Modeling the Human Trajectory

https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/modeling-human-trajectory
If global economic growth keeps accelerating, the future will differ from the present to a mind-boggling degree. The question is whether there might be some plausibility in such a prospect. That is what motivated my exploration of the mathematical patterns in the human past and how they could carry forward. Having now labored long on the task, I doubt I’ve gained much perspicacity. I did come to appreciate that any system whose rate of growth rises with its size is inherently unstable. The human future might be one of explosion, perhaps an economic upwelling that eclipses the industrial revolution as thoroughly as it eclipsed the agricultural revolution. Or the future could be one of implosion, in which environmental thresholds are crossed or the creative process that drives growth runs amok, as in an AI dystopia. More likely, these impulses will mix.

I now understand more fully a view that shapes the work of Open Philanthropy. The range of possible futures is wide. So it is our task as citizens and funders, at this moment of potential leverage, to lower the odds of bad paths and raise the odds of good ones.

China cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abortion, sterilization

https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.

While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”

More cats reacting to cat face filter

https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/e7yru7/more_cats_reacting_to_cat_face_filter/

The eye of the storm - Marie Le Conte on the bruising experience of inadvertently becoming the target of a Twitter feeding frenzy

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/july-august-2020/the-eye-of-the-storm/
It’s hard to describe what it feels like, being the main character on Twitter. People tweet at you, at first to criticise what you said, then insulting you for what you said, then trying to find other things you said to criticise and insult you for, then moving on to discussing your appearance, what you may be like in bed, and anything else they can think of. They also tweet about you, which is more disconcerting if you aren’t a celebrity, which I am not. They are no longer talking to you but about you to each other; it’s a book club and you’re the book.

At least a book is self-contained; when you become the main character, people take the dots that they have, link them up, then add some new ones where they think they should be and at the end of it there is a person they can attack, but only a small part of that person is you. It was decided I was a frustrated and uptight straight woman; I am bisexual. It was decreed that I was a racist white woman; I am mixed-race.

A few days later, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made her boyfriend cut his hair and trim his beard, and posted a video on Instagram where someone out of shot called him a bin raccoon and he laughed. I had found the joke funny; the subjects of my joke had found the joke funny; it’s just a shame that the thousands of people standing between us disagreed.

India Is No Longer India

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/05/exile-in-the-age-of-modi/609073/

By the time I was an adult, the urban elites and the “heart of the nation” had lost the means to communicate. The elites lived in a state of gated comfort, oblivious to the hard realities of Indian life—poverty and unemployment, of course, but also urban ruin and environmental degradation. The schools their children went to set them at a great remove from India, on the levels of language, religion, and culture. Every feature of their life was designed, to quote Robert Byron on the English in India, to blunt their “natural interest in the country and sympathy with its people.” Their life was, culturally speaking, an adjunct to Western Europe and America; their values were a hybrid, in which India was served nominally while the West was reduced to a source of permissiveness and materialism. They thought they lived in a world where the “idea of India” reigned supreme—but all the while, the constituency for this idea was being steadily eroded. It was Bharat that was ascendant. India’s leaders today speak with contempt of the principles on which this young nation was founded. They look back instead to the timeless glories of the Hindu past. They scorn the “Khan Market gang”—a reference to a fashionable market near where I grew up that has become a metonym for the Indian elite. Hindu nationalists trace a direct line between the foreign occupiers who destroyed the Hindu past—first Muslims, then the British—and India’s Westernized elite (and India’s Muslims), whom they see as heirs to foreign occupation, still enjoying the privileges of plunder.

The more you have, the more you want? Higher social class predicts a greater desire for wealth and status

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.2620
Traditional theories have focused on the intentions of lower‐class individuals to climb on the social ladder, yet they have paid relatively little attention to the motivations of upper‐class individuals to ascend even higher. Addressing this issue, Studies 1 and 2 provided cross‐national evidence that higher social class is associated with a greater desire for wealth and status. Moreover, by manipulating perceived social class, Studies 3 and 5 experimentally confirmed that compared to people in the lower‐class group, those in the upper‐class group express a stronger desire for wealth and status. Furthermore, in line with self‐categorization theory predictions, Studies 3–5 showed that upper‐class individuals tend to see and use wealth and status as important attributes in defining and categorizing self, and this tendency explains the effect of social class on desire for wealth and status. Together, our findings demonstrate a “having more—wanting more” relationship, and its consequences are further discussed.

