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it was amazing
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Oligarchies aren´t just a thing in dictatorships or fringe puppet democracies, but the real deal in the US and most of Europe too. One of the best met Oligarchies aren´t just a thing in dictatorships or fringe puppet democracies, but the real deal in the US and most of Europe too. One of the best meta analysis of how neofeudalism, neocolonialism, and the notorious neoliberalism, what a fraud, could become the driving forces of the 20th and 21st century, a stunning big history picture of how just 2 good decades, the 50s and 60s, were given to the people before greed, personified as the almighty mister mammon, destroyed everything. Again, as so often in history. And the future. Meh, ok, as long as humans will exist. It´s not as if Chomsky, Klein, Ziegler, Graeber,etc. wouldn´t be repeating this important message for, in some cases, decades now, but everything that once was a living, healthy democracy has been sold to big business, deregulated, neoliberated until nothing of a long time ago working social infrastructure, public whatever nets, or a last grain of distributional justice was left. The focus on Koch industries is a prime example of how the good old evergreen „Whose money I take, whose song I sing“ is the ultimate earwig and all time playing megahit in any kind of government, big or small, openly democratically camouflaged or totally banana. The ways taxfree dollars are whitewashed, reused, put in gerrymandering, hundreds of fake NGOs, all kind of far right wing political parties ( in astroturfed fake extreme left, green, whatever is necessary to give them negative publicity, too), conservative movements, republicans, etc. would mean long prison sentences for each normal, small average Joe. It would be a combination of tax fraud, financial crimes, and massive, illegal manipulation of democratic processes. But as soon one is too big to fail, there are no rules anymore, nobody will ever be annoyed with any kind of legal consequences, because the companies, conglomerates, and mega wealthy billionaires get anything written, any wish fulfilled by the senate, government, judges, whoever, it doesn´t matter. All the scandals, and often even open and free information about how government functions these days, are just the tip of the iceberg. The legal methods to do all of this are just what has to be made public, but what else happens in the background with the real dark, black money can hardly be imagined. This means that many Western democracies are under control by unknown amounts of black money from unknown sources, companies, rich individuals, other states, organized crime, the Illuminati, freaking reptilian overlords in the bodysuits of our leaders, heck! Seriously, the dimension of the black comedy potential of how societies function these days is so enormous that real life beat satire a long time ago. Right next to manipulating any kind of democratic progress with billions of dollars and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaga... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol... is the problem of economic inequality, environmental destruction, and unimaginable suffering, death, and illness, especially in the Southern hemisphere, all directly related to and caused by these practices, fueled by neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and neoconservatism. Did you know that each serious scientist (in economics cough cough) made fun of Milton Friedman before he became the apologist and chief demagogue of dog eat dog turbocapitalism and globalization? Well, guess who made him Americas´ next super economist? Exactly these superrich people ruining lives for everyone since, let´s say 1969, because the whole mess began and continued with republican and, and that's very important to note and think about, democratic presidents and their "fiscal plans" these days. Nothing changed when democrats ruled a house or houses, which means that voting is futile because everything stays the freaking, worsening same. Even if one of the big players is ever caught with something that´s too extreme to be covered, censored, and hidden from the public eye, the only thing waiting is some time of house arrest or a luxury prison she/he owns 30 percent of and all jailers are servants or something. But mostly, because many very mighty people are involved, nothing happens or someone else is sacrificed so that the real perpetrators are never caught. And, to even top that all, there are simply no laws that could do any real harm to someone involved in the big, white collar financial crimes, and, for logical reasons, there won´t be any soon or anytime. I mean, who would pay billions of lobbyism money for a law that´s bad for one´s own business practices? That would just be stupid, one needs security and self protection. The way out of this mess? Well, civil movements, real NGOs (don´t ask me how to identify the difference between real and astroturfing, it´s like deep fake, indistinguishable from reality), the internet, social media, breeding the next generation of enlightened human beings, but please, really, forget politics. Because, maybe anyone else could have noticed it too, nothing changes no matter what party, left or right, green or coal, monogamy or polygamy, liberal, progressive, conservative, socialistic, whatever, is in power; income inequality, environmental destruction, climate change, poverty, everything just keeps worsening. All just empty drivel, forced into line propaganda blather blather, yadda yadda yadda about the vague symptoms of the many inherent maladies of a lunatic exponential growth system, not even daring to name the varieties of the sickness, because all of their fringe ideologies are infested, compromised, and biased towards political correct do gooder positive thinking, everything is fine, nothing to see, manufacturing consent, mentality. It doesn´t matter who one is voting for, because they are all part of the problem of a dead, hilarious satire of a democracy so many died to establish. Same for the free press, the educational system, public discussion, it´s close to all just system hailing, distortion of history, avoiding at any cost to talk about the serious, underlying problems and causes, to avoid change, fairness, and a better world as long as possible. Check out the Koch clans´ lives, that´s so amazing that it seems closer to fiction than reality, but they acted that way, were brought up under such circumstances, and developed an, for all other people devastating, appetite to consume everything and all of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_In... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_C.... It´s quite convenient that some facts have been „forgotten“ in the English Wikipedia that are mentioned in the German edition I do highly recommend to auto translate, especially the upbringing. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles... and enjoy: „The father was very strict and often beat the children up. In Charles ’first years of life (until 1940) they also had a strict female German teacher who scared them with German children's books like Struwwelpeter and presented Adolf Hitler as a role model. Charles later said his father taught him a work ethic when he was eight. While other children were allowed to have fun at the neighboring country club in their free time, he had to work in the garden and on the ranch. Der Vater war sehr streng und verprügelte die Kinder häufig. In Charles’ ersten Lebensjahren (bis 1940) hatten sie außerdem eine strenge deutsche Erzieherin, die ihnen mit deutschen Kinderbüchern wie Struwwelpeter Angst machte und Adolf Hitler als Vorbild darstellte. Später erzählte Charles, der Vater habe ihm bereits im Alter von acht Jahren eine Arbeitsethik beigebracht. Während andere Kinder sich in ihrer Freizeit im benachbarten Country-Club vergnügen durften, musste er im Garten und auf der Ranch arbeiten.“ There´s not really much to add to that little English Wikipedia oopsie, it certainly wasn´t important or something, being indoctrinated by a literal nazi with the full approval of the, a bit right leaning, father. A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthrop... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_His... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodive... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultura... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrim... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocen... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarce... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrohi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocolo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolibe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaga... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restora... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retribu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_... ...more |
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| 4.22
| 3,206
| Aug 11, 2020
| Aug 11, 2020
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it was amazing
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Neoliberalism is no science, but one of the most dangerous, destructive, and inhumane ideologies ever created. Andersen expands the thoughts of Chomsky Neoliberalism is no science, but one of the most dangerous, destructive, and inhumane ideologies ever created. Andersen expands the thoughts of Chomsky, Klein, Ziegler, Crouch, Graeber, etc., and capitalism and globalization criticism to a big history tour of how the US (and thereby indirectly Europe, that got brainwashed too) was ruined by bad science, lying with statistics, economics, dogmas, useful idiots, conservative right wing superrich, think tanks, and other usual suspects. What a lesson, what an amazing story of how the ideals of a nation were corrupted, how the once United States of America were defragmented, backlashed to a feudalistic new aristocratic age with inequality so enormous to be one of the rare democracies with such devastating numbers. Because it seems as if, duh, that all European, strong eco social Keynesian welfare states with high taxes and regulated markets, free education, health care, strong social nets, etc. generate happy people, no matter what quality of life index is used for comparison, the US fails terribly. When a state cares for its citizens and has (somewhat) control over its corporations, conglomerates, and other super entities, there are no medieval dystopic nightmare hellhole slums, industrial military complexes, extremism, dozens of millions of people left to fight to survive. Each neoliberal economist, sociologist, or politician should maybe spend 1 unprotected hour in a hood or prison, it´s not as if she/he would survive it, but before dying, she/he would possibly realize the stupidity of fringe science. Those are no scientists, but bought, demagogic apologists. But what flies too deep under the radar and is hardly ever asked is the question: What were the democrats, green, left, progressives (I was and still kind of am in this camp too, although highly disillusioned and frustrated) doing all the time and why did nothing change when they were in power? Well, let´s see. It´s irritating that this realistic view of how our current world with all its horrors was formed is completely underrepresented, if not even censored, in close to all media, no matter if left or right. Who dares to criticize the system, the consent, who wants to speak up, to start the radical necessary change for people and the planet? Well, nobody, because everyone is concerned about the main topics given to the people by controlled propaganda media and well, it was me and, as he mentions, the author too. And don´t get me wrong, but just as the author concludes and realizes for himself, we are sold, lost, and all hope is gone, because the "good" left, liberal, progressive, democratic, eco social, environmental, etc. side has been bought and sold, is manipulated without noticing, to just talk about and concentrate on irrelevant topics that don´t change the system or don´t even realize that there is still an immense problem. Because they are living in their ivory towers, secure suburbs, and fantasy lands with imaginary visions of how the world really works. And I was one of them, which makes me feel kind of ashamed, which is usually a rare thing, because I´m quite a bigoted fellow. Just as Andersen, which makes this work even more precious than the other books describing the self destructive potential of our current system: He realizes the blind spots, cognitive biases, hidden lunacies, etc. of mentioned "good" activities and how they brainwashed him with feel good propaganda made influenced by the code of conducts, corporate responsibility, and whitewashing political feelgood drivel. One thing I just don´t get about people is how nonfiction could get so infested with anecdotal, autobiographical, and thereby often completely irrelevant topics and persons. Don´t get me wrong, great inventions, great leaders, everything fine, but they are nothing and unimportant in comparison to the development of the whole humans' species. But the real deal, heavy, difficult books have the