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

1. Accumulation. The simplest and most obvious force that forms and sustains friendships is time spent together. One study estimates that it takes spending 40 to 60 hours together within the first six weeks of meeting to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, and about 80 to 100 hours to become more than that. So friendships unsurprisingly tend to form in places where people

… [ Read more ]

Author: Julie Beck
Source: The Atlantic (June 10, 2022)
Subjects: Excerpts, Family & Friends, Life & Society

We feel our way through life, then rationalize our actions, as if emotion were a shameful scar on the countenance of reason. […] Our emotional lives [are] the root of our motives beneath the topsoil of reason and rationalization. – Maria Popova

—

We suffer primarily because we are so insentient to our own emotions, so illiterate in reading ourselves. – Maria Popova

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The main difficulty that faces … [ Read more ]

Authors: John Macmurray, Maria Popova
Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings)
Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Senses, Thought | Inquiry

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.” – William James

—

“Nothing we do or experience … is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we — consciously or nonconsciously — were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that … [ Read more ]

Authors: Andy Clark, Maria Popova, William James
Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings)
Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Insight, Psychology | Behavior, Senses, Thought | Inquiry

Psychologist and law professor Dan Kahan and his collaborators have described two phenomena that affect the ways in which people form different beliefs from the same information.

The first is called “identity-protective cognition.” This describes how individuals are motivated to adopt the empirical beliefs of groups they identify with in order to signal that they belong.

The second is “cultural cognition”: people tend to say that a … [ Read more ]

Author: James Steiner-Dillon
Source: The Conversation (March 2, 2023)
Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

As the Republican Party evolves from a party focused on individual liberty and limits on government power to a party that more fully embraces government control of the economy and morality, it is reversing many of its previous stances on free speech in public universities, in public education, and in private corporations. Driven by a combination of partisan animosity and public fear, it is embracing … [ Read more ]

Author: David French
Source: The Atlantic (April 11, 2022)
Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Freedom | Liberty, Politics & Public Policy

Cognitive flexibility is a skill that enables us to switch between different concepts, or to adapt behaviour to achieve goals in a novel or changing environment. It is essentially about learning to learn and being able to be flexible about the way you learn. This includes changing strategies for optimal decision-making.

[…] 

Cognitive flexibility provides us with the ability to see that what we are doing is … [ Read more ]

Authors: Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, Christelle Langley, Victoria Leong
Source: The Conversation (June 21, 2021)
Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Thought | Inquiry

The value flows from corporations to households through eight different pathways. If you take a dollar of revenue that the average corporation generates, 25 cents of that flows through as labor income: wages, salaries, and other benefits to employees. Seven cents of that dollar goes to capital income, meaning dividends, share buybacks, and interest payments to debtholders. Six cents goes to investment—earnings that are retained … [ Read more ]

Authors: Clarisse Magnin-Mallez, Michael Birshan, Sean Brown
Source: McKinsey Quarterly (November 12, 2021)
Subjects: Business, Economics | Economy, Excerpts

Since the 1950s, political scientists have theorized that political polarization—increased numbers of “political partisans” who view the world with an ideological bias—is associated with an inability to tolerate uncertainty and a need to hold predictable beliefs about the world.

But little is known about the biological mechanisms through which such biased perceptions arise.

To investigate that question, scientists measured and compared the brain activity of committed partisans … [ Read more ]

Authors: Corrie Pikul-Brown, David J. Halpern, Jeroen van Baar, Oriel FeldmanHall
Source: Futurity (May 14, 2021)
Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

Since 1992, people have been talking about “Dunbar’s number,” the supposed upper limit of the number of people with whom a person can maintain stable social relationships. Named for British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, its value, rounded from 148 to 150, has permeated both professional and popular culture. […] It’s also probably wrong. Despite its fame, Dunbar’s number has always been controversial. A new study … [ Read more ]

Authors: Robin Dunbar, Scotty Hendricks
Source: Big Think (May2021)
Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Five key fallacies and pitfalls have affected public-health messaging, as well as media coverage, and have played an outsize role in derailing an effective pandemic response. These problems were deepened by the ways that we—the public—developed to cope with a dreadful situation under great uncertainty.

