Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. Laurie Taylor talks to Robert H. Frank, Professor of Economics at Cornell University's Johnson School of Management, about the role luck has to play in life's successes, or failures. Frank argues that chance is much more significant than people give it credit for. Lynsey Hanley, writer and Visiting Fellow at the Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, joins the discussion. Also, Claire Maxwell, Reader of Sociology of Education at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London, talks about her co-authored paper looking at the attitudes of privately-educated young women towards the idea of cosmopolitanism. Did they feel like global citizens, or were their aspirations confined to the local and the national?
12 December 2016
The Atlantic: Who Really Lost Iraq?
And yet Obama didn’t turn victory into defeat. For a start, there was no victory. In 2009, the troop surge had helped pull Iraq back from the brink of utter catastrophe, but the country remained extremely fragile and deeply traumatized. “Committing murder in Iraq is casual,” said one Iraqi official, “like drinking a morning cup of coffee.”
Furthermore, when Republicans berate Obama for withdrawing American troops, they neglect to mention that Obama inherited a timetable negotiated by the Bush administration for a complete U.S. exit. Could Obama have convinced the Iraqis to switch direction and accept a follow-on force? Here, opinion differs widely. It’s fair to say that the White House was internally divided about a successor force, and didn’t push as hard as it could have. But a rising tide of Iraqi nationalism made striking such a deal extremely challenging. When I interviewed John Abizaid, the former head of Central Command, for my book on U.S. military failure, he told me that an American successor force was “not in the cards at all.”
Republicans also vastly embellish what an American successor force might have accomplished. In the GOP’s imagination, these troops have grown into supermen who could have held off extremism in the Middle East—as if Obama pulled the Spartans out of Thermopylae. But if 150,000 U.S. troops couldn’t salve Iraq’s sectarian divisions, why would 10,000 soldiers have solved the puzzle? And these troops would almost certainly not have prevented the emergence of ISIS, which mainly arose across the border in Syria. [...]
Plus, the stab-in-the-back myth prevents real reflection about failed wars. After World War I, Germans didn’t come to terms with the price of militarism. Instead, they looked for scapegoats at home and vengeance abroad. The idea that Vietnam was a triumph forsaken prevented the United States from fully recognizing how its Asian adventure had been premised on a series of illusions, including the perception of communism as a monolith. In a bid to blame Obama, Republicans neglect critical questions about why the United States invaded Iraq—about the wild overconfidence, the failures of unilateralism, and the lack of planning for the post-Saddam era.
The Los Angeles Review of Books: The World According to Stanisław Lem
THERE’S A PARADOX at the heart of science fiction. The most basic aspiration of the genre — its very essence, really — is to transcend time and place. Not just to predict the future, but to imagine things that are totally foreign to human experience. How would an alien life form have evolved, compared with those on Earth? What will human society look like 10,000 years from now? What is artificial intelligence, anyway? SF tries to imagine the unimaginable, to comprehend the incomprehensible, to describe the indescribable, and to do it all in entertaining, accessible prose.
But SF, like everything else, is also a product of its time. Jules Verne’s tales of trips around the globe and voyages to the center of the Earth reflected the scientific optimism of the late 19th century, before World War I blew open technology’s dark side. During its midcentury golden age in the United States, the pulpy genre cheered on the rising economic and military dominance of the United States, forecasting an American empire that stretched to the stars. Not long after, New Wave authors like Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, and Ursula K. Le Guin wrestled with the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, from Cold War paranoia to the Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism, and the drug culture. What kind of stories the Trump era might inspire is still unknown, but they probably won’t be cheerful. [...]
Compared to most science fiction writers, Lem’s thinking was both disinterested and far-reaching. In works like the nonfictional Summa Technologiae, he explored the possibilities of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and genetic engineering, comparing technological advancement to biological evolution. Just as evolution had no moral agenda, he argued, technological developments were neither inherently good nor bad, but followed their own internal logic. Unlike most would-be prophets, who predict the future with warnings of dystopia or promises of a better tomorrow, Lem approached the subject without a moralizing tone. [...]
