justice and saw a few flying critters on his journey. Thinking that a particular Oni might be interested, Ayato took upon himself to catch a few of them.

And the two are not onikabuto fighting again, now with flight!

[authoralexharvey]

All of my recent projects have had environmental/institutional villains versus like. A single Big Bad. That said, the next villain I write that isn't Enora Cyrriak absoLUTELY needs to be a spin on Wind Waker!Ganondorf. He compels me, your honor.

[star-ocean-peahen]

sleepyl

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Published: Sep 25, 2024

Transcript edited for readability. Link to video interview here.

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and PhD from Harvard. Johnstone is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard; he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, teaching, and books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He was Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and writes frequently for the New York Times, the Guardian, and other publications. His twelfth book, published in 2021, is called Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So we are here again with Professor Steven Pinker, one of the most prominent humanists around, particularly around the exhaustive research you do on various topics, dispelling myths around increasing violence–the fact that violence is declining. Things of this nature. Some of the recent news that has popped up has been about how students feel on campus about wanting to be able to speak more freely. This is probably more particularly prominent in the American context with the First Amendment there. What are your reflections over the last decade on campuses where there has been pushback to bolder speech around issues that might be either new or perennial controversies?

Professor Steven Pinker: Well, the pushback is very recent, and there is a very strong feeling among American university students that you have to watch what you say, that you cannot speak your mind, and you never know when you might commit racism, that you might commit some political sin and be cancelled, what used to be called excommunicated. The universities have not done a good job of fostering an environment of free speech. There are often student orientations in which they are warned about how they can commit a microaggression if asked somewhere, “Where are you from?” That can be considered a form of subtle racism. If you say, “Oh, you speak very well,” that can be a form of racism. So, they are often terrified. I am not even talking about controversial political or scientific opinions. I am talking about ordinary interactions where they feel like they must walk on eggshells. This leads to the paradox that many American university students in their dorms are in adolescent heaven. Their peers surround them. They are constantly invited and given opportunities for socializing and recreation. They eat with each other, but they say they are lonely. How can this be?

We have reason to believe that in adolescents and young adults. There is an increased risk of anxiety and depression, given that social interaction is one of the most important elixirs for mental health. Why is this possible? I suspect that the fact that interactions are so policed and so guarded means that social opportunities for interaction, far from being opportunities to relax, kick back, and laugh together, are more sources of anxiety. Particularly when a lot of it is done on social media, where you have to worry about being mobbed in real-time, anything you say can be dug up decades later by offence archaeologists and used to cancel you retroactively. None of this even gets to the expression of opinions on political, social, or scientific issues.

Jacobsen: Right, I like that. I like that step back from touching on social dynamics.

Pinker: A lot of social media technologies, too. I suspect, and we do know there are cases, a famous or notorious case at Harvard where a student was admitted and then the admissions office rescinded his admission when one of his social enemies uncovered a late-night chat when he was 15 years old in which he was throwing around racist terms to be transgressive. That he and his friends would be “bad boys.” Harvard withdrew the admissions offer. So you have to worry not about what you might say in an op-ed or a paper where you are formulating your opinions, but when you are kicking back in a chat room. It might come back years later to ruin your life.

Jacobsen: So that will not lead to conversation, whether it be social or intellectual. There will be some people who, in response, will say, “Good, they got their comeuppance for the things they have done.” I am sure you live and work in that world. What happens in those contexts?

Pinker: One quick note that one of the side effects is the epidemic of mental health problems, together with the cases in which that general attitude of censorship and cancellation leads to entire societies adopting the wrong policies or being in the dark as to major issues, such as the effects of, say, school closures and masking during COVID, where there appears to be tremendous harm on a generation of children losing out on a year or two of education based on what turns out to be a very trivial risk of their degree of harm. At a time when it was considered taboo to criticize policies of masking children during school closures and widespread shutdowns, bringing it up would lead to massive condemnation. If there had been a greater commitment to free speech and people not being punished for their opinions, realizing that these policies are harmful may have come sooner.

Jacobsen: People will probably consider this a largely academic phenomenon outside of the social media landscape. People from more ordinary backgrounds working blue-collar jobs and do not necessarily need higher education for their pursuits might think, “It is a humanistic thing that we should generally care about, but why should I, as a blue-collar person, necessarily care about this?”

