Philosophy Tube: Social Constructs

 What are social constructs, and why do some people get so upset about them?

PolyMatter: Why Kazakhstan is Changing Alphabets

 

BBC4 In Our Time: Macbeth

 Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. When three witches prophesy that Macbeth will be king one day, he is not prepared to wait and almost the next day he murders King Duncan as he sleeps, a guest at Macbeth’s castle. From there we explore their brutal world where few boundaries are distinct – between safe and unsafe, friend and foe, real and unreal, man and beast – until Macbeth too is slaughtered.

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Deutsche Welle: Opinion: China's ethnic socialism

 Just a few weeks ago, Beijing introduced a new language policy for schools in Inner Mongolia, whereby instruction in Mongolian will be replaced with lessons in Mandarin in a number of subjects. Many fear that this will massively impact on Mongolian culture. [...]

Most of the inhabitants of Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet are not Han Chinese, who constitute the majority in China. Until 2012, when Xi Jinping took office, all 56 recognized ethnic groups in China enjoyed equal rights. But Xi, who, if things go very wrong, will be able to let himself be chosen as president for life in 2023, put an end to that equality. [...]

The West did not understand why Beijing could not wait until 2047, when the "one country, two systems" policy would have expired anyway and China would have won. However, for China, this is not a question of rational politics but of ideology, one according to which the Han are considered superior to China's other ethnic groups. The people of Hong Kong, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang are not seen as equal partners, and this explains the Communist Party's inhumane treatment of certain groups, who are nonetheless all citizens of China.

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Psyche: Recognising our common humanity might not be enough to prevent hatred

 None of us are exempt from these forces. In contemporary Western societies, it’s not uncommon to hear immigrants referred to as a ‘swarm’ or an ‘infestation’. Psychological research also suggests that dehumanisation is not the preserve of extremists. When volunteers are asked to rate the qualities of different groups, even those holding moderate political views will often subtly deny outgroups uniquely human qualities, such as civility, rationality and refinement. In studies of emotion perception, in which volunteers are asked to evaluate the emotional experiences of others, they report that outgroup members experience complex human emotions such as pride, admiration and guilt to a lesser extent than do their fellow ingroup members.

However, look more closely at the evidence, and the claim that outgroups are dehumanised loses some, perhaps most, of its explanatory value. There are two key problems. First, it’s not clear that outgroups really are perceived as less human than the ingroup. Second, even if outgroups are perceived as less human, it’s not clear why this should increase the risk of harm against them. [...]

There are also challenges for neuroscientific research that purports to show evidence of dehumanisation. In a widely cited paper published in 2006, the researchers Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske argued that, when people dehumanise outgroups, they think of them as lacking mental states such as desires, beliefs and goals. Apparently supporting this view, the pair reported that when their research volunteers viewed pictures of outgroup members, such as homeless people or drug addicts, they exhibited less activation in brain areas associated with mentalising, particularly the medial prefrontal cortex. However, Harris and Fiske’s characterisation of dehumanisation is undermined by supposedly prototypical examples of extreme dehumanisation in which perpetrators appear to make mental-state inferences about their victims. For instance, Nazi propaganda is replete with references to what Jews were supposedly lying about and scheming to achieve. These references to Jewish people’s beliefs and goals were inaccurate and filled with malicious intent, but they were mental-state inferences nonetheless – to accuse someone of lying is to make an inference about what they are thinking. [...]

My critique of dehumanisation as an explanation for intergroup harm has implications beyond academic debate. Inspired by work in this area, some researchers have started to develop interventions for social change that aim to reduce dehumanisation. Though well-intentioned, such efforts could be misguided. My analysis suggests that attempts to foster a more inclusive and egalitarian society might be better targeted at other well-established psychological processes, such as the human tendency to stereotype and derogate people seen as outsiders.

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TLDR News: Why Do Migrants Want to Come to the UK? The Appeal of Britain to Refugees Explained

 With footage of asylum seekers and migrants crossing the channel to get to Britain, some are beginning to question why they're making the trip at all. I mean, they've already made it to Western Europe, why then risk your life in a dinghy to attempt to get into Britain? In this video, we explain some of their motivation and if there truly are a lot of migrants trying to get into the UK.

