Articles 10.
10.1
My 8 Best Techniques For Evaluating Character - Ted Gioia
“I made mistakes early in my life by not accurately judging the character and reliability of other people. I was better at evaluating data than individuals.
I took far too much at face value. I believed what people told me. And I paid a price for this, sometimes a high price.
You may have had similar experiences
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1. Forget what they say—instead look at who they marry.
This is a sure-fire technique, and it tells you important things about people you can’t learn any other way. A person’s choice of a spouse—or if they aren’t married, their closest lifelong partner—is much more revealing than anything they say or do in public.
This choice tells you about their own innermost longings, expectations, and needs. It tells you what they think of themselves, and what they think they deserve in life (or will settle for). It is, I believe, the clearest indicator of priorities and values you will ever find.
So the next time you’re introduced to strangers at the party, and they start talking business, spend at least a little time sizing up their partners. If you don’t pay attention to this, you will have lost an important source of insights, and may pay a high price as a result. “
10.2
On Sex & Gender Issues - JK Rowling
“If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so-called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.
But accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).
So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?
Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.”
10.3 **
The Age of Censorship - Heather Heying
“And then there are the sensitivity readers. Surely this is a category that Orwell would have been proud to include in Newspeak. Given that war is peace, and ignorance is strength, perhaps censorship is inclusion. Or maybe censorship is enlightenment.
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Allow me a diversion into my own educational history, and what I learned from my students, many of whom, by the time I met them in college, had had a wildly different experience than mine in school.
I was one of the lucky ones: I loved school, I was good at it, and I learned from it. One or more of those conditions is missing for most people, sometimes causally so: If you can’t learn from school, you’re probably not good it, and you definitely don’t love it. And being “good at school” may mean that you love it, because you’re getting rewarded there, but that doesn’t inherently mean that you’re learning.
It is one of the great failures of modern education that most educators are either people like me in this regard, or people who were good at school without being good at learning in school. Both look like “A-students” from the outside, but we’re not really the same. It is a failure of modern education that the adults who choose to make a life there mostly come from the ranks of A-students, because many A-students can’t grasp that people who don’t get good grades are not inherently stupid or lazy.
If you’re a human of any age, and have not compelled yourself into a fury of denial stemming from ideological certainty, you will know this: kindness can show up in the most unexpected places. So too insight. And wisdom.
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Given the great variety of ways that we experience the world, and given that school is inherently less diverse in its manifestation than are the students who populate it, it should be obvious that many people will not be a good fit for school. This does not mean that they are stupid. And it does not mean that they are lazy. There are surely both stupid and lazy people among those who are not good at school. As, I know for a fact, are there stupid and lazy people among those who are good at school.
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I hazard to guess that modern day censors—the sensitivity readers of Roald Dahl, the university Newspeakers, the fact checkers of PolitiFact—were mostly A-students. What comes next is based on that assumption.
Maybe those A-students got there the honorable way, happening to be well-suited to school-style learning, loving the process, and learning voraciously along their entire academic path. Or maybe they got there by learning how to game the system, memorize some stuff, and regurgitate back to teacher what teacher most liked to hear. I’m thinking there is a mix of these types among the censors. But if the censors are mostly or entirely made up of A-students, there is a good chance that few if any among them actually have empathy for those who weren’t or aren’t good in school. The censors are bullying others in mental space, just as schoolyard bullies do so in the physical
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There are many things troubling about the creative work of an author being changed after his death. It interferes with our understanding of our own history. We live downstream of our actual history, which did not change just because censors got ahold of our documents. Having the recorded version of history scrubbed interferes with our ability to make sense of our world.”
10.4
On The History of Liberia - Colemans Hughes
“There’s a certain kind of person who believes that only Europeans have done evil things historically. Some of these people still hold it against white people today. I remember debating a Native American chief who sincerely believed that only white people had ever killed for racist reasons, for example. As the filmmaker Michael Moore once put it, “Give it up! We [white men] have been running the show for 10,000 years!”
This kind of ignorance irks me. Have these people ever heard of the largest contiguous land empire in history (and no it wasn’t Europeans)? Or of the millions of African slaves taken to the Middle East by Arab slavers? Or Aztec slavery? Or slavery in Korea? Or the slave-raiding Dahomey tribe, depicted all-to-rosily in The Woman King?