problem of being very nasty to read, attacking things and ideas one loves, being filled with loads of facts, history, and general more boring stuff than the glorious life of whoever just wrote about what she/he did for a living. Imagine just one of the really important, critical thinkers being sold and reviewed like a billionaire's way to wealth or superstar or ex president anecdotes (or at least instead of terrible, apologetic Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling propaganda). That would make a real impact, initialize some change but nope, even the rare people that read books prefer to stay in their comfort zone and be not that dangerously progressive with their reading choices. Not that the neighbors, friends, family, say that they are dirty leftist communists or something, reading such bad, dangerous books that should best be burned. Regarding sacrificing everything to fire: The witch hunt started against the poorest and keeps expanding towards middle and upper middle class, until nothing will be left except of the elite owning everything. But enough of self criticism of the high handed do gooders, SJWs, and political overcorrect bigoted hypocrites, back to the show. It´s completely understandable that people revolt and troll against the descriptions of the real life offered in this book and by mentioned authors, because everyone hates to accept that ideology and world view, given in schools and universities, beloved newspapers full of empty pseudo fringe pop psychology sociology economy, etc empty drivel, is just plain wrong, mumbo jumbo, yadda yadda, empty drivel, closer to crazy cults and sects than anything substantial, über ultra replication crises, a world built on wacky scheme snake oil salesman mentality. It will take decades and longer to change anything substantial and until then, we will have erased up to anything above 90 or even 95 and more percent of all lifeforms on earth, the human era, the Anthropocene, will forever be archeologically seen as the time of the greatest mass killing of species just for profit. Before we go to another world and do the same there, of course, maybe even just preemptive, you know, sterilize the whole Goldilock zone planet for convenience, because it´s cheaper or because the megacorporations controlling everything in the solar systems don´t want to bother with indigenous people and stuff. Try to calculate how many people will have unnecessarily and preventably suffered and died until then, because the most dangerous entities humans ever created, corporations, are just lifting off. So, take all the victims of already half a century of exploitation and natural destruction and add, what? 30, 50, 125 more years of this lunacy, and the death toll is what? A 1 or 2 digit billion number? What is talked about in this book are first world country problems, one of the richest states in the world is doing these terrible things with its own people, we don´t even know how much suffering has been caused by this in the Southern hemisphere over the last decades. After colonialism and slavery ended, neoliberalism and neocolonialism came to continue business as usual. To quote George Carlin: “Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that've long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them.” Personal, irrelevant, boring, anecdotal, empty drivel: I really wanted to leave the nonfiction reading boat after White fragility https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4... and Why I am no longer talking to white people about race https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3... destroyed everything about the green left ideology I tended to surf on for decades, but I just couldn´t resist the temptation to get this ingenious infodump. Hopefully, I will be stronger in the future. However, spread the word, the only thing left to perfectly self deceit oneself into believing that it´s not far too late, especially for close to all species on earth. I´ve read similar descriptions of the immense perversion, inhumanity, and madness of our current system, to find in the social criticism shelves. A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthrop... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_His... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodive... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultura... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrim... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocen... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarce... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrohi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocolo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolibe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaga... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restora... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retribu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_... ...more |
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| 4.08
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| Aug 25, 2020
| Aug 25, 2020
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really liked it
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Fake newsing one´s way to the top. A nice description of how demagogic politicians and conservative, right wing media outlets work together. The cyni Fake newsing one´s way to the top. A nice description of how demagogic politicians and conservative, right wing media outlets work together. The cynicism and cold intelligence behind these networks are astonishing, it´s getting more and more movie like, a mixture of thriller, dark satire, and a mixture of Orwellian and Huxleyian visions. One of the most important conclusions of this work is not to just criticize the obviously biased, far right and left wing media outlets, but the so called objective, free press too. Because they are not producing easy to see propaganda, but subtle consent towards that the economic and democratic system is still working, which is totally wrong too. George Carlin said it best https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9646... Of course, there are immense differences in quality and sophistication between Fox and CNN, but in general, each kind of medium has a more or less obvious and well or bad hidden mixture of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaga... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol... I can´t overemphasize this enough, one of the reasons why I am often throwing around with these 4 links is that people tend to think of an end of history, of a kind of final democratic victory in states with a free press, but instead Chomsky, Crouch, etc. are right when they are describing a corporatocracy completely out of control for decades that is disguised as ridiculous voting all 4 to 5 years with all media together creating the phantasmagoria of lived enlightened ideals, which is not the case. Even the most social democratic, left, even green media and parties don´t say out loud that the whole press and governmental system is a satire, a bad joke, not even worth investing time and effort, because if there would be a good, fair, competent, not sold and completely lobby controlled sockpuppet parliament in close to every democratic Western country, the world wouldn´t be breaking to pieces, nature getting completely destroyed, millions unnecessarily dying each year, neofeudalism and neoliberalism devastating the once eco social Keyniasian European states while neocolonialism is overexploiting what is left of biodiversity in the Southern hemisphere, etc.. It´s ridiculous, it´s as if close to all state and private media would be reporting out of an insane asylum for decades now and everybody is wasting her/his time by thinking and talking about this garbage, never getting informed about the fact that there are many better alternatives. Because of much talk and discussion about the replication crisis, I add these thoughts to nonfiction books dealing with humanities, so you might have already seen it. One could call the replication crisis the viral fake news epidemic of many fields of science that was a hidden, chronic disease over decades and centuries and has become extremely widespread during the last years, since the first critics began vaccinating against it, provoking virulent counterarguments. I don´t know how else this could end than with nothing else than paradigm shifts, discovering many anachronisms, and a better, fact- and number based research with many control instances before something of an impact on the social policy gets accepted. Some soft science books are nothing more than fairytales for adults who never had the chance to built a free opinion because most of the media they consume to stay informed and get educated avoids any criticism of the current economic system. Without having read or heard ideas by Chomsky, Monbiot, Klein, Ken Robinson, Monbiot, Peter Singer, William McDonough, Ziegler, Colin Crouch, Jeremy Rifkin, David Graeber, John Perkins, and others, humans will always react to people like me, condemning the manipulation practiced everywhere with terrifying success, with anger and refusal. These authors don´t hide aspects of the truth and describe the real state of the world, don´t predict the future and preach the one only, the true way, ignoring anything like black swans, coincidences, or the, for each small child logical, fact that nobody knows what will happen, and collect exactly the free available data people such indoctrinated people to ignore forever. A few points that led to the replication crisis: I had an intuitive feeling regarding this for years, but the replication crisis proofed that there are too many interconnections of not strictly scientific fields such as economics and politics with many humanities. Look, already some of the titles are biased towards a more positive or negative attitude, but thinking too optimistic is the same mistake as being too pessimistic, it isn´t objective anymore and one can be instrumentalized without even recognizing it. In natural sciences, theoretical physicists, astrophysicists, physicians… that were friends of a certain idea will always say that there is the option of change, that a discovery may lead to a new revolution, and that their old work has to be reexamined. So in science regarding the real world the specialists are much more open to change than in some humanities, isn´t that strange? It would be as if one would say that all humans are representative, similar, that there are no differences. But it´s not, each time a study is made there are different people, opinions, so many coincidences, and unique happenings that it´s impossible to reproduce it. Scandinavia vs the normal world. The society people live in makes happiness, not theoretical, not definitive concepts. One can manipulate so many parameters in those studies that the result can be extremely positive or negative, just depending on what who funds the study and does the study wants as results. One could use the studies she/ he needs to create an optimistic or a pessimistic book and many studies about human nature are redundant, repetitive, or biased towards a certain result, often an optimistic outcome or spectacular, groundbreaking results. Do you know who does that too? Statistics, economics, politics, and faith. I wish I could be a bit more optimistic than realistic, but not hard evidence based stuff is a bit of a no go if it involves practical applications, especially if there is the danger of not working against big problems by doing as if they weren´t there. A few points that lead away from it: 1. Tech 2. Nordic model 3. Open data, open government, 4. Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, quantum computing, to make each financial transaction transparent and traceable. 5. Points mentioned in the Wiki article 6. It must be horrible for the poor scientists who work in those fields and are now suffering because the founding fathers used theories and concepts that have nothing to do with real science. They worked hard to build a career to just find out that the predecessors integrated methods that couldn´t work in other systems, let's say an evolving computer program or a machine or a human body or anywhere except in ones´ imagination. They are truly courageous to risk criticism because of the humanities bashing wave that won´t end soon. As in so many fields, it are a few black sheep who ruin everything for many others and the more progressive a young scientist is, the more he is in danger of getting smashed between a hyper sensible public awareness and the old anachronism shepherds, avoiding anything progressive with the danger of a paradigm shift or even a relativization of the field they dedicated their career to. There has to be strict segregation between theories and ideas and applications in real life, so that anything can be researched, but not used to do crazy things. The worst bad science practice includes, from Wikipedia, taken from the article about the replication crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replica... 1. The replication crisis (or replicability crisis or reproducibility crisis) is, as of 2020, an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce. The replication crisis affects the social sciences and medicine most severely.