99 Percent Invisible: The Natural Experiment

Usually, Fournet relies on quiet periods in an individual day to try and understand how ship noise changes whale behavior. If she’s lucky she’ll get 6-7 hours of silence, but now the ocean was about to experience months of quiet. Fournet is all set to record an entire summer of whale sounds in strangely quiet seas, “This is the first time in human history that we’ve been able to listen to truly quiet behavior,” she says. “We will finally get a baseline for what the ocean sounds like in the absence of human activity.” [...]

The shutdowns have also been incredible to researchers who study air pollution, researchers like Sarath Guttikunda. Guttikunda says that in their work they are always looking to understand the baseline air quality, like what a clean air scenario looks like. Usually, they use rainy days to do this, but the problem with rain is that it doesn’t last. “When it rains, it’s clean for one day and then the build-up starts again. But what we are seeing here is a sustained period of low numbers.” And so this shutdown feels like the entire country is running an experiment for him… a forced experiment that shows what happens if you turn many of the major sources of pollution down basically to zero.

Having this extended period of clean air is also allowing them to do more fine-tuned research experiments. Some of those experiments are chemistry experiments looking at particular pollutants like ozone. But they’re also trying to do a forensic accounting of where all this pollution is coming from because there’s actually a lot of confusion about that. And a big question people have is: is the pollution being generated inside the city, by things like cars, trash burning, and dirty cookstoves? Or is it floating in from outside sources, things like power plants and heavy industry outside the city, or farmers in the countryside who burn their fields before they replant? All of those sources are contributing to the problem but the uncertainty has allowed cities to throw up their hands and say this isn’t a problem we can solve. It allows people in power to pass the buck of responsibility. [...]

Westgate says that in the last two decades there has been a growing consensus that boredom is, in fact, a real emotion, like anger or sadness. And just like other emotions, it’s not intrinsically good or bad. Instead, it’s a signal telling you something is amiss with your situation that needs to be changed somehow. But when it comes to the question of “Why do we get bored?” — that’s where the scientific consensus ends. “When you get down to the nitty-gritty of what exactly is causing boredom, you’re going to start finding a lot of disagreement.”

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The Prospect Podcast: Jonathan Haidt on political speech

American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt joins the Prospect podcast to discuss political anger on both sides of the Atlantic, from Boris Johnson’s discussion of Brexit to the American 2020 election.

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PolyMatter: Macau: The Story of China's Golden Child

Macau, despite its extravagance, is largely forgotten amidst the protests of its larger sibling, Hong Kong. But it too has a unique story to tell, and one that sheds light on the turbulence next-door.

The Guardian: Why it’s time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language

There is no such thing as linguistic decline, so far as the expressive capacity of the spoken or written word is concerned. We need not fear a breakdown in communication. Our language will always be as flexible and sophisticated as it has been up to now. Those who warn about the deterioration of English haven’t learned about the history of the language, and don’t understand the nature of their own complaints – which are simply statements of preference for the way of doing things they have become used to. The erosion of language to the point that “ultimately, no doubt, we shall communicate with a series of grunts” (Humphrys again) will not, cannot, happen. The clearest evidence for this is that warnings about the deterioration of English have been around for a very long time. [...]

For those who worry about language deteriorating, proper usage is best exemplified by the speech and writing of a generation or so before their own. The logical conclusion is that the generation or two before that would be even better, the one before that even more so. As a result, we should find Trevisa’s language vastly more refined, more correct, more clear and more effective. The problem is, we can’t even read it. [...]

The hard truth is that English, like all other languages, is constantly evolving. It is the speed of the change, within our own short lives, that creates the illusion of decline. Because change is often generational, older speakers recognise that the norms they grew up with are falling away, replaced with new ones they are not as comfortable using. This cognitive difficulty doesn’t feel good, and the bad feelings are translated into criticism and complaint. We tend to find intellectual justifications for our personal preferences, whatever their motivation. If we lived for hundreds of years, we would be able to see the bigger picture. Because when you zoom out, you can appreciate that language change is not just a question of slovenliness: it happens at every level, from the superficial to the structural.

