16 Posts found for source_year: 2020

Because complex goods and services require much planning and coordination, management (even though it is only indirectly productive) adds a great deal of value. And managers as a class capture much of this value as pay. This makes the question of who gets to be a manager extremely consequential.

[…]

Middle managers, able to plan and coordinate production independently of elite-executive control, shared not just the … [ Read more ]

Author: Daniel Markovits | Source: The Atlantic (February2020) | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Excerpts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Just over a decade ago, in their paper “Hypotheses on Status Competition,” William C. Wohlforth and David C. Kang, professors of government at Dartmouth and the University of Southern California, wrote that “social status is one of the most important motivators of human behavior” and yet “over the past 35 years, no more … [ Read more ]

Author: Thomas B. Edsall | Source: The New York Times (December 9, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Motivation, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became… The illusion of control is what prevented … [ Read more ]

Authors: Maria Konnikova, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 8, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Originalism sells itself as a way of constraining judges. But it’s more often a way of unleashing them.

Author: Ian Millhiser | Source: Vox (October 12, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Law | Legal

Logic is the bedrock of pretty much all human knowledge. As such, philosophers have killed many trees over the centuries, analyzing and determining the principles that define logic and reason. Their ambition has been to determine what we can know to be true and what we cannot know to be true.

What most people don’t realize is that logical fallacies—that is, errors in judgment and reasoning—are … [ Read more ]

Author: Mark Manson | Subjects: Communication, Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy, Thought | Inquiry

Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.

Author: Wade Davis | Source: Rolling Stone (August 6, 2020) | Subjects: America, Excerpts, History

The thing is, the immune system is very complicated. Arguably the most complex part of the human body outside the brain, it’s an absurdly intricate network of cells and molecules that protect us from dangerous viruses and other microbes. These components summon, amplify, rile, calm, and transform one another: Picture a thousand Rube Goldberg machines, some of which are aggressively smashing things to pieces. Now … [ Read more ]

Author: Ed Yong | Source: The Atlantic (August 5, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Health & Medicine

One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper … [ Read more ]

Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

In November 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, a mob of 2,000 white men expelled black and white political leaders, destroyed the property of the city’s black residents, and killed dozens — if not hundreds — of people.

For decades, the story of this violence was buried, while the perpetrators were cast as heroes.

Source: Vox (June 20, 2020) | Subjects: History, Race Relations

Three primary reasons people are attracted to conspiracy theories:

1. Conspiracy theories make us feel special. According to Tom Nichols, “[Conspiracy] theories also appeal to a strong streak of narcissism: there are people who would choose to believe in complicated nonsense rather than accept that their own circumstances are incomprehensible, the result of issues beyond their intellectual capacity to understand, or even their own fault.” In other

… [ Read more ]

Author: Joe Forrest | Source: Instrument of Mercy (May 7, 2020) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

In his new book, historian Rutger Bregman argues that people are actually fundamentally good.

Author: Mike Jakeman | Source: strategy+business (June 12, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology

In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote the book On Death and Dying. In it, she began by describing how patients talk about dying, and went on to discuss how end-of-life care could be improved.

The part of it that stuck in the public imagination was the idea that when a person is diagnosed with a terminal illness they go through a series of emotional stages.

Kübler-Ross described five … [ Read more ]

Authors: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Lucy Burns | Source: BBC (July 3, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior

One of the most important [Shaolin] teachings is the “five hindrances of self-mastery.” These are the core mental states that prevent us from seeing clearly, making smart decisions, achieving our goals and living a happier, more harmonious life.

1. Sensual desire. Sensual desire is intertwined pleasure, and it arises when we have a deep craving for something that stimulates one or more of our five senses (vision,

… [ Read more ]

Author: Shi Heng Yi | Source: CNBC (June 17, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Years before Walter Lippmann explored stereotypes and the psychology of prejudice, rooted in the disquieting fact that “we do not first see, and then define, [but] define first and then see,” and decades before Hannah Arendt observed that “society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed” before she … [ Read more ]

Authors: Elsie Clews Parsons, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (March 11, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Immigration, Life & Society, Power, Sociology | Anthropology

After World War II, so many Americans believed in the new, activist New Deal state, the “liberal consensus,” that politicians could not motivate voters with sweeping stories of what it meant to be an American: almost all Americans agreed on those basic principles. So political scientists concluded that there was no longer any real defining ideological difference between Republicans and Democrats. In a famous book … [ Read more ]

Author: Heather Cox Richardson | Source: Facebook (February 9, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy

Within the field of moral philosophy, the main rival to deontology [the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules, rather than based on the consequences of the action] is a school of thought known as “consequentialism.” In this view, the morality of actions must be judged by their consequences: … [ Read more ]

Author: Dylan Matthews | Source: Vox (January 27, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Philosophy, Politics & Public Policy