Snippets, May ’22
Axios: Facebook was designed to exploit human “vulnerability”
“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them … was all about ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.… It’s a social-validation feedback loop… [we’re] exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.… The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.” – Sean Parker
The Atlantic: Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three.
“I don’t think that’s who we are as a country. I don’t think that’s who we should be as a country.” – Alice Spence
The New Republic: Make America Good Again
The idea that America is a uniquely awful, sinful country is every bit as navel-gazing, self-centered, and harmful to the national polity as the conception of the United States as a uniquely good—or even Godly—nation. To be an exceptionalist or a counter-exceptionalist is, fundamentally, to put stock in a fiction, in the idea that an imagined agglomeration built first and foremost to keep things running is in fact a moral arbiter. Such a system of reasoning, by its very nature, absolves the officials (elected or otherwise) currently running a nation from moral judgment; a predetermined course of sin or of glory cannot reflect too harshly, or too well, on those who are merely in the carriage as it trundles along its set route. It gives, too, leeway to citizens; in an exceptionalist or counter-exceptionalist polity, we each become not actors capable of altering our own destiny, but observers who can do only two things: witness or leave.
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It takes more than a belief in an America that is good for America to become good. We cannot imagine righteousness and thus live it. But—and this is the tricky part—we cannot make America a force for good if we believe it is fundamentally incapable of goodness. We cannot create justice in soil where we see no place for it to take root. Whether America is considered exceptionally good, exceptionally bad, or simply exceptional, we lose something when we see in ourselves not a country like any other—possessed of better angels and lesser demons, with a winding history in which glory stands alongside shame—but a beast unique, walking its own preordained path upon a fated course. This new generation of Americans should seek not to tear down the country entirely, nor to embrace a sort of national amorality, but to strive to live its values, and so—for a little while—to build a better country, and to do the work of, in Baldwin’s terminology, “achieving” a better kind of America, not for the sake of exceptionality, but for decency.
NPR: Soot is accelerating snow melt in popular parts of Antarctica, a study finds
The number of tourists visiting [Antarctica] each year has ballooned from fewer than 10,000 in the early 1990s to nearly 75,000 people during the austral summer season that began in 2019, according to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators.…
Soot in Antarctica comes primarily from the exhaust of cruise ships, vehicles, airplanes and electrical generators…
The blanket of dark bits exacerbates melting that was already happening more quickly because of global warming. When snow and ice are pristine, they reflect an enormous amount of sunlight before it can turn into heat.… When those mirrors are covered in a film of dark bits, they are less reflective.
The NY Review of Books: What We Owe Our Fellow Animals
Achieving even minimal justice for animals seems a distant dream in our world of casual slaughter and ubiquitous habitat destruction. One might think that Utilitarianism presents a somewhat more manageable goal: Let’s just not torture them so much. But we humans are not satisfied with non-torture. We seek flourishing: free movement, free communication, rich interactions with others of our species (and other species too). Why should we suppose that whales, dolphins, apes, elephants, parrots, and so many other animals seek anything less? If we do suppose that, it is either culpable ignorance, given the knowledge now so readily available, or a self-serving refusal to take responsibility, in a world where we hold all the power.