Risk Compensation

One of the most important problems undermining the pandemic response has been the mistrust and paternalism that some public-health agencies … [ Read more ]

Author: Zeynep Tufekci
Source: The Atlantic (February 26, 2021)
Subjects: Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy

Forty-two percent of Americans say that humans were created in their present form within the past 10,000 years — a percentage that hasn’t changed much since 1982, when Gallup started polling views on evolution.

Several lines of evidence, from the fossil record, comparative anatomy, and genetics, tell another story. But you don’t have to read all the research to find signs of our evolutionary history — … [ Read more ]

Sources: Vox, YouTube (March 17, 2016)
Subjects: Health & Medicine, Math & Science

Human beings are creatures of mimicry. We are evolutionarily supercharged to do one thing better than anyone else: learn by watching and copying others. And the most important thing we learn is how to want. 

As we grow up and live our lives, we watch others and learn what it is we ought to want. Aside from the basics, like food, water, shelter and sex, our … [ Read more ]

Author: Alex Danco
Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology

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

The divide between urban and rural voters is growing everywhere: from New York City to farm towns.

Authors: Ian Chipman, Jonathan Rodden
Source: Stanford University (May 2, 2017)
Subjects: America, Excerpts, International, Politics & Public Policy

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

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, it will set off tectonic shifts in the American political landscape not seen since the civil-rights movement—or perhaps even the Civil War.

Author: Jeffrey Rosen
Source: The Atlantic (June2006)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Law | Legal, Politics & Public Policy

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

By the close of the 1990s the United States had become more unequal than at any other time since the dawn of the New Deal—indeed, it was the most unequal society in the advanced democratic world. The top 20 percent of households earned 56 percent of the nation’s income and commanded an astonishing 83 percent of the nation’s wealth. Even more striking, the top one … [ Read more ]

Author: Ray Boshara
Source: The Atlantic (January2003)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Economics | Economy, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy

Alec Nevala-Lee, author of Astounding, a forthcoming book on the history of science fiction, digs into the writing career of L. Ron Hubbard, gaining new insights into the life of the controversial founder of dianetics and the origins and nature of Scientology itself.

Source: Longreads (February 1, 2017)
Subjects: Excerpts, Literature | Arts, Religion

The savanna theory of happiness is the idea that life satisfaction is not only determined by what’s happening in the present but also influenced by the ways our ancestors may have reacted to the event. Evolutionary psychology argues that, just like any other organ, the human brain has been designed for and adapted to the conditions of an ancestral environment. Therefore, the researchers argue, our … [ Read more ]

Author: Sarah Sloat
Source: Inverse (December 6, 2016)
Subjects: Excerpts, Happiness, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology

Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance.

[…]

Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

[…]

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: … [ Read more ]

Author: George Packer
Source: The Atlantic (June 8, 2019)
Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Literature | Arts, Politics & Public Policy

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

Understand how the world’s most controversial conflict — between Israel and Palestine — has intensified over the last century

Subjects: History, International

Last Updated: April 11, 2022

Here is a list of COVID-19 tracking tools and other useful articles and resources about Coronavirus and COVID-19. I don’t claim this to be authoritative or anywhere near complete. It’s merely a collection of the better things I have read over the past months. I compiled this list mostly for my own reference but if it can be of value to … [ Read more ]

Subject: 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

A prominent historian ponders the long-term legacy of the elusive Bush Doctrine.

Author: John Lewis Gaddis
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2008)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Foreign Policy, History, Politics & Public Policy

Here are two interesting videos produced by Vox covering the history of the Democratic and Republican parties.

Source: Vox
Subjects: History, Politics & Public Policy