NASCAR Completes Noose Investigation; Can't Determine How It Got Into Driver's Garage

https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/25/883432500/nascar-completes-noose-investigation-cant-determine-how-it-got-into-driver-s-gar

NASCAR has finished its investigation and says it still doesn't know who tied a noose that was discovered this past weekend in the garage stall used by African American stock car driver Bubba Wallace at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama.

NASCAR also released a photo taken on Sunday by its security personnel of what it says was the garage pull rope tied into a noose at a Talladega race in October of 2019, and not reported until last weekend.

In a Thursday conference call with reporters, NASCAR President Steve Phelps said investigators conducted a thorough sweep of all garage areas across the tracks where NASCAR races. That's 29 tracks and 1,684 garage stalls. 44 of them are at Talladega. Phelps said they found only 11 stalls using a pull down rope tied in a knot. And only one was tied into a noose – the one discovered in Wallace's garage.

North Texas family shaken after 18 relatives test positive for COVID-19 following surprise birthday party

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/north-texas-family-shaken-after-18-relatives-test-positive-for-covid-19-following-surprise-birthday-party/287-ea8960ea-4c3c-40c1-b75e-f4437fe6f836

CARROLLTON, Texas — As North Texas watches COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations surge, one family is shouldering a health crisis that they never expected to face. 

That crisis, all began on May 30 when just a single relative, unknowingly infected with COVID-19, interacted with seven family members at a surprise birthday party. 

Reflections from a Christian scholar on Social Justice, Critical Race Theory, Marxism, and Biblical Ethics

https://www.facebook.com/kelly.hamren.7/posts/10156935647256923

Argument #4: The concept of “white privilege” is unjust because it blames white people today for atrocities, such as slavery or segregation, that were set up generations ago and that they had no hand in creating. It also suggests that white people today should feel guilty for racism even if they are not racists themselves.

Response: Some people probably do use the term “white privilege” in this way (the conversation is developing at such a rapid pace that such terminology is developing new shades of meaning at an accelerated rate). However, the term is helpful in describing a real phenomenon—one that I’ve personally witnessed taking place. Bear with me, and I’ll define it first, then share a personal story to illustrate what I mean.

“White privilege” refers to the phenomenon in which white people receive certain societal benefits that they did not earn—benefits they receive by default simply for being white.

To be clear, I do not feel guilty for being born white. I was created that way, and it’s no more a sin to be born white than it is to be born a member of any other race. However, I do recognize that some people—and some institutions—will respond to me differently because I am white. I do not, for example, get followed around department stores by loss-prevention officers because I look like “the kind of person who might steal something.” My Black friends do have that happen to them.

This is where the term “privilege” gets sticky, because it can be understood to mean I have a benefit that I shouldn’t have—i.e., that we should both be followed around the store. Actually, however, what I’m receiving is the benefit of the doubt—the default assumption that I’m going to be honest until I do or say something to undermine that assumption. What the concept of privilege actually suggests is that we should both get the benefit of the doubt. It is not a privilege because I shouldn’t have it; it is a privilege because I have it and other people just as honest as I am do not have it. The term, in this context, calls attention to an unjust and illogical disparity in expectations.

30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/can-an-unloved-child-learn-to-love/612253/

In 1998, at a small scientific meeting, animal research presented back-to-back with images from Romanian orphanages changed the course of the study of attachment. First the University of Minnesota neonatal-pediatrics professor Dana Johnson shared photos and videos that he’d collected in Romania of rooms teeming with children engaged in “motor stereotypies”: rocking, banging their heads, squawking. He was followed by a speaker who showed videos of her work with motherless primate infants like the ones Harlow had produced—swaying, twirling, self-mutilating. The audience was shocked by the parallels. “We were all in tears,” Nelson told me.

In the decade after the fall of Ceaușescu, the new Romanian government welcomed Western child-development experts to simultaneously help and study the tens of thousands of children still warehoused in state care. Researchers hoped to answer some long-standing questions: Are there sensitive periods in neural development, after which the brain of a deprived child cannot make full use of the mental, emotional, and physical stimulation later offered? Can the effects of “maternal deprivation” or “caregiver absence” be documented with modern neuroimaging techniques? Finally, if an institutionalized child is transferred into a family setting, can he or she recoup undeveloped capacities? Implicitly, poignantly: Can a person unloved in childhood learn to love?