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The Guardian: Four lessons the Spanish flu can teach us about coronavirus

Spanish flu is estimated to have killed between 50 million and 100 million people when it swept the globe in 1918-19 – more than double the number killed in the first world war. Two-thirds of its victims died in a three-month period and most were aged 18-49. So what lessons has the world’s deadliest pandemic taught us? [...]

The Spanish flu hit during the first world war, so authorities were unusually keen to avoid further social disruption or blows to national morale. Much of the pandemic was characterised by increasingly untenable reassurances that the Spanish flu was not something to be overly concerned about. In June 1918, just before the UK felt the full force of the outbreak, the Daily Mail advised readers that flu was no worse than a cold and that people should not have “any great dread” but “maintain a cheery outlook on life”. The Times initially adopted a casual, jokey tone before growing critical of official complacency. [...]

Flu viruses are fundamentally different from coronaviruses in that they are constantly shuffling their genomes, which means they rapidly morph from one strain into another – that’s why flu vaccines are needed annually. Coronaviruses tend to be genetically fairly stable and so scientists don’t expect a sudden shift in the mortality rate of Covid-19. But the question of whether coronavirus will disappear, reappear in waves or simmer in the background as an endemic illness still remains to be answered.

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Nerdwriter1: How Bernie Sanders Answers A Question

BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Hidden gay lives

Hidden gay lives: Laurie Taylor uncovers the ‘fabuloso’ history of Polari, Britain’s secret gay language with Paul Barker, Professor of English Language at Lancaster University. He also talks to the cultural historian, James Polchin, about the ways in which 20th c American crime pages recover a little discussed history of violence against gay men, one in which they were often held responsible for their own victimisation.

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The Atlantic: ‘Pure Poison’ for a Scholarly Career

All we know for certain, through forensic testing, is that the manuscript likely dates to the 15th century, when books were still mostly handmade and rare. But its provenance and meaning are uncertain, making it virtually impossible to corroborate any claims about its contents against other historical materials. So why are so many scholars and scientists driven to solve the puzzle?

For many, it’s the ultimate opportunity to prove their analytical skills in their given field. For others, it’s a chance to test promising new digital technologies and artificial-intelligence advances. And for some, it’s simply the thrill of the hunt. [...]

“Everyone wants to be the one to prove it, to crack it, to prove your own abilities, to prove you’re smarter,” says Davis, the medieval scholar. One problem, she adds, especially with a complex medieval manuscript, is that researchers are specialists. “Hardly anyone out there understands all the different components” of the manuscript, she points out, referring not just to the illustrations but to things like the binding, the inks, and the handwriting. “It’s going to take a whole interdisciplinary team.” [...]

In the end, the manuscript may simply be an unsolvable mystery. Robert Richards, a historian of science at the University of Chicago, uses the codex to teach the concept of scientific paradigms, where a scientific theory comes to shape a field of research so strongly that scientists can’t always explain or identify anomalies outside of the theory.

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History Today: Pause and Effect

In classical times there were no punctuation marks or spaces between words. Since punctuation determines sense (‘Let’s eat, Grandpa’ versus ‘Let’s eat Grandpa’), scriptio continua allowed scribes to offer their masters a clean text, waiting to be interpreted by those higher up the social ladder. Writing was merely a recording of, or preparation for, speech: any punctuation that was inserted had oratorical, rather than grammatical, functions, indicating the degree of pauses upon delivery only. There was no such thing as reading at first sight. [...]

Over the following centuries, the existing punctuation marks became increasingly differentiated in order to prevent confusion. At the same time, new marks such as the question mark were born, evidencing a need for further distinction of written language. The 15th century saw a boom of inventive punctuation, including the exclamation mark, the semicolon and brackets (or parentheses). New marks arise when a lack of clarity needs to be redressed, communication controlled and sense disambiguated, an emergency perhaps stemming from greater reliance on written diplomacy as well as the newly fashionable art of letter writing. Brackets, for example, first appeared in the 1399 manuscript De nobilitate legum by the Italian humanist Colluccio Salutati. Salutati’s own additions of the marks around certain sentence elements are visible between the text noted down by his secretary.[...]