These ideas evoke comparisons to Orwell, and to the British novelist’s famous depiction of Stalinism in 1984 (1949). But in his letters to Kandel, Lem claimed that Orwell had gotten Stalinism wrong. Whereas Orwell described his dystopian regime as “a boot stamping on a human face — forever,” Lem argued that communist oppression was not a sadistic evil pursued for its own sake but a natural result of turning state ideology into dogma. Similarly, Lem critiqued Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, writing that “she made out these systems to be fruit of strictly intentional evil.” Rather, he writes, “Stalin’s times concocted a myth, never concretely or cogently expressed, of the state as a machine that was not only perfect, but also omniscient and omnipotent.” For Lem, the tragic consequences weren’t the result of premeditated cruelty, but the logical outcome of turning politics into faith.
Nautilus Magazine: Your Speech Is Packed With Misunderstood, Unconscious Messages
Many scientists, though, think that our cultural fixation with stamping out what they call “disfluencies” is deeply misguided. Saying um is no character flaw, but an organic feature of speech; far from distracting listeners, there’s evidence that it focuses their attention in ways that enhance comprehension.
Disfluencies arise mainly because of the time pressures inherent in speaking. Speakers don’t pre-plan an entire sentence and then mentally press “play” to begin unspooling it. If they did, they’d probably need to pause for several seconds between each sentence as they assembled it, and it’s doubtful that they could hold a long, complex sentence in working memory. Instead, speakers talk and think at the same time, launching into speech with only a vague sense of how the sentence will unfold, taking it on faith that by the time they’ve finished uttering the earlier portions of the sentence, they’ll have worked out exactly what to say in the later portions. Mostly, the timing works out, but occasionally it takes longer than expected to find the right phrase. Saying “um” is the speaker’s way of signaling that processing is ongoing, the verbal equivalent of a computer’s spinning circle. People sometimes have more disfluencies while speaking in public, ironically, because they are trying hard not to misspeak. [...]
Experiments with ums or uhs spliced in or out of speech show that when words are preceded by disfluencies, listeners recognize them faster and remember them more accurately. In some cases, disfluencies allow listeners to make useful predictions about what they’re about to hear. In one study, for example, listeners correctly inferred that speakers’ stumbles meant that they were describing complicated conglomerations of shapes rather than to simple single shapes. [...]
If disfluencies appear to generally help communication more than they hinder it, why are they so stigmatized? Writer and linguist Michael Erard argues in his book Um… that historically, public speakers have been blissfully unconcerned with disinfecting their speech of disfluencies until about the 20th Century—possibly because neither hearers nor speakers consciously noticed them until it became possible to record and replay spoken language in all its circuitous and halting glory. The aversion to disfluencies may well have arisen from speakers’ horror at hearing their own recorded voices. Erard suggests that the modern repugnance for disfluencies is less an assessment of a person’s speech than it is a “deeper judgment about how much control he should have over his self-presentation and his identity.” In truth, disfluencies appear to distract mainly those who have been trained to revile them.
Politico: What if the terrorists won?
A year later, are we still sitting on the edge of our seats, half-expecting a terrorist to enter the room? No. Take a walk on any nightlife stretch in the French capital and you will see café terraces full of young people drinking and smoking as patriotically as before. The fact that Parisians returned to their old haunts so rapidly after the attacks was widely interpreted as proof of the French Republic’s resilience in the face of terror. The Moveable Feast was still on the move. The City of Light was shining as brightly as ever. Take that, terrorists, we said, raising our glasses of wine.
But it would be wrong to say that France simply snapped back to the way it was before the attacks. The place has changed more profoundly than most of its residents are willing to admit. Repeated acts of violence have robbed the French of their presumption of safety. Despite admirable efforts to respond to the terrorist threat in a measured way, to avoid reaching Israeli levels of obsession with security, France has mutated into a different version of itself: angrier, ready for more violence and locked into increasingly hostile and polarizing debates. [...]
Despite such measures, leaders acknowledge there is no such thing as zero risk. To prepare the population for the possibility of another big event, the state has ordered public hospitals, institutions and schools to carry out large-scale simulations of terrorist attacks. Even primary schools are no exception. In September, children as young as six practiced how to behave in case of a terrorist attack on their school, taking cover behind solid objects in classrooms with teachers barricading the doors. That same month, Prime Minister Manuel Valls called the terrorist threat “maximal.”