If I dropped you anywhere on Earth before about 1800, odds are one group of people was doing unspeakable things to the people right next door: regardless of their race. The only thing special about Western Europeans in the 15th century and onward was that their technology gave them a temporary edge on the rest of the world––just like China and the Middle East had a temporary edge on Europe in the centuries prior.
In part, people can be forgiven for this kind of ignorance. After all, many American teachers selectively teach the crimes of Europeans post-1492 in a vacuum. They teach that slaves were snatched from Africa and brought to America, instead of the truth, which is that they were already enslaved by other African tribes and purchased by Europeans. There is something deep in the heart of progressives today which says “whiteness is evil” and “POC-ness is good”. And their version of history reflects that bias.
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So, a brief summary: In the decades leading up to the Civil War, slavery was the issue of the day. Some Americans wanted to abolish it and integrate society; some wanted to abolish it but keep the races segregated; others wanted slavery to continue forever. A fourth “solution,” however, was favored by some white Americans: sending all blacks, slave and free, back to Africa––ridding America of the “Negro problem,” as they would have seen it, once and for all. These people formed and funded an organization called the American Colonization Society (ACS).
Some black Americans liked this idea too, but for different reasons: they would get to leave America, where they were discriminated against at every turn, and return to an ancestral homeland to create a society run by blacks, for blacks. These various interests linked arms to send nearly 5,000 black Americans––some freemen and others freed slaves––to settle in West Africa between 1820 and 1847, when they declared independence from the ACS.
That’s the part that is taught in history classes. What is not often taught is what happened after black Americans got to Liberia ––in other words, everything that would answer the question, “How would black Americans of the past have governed society differently if they had been in power instead of whites?” The answer, in the case of Liberia, is that they ruled more or less exactly like European colonizers did.”
10.5
Me, She, He, They - Heather Heying
“In much of life on Earth, in nearly all plants and animals, and in absolutely all mammals, which includes humans, sex is real and ubiquitous. In his masterful compilation and analysis of the anthropological literature, Donald Brown writes that all cultures “have a sex terminology that is fundamentally dualistic, even when it comprises three or four categories. When there are three, one is a combination of the two basic sexes (e.g., a hermaphrodite), or one is a crossover sex (e.g., a man acting as a woman). When there are four there are then two normal sexes and two crossover sexes.
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The 21st century WEIRD world has left many bereft of choice, lacking in passion or insight to contribute in a way that feels meaningful. Coming of age can be filled with angst, but this historical moment goes well beyond what is common. The blame for the widespread failure to find meaning in existence can be placed in several additional courts: Currently fashionable parenting styles “protect” children from risk and experience. Screens are replacing social engagement in real life. Schools are ever more broken, teaching compliance and obedience to the new orthodoxies, as they actively punish rigor and extrapolation, critical and independent thought¹⁴. Prescription drugs are being used widely to treat disengagement, hyperactivity, and anxiety—a “corrective”, in part, for the fact that some children resist underwhelming or toxic school experiences¹⁵. And falling economic prospects make things like owning your own home an ever more distant dream for most young people. Add to this the recognition among many that our economic and political systems are decohering. The rate of change is accelerating so fast that even the near future will not look anything like the past¹⁶. All of these contribute to the ever-greater number of people who arrive at the cusp of adulthood with the bodies of adults, but either the minds of children, or an overwhelming sense of futility, or both.
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Those who would make their mark on the world - as scientists, or artists, explorers, or healers - are more adrift than ever, unless they choose one of two routes. They can join the establishment, get the appropriate degrees, get jobs with or appeal for funding from the appropriate entities, and become ever more beholden to those entities. They may well find their thoughts converging with what everyone else thinks. They’re not engaging in a craven embrace of orthodoxy; it’s simple survival. Or they can gamble on becoming “influencers,” many of whom are a caricature of the creative lifestyle, a kind of hedonistic embrace of all that is frivolous, fleeting, and decadent. Successful influencers make a “good living” doing this, but are they living a good life?”