Pinker: Well, partly because many blue-collar people are on social media, but also, what happens in academia does not stay in academia. About 10 or 15 years ago, people argued, “Who cares what kids get taught or what censorship regimes are implemented in academia? When students enter the real world, they will find they cannot escape this nonsense.” What we know happens is that the whole generation brought the regime of cancel culture into the workplace, so, publishing houses, newspapers, nonprofits, and artistic organizations are being torn apart by the regime of cancel culture, microaggressions, and constant accusations of racism because they have been exported from universities, including blue-collar people being fired from their jobs because of some accidental offence–precisely because the culture of the universities was then taken into the workplace and government and nonprofits. 

Jacobsen: So, eventually, this does not only chill academic life; it also chills general culture.

Pinker: Yes, well, it is a chill in that the culture of academia is often brought into other institutions by the graduates of universities as they take positions of power. However, when it comes to societies making collective decisions based on an academic consensus, it can often be the wrong consensus if academia is churning out falsehoods because ideas cannot be criticized. I mentioned the effect of school closures and masking children. However, the other example is even the origin of SARS-CoV-2, where it was considered to be racist to suggest that the virus might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan. We do not know that that is true, but it is not implausible; it might very well have happened.

If it is true, it would have a major implication that we have got to ramp up lab security drastically, perhaps not do gain-of-function studies of the kind that could have created this virus, on pain of suffering from another catastrophic pandemic if we do not learn the lesson. So, that is a case in which what academics decide can affect the world’s fate. Another example would be the effectiveness of policing. If there is reason to think that after the George Floyd demonstrations and the riots of 2020, the idea that police do not matter or that there is an epidemic of shooting by racist cops may have led to withdrawals of policing that then caused the violent crime, if that understanding of an epidemic of racist shootings had been put into context in the first place, they knew that there are not that many shootings of unarmed African-Americans by cops, that this was a false conclusion. Journalism has as much a role in this as academia, but journalism has also developed a regime of cancel culture, where heterodox opinions are often firing offences. If the nationwide consensus is distorted, society will adopt policies that worsen it. Finally, one other thing, and I will turn it back to you, is that even when the academic consensus is almost certainly correct, as in the case of, say, human-induced climate change, if scientists, government officials, and scientific societies have forfeited their credibility by ostentatiously punishing dissenters, leading to the impression that they are their cult, we could blow off their recommendation because if anyone disagreed, they would be cancelled. So it is another cult, it is another priesthood, it is another political faction. The scientific consensus loses credibility if it comes from a culture known for intolerance of dissent.

Jacobsen: We could probably iterate that across domains, whether it is the combat over creationism, or vaccines causing autism, and things of this nature.

Pinker: Yes, so if the scientific consensus tries to debunk it, then no one has enough scientific competence to review everything scientists say perfectly. Some of the acceptance of the findings of science has to be committed trust; these are people who know what they are doing. They have means of distinguishing true from false hypotheses. If something they believed were false, it would be self-correcting. If you undercut that assumption, then people will blow off what scientists say. Scientists themselves are surprisingly oblivious to this possibility. Many scientific societies churn out a woke boilerplate, branding themselves as being on the hard political left and cultural left, with no appreciation that this may alienate the people who are not on the left or in the center who do not care but perceive science as another faction.

Jacobsen: What areas are incursions of what is called something like woke ideology or wokeness into academic and empirical findings or before the empirical findings impact a lot of academic and professional life? So, at the highest level, where people are tenured professors, it is an ideological strain pushing against proper consideration of the evidence.

Pinker: It is worse in the humanities than in the social sciences, worse in the social sciences than in science and engineering. Although, those are generalizations. Probably worst of all, the branches of humanities and social science that are sometimes denigrated as grievance studies are often departments of women and gender studies or studies devoted to particular ethnic groups. Some of the social sciences are worse than others. For example, cultural anthropology is a lost cause. There has been such ideological capture. Most of my field, psychology, is not nearly that bad. Although, there are strains there. Sociology is divided; there is a branch of more quantitative sociology, verging into economics, that is pretty empirically oriented, but then there is another far more ideological part. Even the hard sciences, particularly the scientific societies, have plenty of wokeness, even though the actual lab scientists may be more neutral or empirically oriented. However, the societies themselves tend to be “woker” than their members.