Jacobin Magazine: Christmas gift-bringers of Europe
Santa Claus is relentlessly trying to enter our European households (mostly through our mailboxes rather than chimneys), but Father Christmas, Baby Jesus, Grandfather Frost, and other traditional gift-bringers have managed to fend him off so far.
Each country (or region) has its own traditional Christmas gift-bringer. Some of them are quite nice, such as the British Father Christmas, others are outright weird, such as the Catalan “defecating log”, but all of them are equally interesting. The following map shows the gift-bringers’ names with translations, coloured by relatedness of the concepts themselves (that is, not by etymological relatedness of the names).
Please note that some of the stripes and gradients may not represent the actual geographical distribution completely accurately; they just show general geographical trends. For example, Weinachtsmann is more common in the north of Germany, Christkind (or Christkindl) in the south, but the border is not entirely clear.
Al Jazeera: Facing the mirror: Filmmaker records exile in Beirut
What is it like to flee home, and then remember what happened there before you did? What does it feel like to never know when, or if, you will return? As exiled Syrian journalist and dissident Samar Yazbek once wrote, "Exile is exile, and nothing else. It means walking down the street and knowing that you don't belong there".
A new film by Beirut-based Syrian filmmaker Saeed al-Batal, one of the countless activists and artists who have settled in the city since 2011, records just that feeling by filming an imagined walk through Beirut, after fleeing a besieged neighbourhood in Damascus. It is filmed from the perspective of a semi-autobiographical character trying to make sense of where he is: a first-person exile's view of exile. [...]
For Batal, the film records a time of uprooting and alienation, one that gave him a mirrored view of Beirut and the city he had left behind. "It was a kind of therapy … to walk around in a city with no destruction, no news happening, and just film. I wasn't even sure if I could balance picture without destruction, because I always used to use [it] to balance my pictures [in Syria]," he said, remembering the contrasts between the two cities. [...]
"The most difficult discovery [arriving from Syria] is that you are not the centre of the universe: no one cares as much as you think, and life is still going on and people are still living," Batal said. "If you've lived through a big crisis, you feel that that's going to be the centre of the universe… especially if you witnessed things like chemical attacks."
But people "got bored" of Syria, he said, adding that it is up to Syrians to change their approach. "I know that we [Syrians] are feeling … as if we own the right to be angry at the world, but we need to learn from these past five years. If we don't come up with a solution, the world won't care enough to solve our problems for us. We need to face the mirror."
The Conversation: Five reasons why we (eventually) become happier as we get olde
Happiness has become a modern obsession. Searching for it, holding on to it, and wishing it on our loved ones have all become motivating forces for how we live our lives.
We also use happiness as a measuring stick for life decisions. If a job doesn’t make us happy, we quit it. If a relationship stops making us happy, we leave it.
Happiness has lodged itself at the centre of our lives and we make some drastic choices desperately trying to reach it. This is especially true for people in their 30s and 40s, who are at the highest risk of using antidepressants and developing mood disorders than any other age group. [...]
So, if we are feeling unhappy today, can we hope for a better tomorrow? Fortunately, research suggests that we can, because regardless of our individual differences, we go through some natural changes in life that influence our happiness. These changes allow us to experience relatively high levels of happiness in our 20s, which then begin to tumble, reaching their lowest point in the late 30s and early 40s – when they start to climb again.
There are five reasons for this natural upturn.
Motherboard: New Research Suggests Our Faces Evolved to Function Like Chimpanzees' Red Asses
Researchers out of Leiden University and Kyoto University used experiments based on the “inversion effect” for facial recognition. When chimpanzees are experts at recognizing something, such as other chimp-faces or human faces, they’re able to pick it out even if it’s flipped upside-down. Previous recognition studies, they write in their study published in PLOS, have examined every body part “except the most obvious one,” the butt. Obviously!“
The findings suggest an evolutionary shift in socio-sexual signaling function from behinds to faces, two hairless, symmetrical and attractive body parts, which might have attuned the human brain to process faces, and the human face to become more behind-like.” Our faces, our asses, our selves. [...]
As we evolved, faces, especially in females, grew to have redder, thicker lips and fattier cheeks. Our faces even blush as a signal for emotional or hormonal response, and can be interpreted as a socio-sexual cue.
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