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Over the last several years, the number of people declaring themselves trans has increased by a factor of twenty (see data from the U.K. and the Netherlands, and find more at statsforgender.org²¹). Furthermore, historically, the very low number of trans people has been biased towards MtF (Male to Female): young men transitioning into transwomen. But that has recently reversed²². In one year alone in the U.S.—from 2016 to 2017—the percentage increase in FtM “gender confirmation” surgeries, in which young women are surgically modified into transmen—was 289%. This is not subtle. And it is not organic. As with eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, social contagion is likely playing a powerful role, as evidenced in part by the rapidity with which trans identity spreads through female friend groups.
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Children are in the act of figuring out what the world is. They check their experience against what the trusted adults say, a sibling’s interpretation against that of a friend, today’s experience against last week’s. Childhood is when we learn how to be, and discover what we can be. Free and wide-ranging exploration will include ideas that are out of this world. Adults should allow children their fantasies, within reason, but not allow them to believe that fantasies are real as they approach adulthood.
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As I was writing this essay, I saw a young woman wearing a sweatshirt that said “anti gender roles club.” Yes to that. Yes to freeing ourselves of the now unnecessary baggage that has been entrenched by social norms. Let us free ourselves from that part of our expectations that we can free ourselves from, without pretending that we, men and women, are the same.
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Sex is real and ubiquitous and fixed. DSDs are real and very rare. Transsexual people do not exist, but transgender people do. But feeling out of step with gender norms does not make you trans. Also, feeling out of step with gender norms is neither wicked, nor should it be noteworthy. Feeling out of step with gender norms certainly should not warrant the creation of fictional new categories, like non-binary, unless the point is to keep the rest of us on our toes.
To that little boy who would have us believe that his cat might be both male and female—and to the legions of people who would have us believe that their sex is a matter of choice—I say this: Your beliefs are not merely wrong, they are acutely disempowering. This marks a step backwards for all of us individuals who are gender non-conforming: the girls who like to play in the mud and with numbers, and the boys who like to save injured birds and discuss their feelings. It therefore marks a step backwards for society, because allowing all humans to find their skills and interests and passions, rather than constrain them to stereotypes, is fundamental.
10.6 *
Cute Authoritarianism - Ewan Morrison
“How could authoritarianism ever be cute? Surely, it is “a boot stamping on a human face, forever,” as Orwell writes in 1984. We associate the aesthetics of authoritarianism with Stalinism, Maoism and Nazism: soldiers and superhuman workers brandishing fists and flags, chanting slogans about political solidarity and the need to annihilate their enemies.
However, there is a much more insidious authoritarianism that is predicted in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The novel depicts a thoroughly positivist and hedonistic high-tech society, which constantly reinforces cheerful messages and pacifies its citizens with daily doses of the addictive happiness drug Soma. Whenever the controllers of this dystopia want to force people to do something, they couch the command in happy language: it is “for the good of all.
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Cute authoritarian imagery, then, is all around us: it is used in public health, tech, corporate communication, quangos, NGOs and even the military. But is there a broader agenda connecting all these uses?
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Many corporations have learned to capitalize on this in advertisements that feature images of puppies, kittens and children. Möller describes this strategy as “fluffy dollars.” This strategic use of cuteness is also used to sell non-cute items, such as AI. According to a Chinese study, customers are more willing to adopt AI applications with “high perceived cuteness.”
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Most citizens of modern democracies are resistant to being forced to do things against their will. To combat this, social engineers have developed the psychological tool of nudging. Pioneered by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, nudge theory draws on the reductive science of behaviourism and advocates the practice of operant conditioning through indirect suggestions and positive reinforcement through “rewards.” Specialist Natasha Burton argues, “a mere nudge can be used to help people make better choices for themselves.” The message here is: we know what’s best for you, but we won’t tell you that or let you know when we’re influencing your choices.
Nudge theory became influential in around 2009, when it was adopted by both UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who established a Nudge Unit, and by the Obama administration. Nudges used in business have included adding arrows to workplace floors; reducing plate sizes in canteens; reducing the size of office bins to disincentivize the use of printers; offering renewable energy as a default; putting unhealthy foods out of reach; and decorating offices with cute “inspirational photos.”