Articles 6.
6.1
Higher Ed Needs a Reboot - Heather Heying
“The standard modern educational model—a sage on the stage, with students in rows taking notes—works for some disciplines, sometimes. But it is not the best model for all disciplines, and it may not be the best for any. Engaging ideas and people in real time, over shared physical space, is utterly necessary for some kinds of learning. Some subjects and material can be successfully, and perhaps most efficiently, learned on-line, but not all.
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We are losing physical libraries and quads to the virtual sphere, a process that accelerated in the last two years. Those who would assure us that nothing is lost are surely working from a reductionist, metric heavy understanding of what education is, what cognition is, and what humans are. Metrics are all well and good, as a first pass, and for simple systems. But education, cognition, and humans, are all complex systems. Human cognition is embodied, changed by physical activity and place in the world. Furthermore, physical spaces allow chance meetings, with ideas or with people, and can open up entirely new worlds.
The modern university also tends to cordon off disciplines from one another. This is to appease faculty egos, and draw territorial lines, and because it’s the way it’s always been done (which is not, in fact, true). Its effect is to reduce the opportunity for discovery, creativity and analysis, by faculty and students alike.
And as much as one of the hottest educational buzzwords for many years now has been “interdisciplinary,” how this is instantiated is all too often very narrow.
Interdisciplinary, sensu stricto (in the narrow sense), might involve two researchers from different but compatible disciplines collaborating on a project. Interdisciplinary, sensu lato (in the broad sense), can mean so much more. Instead of training only specialists, who get narrower and narrower with every year of school they endure, we ought not just allow generalists, but expect them. We need generalists who can, within a single brain, cross disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, undergraduate students, who have even less reason to be trained narrowly than do grad students, ought be encouraged to take dives that are by turns both deep and broad, to come up for air frequently, and to dive again.”
6.2
Making Something Social Destroys the Truth of It - Naval
“Science—at least the natural sciences—was this unique discipline where you could have an individual truth-seeking on behalf of the rest of society. Other individuals verify that they did, indeed, have the best current model of how reality works, and then that could be spread out through inventions to the rest of society.
But the social sciences are this virus that crept into academia and have taken over. Social sciences are completely corrupted.
First, they need to appeal to society for funding, so they are politically motivated. Then, they themselves are influenced in society because the studies and models are used to drive policy. So, of course, that ends up corrupted as well. Now even the natural sciences are under attack from the social sciences, and they’re becoming more and more socialized.
The more groupthink you see involved, the farther from the truth you actually are. You can have an harmonious society while still allowing truth seekers within the society to find truth and to find the means to alter and improve reality for the entire group.”
6.3
The Woke: On The Wrong Side of History - Andrew Sullivan
“The “B&b” formula, in other words, is on the wrong side of history. It is obsessed with a binary racial past that has long since been erased by a radically more complex future. It defines every group through the lens of “oppression” — at the expense of countless other complicating factors. Even within the CRT category of “brown,” there are those who identify as white, those who identify as black, and many whose own concepts of light, lighter, dark and darker skin are even more complex and bewildering. There are different nationalities, varying levels of socio-economic status, religions and languages — added to differences between men and women (the Latino political gender gap is very pronounced).
And that’s why the crude racial engineering the left elites are now so enthused about is almost certainly a dead end. It’s one thing to have a country in which white people clearly dominated black people in a society divided into those two categories; and to end the government’s clearly disparate treatment of those two groups. That was the 20th Century. It’s quite another thing to live in a 21st Century of mind-boggling racial diversity from every continent on earth, where Asian-American women now out-earn white men, where black men and Latino men have almost identical median earnings, and where native-born white Americans have a lower median household income than Indian, Pakistani or Syrian immigrants, among many others.
An attempt to craft systemic “racial justice” onto this ever-more complex and constantly changing sea of ethnic identities is practically speaking impossible. How does one adjudicate the racial power hierarchy between, say, first-generation Somali immigrants and fourth-generation Polish ones? How to measure the relative oppression of a millionaire Nigerian immigrant and a descendant of slaves in Alabama? Which groups are the oppressors and which are the oppressed? How much of this “oppression” occurs within groups as well as between them? And how can we know?”
