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The Tipping Point: Fascinating but mythological? | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
Tipping point stories are fascinating, but do we observe them in the real world? I became intrigued with this question a while ago and eventually published a paper testing the predictions of the tipping point story for its original application – racial segregation of US neighbourhoods
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The basic prediction is that mixed neighbourhood are unstable but segregated neighbourhood are stable. Data on American neighbourhoods from 1970 to 2000 rejected these predictions – it was the segregated neighbourhood that were unstable. There was as much “white flight” out of all-white neighbourhoods as there was out of mixed neighbourhoods, and there was a white influx into segregated non-white neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods are still very segregated in the year 2000, but not because of tipping. Maybe segregation exists because most whites really do want segregation, not because of a chain reaction due to herd behaviour.
slacktivist: Falling flat
And but so anyway, I told them, that is what I think happened to Pop. That is what I think will happen to us all. One day you and I will be out of time and we cannot conceive or comprehend what that means any more than the poor Linelanders can understand North and South or the poor Flatlanders can understand Up and Down.
Salon.com Books | How to go viral
Bill Wasik is an Internet instigator... Wasik is best known as the creator of flash mobs... he's analyzed how and why some stories became cultural phenomenons and others languish in the nursing home of online oblivion.
Now, in his new book "And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture", Wasik sets out to explain what he's learned from all his Web mischievousness and also what our increasing addiction to the Internet indicates about us as a society. We now have more information at our fingertips than ever before, but Wasik suggests we find it hard to focus on issues that really matter because we're so consumed with myopic, ephemeral things.
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Absolutely. One of things that I find so depressing about the climate change conversation is the fact that we actually have succeeded in implanting climate change in a lot of people's minds as an important long-term challenge. But more often than not, the way that that happens in public discourse is seizing on these tiny, little, grabby ideas that are really, really short-term. So, Al Gore has a movie. That was the seminal moment in coming to an understanding about climate change in this country, where we could turn it into a little entertainment business piece. And I think your point about the economic crisis is right on too. We sat there and talked about the AIG bonuses for four days. It was very telling that we can only know the big problem these days by way of some tiny little piece of outrage or delight, through these little nanostories.
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I would say that for 90 percent of culture makers coming up today, your break is going to be online. And the way that you're going to know you had your break is going to be numbers. It isn't going to be a single person, like an established poet, or an established musician coming up to you after a show or responding to a piece of writing you sent them and saying, I really believe you can do it. Instead, it's like this giant hive mind will pluck out something that you've done and say, this we love, this we bestow the pleasure of 2 million hits on. From there on out, you're going to use those cues you get from this giant machine to tell you what to keep doing and to tell you what to stop doing. And that to me is potentially scary in all sorts of ways. The hive mind selects for a certain kind of thing, it selects for culture that is instantly digestible, it selects for culture that is sensational in a certain sort of way.
Less Wrong: Nonparametric Ethics
Nonparametric ethics says: "Let's reason about which moral situations are at least rough neighbors so that an acceptable solution to one should be at least mostly-acceptable to another; and let's reason about where people are likely to be highly biased in their attempt to adjust to specifics; and then, to reduce moral error, let's enforce similar resolutions across neighboring cases."
Gunnar Olsson: Abysmal - a Critique of Cartographic Reason
People rely on reason to think about and navigate the abstract world of human relations in much the same way they rely on maps to study and traverse the physical world. Starting from that simple observation, renowned geographer Gunnar Olsson offers in Abysmal an astonishingly erudite critique of the way human thought and action have become deeply immersed in the rhetoric of cartography and how this cartographic reasoning allows the powerful to map out other people’s lives.
OnTheCommons.org » Still Spooked by Communism
This is just stupid. As a matter of intellectual history and politics, the emerging online collectivism has nothing to do with communist revolutions or state socialism. So why even locate online media in that tradition? One suspects that Kelly or some shallow editor thought that “the new socialism” would be a catchy, provocative hook. Sigh. The silly conventions of mass-market journalism.
Towards an Ecology of Conversations -
Live Speech & Dead Speech in 'Psychotherapy'
By
Vincent Kenny
Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm › Weeds and Tubers
Species with an r-Selected architecture (weeds, annuals, insect pests,bacteria) tend to be opportunistic. They spread fast. The “r” stands for resources. If storm clears a section of forest the nearby maple is ready to seed that clearing. These species quickly cover new territory and quickly compose the dead. They tend to fluctuate quickly with the weather.
Species with K-Selected strategy (coconuts, apples, birds, most mammals) expend more on each offspring. Their populations tend to be more constant and self regulating
slacktivist: George Bailey & The Bailout
That's more or less the same situation we find in the ending of It's a Wonderful Life.
That $8,000 that Uncle Billy "lost" was pocketed by Old Man Potter himself. He stole from his depositor. And he got away with it. The missing money was replaced, but not by Potter -- it was cobbled together out of the pockets of the working people of Bedford Falls. ("Do you know how long it takes a working community to save $8,000?")