Jacobsen: Why are societies more likely to be captured than individuals?

Pinker: Yes, it is a good question, partly because of the selection of who goes into societies and institutions. If your heart and soul want to do science, you will be in the lab, getting your hands dirty with data. If your motivation is more political, verbal, or ideological, you will try to become a magazine’s editor or a society’s spokesperson. There is a tendency for institutions to drift leftward. Robert Conquest, the historian, is sometimes credited with a law that states that any institution that is not constitutionally right-wing becomes left-wing. You can see the drift that has happened to many institutions recently. They have not become left-wing in the economic quasi-Marxist sense but “woke” in the sense of identitarian politics, seeing culture and history as a zero-sum struggle among racial and sexual groups. A kind of intolerant identitarian politics has captured several societies with well-defined intellectual goals. It has happened to the ACLU, the American Humanist Association, and Planned Parenthood.

So, selection is part of it. Another part may be the belief that the way to change the world is through the imposition of verbally articulated philosophies, as opposed to a bottom-up approach of experimentation, data gathering, entrepreneurship, trying things out, and seeing what happens. The top-down approach is much more likely to start with a predefined narrative and to try to impose that narrative. There may be something more pleasant to institutions in this approach.

To a more left-wing mindset. To elaborate on that a little bit, this comes from Thomas Sowell. Some systems achieve order spontaneously and in a distributed fashion, market economies being the most obvious example—the invisible hand. No planner decides how many size eight shoes to make or where to sell them. The millions of people making choices proliferate information in markets, and the system becomes intelligent, with no one articulating exactly why. The evolution of a language works that way; a culture with its norms and mores works that way. There is a kind of sympathy for these distributed systems that are more on the right, and historically, there are many exceptions. However, on the left, there is more of an articulation of foundational principles, which is a good theory. Therefore, you are more likely to try to change things by joining an institution that can pass resolutions and implement verbally articulated policies. Conversely, on the right, people will go into business, try to invent things, and hope the invention will take off as part of this more distributed, bottom-up approach.

Jacobsen: Do you think the general humanistic approach is akin to an evidence-based moral philosophy where you work bottom-up and then formulate the principles of your ethics from that, rather than top-down, as you might find in divine command theory?

Pinker: There is some affinity in that humanism starts from the flourishing and suffering of individuals. When that is your ultimate good, instead of implementing scriptures or carrying out some grand historical dialectic or privileging some salient polity or entity like a nation, or a tribe, then, if you are a humanist, you see the point of a society, a religion, and so on, is what will leave those people better off. 

My pleasure, thanks for the time to talk to you, Scott.

Jacobsen: Excellent. Take care. Bye.

[amerasdreams]

It's interesting that not only does the Stephen King book I got have some similarities in the plot as the story I'm writing, he happens to use the same Biblical metaphor for a similar thing. I found this out after I wrote mine.

[vague-humanoid]

At the California Institute of the Arts, it all started with a videoconference between the registrar’s office and a nonprofit.

One of the nonprofit’s representatives had enabled an AI note-taking tool from Read AI. At the end of the meeting, it emailed a summary to all attendees, said Allan Chen, the institute’s chief technology officer. They could have a copy of the notes, if they wanted — they just needed to create their own account.

Next thing Chen knew, Read AI’s bot had popped up inabout a dozen of his meetings over a one-week span. It was in one-on-one check-ins. Project meetings. “Everything.”

The spread “was very aggressive,” recalled Chen, who also serves as vice president for institute technology. And it “took us by surprise.”

The scenariounderscores a growing challenge for colleges: Tech adoption and experimentation among students, faculty, and staff — especially as it pertains to AI — are outpacing institutions’ governance of these technologies and may even violate their data-privacy and security policies.

That has been the case with note-taking tools from companies including Read AI, Otter.ai, and Fireflies.ai.They can integrate with platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teamsto provide live transcriptions, meeting summaries, audio and video recordings, and other services.

