Lots of items in the news media today about the Oscars, of course. Here’s a typical article about them, followed by some of my reactions, to the awards, and (tomorrow) to some of the individual films.
Salon, Melanie McFarland, 13 Mar 2023: How the Academy Awards managed to be both uplifting and disappointing – everything, all at once, subtitled “Historic wins for Michelle Yeoh and ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ are balanced by dismay at who was left out”
Items about Daylight Saving Time, Tucker Carlson, Biblical Errancy, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Richard Dawkins
Salon, Nicole Karlis, 12 Mar 2023: Why sleep scientists think Standard Time is best, subtitled “People love the extra hour of sunlight at night, but there’s a cost to that”
and Human Nature and Its Biases and Rationality and The Two Cultures and Consilience.
Gregory Feeley, in a friends-only post on Facebook three days ago, linked the two items below and and made some generalizing comments about them.
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About that mask study; about the lab leak theory; and the volume of social media; and about the length of nonfiction books.
NY Times, Zeynep Tufekci, 10 Mar 2023: Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work
It’s like a traffic accident; you can’t look away. Recent headlines on political matters as influenced by religion. One particular religion, whose followers apparently do not respect the Constitution (or at least the establishment clause of the First Amendment). The one religion that would rule them all.
Slate, Dahlia Litchwick, 9 Mar 2023: Which Religion Counts in America, subtitled “A brief in a case out of Indiana shows exactly how fundamentalist Christian beliefs trump everything else in the courts these days.”
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In the closing pages of Michael Shermer’s new book, he quotes Jonathan Rauch’s list, from his book The Constitution of Knowledge, about social rules for turning disagreement into knowledge. Shermer expands upon them, and for one of them provides a summary of the whole of the arc of the Enlightenment and moral progress, including ideas from Steven Pinker’s books and his own earlier book The Moral Arc (review here.) Continue reading
Michael Shermer’s latest book, a thorough account of why people believe conspiracy theories, why it might be beneficial (for evolutionary reasons) to give them the benefit of the doubt (even if they’re not true), with some deep dives into several real and false conspiracy theories. Ending with rules and heuristics for identifying which conspiracy theories might be true, and how to rebuild trust in truth. (( Review completed Wed 8 Mar. ))
Political items? Or items about people who don’t quite live in the real world? Is there a psychological term for them?
NY Times, Linda Qiu, 4 Mar 2023: Fact-Checking Trump’s Speech at CPAC, subtitled “The former president made inaccurate claims about the murder rate in New York, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and windmills at a conservative conference.”
Items about Isaac Asimov and AI, Adrian Tchaikovsky and octopuses and AI, SF magazines and AI-generated stories.
The Atlantic, Jeremy Dauber, 3 Mar 2023: What Isaac Asimov Can Teach Us About AI, subtitled “The science-fiction writer imagined artificial intelligence—and what it might want—long before this uncanny reality ever became our own.”
There seems to be two kinds of wokeism (just, as we saw yesterday, there seems to be two Overton Windows), which might be described as wokeism on the right and wokeism on the left. If wokeism might be described as a perhaps exaggerated respect for the sensitivities of others, a sort of extension of what was once branded “political correctness,” the implication by those against it is that valuable things are being thrown away or suppressed to protect those sensitivities, at the expense of traditions of the past, or even the reality of science in deference to traditional worldviews.
Most broadly, being “woke” simply means being aware of how others perceive the world, and how the assumptions made yesterday might not be appropriate today and might be improved. Woke; awake; aware. In practice, especially on the right, it means opposing anything that challenges the tradition in the US of white Christian culture. On the left it means challenging, even trying to correct, injustices of the past, including almost incidentally racist attitudes in old books, from Dr. Seuss to Roald Dahl. Conservatives are outraged that something traditional is being lost when Random House declines to keep in print certain cringe-worthy Dr. Seuss books, but then turns around to ban, as best they can, other books that *they* don’t like, those that concern people and practices that weren’t part of their traditional conservative past. And so on.
Outrages against wokeism are easy to find on the right (see: Florida), less common on the left, where it seems to be confined to the academic community. Today, a couple examples of that.