Retired ambassador, veteran: Time to change Fort Bragg’s name

https://www.fayobserver.com/opinion/20200620/retired-ambassador-veteran-time-to-change-fort-braggrsquos-name

Why we have a “Fort Bragg”

First, we must understand why Fort Bragg, and 10 other army posts in the south were named for Confederate generals in the first place.

These posts were constructed prior to World War II. The Army needed to obtain large tracts of land, so they bowed to pressure from local officials. This was at the height of the Jim Crow era, and the Army itself was segregated at the time. The feelings of Black Americans – like me – weren’t considered when agreeing to name a federal installation after an individual who had taken up arms against the federal government. And who often supported slavery.

To those who say that these designations represent our traditions of honor and victory, I would point out that, in the case of Bragg, the fort was named for a general who was considered one of the most bumbling commanders in the war, even by his own side. He was removed from his command after a rout at the Battle of Chattanooga. Only support from Confederate president Jefferson Davis kept him from being cashiered from the Confederate army. The name is insulting to soldiers of color, sure – but it is also insulting to those who think an army’s job is to win.

The same can be said of other bases. Fort Hood in Texas, for example, is named for John Bull Hood, who was not a native Texan, and whose reckless decisions sped the fall of Atlanta.

I will not argue that removing these names from U.S. Army installations will be controversial. Change is always controversial. But this should not be “divisive.” In the current climate, it is more divisive to refuse to consider doing so. Even the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee is supportive, and the public mood, in the wake of recent incidents of police violence against people of color, is swinging in the direction of change.

‘Living His Mother’s American Dream’

https://www.wsj.com/articles/living-his-mothers-american-dream-11592605433

Yet Mr. Scott is outspoken about police excesses. He says his ambition to reform law enforcement is driven by his Christian ideas of fairness and justice. It’s also informed by personal experience. In his Wednesday speech, he said he’d been stopped by police 18 times since 2000, “including seven times in one year” as an elected official.

On four separate occasions, he says, Capitol Police officers have tried to impede his entry into the building, disbelieving that he’s a U.S. senator. “The first time, I didn’t say much because [the cop] physically put his arms out, so I couldn’t walk in,” Mr. Scott says. “My chief of staff called the police department after, and they thought I was exaggerating.” They looked at the security-camera footage and called back to apologize. “That kind of scars your soul a little bit.”

Black Lives Matter: Memo to Lucidworks Employees

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/black-lives-matter-memo-lucidworks-employees-will-hayes/
Ultimately, the only way forward is for good people of all walks of life to stand together and demand institutional transformation — not marginal or incremental change. We need to address human suffering and the inequality experienced by people of color, especially the black community. We need to address inequality when it comes to education, infrastructure, and arrest rates. We need to move beyond standards that have somehow become acceptable in our societal narratives. We need to truthfully re-examine public policy that was enacted with racist intentions. Identifying these issues are the easy parts, solving them will take real work and a commitment from all levels.

Despite all this, I am extremely proud of our country. To me, the notion of American greatness is not unachievable; it is neither lost in some nostalgic past nor does it lie beyond our grasp in some unnavigable future. America’s greatness comes from our willingness and ability to endlessly innovate and iterate, and our shared belief that there is always a way to do it better — to be better. This is precisely why the black experience is such a critical piece of Americana. It makes an indelible mark upon our sciences, literature, music, and culture, helping to make America what it is today. This is just one of the reasons why America owes its black and brown people the same rights to liberty and justice as it does its white brothers and sisters.

For Black CEOs in Silicon Valley, Humiliation Is a Part of Doing Business

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/black-lives-matter-highlights-adversity-facing-black-tech-ceos
Black entrepreneurs say they are encouraged by the movement but deeply skeptical that the industry will change. Interviews with 20 Black tech leaders depict a position of power that can sometimes feel powerless. Repeated assumptions that they’re not in charge of their own companies, a common experience among Black chief executive officers, can instill a lingering sense of self-doubt. They describe a career of subtle slights or outright discrimination in which they face regular inquisition about their credentials and peculiar suggestions to hire a White business partner to make investors more comfortable. One says he carries around a notebook emblazoned with the logo of his alma mater, Stanford University, to fit in.