Potter was never punished and the deficit for the money he stole, and kept, was paid for by a communal bailout.
Robert Paterson's Weblog: Cynefin - Matching Math to the type of problem - Fractals for our Time
Going into Shock ~ Angry Bear
Substitute body/shock metaphors for 'belt tightening'
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In this case, a different metaphor seems more appropriate. Compare the economic body to a human body going into shock.
A detailed description of shock [link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_(circulatory) ] makes it clear that it's no minor ailment. Shock is a killer -- not a psychological event but a string of chemical processes which lead to organ failure and death if not interrupted.
Like all biochemistry, it's pretty complicated. The commonest form of shock is called hypovolemic shock -- that is, shock due to loss of blood volume, often from serious accidental injury, stabbing, gunshot, or hemorrhage.
In sequence, the inadequate blood volume leads to loss of oxygen and nutrients to the cells. This leaves the cells trying to keep themselves going by using other energy sources which have toxic byproducts. Soon, breakdown of the cell membrane and failure of the sodium pump follows, leading to a bodily release of digestive enzymes, which releases more toxic substances into circulation. Eventually capillary damage and generalized cell death follows -- that is, the patient dies of pervasive metabolic poisoning and organ failure.
It seems to me that the sudden loss of circulatory volume to the economic body is having much the same effect on the interconnected and mutually dependent nations of the world.
Faith and Deficits - Stanley Fish Blog - NYTimes.com
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At first glance, Christian doctrine and economic exigencies seem unrelated, but in recent days I have come across two different ways of bringing them together.
One is an updated version of the Protestant linking of thrift and virtue. Given that we are commanded by the Bible to be good stewards of God’s graces (I Peter 4:10), the prudent management of the material goods of His creation is a religious duty; not because we are to attach ourselves to those goods (that would be idolatry), but because we will only be able to turn our minds to the true treasure — God’s love for us — if we are free from the crippling anxieties that overwhelm us when our earthly treasure is threatened.
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But in another popular Christian discourse, there is no way out of debt, and bankruptcy is the condition we are in from the moment of birth. This is a Calvinist discourse in which the language of money is allegorized. The debt we owe is owed to the God who made us in his image, an image defiled and corrupted by Adam and Eve, whose heirs in sin we all are. We may think that this unhappy inheritance could be overlain and covered by a succession of good deeds, but every deed we perform is infected by the base motives from which we cannot move one inch away. Every piece of currency we offer in payment of debt only increases it. The situation seems hopeless.
But it’s not, we are told, if we embrace bankruptcy rather than try (vainly) to extricate ourselves from it. The acknowledgment of bankruptcy and of the impossibility of working our way free of it is the beginning of wisdom.
Less Wrong: When Truth Isn't Enough
Analyze these sentences:
I am intelligent. You are clever. He's an egghead.
I am proud. You are arrogant. He's full of himself.
The Art of Living | Front Porch Republic
?? - "Water is inherently conservative, conforming to its conditions yet remaining essentially the same. Water prefers stillness. If it is a stream, it runs downhill until it finds a resting place; but it is always in the process of changing, yet it is always only water. In the same way, the essence of conservatism is always the same, even though its conditions constantly change."
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Which is purer? Claiming to know when one does not, or claiming not to know when one does? True knowledge is ignorance—like Socrates’ maxim, “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.” To proclaim one’s ignorance sincerely is to remain open to one’s historical, cultural, and cosmological place. Admitting one’s indebtedness requires a healthy dose of humility. As my father says, “Humility is in short supply and has a short shelf life.” To merit anything, we must first exist; therefore, existence is wholly unmerited grace. Accepting the gift of one’s place and giving it to others is humble graciousness. The knowledge we receive is a gift, not something we have merited. The default state of all human beings is ignorance. We are born into the world ignorant and only after that find knowledge. As C.G. Jung observes in Man and His Symbols, with the birth of consciousness come the faults of knowledge. It is no coincidence that the Fall came when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge. Was the acquisition of this knowledge itself sin? The first sin was more likely what John Milton says in Book III of Paradise Lost: ingratitude.
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Technology and art are at odds like never before. We have lost sight of the truth. Technologically, we are more advanced than we have ever been. But what about artistically? There are few artists today who consider the ontological bearing of art, and even fewer who use art to communicate grace. As tools are necessary for art—brushes, pigments, canvas—so technology is simply a tool for the art of living. Technology is in its essence incomplete, waiting to be fulfilled by its use as part of art. Today the technology of living, which focuses on youth, longevity, and pleasure subverts the art of living which focuses on maturity, sustainability, and truth. The art of living has been replaced with the technology of living. I do not know how we can return to the art of living.
digital digs: hacking education conference
The basic problem is that as a student you don't know what you need to know. As we know from Socrates, figuring this out is a kind of passageway into a philosophical life. I think it would be asking a tremendous amount from students to imagine that they can construct their own curriculum or cobble together curriculum from a variety of otherwise unrelated sources.
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