[ 2. The inability to replicate the studies of others has potentially grave consequences for many fields of science in which significant theories are grounded on unreproducible experimental work. The replication crisis has been particularly widely discussed in the field of psychology and in medicine, where a number of efforts have been made to re-investigate classic results 3. A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist's experiment (50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments).[8] In 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once and 14% admitted to personally knowing someone who did. 4. „Psychological research is, on average, afflicted with low statistical power." 5. Firstly, questionable research practices (QRPs) have been identified as common in the field.[18] Such practices, while not intentionally fraudulent, involve capitalizing on the gray area of acceptable scientific practices or exploiting flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting, often in an effort to obtain a desired outcome. Examples of QRPs include selective reporting or partial publication of data (reporting only some of the study conditions or collected dependent measures in a publication), optional stopping (choosing when to stop data collection, often based on statistical significance of tests), p-value rounding (rounding p-values down to 0.05 to suggest statistical significance), file drawer effect (nonpublication of data), post-hoc storytelling (framing exploratory analyses as confirmatory analyses), and manipulation of outliers (either removing outliers or leaving outliers in a dataset to cause a statistical test to be significant).[18][19][20][21] A survey of over 2,000 psychologists indicated that a majority of respondents admitted to using at least one QRP.[18] False positive conclusions, often resulting from the pressure to publish or the author's own confirmation bias, are an inherent hazard in the field, requiring a certain degree of skepticism on the part of readers.[2 6. Secondly, psychology and social psychology in particular, has found itself at the center of several scandals involving outright fraudulent research, 7. Thirdly, several effects in psychological science have been found to be difficult to replicate even before the current replication crisis. Replications appear particularly difficult when research trials are pre-registered and conducted by research groups not highly invested in the theory under questioning. 8. Scrutiny of many effects have shown that several core beliefs are hard to replicate. A recent special edition of the journal Social Psychology focused on replication studies and a number of previously held beliefs were found to be difficult to replicate.[25] A 2012 special edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science also focused on issues ranging from publication bias to null-aversion that contribute to the replication crises in psychology.[26] In 2015, the first open empirical study of reproducibility in psychology was published, called the Reproducibility Project. Researchers from around the world collaborated to replicate 100 empirical studies from three top psychology journals. Fewer than half of the attempted replications were successful at producing statistically significant results in the expected directions, though most of the attempted replications did produce trends in the expected directions. 9. Many research trials and meta-analyses are compromised by poor quality and conflicts of interest that involve both authors and professional advocacy organizations, resulting in many false positives regarding the effectiveness of certain types of psychotherapy 10. The reproducibility of 100 studies in psychological science from three high-ranking psychology journals.[44] Overall, 36% of the replications yielded significant findings (p value below 0.05) compared to 97% of the original studies that had significant effects. The mean effect size in the replications was approximately half the magnitude of the effects reported in the original studies. 11. Highlighting the social structure that discourages replication in psychology, Brian D. Earp and Jim A. C. Everett enumerated five points as to why replication attempts are uncommon:[50][51] 1. "Independent, direct replications of others' findings can be time-consuming for the replicating researcher" 2. "[Replications] are likely to take energy and resources directly away from other projects that reflect one's own original thinking" 3. "[Replications] are generally harder to publish (in large part because they are viewed as being unoriginal)" 4. "Even if [replications] are published, they are likely to be seen as 'bricklaying' exercises, rather than as major contributions to the field 5. "[Replications] bring less recognition and reward, and even basic career security, to their authors"[52] For these reasons the authors advocated that psychology is facing a disciplinary social dilemma, where the interests of the discipline are at odds with the interests of the individual researcher 12. Medicine. Out of 49 medical studies from 1990–2003 with more than 1000 citations, 45 claimed that the studied therapy was effective. Out of these studies, 16% were contradicted by subsequent studies, 16% had found stronger effects than did subsequent studies, 44% were replicated, and 24% remained largely unchallenged.[58] The US Food and Drug Administration in 1977–1990 found flaws in 10–20% of medical studies 13. Marketing is another discipline with a "desperate need" for replication.[64] Many famous marketing studies fail to be repeated upon replication, a notable example being the "too-many-choices" effect, in which a high number of choices of product makes a consumer less likely to purchase.[65] In addition to the previously mentioned arguments, replication studies in marketing are needed to examine the applicability of theories and models across countries and cultures, which is especially important because of possible influences of globalization. 14. A 2016 study in the journal Science found that one-third of 18 experimental studies from two top-tier economics journals (American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics) failed to successfully replicate.[67][68] A 2017 study in the Economic Journal suggested that "the majority of the average effects in the empirical economics literature are exaggerated by a factor of at least 2 and at least one-third are exaggerated by a factor of 4 or more. 15. In the US, science's reproducibility crisis has become a topic of political contention, linked to the attempt to diminish regulations – e.g. ...more |
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| 198213173X
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| 198213173X
| 4.17
| 24,466
| Sep 15, 2020
| Sep 15, 2020
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it was amazing
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The immortality Trump is desperately searching for has already been created by wantonly helping to unleash a plague after nearly causing a WW3 style n
The immortality Trump is desperately searching for has already been created by wantonly helping to unleash a plague after nearly causing a WW3 style nuclear escalation that could have lead to a major war while downplaying racism, hate, and misogyny. Like a child, he can take no criticism, never finished the deviant phase. This is certainly psychologically fascinating, especially regarding the latent and clinical pathology, but shouldn´t there be any mechanisms to maybe make sure that the psyche of presidents, ministers, and members of important cornerstones of democracy is stable? Not uncertain, not breaking easily, built on solid logic, not on drivel and false accusations? Trump's relationship with Kim is a prime example of a narcissistic, social media obsessed hedonist without any conscience regarding the fact that he is having a bromance with a dictator, more keen on showing Woodward pictures of him and Kim than talking about the geopolitical and macroeconomic consequences of the historic event. Not as if he would have been able to spontaneously answer the simplest questions about these topics without preparation, maybe also one of the reasons why most of these interviews are about him, his attitudes, and people loving him because he is he. Me me me, again, child behavior. That Trump wants to make himself immortal can´t just be seen in the historic milestone of talking a walk with Kim, but in trying to give Woodward a poster, arranging the White house desk like a PR table, and generally being obsessed about how cable news and social media react to him. Not serious books, not serious news channels, not magazines, the president watches TV and frenetically and obsessively scrolls social media timelines to decide what´s the best for his reputation, sometimes for the country. It´s not as if there would be enough monuments, world wonders, and megalomaniac buildings that show the desperate search for honor of mighty men by demonstrating their importance. Strange and telling that they never got or get the idea of doing it with reforms and pushing positive social and cultural evolution. Why not talking about a secret nuclear weapons program? Would be even cooler if it would have happened live on a press conference while his generals are facepalming and eye rolling in the background.Would have made a great meme. Possibly he would have even mentioned where it´s researched. That´s just one of these points, nuclear war threat, that lets one ask if there isn´t still too much power concentrated in too few hands, especially because I naively tended to think that there are so many consultants, assistants, and lobbyists that help any high ranking member of the government to make decisions. It terrifyingly seems to me as if leaders still have some, potentially fatal, power left to just do anything they deem funny, I mean, how Mutually Assured Destruction is this? One must imagine that leading employees were highly alarmed and stated that they deem the President unfit, dangerous, and generally completely incompetent without real attention span, the ability to reflect and understand, and many other problems. Nobody knows if this is just perfectly normal for Trump or if it is his age, but is again opens the question of how it´s possible that in a democracy, where a representative function such as a President should be under control by the other elected members of the government or any similar strange control instance entities, he can act just as he wishes to. That´s not really what one understands and imagines when thinking about democratic elections, that´s more of an authoritarian government style, so how is it possible that there is still so much power in the hands of some strange people without any control instances? I know that I am redundant in the last 2 paragraphs, but especially regarding that the danger of a Covid19 pandemic was known since the early days of February and nobody reacted in an appropriate way, nowhere, not in Europe, not in the US, just Korea and Japan going into an intelligent direction, let´s one wonder about how, why, and especially, when again? What´s the next surprise government knows about for months but, because the King or chancellor or leader or whatever is in a bad mood or disinterested, is simply hidden. Completely without ageism, one has to ask, just as with certain jobs or maybe one day driving, if there shouldn´t be tests and/ or age limits for certain jobs. Strangely, it´s logical for a surgeon or a pilot who could hurt or kill just one or a few hundred people, while world leaders able to harm and injure hundreds of millions in their own countries and globally, are free to act as long as they wish, although it´s biological logic that at a certain, highly individual stage, the effect of age influence the ability to function. It´s ridiculous in each country with politicians that are far beyond 65, but the US is actually breaking the record, it might be impossible to spin doctor such candidates in other countries or, said with the wiseness of kids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0ZTK... certain candidates wouldn´t be elected by enlightened citizens. Which sophisticated adult would ever dare to react by asking why this very old, seemingly not so healthy and mentally fit great great grandfather should be a president, asking how long he will live, etc. Subjective note: That´s why I am astonished, motivated, and still hopeful, but extremely misanthropic regarding mostly anyone above the age of 25 to 30. It´s forbidden to think that by the stupidity of adult´s political correctness and misunderstood courtesy, but as wrong as it just can be. Of course also a sign of a dysfunctional, mad, wrong neoliberal economic paradigm, where just superrich, white, old men can effort becoming president with programs continuing the completely wrong social direction most of the world is heading towards for soon over half a century. 