By the 18th century, English punctuation trod on the spot, having embraced other early modern inventions such as the dash and ellipses, permitting yet more refined ways of interrupting, hesitating and changing of thought. By the 20th century, punctuation had, again, regained its strong connection to speech, although it did not denote an actual guide to performance, but rather imitated how the voice might look on the page. It also came to inspire modernist writers in their exploration of the human mind and the strange ways consciousness moves. At one end stands Ernest Hemingway, whose numerous full stops cut his prose into repressed chiselled parcels of supposedly objective observations; on the other, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, manipulating the lack of punctuation as a representation of the vagaries of thought. One look at the end of Ulysses suffices to see how Joyce imitates the breathlessness of Molly Bloom’s thought pouring out in masturbation-orgasm as she yes comes on unpunctuated strings yes of words ending yes on yes

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99 Percent Invisible: The ELIZA Effect

Weizenbaum started raising these big, difficult questions at a time when the field of artificial intelligence was still relatively new and mostly filled with optimism. Many researchers dreamed of creating a world where humans and technology merged in new ways. They wanted to create computers that could talk with us, and respond to our needs and desires. Weizenbaum, meanwhile, would take a different path. He’d begin to speak out against the eroding boundary between humans and machines. And he’d eventually break from the artificial intelligentsia, becoming one the first (and loudest) critics of the very technology he helped to build. [...]

In 1950, British mathematician Alan Turing wrote the seminal Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human, notes that this paper was published “at the very beginning of computer science … but Turing is already … seeing ahead into the 21st century and imagining” a world in which people might build a machine that could actually “think.” In the paper, Turing proposed his now-famous “Turing test” in which a person has a conversation with both a human and a robot located in different rooms, and has to figure out which is which. If the robot is convincing, it passes the test. Turing predicted this would eventually happen so consistently that we would speak of machines as being intelligent “without expecting to be contradicted.” [...]

He also may have missed something that Darcy has thought about a lot with Woebot: the idea that humans engage in a kind of play when we interact with chatbots. We’re not necessarily being fooled, we’re just fascinated to see ourselves reflected back in these intelligent machines.

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PolyMatter: Why Kazakhstan is Changing Alphabets

In Defence of Marxism: Marxism vs. Queer Theory

The main premises of Queer Theory, which we will examine more closely below, are the following: our (gender) identity is nothing but a fiction. Hence, hetero-and homosexuality is also a cultural fiction. This fiction is produced by discourses and power in society. We must uncover how these discourses function and parody them (ridicule them, show their contradictions, “displace” them). [...]

Feminist theories that portray class struggle as secondary to the cultural struggle against patriarchy, or that deny the existence of class struggle altogether, gained influence. It was no longer about fighting against class society and women’s oppression rooted within it, but about fighting against “transhistorical patriarchy” (i.e. remaining the same throughout different forms of society). The revolutionary subject was no longer the working class but woman oppressed by man. From this premise an abundance of texts and discussions were launched that dealt with the question of the essence of patriarchy and how “woman”, who had become the main subject of analysis, could be defined. The idea of differentiating between biological sex and social, acquired gender became prominent. [...]

If we translate this pompous formulation into comprehensible English, Butler tells us that every form of Being is simply an effect of ‘discourses’ (language), that is to say: Idea, the word, language is primary, matter an effect derived from it, ultimately also only language. This means that, for her, anatomy, biology and the natural sciences are all language constructs. That’s why sexes are not “artificial” – because from her point of view there is nothing outside of cultural constructs. To think of material reality as something that exists independently from our ideas only means to be hoodwinked by the ruling discourse, which tells us that there is such a thing as a Dualism between “matter” and “culture”. This ruling opinion (“hegemony”) makes us believe that there is a “real” sex and an “unreal” gender. But Butler has seen through it all! ALL is culture, all is language – all is Idea! [...]

