Florida sugar mill worker, 86, fatally shoots boss after he’s fired, sheriff says NBC
OUR DYSFUNCTIONAL SYSTEM BETTER AS USUAL HUMAN REMAINS: “See how this works? The law apparently does nothing to protect you from crazy people, but ‘the confidentiality of health records’ does prevent you the from finding out how many times this kook got turned loose.”
Plus: “This is the price you pay for the ‘autonomy’ of crazy people — three innocent people killed after years of neighbors complaining about the disturbing behavior of this dangerous kook.”
And: “Can you tell me the difference between Everton Brown’s delusional rants and the ranting of Dr. Aruna Khilanani at Yale University?” Credentials.
It's a quick and agitating story about a human being like the one we have in this tale, that can really bring the blood to a boil, when it comes to stewing over how certain incompetent individuals end up in the positions of power that they do. Seriously, it sounds like it's only a matter of time before John ends up making a fail on such a scale that the company itself suffers a big hit
Dumblittleman: How To Create A Sustainable Workout Routine
Productivity501: Prioritization More Important Than Any Productivity Technique
Conductors aren't quite unnecessary to an orchestra, but they're not as important as those baton wagglers would like us to think ... leaders importance of power and human remains
Koch Use Causes Rift in Philosophy Department
“The depth of the conflict in the Department is troubling.”
That’s from a report by Jennifer A. McHugh, an outside lawyer appointed by the Ohio attorney general’s office to investigate allegations of corruption, harassment, bullying, and bias in the Department of Philosophy at Bowling Green University, according to an article at The Chronicle of Higher Education
THE NEW CLERISY — Faith in science is an oxymoron:
The scientific establishment, like the political establishment, is a human institution. It’s not an impartial supercomputer, or a transcendent consciousness. It’s a bunch of people subject to the same incentives and disincentives the rest of us are subject to: economic self-interest, careerism, pride and vanity, the thirst for power, fame and influence, embarrassment at admitting mistakes, intellectual laziness, inertia, and ad-hoc ethical rationalization, as well as altruism, moral purpose, and heroic inspiration. Scientific experts deserve the respect due to them by dint of their education and experience, and they deserve the skepticism due to them by dint of their existence as imperfect actors functioning in complicated and deeply flawed human networks and organizations. If you “believe in science,” you don’t bow to their authority. You don’t transform them into living legends and teach your children to follow the example of their lives. You don’t light votive candles to them and castigate anyone who dares doubt their infinite wisdom.
Instead, you demand the best proof they can offer. You consider their motivations, their ideological biases and their conflicts of interest. You interrogate their advice, and weigh it against that of their critics. You exercise diligence. You ask questions. You trust in evidence, not in people. You think for yourself.
In our drift toward political tribalism, these are skills we are quickly unlearning. Those who call the shots in this country are happy to have it that way.
Google and MIT prove social media can slow the spread of fake news
Fast Company: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, the public has been battling a whole other threat: what U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has called a “pandemic of misinformation.” Misleading propaganda and other fake news is easily shareable on social networks, which is threatening public health. As many as one in four adults has claimed they will not get the vaccine. And so while we finally have enough doses to reach herd immunity in the United States, too many people are worried about the vaccines (or skeptical that COVID-19 is even a dangerous disease) to reach that threshold. However, a new study out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Google’s social technology incubator Jigsaw holds some hope to fixing misinformation on social networks. In a massive study involving 9,070 American participants—controlling for gender, race, and partisanship—researchers found that a few simple UI interventions can stop people from sharing fake news around COVID-19…”
- “On average, people in more individualist countries donate more money, more blood, more bone marrow and more organs” — recent research on individualism, altruism, and selfishness
- “The question I am asking is whether, looking at ourselves from outside, we should come to view our attachment to rights and deontology as an unnecessarily cluttered moral outlook” — Thomas Nagel (NYU) attempts to bring our moral intuitions and the science on them into reflective equilibrium.
- On teaching: “I don’t think it is a particularly meaningful job, despite what some people claim” — John Danaher (NUI) explains his negative view of teaching
- APA reinstates Diversity Grant and Small Grants programs — they had been suspended during the pandemic. Applications are open now.
- Improvement through subtraction — experimental research on the human tendencies to think solutions involve adding something, and to overlook solutions that involve removing something
- “Further reflections on tolerance and its difficulty” — T.M. Scanlon (Harvard) delivers the 2021 Knox Lecture at St. Andrews
- “Weil was an anarchist who happened to espouse conservative ideals” — Robert Zaretsky (Houston) on how Simone Weil might offer conservatives “a path forward”