Higher-ed interest in these products isn’t surprising.For those bogged down with virtual rendezvouses, a tool that can ingest long, winding conversations and spit outkey takeaways and action items is alluring. These services can also aid people with disabilities, including those who are deaf.

But the tools can quickly propagate unchecked across a university. They can auto-join any virtual meetings on a user’s calendar — even if that person is not in attendance. And that’s a concern, administrators say, if it means third-party productsthat an institution hasn’t reviewedmay be capturing and analyzing personal information, proprietary material, or confidential communications.

“What keeps me up at night is the ability for individual users to do things that are very powerful, but they don’t realize what they’re doing,” Chen said. “You may not realize you’re opening a can of worms.“

The Chronicle documented both individual and universitywide instances of this trend. At Tidewater Community College, in Virginia, Heather Brown, an instructional designer, unwittingly gave Otter.ai’s tool access to her calendar, and it joined a Faculty Senate meeting she didn’t end up attending. “One of our [associate vice presidents] reached out to inform me,” she wrote in a message. “I was mortified!”

[draconicace]

reacting to every page in "what happens next (will shock you)" is just going:

"ohhh nooo. ohh no. oh nooooo. fuck the carceral state. ohhhhhhh nooooooooooo"

[wetbananapeel]

| MomI'mSafe {detail} - Amay Kataria (2020) | South Asia Institute, Chicago, IL

[absentlyabbie]

seriously, though. i work in higher education, and part of my job is students sending me transcripts. you'd think the ones who have the least idea how to actually do that would be the older ones, and while sure, they definitely struggle with it, i see it most with the younger students. the teens to early 20s crowd.

very, astonishingly often, they don't know how to work with .pdf documents. i get garbage phone screenshots, sometimes inserted into an excel or word file for who knows what reason, but most often it's just a raw .jpg or other image file.

they definitely either don't know how to use a scanner, don't have access to one, or don't even know where they might go for that (staples and other office supply stores sometimes still have these services, but public libraries always have your back, kids.) so when they have a paper transcript and need to send me a copy electronically, it's just terrible photos at bad angles full of thumbs and text-obscuring shadows.

mind bogglingly frequently, i get cell phone photos of computer screens. they don't know how to take a screenshot on a computer. they don't know the function of the Print Screen button on the keyboard. they don't know how to right click a web page, hit "print", and choose "save as PDF" to produce a full and unbroken capture of the entirety of a webpage.

sometimes they'll just copy the text of a transcript and paste it right into the message of an email. that's if they figure out the difference between the body text portion of the email and the subject line, because quite frankly they often don't.

these are people who in most cases have done at least some college work already, but they have absolutely no clue how to utilize the attachment function in an email, and for some reason they don't consider they could google very quickly for instructions or even videos.

i am not taking a shit on gen z/gen alpha here, i'm really not.

what i am is aghast that they've been so massively failed on so many levels. the education system assumed they were "native" to technology and needed to be taught nothing. their parents assumed the same, or assumed the schools would teach them, or don't know how themselves and are too intimidated to figure it out and teach their kids these skills at home.

they spend hours a day on instagram and tiktok and youtube and etc, so they surely know (this is ridiculous to assume!!!) how to draft a formal email and format the text and what part goes where and what all those damn little symbols means, right? SURELY they're already familiar with every file type under the sun and know how to make use of whatever's salient in a pinch, right???

THEY MUST CERTAINLY know, innately, as one knows how to inhale, how to type in business formatting and formal communication style, how to present themselves in a way that gets them taken seriously by formal institutions, how to appear and be competent in basic/standard digital skills. SURELY. Of course. RIGHT!!!!

it's MADDENING, it's insane, and it's frustrating from the receiving end, but even more frustrating knowing they're stumbling blind out there in the digital spaces of grown-up matters, being dismissed, being considered less intelligent, being talked down to, because every adult and system responsible for them just

ASSUMED they should "just know" or "just figure out" these important things no one ever bothered to teach them, or half the time even introduce the concepts of before asking them to do it, on the spot, with high educational or professional stakes.

kids shouldn't have to supplement their own education like this and get sneered and scoffed at if they don't.

[reasonsforhope]

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

-via Wired, February 19, 2024