6.4
Fear In The Time of Coronavirus - Heather Heying
“About some of it, I want desperately to be wrong: I want the Covid vaccines to be both safe and effective. I want them to be the simple, easy solution that was promised. I want the public health measures to have been effective and for us to be returning to a democracy that is intact and healthy. I see many pronouncements asserting the veracity of these claims, but no evidence that any of them are true.
The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.
We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business….
Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.
These excess deaths—these excessive excess deaths—aren’t attributed to Covid. And they’re not in old people. They are most abundant in people between the ages of 18 and 64.
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Again: I’m sorry you’re scared. Your fear is misplaced, however. And your fear shouldn’t be allowed to obliterate my freedoms.
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Seriously. Stop huddling behind your fear. Stop taking comfort in your fear. Stop using the power—yes, power—that you have, as women, to get men to behave in certain ways. You are using that power for ill, encouraging more fear, more destruction and depravity and incoherent public policy, all in the name of a single variable, one that is, by the way, not what you have been told. Stop using feminine power to wreak havoc on the world.”
6.5
Why You Should Stop Reading News - Shane Parish
“We spend hours consuming news because we want to be informed. The problem is news doesn’t make us informed. In fact, the more news we consume the more misinformed we become.
News is, by definition, something that doesn’t last. It exists for only a moment before it changes. As news has become easier to distribute and cheaper to produce, the quality has decreased and the quantity has increased, making it nearly impossible to find the signal in the noise
Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves questions about the media we consume: Is this good for me? Is this dense with detailed information? Is this important? Is this going to stand the test of time? Is the person writing someone who is well informed on the issue? Asking those questions makes it clear the news isn’t good for you.
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Most of what you read online today is pointless. It’s not important to living a good life. It’s not going to help you make better decisions. It’s not going to help you understand the world. It’s not dense with information. It’s not going to help you develop deep and meaningful connections with the people around you.
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When you stop reading the news the first thing you notice about people who read the news is how misinformed they are. Often, they cherry-pick one piece of information and give it enormous weight in their opinions. Like the dog that didn’t bark you realize that they have a tiny lens into a big and messy issue.”
6.6*
I Was Deceived About COVID Vaccine Safety - Joomi Kim
“ Everybody knows that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. But if hospitalizations and deaths were almost exclusively occurring in the unvaccinated, why would booster shots be necessary?
Or why would the statistics be so different in the UK? Where most COVID hospitalizations and deaths are among the fully vaccinated?
There’s a disconnect there. There’s something to be curious about. There’s something not adding up.
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However, what I will share with you today… is that a few days ago, after this was published, somebody from a very prestigious British institution, cardiology department researcher… contacted me to say that the researchers in this department had found something similar within the coronary arteries, linked to the vaccine...
And they had a meeting and these researchers at the moment have decided they’re not going to publish their findings, because they are concerned about losing research money from the drug industry…
Knowing this information, which is very concerning, Steven Gundry’s paper in Circulation, and also anecdotal evidence; I mean I have a lot of interaction with the cardiology community across the UK and anecdotally I’ve been getting told by colleagues that they are seeing younger and younger people coming in with heart attacks.
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And they’re not just scared to come forward because they might be vilified or labelled “anti vax.” It’s because they could actually lose their license.
Listen to this interview from Dr. James A Thorp, who describes how any healthcare provider who is deemed to be spreading “misinformation” (in the view of their governing board) is in danger of losing their medical license.
Under such conditions, how is it possible that we have not grossly underreported vaccine adverse events?
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Is it a problem that doctors, scientists, medical journals, teaching hospitals, and university medical schools can accept money from the pharmaceutical industry?
A former editor of the British Medical Journal describes how Pharma can cleverly use medical journals to its own advantage. And this review article investigates whether Pharma funding leads to more outcomes favorable for the funder (spoiler alert: it does).
Is it a problem that when drug companies submit their trial data to science journals, they own the data, and the peer reviewers and editors of the journal don’t get to actually see the raw data? So they have to take the drug companies for their word?
And is it a problem that most doctors don’t seem to know this?“