74 and 77 years old, Trump vs Biden, honestly? That´s not really what one is imagining as a living, active democracy, more the caricature of a gerontocracy. To be fair, I deem all, except of the Scandinavian countries, Swiss, and the Netherlands, industrial northern democracies the same messes, just with different grades of suffering and pain for the citizens. Social evolution has stagnated and lead to a dead, ridiculous democratic system, completely controlled by lobbyism, not to be taken seriously anymore, leading to a situation where comedy shows and websites such as The daily show with Trevor Noah https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWh... The onion https://www.theonion.com/ The late show with Stephen Colbert https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMtF... etc. bring more depth, insight, and truth than all education in schools, newspapers, news networks, and, lol, the representatives themselves. If it wouldn´t be so sad, destroy the planet, and harm so many innocent people, especially in the Southern hemisphere, the laughs wouldn´t be that bitter. A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preside... History of madness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocolo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolibe... Establishing the lunacy using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaga... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol... The lenses it will be seen with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_His... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrohi... I´ve, in other reviews, said before that I wanted to avoid soft humanities such as politics, economics, homeopathy whose inventor was totally nuts too, etc., but I just couldn´t resist, sorry for that, relapse is my second name after procrastination. Because of much talk and discussion about the replication crisis, I will add these thoughts to all following nonfiction books dealing with humanities in the future, so you might have already seen it. One could call the replication crisis the viral fake news epidemic of many fields of science that was a hidden, chronic disease over decades and centuries and has become extremely widespread during the last years, since the first critics began vaccinating against it, provoking virulent counterarguments. I don´t know how else this could end than with nothing else than paradigm shifts, discovering many anachronisms, and a better, fact- and number based research with many control instances before something of an impact on the social policy gets accepted. Some soft science books are nothing more than fairytales for adults who never had the chance to built a free opinion because most of the media they consume to stay informed and get educated avoids any criticism of the current economic system. Without having read or heard ideas by Chomsky, Monbiot, Klein, Ken Robinson, Monbiot, Peter Singer, William McDonough, Ziegler, Colin Crouch, Jeremy Rifkin, David Graeber, John Perkins, and others, humans will always react to people like me, condemning the manipulation practiced everywhere with terrifying success, with anger and refusal. These authors don´t hide aspects of the truth and describe the real state of the world, don´t predict the future and preach the one only, the true way, ignoring anything like black swans, coincidences, or the, for each small child logical, fact that nobody knows what will happen, and collect exactly the free available data people such indoctrinated people to ignore forever. A few points that led to the replication crisis: I had an intuitive feeling regarding this for years, but the replication crisis proofed that there are too many interconnections of not strictly scientific fields such as economics and politics with many humanities. Look, already some of the titles are biased towards a more positive or negative attitude, but thinking too optimistic is the same mistake as being too pessimistic, it isn´t objective anymore and one can be instrumentalized without even recognizing it. In natural sciences, theoretical physicists, astrophysicists, physicians… that were friends of a certain idea will always say that there is the option of change, that a discovery may lead to a new revolution, and that their old work has to be reexamined. So in science regarding the real world the specialists are much more open to change than in some humanities, isn´t that strange? It would be as if one would say that all humans are representative, similar, that there are no differences. But it´s not, each time a study is made there are different people, opinions, so many coincidences, and unique happenings that it´s impossible to reproduce it. Scandinavia vs the normal world. The society people live in makes happiness, not theoretical, not definitive concepts. One can manipulate so many parameters in those studies that the result can be extremely positive or negative, just depending on what who funds the study and does the study wants as results. One could use the studies she/ he needs to create an optimistic or a pessimistic book and many studies about human nature are redundant, repetitive, or biased towards a certain result, often an optimistic outcome or spectacular, groundbreaking results. Do you know who does that too? Statistics, economics, politics, and faith. I wish I could be a bit more optimistic than realistic, but not hard evidence based stuff is a bit of a no go if it involves practical applications, especially if there is the danger of not working against big problems by doing as if they weren´t there. A few points that lead away from it: 1. Tech 2. Nordic model 3. Open data, open government, 4. Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, quantum computing, to make each financial transaction transparent and traceable. 5. Points mentioned in the Wiki article 6. It must be horrible for the poor scientists who work in those fields and are now suffering because the founding fathers used theories and concepts that have nothing to do with real science. They worked hard to build a career to just find out that the predecessors integrated methods that couldn´t work in other systems, let's say an evolving computer program or a machine or a human body or anywhere except in ones´ imagination. They are truly courageous to risk criticism because of the humanities bashing wave that won´t end soon. As in so many fields, it are a few black sheep who ruin everything for many others and the more progressive a young scientist is, the more he is in danger of getting smashed between a hyper sensible public awareness and the old anachronism shepherds, avoiding anything progressive with the danger of a paradigm shift or even a relativization of the field they dedicated their career to. There has to be strict segregation between theories and ideas and applications in real life, so that anything can be researched, but not used to do crazy things. The worst bad science practice includes, from Wikipedia: 1. The replication crisis (or replicability crisis or reproducibility crisis) is, as of 2020, an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce. The replication crisis affects the social sciences and medicine most severely.[ 2. The inability to replicate the studies of others has potentially grave consequences for many fields of science in which significant theories are grounded on unreproducible experimental work. The replication crisis has been particularly widely discussed in the field of psychology and in medicine, where a number of efforts have been made to re-investigate classic results 3. A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist's experiment (50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments).[8] In 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once and 14% admitted to personally knowing someone who did. 4. „Psychological research is, on average, afflicted with low statistical power." Continued in comments ...more |
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| 4.17
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| Jun 26, 2018
| Jun 26, 2018
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it was amazing
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Victim role and defense mechanisms prevent an emancipated and enlightened reappraisal of past and present grievances, culminating in worsening of syst
Victim role and defense mechanisms prevent an emancipated and enlightened reappraisal of past and present grievances, culminating in worsening of system immanent problems, backlashes, and indirect and unconscious promotion of racial divide. Building mental suppression reflexes, fortifications against unwanted truth, is a sign of an immature and romantic idealization of one´s ego for the price of being part of the problem. The term aversive racism is well chosen, it´s exactly the subconscious mechanism many are unwilling to accept as part of their socialization and conditioning, an epigenetic factor expanding in those trying to be against prejudices, but unwillingly promoting them in a way they don´t even see. It´s the misuse of altruism by indirectly enforcing stereotypes, belittling minorities and other ethnicities, and downplaying the own bias and agenda one deems positive. Look at who built Western society, what inhuman ideologies they had, and think about what that means about the foundations of any system and how much of it is still there under the surface. If one isn´t willing to accept it and wants to keep living the illusions while having a privileged life, try this one: Contrast the reality with a fictional culture built by women for women, an ecotopia by environmentalists, a techno utopia by futurists, etc. In none of these cases someone would deny that key elements of the main ideas can be seen in all elements of the culture, but in reality, of course, no, thank you, inappropriate idea, we are over that, everything is fine. Ignoring own problems worsens them and the older we get the more passive aggressive indirect racist mindsets, that are often indirectly expressed in economic and political contexts, come to mind. Whenever a person is insecure about not possibly promoting ideologies that have integrated exploitative and evil elements, one can easily find cozy reassurance of the righteousness of one's behavior thanks to echo chambers and media exponentiating the hypnotizing sound of all these decent people who can´t all be wrong. And then, bam, someone dares to tell the truth about such self deception mechanisms that don´t just include individual blinders, but many other, good willing people with the same opinion, friends, family,… that of course also don´t deem themselves part of the problem and the natural reaction is, of course, extreme outrage, pure white fragility. „I, an activist for years, decades, having so many friends of all ethnicities, etc. yada, should be a bigoted, opportunistic enforcer of racist ideas? You, harbinger, are wrong and should be ashamed for making me feel bad about your fake history news! And I am activating my being offended mode because now I just feel and can´t think anymore.“ It´s exactly what I´ve experienced with many other problems privileged, white people don´t have to deal with and build illusions, ivory towers, and excuses for their inactions and stubborn behavior around them.instead. In Europe, precisely Austria, it´s done with refugees, the economic system, nazi past, sexism, conservatism, etc that way. People have their unbalanced, strange, implemented opinions they mainly built on news media, friends, and family instead of book and science and repeat bias, mantras, and illogical and bad explanations. As soon as someone points the finger on the hard, real facts, they react this way, get aggressive, change topic, do as if they didn´t mean it that way, behave like expected by good extremists and fanatics. The refuge of pseudointellectual wanna be experts that keep repeating whatever their social media feed drips in their mind, even infecting people that should know better. Even well meaning people who are active in charity organizations, NGOs,… are prone to this blind spots, some strange examples I´ve tried out: Try talking to environmentalist about positive aspects of NGOs, to human rights activists about dehumanizing elements of our whole system and how it indirectly promotes circles of violence instead of just helping whistleblowers and journalists, to hard working people who invest much of their money in destructive, useless consumerism, to green party members…or to anti racism and equal rights groups about this. Forget it, they will act like kids, immediate defiant phase activation, lalala, don´t want to hear. Honestly, part of my misanthropy is that I´ve lost interest in and respecting of many people who are so blind to how they have been instrumentalized to greenwash corporate responsibility PR camouflaged as real activism without even recognizing, and absorb the propaganda as part of their identity, thinking we have reached the end of history, attacking anything questioning their distorted and self aggrandizing world view. They are lost, stranded in a mixture of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogniti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of... salted with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaga... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychol... fueled by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replica... that legitimates their disturbing views with fringe science. Their whole personality is built on nothing more than the soft washed, trivialized, indirect fallout of anachronistic ideals still secretly metastasizing and growing with any descendant of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. At a moment in history where anyone could build an objective opinion by using the amazing possibilities of wikis, apps, independent media, and progressive nonfiction authors instead of reading the same, repetitive, everything is fine fairy tale unicorn rainbow BS. Instead, they keep being used by forces they don´t want to be real, whose main interest is to divide and rule by fueling any kind of conflict between social groups to keep their status. It made me hyper sceptical regarding many humanities and soft sciences they use as arguments too. It also took me some time over the last decade to go chronologically through the feelings of disbelief, anger, something close to hate (one of the rare emotions I feel next to flow, hungry, the other ry (not sorry), and sleepy), motivation to try to change people, I am still laughing about this one, repeating of the first circle, to end up with cold, cynic apathy for, disinterest in, and avoidance of the overwhelming majority of the population. But it luckily fueled my belief in the youth and the next generation instead. Power resetting people´s mindsets is very difficult and if it´s not combined with an extreme ideology (and even then it´s close to impossible to make people accept that they´ve been wrong over years or decades), but with thinking of themselves as progressive founding mothers and fathers of a better future, it gets close to impossible. They´ve invested time, heart blood, belief, studying, debating,… in becoming the person and identify they are and I don´t believe many of them will change, because it includes many other aspects of their agenda and ideology, they would have to reevaluate and revise key elements, something too brutal and hard. See what I just did, I indirectly defended white fragility, it´s truly a hellish circle. And an extremely ridiculous one in the eyes of discriminated groups and minorities, it´s a kind of black comedy mentally instable person gag where the wealthy, carefree, lucky ones do as if changing the inhuman system that made them rich, and some of their opinions, is something unfair, painful, and gruesome to them. A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrim... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultura... ...more |
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| 0735210934
| 4.05
| 11,571
| Jul 23, 2019
| Jul 23, 2019
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really liked it
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Language developed very slow, ugh, ah, and is accelerating faster and faster. Hm, everything seems to do this nowadays. Take all those funny ancient,
Language developed very slow, ugh, ah, and is accelerating faster and faster. Hm, everything seems to do this nowadays. Take all those funny ancient, medieval, renaissance texts and how entertainingly cute they wrote, talked, and grammared, isn´t it lovely. For a very long time the control over punctuation, grammar, spelling, was in the hand of the few ever so smart intellectuals that decided what was right and wrong, what a correct standard is and what an evil, wrong, stinking, different approach. This lead to bizarre overcomplications, reforms that got reformed and so many unnecessary overachiever brain wars that wanted one right language and not an intelligent compromise like, let´s say, for instance, different alternatives to write something as long as the logic and intelligibility don´t suffer. But then the specialist would have had no jobs anymore, so the senseless learning for millions of kids continued. And then, bang, internet. Not that the poor young ones didn´t have to learn stupid, illogical rules anymore ( I mean, what do they believe language is, math, physics or something?), but now language could start evolving quicker, freer, and more manifold than ever before, with each subgroup, culture, special interest, and it keeps accelerating, bazinga. This fascinating concept, how language is changing and will develop in the future thanks to interconnecting anyone with all human beings and their knowledge and unique speech, use of language and speaking and writing style, is the main idea of McCullochs´ revolutionary work. Yes, I know, there are emojis, memes, hashtags, emoticons, much viral stuff that will continue forever, but I find the transformation of the way people directly interact with each other in social media, chats, comments, VR, AR, and in some rare cases, real life, much more fascinating than ;) and grumpy cat. Sorry for that, but neologisms, new slangs, diminutives, and jargon and how they collide with and change the old language, as the digital natives keep using new grammar when they become parents themselves and the before mentioned, is much more fascinating than pics and evolving smileys. I have a certain mentality regarding emojis and I will stay with it, saying: “I´ll tip and tap them. With my cold, dead hands.“ But not before. It´s all a bit of emancipation too, because, do you know what, in my subjective opinion, is the ultimate proof of conservative stupidity? Having tens of thousands of linguists in universities all around the world that play with the rules of languages and boring, useless studies about stuff nobody is interested in while important, new, interdisciplinary, progressive fields get no funding for research in this unbelievable revolution of everything regarding human interaction since the internet began. What right and legitimation have all those anachronism custodians to cherrypick and dictate how language has to evolve, when a reform is necessary, and how one has to do grammar, yada, blah blah, and babble? The language is free, wooden girls and boys, chill a bit, open your mind for more levity in language and ethical and cultural references. But luckily internet linguistics is starting to take off and will analyse a parallel evolution of real and digital language, how stronger languages are cannibalizing others (those poor little ones like German that suffer so much with each anglicism killing one of their old friends, oh look, now it cries) and one has to always keep in mind that we will seem as strange to future people as medieval knights and Victorian ladies seem to us today. Regarding emojis I asked myself how the biochemical and neurological effect of it will develop if VR and AR are used by kids in some years and they are conditioned to use animations and pictures of mimic, gestures, and body language that are written into their wetware and give conversations and thoughts an extra lawyer, linking different brain regions together and, sigh, being quite useful for human evolution. But not before! And I still won´t use them, ok!? See, an oldfashioned interrogation and exclamation mark, that´s enough emo for me. And I lold and rofld when the author was talking about a „third place to socialize“ next to work and home, if my math is right, I am still at 0, socialize my … What amazed me the most is realizing that this living, breathing, immortal thing called language is at the moment creating new generations of language users, that this love affair between tech and blah will last forever and create exponentially more and more different manifestations, that McCulloch already defined different phases and varieties of users, that I am one of the ancient ones and finally realized that I am getting old. A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interne... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioli... ...more |
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May 28, 2020
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| 0226320618
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| 0226320618
| 4.16
| 23,887
| Sep 18, 1944
| Oct 15, 1994
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did not like it
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He inspired Milton Friedman. There´s nothing to add to that, it´s just making one speechless. As soon as abstract, not measurable, highly abstract, not He inspired Milton Friedman. There´s nothing to add to that, it´s just making one speechless. As soon as abstract, not measurable, highly abstract, not concrete concepts and words such as freedom, justice, right, etc. are used, it´s often a highly alarming sign, signal, and warning that something is going terribly wrong, that the author has left reality and entered the spheres of speculation, guessing, or just doing as if subjective, in the best cases just eccentric, DIY creative problem solving ideas can be implemented in larger systems or even the world. It reminds me of playing Chinese whisperers, silent post, for two reasons. First, because those pseudo fringe science wannabe intellectuals are as arrogant as possible while behaving like stubborn kids and second, because one begins with a stupid idea that gets copied and modified and mutates to more and more idiotic, tragically real-life appliances. It´s also a bit like a brainstorming, a creative technique, an idea constructing session completely getting out of control. I´ll give it a try. Let´s say that I am biased and hate capitalism such as Hayek hated socialism without any reason, mixed it with pseudo psychology and constructed his crude and inhuman theories. So I want anything in the property of the state, ban private companies, install a system such in China or with communism. Does one see how stupid and onesided that is, this black and white, good and bad, evil economy and friendly economy? But wait, if we instead say that our economic system is as onesided and stupid as communism, that´s, of course, unacceptable treason. One could produce thousands of stupid fringe theories while misusing social sciences and humanities. Oh wait, that´s permanently done, my mistake. I´ve said most about this topic in my reviews of Roslings´ Factfulness https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Pinkers´ Enlightenment Now https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and Friedmans´ Capitalism and Freedom. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... These books are just a repetition of the same yada bla without any accuracy or legitimacy. Some facepalm quotes: “I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.” “Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.” „Wir verdanken den Amerikanern eine große Bereicherung der Sprache durch den bezeichnenden Ausdruck weasel-word. So wie das kleine Raubtier, das auch wir Wiesel nennen, angeblich aus einem Ei allen Inhalt heraussaugen kann, ohne daß man dies nachher der leeren Schale anmerkt, so sind die Wiesel-Wörter jene, die, wenn man sie einem Wort hinzufügt, dieses Wort jedes Inhalts und jeder Bedeutung berauben. Ich glaube, das Wiesel-Wort par excellence ist das Wort sozial. Was es eigentlich heißt, weiß niemand. Wahr ist nur, daß eine soziale Marktwirtschaft keine Marktwirtschaft, ein sozialer Rechtsstaat kein Rechtsstaat, ein soziales Gewissen kein Gewissen, soziale Gerechtigkeit keine Gerechtigkeit – und ich fürchte auch, soziale Demokratie keine Demokratie ist.“ Because of much talk and discussion about the replication crisis with friends and in general, I will add these thoughts to all following nonfiction books dealing with humanities in the future, so you might have already seen it. Sorry folks, this is one of my last rants, I am sick and tired of this and want to focus on true science and great fiction instead, not this disturbed fairytales for adults who never had the chance to built a free opinion because most of the media they consume to stay informed and get educated avoids any criticism of the current economic system. Without having read or heard ideas by Chomsky, Monbiot, Klein, Ken Robinson, Monbiot, Peter Singer, William McDonough, Ziegler, Colin Crouch, Jeremy Rifkin, David Graeber, John Perkins, and others, humans will always react to people like me, condemning the manipulation Hayek was practicing with terrifying success, with anger and refusal. These authors don´t hide aspects of the truth and describe the real state of the world that should be read instead of epic facepalms like this. They don´t predict the future and preach the one only, the true way, ignoring anything like black swans, coincidences or the, for each small child logical, fact that nobody knows what will happen, and collect exactly the free available data people such as Hayek wanted to ignore forever. Some words about the publication crisis that even have some positive points at the end so that this whole thing is not that depressing. One could call the replication crisis the viral fake news epidemic of many fields of science that was a hidden, chronic disease over decades and centuries and has become extremely widespread during the last years, since the first critics began vaccinating against it, provoking virulent counterarguments. I don´t know how else this could end than with nothing else than paradigm shifts, discovering many anachronisms, and a better, fact- and number based research with many control instances before something of an impact on the social policy gets accepted. A few points that led to it: I had an intuitive feeling regarding this for years, but the replication crisis proofed that there are too many interconnections of not strictly scientific fields such as economics and politics with many humanities. Look, already some of the titles are biased towards a more positive or negative attitude, but thinking too optimistic is the same mistake as being too pessimistic, it isn´t objective anymore and one can be instrumentalized without even recognizing it. In natural sciences, theoretical physicists, astrophysicists, physicians… that were friends of a certain idea will always say that there is the option of change, that a discovery may lead to a new revolution, and that their old work has to be reexamined. So in science regarding the real world the specialists are much more open to change than in some humanities, isn´t that strange? It would be as if one would say that all humans are representative, similar, that there are no differences. But it´s not, each time a study is made there are different people, opinions, so many coincidences, and unique happenings that it´s impossible to reproduce it. Scandinavia vs the normal world. The society people live in makes happiness, not theoretical, not definitive concepts. One can manipulate so many parameters in those studies that the result can be extremely positive or negative, just depending on what who funds the study and does the study wants as results. One could use the studies she/ he needs to create an optimistic or a pessimistic book and many studies about human nature are redundant, repetitive, or biased towards a certain result, often an optimistic outcome or spectacular, groundbreaking results. Do you know who does that too? Statistics, economics, politics, and faith. I wish I could be a bit more optimistic than realistic, but not hard evidence based stuff is a bit of a no go if it involves practical applications, especially if there is the danger of not working against big problems by doing as if they weren´t there. A few points that lead away from it: 1. Tech 2. Nordic model 3. Open data, open government, 4. Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, quantum computing, to make each financial transaction transparent and traceable. 5. Points mentioned in the Wiki article 6. It must be horrible for the poor scientists who work in those fields and are now suffering because the founding fathers used theories and concepts that have nothing to do with real science. They worked hard to build a career to just find out that the predecessors integrated methods that couldn´t work in other systems, let's say an evolving computer program or a machine or a human body or anywhere except in ones´ imagination. They are truly courageous to risk criticism because of the humanities bashing wave that won´t end soon. As in so many fields, it are a few black sheep who ruin everything for many others and the more progressive a young scientist is, the more he is in danger of getting smashed between a hyper sensible public awareness and the old anachronism shepherds, avoiding anything progressive with the danger of a paradigm shift or even a relativization of the field they dedicated their career to. There has to be strict segregation between theories and ideas and applications in real life, so that anything can be researched, but not used to do crazy things. The worst bad science practice includes, from Wikipedia, taken from the article about the replication crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replica... 1. The replication crisis (or replicability crisis or reproducibility crisis) is, as of 2020, an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce. The replication crisis affects the social sciences and medicine most severely.[ 2. The inability to replicate the studies of others has potentially grave consequences for many fields of science in which significant theories are grounded on unreproducible experimental work. The replication crisis has been particularly widely discussed in the field of psychology and in medicine, where a number of efforts have been made to re-investigate classic results 3. A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist's experiment (50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments).[8] In 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once and 14% admitted to personally knowing someone who did. 4. „Psychological research is, on average, afflicted with low statistical power." 5. Firstly, questionable research practices (QRPs) have been identified as common in the field.[18] Such practices, while not intentionally fraudulent, involve capitalizing on the gray area of acceptable scientific practices or exploiting flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting, often in an effort to obtain a desired outcome. Examples of QRPs include selective reporting or partial publication of data (reporting only some of the study conditions or collected dependent measures in a publication), optional stopping (choosing when to stop data collection, often based on statistical significance of tests), p-value rounding (rounding p-values down to 0.05 to suggest statistical significance), file drawer effect (nonpublication of data), post-hoc storytelling (framing exploratory analyses as confirmatory analyses), and manipulation of outliers (either removing outliers or leaving outliers in a dataset to cause a statistical test to be significant).[18][19][20][21] A survey of over 2,000 psychologists indicated that a majority of respondents admitted to using at least one QRP.[18] False positive conclusions, often resulting from the pressure to publish or the author's own confirmation bias, are an inherent hazard in the field, requiring a certain degree of skepticism on the part of readers.[2 6. Secondly, psychology and social psychology in particular, has found itself at the center of several scandals involving outright fraudulent research, 7. Thirdly, several effects in psychological science have been found to be difficult to replicate even before the current replication crisis. Replications appear particularly difficult when research trials are pre-registered and conducted by research groups not highly invested in the theory under questioning. 8. Scrutiny of many effects have shown that several core beliefs are hard to replicate. A recent special edition of the journal Social Psychology focused on replication studies and a number of previously held beliefs were found to be difficult to replicate.[25] A 2012 special edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science also focused on issues ranging from publication bias to null-aversion that contribute to the replication crises in psychology.[26] In 2015, the first open empirical study of reproducibility in psychology was published, called the Reproducibility Project. Researchers from around the world collaborated to replicate 100 empirical studies from three top psychology journals. Fewer than half of the attempted replications were successful at producing statistically significant results in the expected directions, though most of the attempted replications did produce trends in the expected directions. 9. Many research trials and meta-analyses are compromised by poor quality and conflicts of interest that involve both authors and professional advocacy organizations, resulting in many false positives regarding the effectiveness of certain types of psychotherapy 10. The reproducibility of 100 studies in psychological science from three high-ranking psychology journals.[44] Overall, 36% of the replications yielded significant findings (p value below 0.05) compared to 97% of the original studies that had significant effects. The mean effect size in the replications was approximately half the magnitude of the effects reported in the original studies. 11. Highlighting the social structure that discourages replication in psychology, Brian D. Earp and Jim A. C. Everett enumerated five points as to why replication attempts are uncommon:[50][51] 12. "Independent, direct replications of others' findings can be time-consuming for the replicating researcher" 13. "[Replications] are likely to take energy and resources directly away from other projects that reflect one's own original thinking" 14. "[Replications] are generally harder to publish (in large part because they are viewed as being unoriginal)" 15. "Even if [replications] are published, they are likely to be seen as 'bricklaying' exercises, rather than as major contributions to the field Continued in comments ...more |
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did not like it
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One of the most destructive books ever written Officer Barbrady: „Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magica One of the most destructive books ever written Officer Barbrady: „Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of s**t, I am never reading again.“ No, of course, I will keep on reading forever, don´t worry. Most of why it´s so stupid has been/will be described in my reviews of books by Naomi Klein, David Graeber, others, and the rants about Hans Roslings´ Factfulness and Steven Pinkers´ Enlightenment now. It´s one of those evil books one might ask to how many people it brought suffering, poverty, and a terrible life until an unnecessary, early death. Let´s make a thought experiment: Let´s say that the Keynesian model stayed and established stable, fair democracies all over the world, strong Nordic model utopias where everybody is happy. Influenced by that, natural destruction, poverty in the Southern hemisphere, climate change, and all the other problems we are facing right now are not nearly as bad and can be solved. So how many people live better lives in such an alternate universe? I would really like to do the math, but it´s a bit tricky, so let´s say that this idiotic economic, political, and social systems keep running for some more years, close to the 22nd century, when there will possibly be up to an 11-digit number of people on the planet. Even if we just take a small amount of these, just one percent of 10 billion, 100.000.000 people that have horrible existences, it´s a crime against humanity of unimaginable dimensions. But we are right now, at this moment, accepting and ignoring that billions of people are dying, suffering, and despairing without any other purpose than to make the rich richer. All politics is part of the problem at the moment, the only change can come from the civil society and NGOs, only engagement in those is useful, real democracy doesn´t exist anymore. The freaking maddest thing about this bonkers ideology faith bad science nightmare is that nobody talks, debates, analyses, thinks,... openly about Hayek and his fanatic soldier Friedman, that the foundation of the corpocracy we are all living in is nothing to openly quarrel about, because it´s like law, it´s like faith, it´s a total dogma that has infected and weakened close to all Western puppet democracies for decades and is at the moment destroying the whole nature of this only earth at a never before seen speed while boiling it at the same time. Because of much talk and discussion about the replication crisis with friends and in general, I will add these thoughts to all following nonfiction books dealing with humanities in the future, so you might have already seen it. Sorry folks, this is one of my last rants, I am sick and tired of this and want to focus on true science and great fiction instead, not this disturbed fairytales for adults who never had the chance to built a free opinion because most of the media they consume to stay informed and get educated avoids any criticism of the current economic system. Without having read or heard ideas by Chomsky, Monbiot, Klein, Ken Robinson, Monbiot, Peter Singer, William McDonough, Ziegler, Colin Crouch, Jeremy Rifkin, David Graeber, John Perkins, and others, humans will always react to people like me, condemning the manipulation Friedman was practicing with terrifying success, with anger and refusal. These authors don´t hide aspects of the truth and describe the real state of the world that should be read instead of epic facepalms like this. They don´t predict the future and preach the one only, the true way, ignoring anything like black swans, coincidences or the, for each small child logical, fact that nobody knows what will happen, and collect exactly the free available data people such as Friedman wanted to ignore forever. Some words about the publication crisis that even have some positive points at the end so that this whole thing is not that depressing. One could call the replication crisis the viral fake news epidemic of many fields of science that was a hidden, chronic disease over decades and centuries and has become extremely widespread during the last years, since the first critics began vaccinating against it, provoking virulent counterarguments. I don´t know how else this could end than with nothing else than paradigm shifts, discovering many anachronisms, and a better, fact- and number based research with many control instances before something of an impact on the social policy gets accepted. A few points that led to it: I had an intuitive feeling regarding this for years, but the replication crisis proofed that there are too many interconnections of not strictly scientific fields such as economics and politics with many humanities. Look, already some of the titles are biased towards a more positive or negative attitude, but thinking too optimistic is the same mistake as being too pessimistic, it isn´t objective anymore and one can be instrumentalized without even recognizing it. In natural sciences, theoretical physicists, astrophysicists, physicians… that were friends of a certain idea will always say that there is the option of change, that a discovery may lead to a new revolution, and that their old work has to be reexamined. So in science regarding the real world the specialists are much more open to change than in some humanities, isn´t that strange? It would be as if one would say that all humans are representative, similar, that there are no differences. But it´s not, each time a study is made there are different people, opinions, so many coincidences, and unique happenings that it´s impossible to reproduce it. Scandinavia vs the normal world. The society people live in makes happiness, not theoretical, not definitive concepts. One can manipulate so many parameters in those studies that the result can be extremely positive or negative, just depending on what who funds the study and does the study wants as results. One could use the studies she/ he needs to create an optimistic or a pessimistic book and many studies about human nature are redundant, repetitive, or biased towards a certain result, often an optimistic outcome or spectacular, groundbreaking results. Do you know who does that too? Statistics, economics, politics, and faith. I wish I could be a bit more optimistic than realistic, but not hard evidence based stuff is a bit of a no go if it involves practical applications, especially if there is the danger of not working against big problems by doing as if they weren´t there. A few points that lead away from it: 1. Tech 2. Nordic model 3. Open data, open government, 4. Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, quantum computing, to make each financial transaction transparent and traceable. 5. Points mentioned in the Wiki article 6. It must be horrible for the poor scientists who work in those fields and are now suffering because the founding fathers used theories and concepts that have nothing to do with real science. They worked hard to build a career to just find out that the predecessors integrated methods that couldn´t work in other systems, let's say an evolving computer program or a machine or a human body or anywhere except in ones´ imagination. They are truly courageous to risk criticism because of the humanities bashing wave that won´t end soon. As in so many fields, it are a few black sheep who ruin everything for many others and the more progressive a young scientist is, the more he is in danger of getting smashed between a hyper sensible public awareness and the old anachronism shepherds, avoiding anything progressive with the danger of a paradigm shift or even a relativization of the field they dedicated their career to. There has to be strict segregation between theories and ideas and applications in real life, so that anything can be researched, but not used to do crazy things. The worst bad science practice includes, from Wikipedia, taken from the article about the replication crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replica... 1. The replication crisis (or replicability crisis or reproducibility crisis) is, as of 2020, an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce. The replication crisis affects the social sciences and medicine most severely.[ 2. The inability to replicate the studies of others has potentially grave consequences for many fields of science in which significant theories are grounded on unreproducible experimental work. The replication crisis has been particularly widely discussed in the field of psychology and in medicine, where a number of efforts have been made to re-investigate classic results 3. A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist's experiment (50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments).[8] In 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once and 14% admitted to personally knowing someone who did. 4. „Psychological research is, on average, afflicted with low statistical power." 5. Firstly, questionable research practices (QRPs) have been identified as common in the field.[18] Such practices, while not intentionally fraudulent, involve capitalizing on the gray area of acceptable scientific practices or exploiting flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting, often in an effort to obtain a desired outcome. Examples of QRPs include selective reporting or partial publication of data (reporting only some of the study conditions or collected dependent measures in a publication), optional stopping (choosing when to stop data collection, often based on statistical significance of tests), p-value rounding (rounding p-values down to 0.05 to suggest statistical significance), file drawer effect (nonpublication of data), post-hoc storytelling (framing exploratory analyses as confirmatory analyses), and manipulation of outliers (either removing outliers or leaving outliers in a dataset to cause a statistical test to be significant).[18][19][20][21] A survey of over 2,000 psychologists indicated that a majority of respondents admitted to using at least one QRP.[18] False positive conclusions, often resulting from the pressure to publish or the author's own confirmation bias, are an inherent hazard in the field, requiring a certain degree of skepticism on the part of readers.[2 6. Secondly, psychology and social psychology in particular, has found itself at the center of several scandals involving outright fraudulent research, 7. Thirdly, several effects in psychological science have been found to be difficult to replicate even before the current replication crisis. Replications appear particularly difficult when research trials are pre-registered and conducted by research groups not highly invested in the theory under questioning. 8. Scrutiny of many effects have shown that several core beliefs are hard to replicate. A recent special edition of the journal Social Psychology focused on replication studies and a number of previously held beliefs were found to be difficult to replicate.[25] A 2012 special edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science also focused on issues ranging from publication bias to null-aversion that contribute to the replication crises in psychology.[26] In 2015, the first open empirical study of reproducibility in psychology was published, called the Reproducibility Project. Researchers from around the world collaborated to replicate 100 empirical studies from three top psychology journals. Fewer than half of the attempted replications were successful at producing statistically significant results in the expected directions, though most of the attempted replications did produce trends in the expected directions. 9. Many research trials and meta-analyses are compromised by poor quality and conflicts of interest that involve both authors and professional advocacy organizations, resulting in many false positives regarding the effectiveness of certain types of psychotherapy 10. The reproducibility of 100 studies in psychological science from three high-ranking psychology journals.[44] Overall, 36% of the replications yielded significant findings (p value below 0.05) compared to 97% of the original studies that had significant effects. The mean effect size in the replications was approximately half the magnitude of the effects reported in the original studies. 11. Highlighting the social structure that discourages replication in psychology, Brian D. Earp and Jim A. C. Everett enumerated five points as to why replication attempts are uncommon:[50][51] 12. "Independent, direct replications of others' findings can be time-consuming for the replicating researcher" 13. "[Replications] are likely to take energy and resources directly away from other projects that reflect one's own original thinking" 14. "[Replications] are generally harder to publish (in large part because they are viewed as being unoriginal)" 15. "Even if [replications] are published, they are likely to be seen as 'bricklaying' exercises, rather than as major contributions to the field 16. "[Replications] bring less recognition and reward, and even basic career security, to their authors"[52] 17. For these reasons the authors advocated that psychology is facing a disciplinary social dilemma, where the interests of the discipline are at odds with the interests of the individual researcher 18. Medicine. Out of 49 medical studies from 1990–2003 with more than 1000 citations, 45 claimed that the studied therapy was effective. Out of these studies, 16% were contradicted by subsequent studies, 16% had found stronger effects than did subsequent studies, 44% were replicated, and 24% remained largely unchallenged.[58] The US Food and Drug Administration in 1977–1990 found flaws in 10–20% of medical studies 19. Marketing is another discipline with a "desperate need" for replication.[64] Many famous marketing studies fail to be repeated upon replication, a notable example being the "too-many-choices" effect, in which a high number of choices of product makes a consumer less likely to purchase.[65] In addition to the previously mentioned arguments, replication studies in marketing are needed to examine the applicability of theories and models across countries and cultures, which is especially important because of possible influences of globalization. Continued in comments ...more |
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| 4.11
| 2,674
| Feb 01, 2000
| Apr 17, 2001
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really liked it
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Of course, nobody really knows exactly, so that all research can just be based on assumptions, theories, hypothesis,... that are mixed with actual bra
Of course, nobody really knows exactly, so that all research can just be based on assumptions, theories, hypothesis,... that are mixed with actual brain science, evolutionary psychology and well, large field studies. Just in theory, because no scientist gets the millions of funding to base her/his ideas on hard, provable facts so that we doubtfully enter the minefield of subjective assumptions. The subject is fascinating both in humans and animals and how it may evolve in the future with our senses changing and how women's´ minds and their ability to select and choose may develop in combination with AR, VR, genetic testing ("Give me your probe or leave, I won´t waste time dating someone who is a potential horrible genetic match." "Yes, Ma´am." "Don´t call me that and where are you going?" "You said you wanted a sample of..." Not that, you perv idiot, just a saliva sample." "Oh, I see. Well, then..." "Not anymore!") and bio-digital fusion, is interesting. Most of the book focuses on animal behavior and concludes that it have always been the females who made a species successful in preventing catastrophes by choosing carefully and mindfully. That might have been one of many reasons that evolution pimped brains and upgraded males, but Miller should have clearly differentiated that is was one of many, unknown driving forces and that is is impossible to name a clear favorite. To define horniness as the only motivation for art, science, charity, humor, interest in upbringing, humanities, everything, seems very far-fetched and I would say that many give a f*** (hoho, wordplay alert) and are just interested in the subject itself, not the groupies. There are some funny theories, not related to this book but worth mentioning in this context, about that nature might tend to make more experiments with the intelligence of males because it might get fatal when women where, well, as dumb as some men. I don´t know any numbers and this is so close to gender racism that there might never be any long-term studies done, but I love the picture of a kind of Gaia entity who orchestrates all evolutions and thinks: "Doesn´t matter if many of the males are too stupid to survive, they aren´t important for the survival of the species, so I will instead fix the minimum intelligence for women to avoid problems." To get highly subjective, I have really met much more stupid men than women and about the same amount of both species, so maybe there is really something behind it, who knows, duh, "look, primary and secondary sexual characteristics, beer, sports and hordes of befriended males with lovely group dynamics, must go, it hardly ever ends in small disasters or world wars if we do that." To take everything with a grain of salt and to not criticize authors who dare to risk to make hypotheses that could become true is important in this case. The problem might be that there are inherent dangers if one of those ideas gets too much media or even public attention and is misused or misinterpreted for one´s own agenda. It´s ingenious by Miller to interpret models of society, politics, and economics depending on his thesis, and mind games integrating evolutionary biology and psychology in sociology and history could be played much more often than just the isolated historical, psychological or political interpretations alone. It also shows how unscientific especially political theory and economics are, how weak the foundations must be that it is so easy to reliably question and reinterpret them without the possibility to negate it. An expert can cherrypick parts of those theories and built whatever she/he wants out of them, make epic battle disses or praises. Try to do this with an engine or in medicine, it will explode or kill the patient. It´s so funny that we eliminated natural selection and that now everybody is lying even more, because an ape or primitive human couldn´t fake smartness, success, etc. or get detailed tutorials by nasty pick-up artists and immoral personal coaches. No wonder women had to develop defense mechanisms against so much deception, falsehood, and virility. The best and most valid security for a women might be, as mentioned, gene tests, as long as males don´t have the option to manipulate their saliva, blood, etc. to seem fitter, but the evolutionary arms race of males trying to fake and delude women into mating may go on forever until we evolve into entities. And it might even continue then when it comes to creating new AIs. Why does anything in my reviews has to evolve to transhuman, superhuman, immortal status... I am highly biased and tend to jay to evolutionary and to meh at psychology, but try to stay objective. I truly don´t write far too wordy and adjectively reviews to seem smart and attractive to potential female mating partners. Damn it, Miller debunked me. Sigh. By the way, now that it doesn´t matter anymore, I am a 35 year old Austrian... A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mating_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor... ...more |