Musings on Masculinity: An Educator Confronts Complicity and (Re)defines Manhood

https://medium.com/@MoKip8/musings-on-masculinity-4c16c18813b4

If I de-center myself and imagine the situation above from Sara’s perspective, here is what I see. In any given week, women receive a lot of unwanted attention and uncomfortable encroachment from men. For all I know, I may not have been the first man that day to make Sara feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Looking back, I shudder when I think about how often Sara — a young woman of colour growing up in New York City — may have been subjected to what Pumla Dineo Gqola brilliantly describes as the “female fear factory” that patriarchy creates.

Two years ago, my girlfriend Asana moved to an apartment a short distance from her office. She was excited about getting to walk more in traffic-laden Johannesburg. But after a few tries, she could no longer stomach it. The catcalls were incessant. They grew from annoying to unbearable and she no longer felt safe to walk to work in the clear light of morning, on busy city streets.

What would it look like for each of these catcallers to think, just for an empathic moment, about how these shouts and whistles are received by the woman. To recognize that their crude mating call isn’t cheeky; it sustains and maintains a violent and pernicious culture that degrades and disempowers — that leaves women, quite literally, in tears.

American Racism: We’ve Got So Very Far to Go

https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/american-racism-weve-got-so-very

I freely confess that to some extent where I stood on American racial issues was dictated by where I sat my entire life. I always deplored racism—those values were instilled in me from birth—but I was also someone who recoiled at words like “systemic racism.” I looked at the strides we’d made since slavery and Jim Crow and said, “Look how far we’ve come.” I was less apt to say, “and look how much farther we have to go.” 

Then, where I sit changed, dramatically. I just didn’t know it at the time. I went from being the father of two white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed kids to the father of three kids—one of them a beautiful little girl from Ethiopia. When Naomi arrived, our experiences changed. Strange incidents started to happen.

There was the white woman who demanded that Naomi—the only black girl in our neighborhood pool—point out her parents, in spite of the fact that she was clearly wearing the colored bracelet showing she was permitted to swim.

There was the time a police officer approached her at a department store and questioned her about who she was with and what she was shopping for. That never happened to my oldest daughter. 

There was the classmate who told Naomi that she couldn’t come to our house for a play date because, “My dad says it’s dangerous to go black people’s neighborhoods.” 

I could go on, and—sure—some of the incidents could have a benign explanation, but as they multiplied, and it was clear that Naomi’s experience was clearly different from her siblings, it became increasingly implausible that all the explanations were benign.  

@AmyDentata

The thing you have to understand about millennials is we were trained for 18+ years in preparation for a world that no longer exists

— Abolish the police (@AmyDentata) June 15, 2020

Jon Stewart Is Back to Weigh In

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/15/magazine/jon-stewart-interview.html
"we point a spotlight on the anecdotal and pretend that it’s universal. What that does is feed the narrative for people who want to use it for their own purposes. That’s what drives me bananas. We’re basically having giant public fights about symbolism, while the reality of our situation goes unexamined."

I was a police chief stopped by my own officer. After Floyd, we need change at all levels.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/11/floyd-killing-police-must-change-former-detroit-chief-column/5341884002/

If my uniform, badge and education cannot protect me from anti-black violence, what can? Now is the time to get to the heart of the matter: There must be a major effort to fundamentally restructure police departments so that they actually do what they promise: Serve and protect all people.

This should include a change at all levels. Here's what we must do to get started: 

►Require higher aptitude and fitness standards for incoming recruits.

►Require regular mental health check-ups to deal with the stress and challenges of law enforcement.

►Develop a nationwide database of all officers to prevent bad officers from jumping departments to avoid marks on their permanent record.

►Stop promoting officers to become supervisors who have multiple disciplinary complaints, particularly, to positions of first-line leaders like sergeants and lieutenants.

►Rehabilitation within police unions. Their intransigence makes it almost impossible to fire and hold officers accountable for breaking the law and the public’s trust.

Decatur High School as it looked when I went there

Source: https://www.facebook.com/decatursportshistory/videos/103138843170545/ and related album