This division of labour, however, did not mean that women were deemed lower than men – on the contrary. As those who ensure the reproduction of our species, they were held in high esteem. Only when humans, in their struggle with nature, found ways of creating a surplus product, which in turn led to the emergence of private property, did the division of labour lead to the oppression of women. In the words of Engels, this was the basis for “the world historical defeat of the female sex” – that is, a historical, not a “biological” event. This means that, while women’s oppression in the last instance does have a biological foundation , it is not an iron natural law. Women’s oppression, over thousands of years, sank deep roots within our society, and it can assume many forms that are not strictly derived from the fact that women can bear children, and were in turn adapted to the respective dominant system. [...]

In critiquing one crude philosophy, Queer Theory goes to the other extreme and adopts its mirror image. No phenomenon coincides directly with the general categories by which we know them. No man or woman fits perfectly with the universal category that we know them by. Nevertheless, men and women exist. Nature expresses itself in patterns that we as humans can learn to recognise. Our ideas of a man or a woman, stripped away from all the accidental and inessential attributes, are crucial for our understanding of any individual man or woman. Queer Theorists, like their postmodern brethren, however, deny the existence of any form of category or patterns in nature. Instead of understanding the dialectical relationship between the individual and the universal, they renounce the universal and raise the individual and accidental to the level of principle.

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OZY: Why This German State Says 'Jawohl' to Migrants

For an industrial hub like Baden-Württemberg — home to auto majors Porsche and Mercedes and multinational corporations like Bosch, SAP and BASF — the approach makes sense, says Gari Pavkovic, head of the Department for Integration Policy of Stuttgart. Aging Germany has an estimated shortage of more than a million skilled workers.

These integration moves also coincided with another trend that runs counter to what’s happening elsewhere. While the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is rapidly gaining support in several states, from Brandenburg and Saxony to Thuringia, in Baden-Württemberg its popularity is declining. A September poll shows support for the anti-immigrant AfD at 12 percent, down from 15 percent in 2016. As mainstream parties in Germany and beyond struggle to stop the surge of the far-right, Baden-Württemberg is showing that the answer to bridging a divide between migrants and locals might lie not just in politics, but in economics. [...]

With Germany as a whole accepting far fewer refugees than it did in 2015, the numbers entering Baden-Württemberg have declined too. Still, in 2018, the state the size of Maryland accepted 11,000 migrants, mostly from Nigeria, Syria and Turkey — the U.S. plans to admit 18,000 in all, in 2020. Twenty percent of the population has a migrant background in Baden-Württemberg, located in the southwest of the country. In Stuttgart, it’s 50 percent. In comparison, Thuringia in the east counts just over 7 percent of its population as foreign-born. [...]

Deutsche Bahn too will only take trainees with sufficient language skills who have passed a psychological test and possess technical knowledge. They need to prove they graduated from a recognized school. For refugees fleeing a war, these can be tough hurdles. That’s where organizations like Caritas — which also helps refugees navigate bureaucracy, from getting educational qualifications recognized to obtaining a driving license — come in. “There are no limits,” says Lisa Maisch, a team leader of one home that houses 146 people. “We connect them or help them figure out ways to do that.”

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The Conversation: There are differences between free speech, hate speech and academic freedom – and they matter

Free speech is the right to say whatever one likes. It is unconstrained by the disciplines of reason and objectivity. It doesn’t require factual accuracy. As with academic freedom, it doesn’t matter if one’s opinion is unpopular. Both free speech and academic freedom are essential to democracy. [...]

In a university, the test of a reasonable opinion is higher. One cannot say whatever one likes and call it academic freedom. [...]

When people say that they want to “reclaim” a country as their own and contest “anti-racism” they are saying overtly and unapologetically that they don’t want others to have a democratic presence. They are saying that they don’t want others to have free speech. Nor do they want academics who are not “young white men” to have academic freedom. [...]

Defending a right to bigotry, or to express hate speech, trivialises what the denial of both free speech and academic freedom can really look like. In China, for example, the state has warned against the presence of “mistaken views” in universities, including the study of constitutional democracy, civil society, economic liberalisation, freedom of the press, challenges to socialism with Chinese characteristics and discussion of universal values including academic freedom.

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