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it was amazing
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I know that it´s totally wrong to be amused or even laugh while reading books with such topics, but the author does such a great, entertaining, scienc
I know that it´s totally wrong to be amused or even laugh while reading books with such topics, but the author does such a great, entertaining, science-education job by combining the worst nightmares of plague history with wit and satire that it´s difficult to stay serious. The key element here is Big History and that makes it an eyeopener because the medical books are just talking about the strange cures, the history books about the consequences on politics and warfare, the biology books about how the critters scuttle from victim to victim, but nobody puzzled the elements together until know. It was a combination of ignorance, stupidity, prudery, faith,... that made the illnesses even worse, because by combining stupid or no healing options with ostracizing, stigmatizing and persecuting the suffering humans, it got spread wider than necessary. The narrative arc of each described illness shows all of those aspects, the ideologies that fostered the wrong ideas and the brave doctors and scientists who tried to find real cures instead while facing scorn and occupational problems. One thing must be said about the inventors of freaking crazy theories about how and why who suffers from what, they were pretty creative. Just as right out of a maniac group brainstorming session, those academic trained, teaching, elite professors saw the damage they caused as science and cure and although some of them might certainly have been frauds, many might have believed that they are doing something Hippocratic instead of sadistic and worsening everything. Pandemics and infectious diseases had a huge impact on human history, art, and probably even genetic development, because eliminating large parts of the gene pool and just leaving the fittest or luckiest with random mutations or even build-in resistance survive, changes the composition of a population forever. If the black death hadn´t wiped out large parts of Europe's population, we might still live in a theocracy; if the peoples of the Americas would have been immune to smallpox and other European diseases, colonialization would have been impossible and there would be no US today. Instead, the tribes could have built huge ships to sail to Europe to bring us their plagues on purpose or accidentally and helped our ancestors to find the path close to extinction and we would live in reservations now. There are plenty of possible uchronia settings. The worst case of mismanagement in the 20th century was the reaction to the coming AIDS epidemic that could have been prevented, but instead, Reagan and, in general, many conservative politicians did everything to make it worse and let it escalate. If it would have been a rich, straight, white man´s disease, it would have been cured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesti... He was such a loveable person. The only difference to today may be that it were just restricted minds and sheer stupidity and not financial interests (or disinterests in finding cures for diseases nobody in the industrialized, rich countries gets or new antibiotics or cheap generics or...) that torpedoed and deferred progress in medical research. And doctors and scientists don´t get witch-hunted and burned any more if they have the nasty habit of getting pesky and just have to fear the loss of funding, license, job, reputation, and respect. It´s a coincidence that I am writing this review at a moment when the 2020 Coronavirus outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2... is omnipresent. (and after the 2019 Ebola crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kivu_Eb...) It´s just a question of the competence of government and international institutions (sadly no joke); the severity of the new mutation of the virus; herd immunity and vaccination rates and how quickly new vaccines can be developed, mass-produced, and distributed; if it may become a too close, not just platonic friend of the yearly flu epidemic and similar, seasonal epidemics or multidrug-resistant germs or biological warfare agents someone let lying around anywhere (looking at you, certain country with terrible military security measures), or...; how quickly it´s discovered and how far it has already spread, if it´s a zoonosis, where it breaks out, how contagious and deadly it is,... and sheer luck or bad luck how bad that future, coming pandemics will get. A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieva... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_h... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_His... ...more |
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Dec 17, 2019
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really liked it
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Finding freedom from consumerism and opportunism in harmony with nature. The principle of living in harmony with nature has been a topic for a long tim Finding freedom from consumerism and opportunism in harmony with nature. The principle of living in harmony with nature has been a topic for a long time until civilization alienated people from their original homeland. However, especially this opens up the possibility for introspection and reflection with the help of the simple life before apparently essential things like consumption, status and power lose their appeal. Thoreau shows how a needless life can be filled with happiness and meaning by getting satisfaction from oneself, one's creativity and the people and nature around and not by the eternal hunt for the imposed, changing ideals of society. Such as "Go into the cave of the enemies and kill them all with a club, so that you can have fun in the hereafter with your comrades who have fallen in battle and massively amounts of willing women and whatever drug we allow you to consume." Alternatively, "Learn stupidly from senseless, non-creatively applicable knowledge to make you highly specialized until up into old age." "Consume with accumulated capital and build up your righteous free time for ritualized buying decisions. "Neglect family and friends and ignore the state of the planet that is so friendly to allow you to live on it. " Unfortunately, the utopian approaches have too often been negatively connoted and presented as impossible. After the dictate that such a world would not be possible. Wars are possible. Fiat money is no problem. But distributive justice with an education system that makes children responsible and happy citizens with environmental awareness? Better not. Nonviolent education was another cornerstone of Thoreau's ideology. At a time when everyone was considered weak, who did not beat children to the bone until blood came out. According to standard doctrine, you had to form these empty shells with black pedagogy until they became, understandably, freaking lunatic religious extremists and fascists. Forcefully forge them like a glowing lump of metal with hammers without love to the instruments one needed to nourish the future generation with pain and cruelty. This educational mentality could have had a not inconsiderable influence on inhumanity at all times, especially with extreme ideologies that gain more access when the majority of the population is from childhood on severely traumatized. When you do evil to innocent beings, teach cruelty and force them to lose all emotions to defend and protect themselves, you get the wished result. The questioning of authorities was and is a stepchild of human behavior. Therefore, Thoreau warned that, even in democracies, one should never bow submissively to majority decisions without questioning them critically. He allowed people the right to protest against bad decisions and to not be forced into a silent consensus. In addition to a pioneer of environmental protection and non-violent pedagogy, he can, therefore, be seen as an icon of the civil rights movement, passive resistance and civil disobedience. His inspirational ideas have influenced icons of freedom movement over the centuries and in the explosive current world situation, they show their visionary power and the potential for the full development of humanist ideas. If everyone lived that way, sustainable existence and peaceful coexistence with nature would be easily possible. The satisfaction with the most essential and the inward turn, rather than longing for ephemeral, mundane consumerism. A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real-life outside books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_D... ...more |
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None
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Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Nov 14, 2019
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0486217612
| 9780486217611
| 0486217612
| 4.21
| 10,563
| 1818
| Jan 02, 2000
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Feb 14, 2019
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0521657296
| 9780521657297
| 0521657296
| 3.96
| 37,203
| 1781
| Feb 28, 1999
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Feb 14, 2019
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0198245971
| 9780198245971
| 0198245971
| 3.96
| 18,773
| 1807
| Nov 30, 1976
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Feb 14, 2019
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0915144867
| 9780915144860
| 0915144867
| 3.78
| 22,346
| Dec 1689
| Jun 1980
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Feb 14, 2019
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0140446044
| 9780140446043
| 0140446044
| 4.23
| 20,431
| 1580
| Sep 07, 1993
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Feb 14, 2019
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0226763749
| 9780226763743
| 0226763749
| 3.88
| 33,119
| Mar 09, 1776
| Jan 01, 1977
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Feb 14, 2019
|
Paperback
|
Mario the lone bookwolf
>
Books:
0-humanities
(140)
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 4.30
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
May 28, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.22
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
May 21, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.08
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
May 13, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.17
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Sep 26, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.17
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Jul 04, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.05
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
May 28, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.16
|
did not like it
|
not set
|
Mar 06, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 3.91
|
did not like it
|
not set
|
Mar 04, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.11
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Jan 24, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.24
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Jan 24, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 3.95
|
not set
|
Dec 17, 2019
|
||||||
|
| 3.94
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Dec 06, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 4.17
|
not set
|
Nov 14, 2019
|
||||||
|
| 3.99
|
not set
|
Nov 14, 2019
|
||||||
|
| 4.21
|
not set
|
Feb 14, 2019
|
||||||
|
| 3.96
|
not set
|
Feb 14, 2019
|
||||||
|
| 3.96
|
not set
|
Feb 14, 2019
|
||||||
|
| 3.78
|
not set
|
Feb 14, 2019
|
||||||
|
| 4.23
|
not set
|
Feb 14, 2019
|
||||||
|
| 3.88
|
not set
|
Feb 14, 2019
|
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