#james surowiecki

[promopirate]

James Surowiecki's article "Later: What Does Procrastination Tell Us About Ourselves?" published in The New Yorker investigates the psychology of procrastination, which is a universal battle despite its absurdity. Surowiecki investigates why people frequently postpone crucial tasks, using concepts from behavioral economics and psychology. He emphasizes that procrastination is an emotional issue, including a conflict between short-term urges and long-term aspirations. According to the essay, procrastination is typically caused by an internal conflict in which our desire for immediate fulfillment takes precedence over our better judgment. Furthermore, the prevalence of distractions in modern life exacerbates the issue. Finally, Surowiecki emphasizes that comprehending procrastination necessitates deeper insights into human motivation and self-control, providing a comprehensive examination of this widespread behavior.

[jdyf333]

"beat poetry" in 2024 by Davivid Rose Via Flickr: A randomly-edited selection of approximately 700 of my pictures may be viewed by clicking on the link below: www.flickr.com/groups/psychedelicart/pool/43237970@N00/ Please click here to read my "autobiography": thewordsofjdyf333.blogspot.com/ And my Flicker "profile" page may be viewed by clicking on this link: www.flickr.com/people/jdyf333/ My telephone number is: 510-260-9695

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So at some point I privately commit to doing a book, and let a certain amount of material accumulate. After a number of words have been amassed I can begin to relax—there will be a book—and from that point on, my need for discipline diminishes because there’s no need for it. Writing the book becomes all I want to do. The quantity of words increases and, simultaneously, some sense of form emerges, a form uniquely appropriate to the subject matter and growing directly out of the material. Great happiness ensues. It’s worth adding—because it’s something I'm grappling with at the moment, with a new book—that I failed to complete the tennis book partly because I let too much material accumulate without organizing it, and it became this swampy mess I could not find a way of navigating through.

Geoff Dyer, from “The essayist on not having a career”, Interview between Geoff Dyer and James Surowiecki, The Yale Review, December 6, 2022

[azspot]

There's something deeply weird about the fact that the parts of the country where people are most likely to use the word "groomer" to refer to LGBT people are also the parts of the country where child beauty pageants are most popular.

James Surowiecki

[darkmaga-retard]

For the last 250 years, the United States, Great Britain, and most of the developed world have been guided by the principles of liberalism (John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, etc.) — that free markets, free people (freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, etc.), and free and fair elections lead to better decisions over the long run than governance by a handful of elites (monarchs, lords, barons, experts, bureaucrats, etc.). 

That’s self-evidently true — a million, or 330 million, or better yet, 8 billion people all using their creativity and ingenuity to solve problems are always going to come up with better ideas over the long run than even the most clever elites. 

(For more on this see The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki — the book is brilliant even though Surowiecki has since turned into a vile Branch Covidian). 

But then in the early 1900s progressives came along and said, ‘Now hold on. Markets sometimes produce wondrous things. But they also produce endless booms and busts, horrors like adulterated meat, and deadly externalities including pollution. What is more, the much-lauded competition in the marketplace does not stay a competition for very long. Some firm eventually wins and when it does, it starts buying up its competitors and other sectors of the economy and we’re left with oligopolies and monopolies controlled by robber barons. And that’s the opposite of freedom.’

[tramsachvn]

Trí Tuệ Đám Đông PDF & Review https://tramsach.vn/tri-tue-dam-dong-pdf/

[xtruss]

The Rise and Fall of For-Profit Schools

— By James Surowiecki | October 26, 2015, The New Yorker Issue

Illustration by Christoph Niemann

Not too long ago, for-profit colleges looked like the future of education. Targeting so-called “nontraditional students”—who are typically older, often have jobs, and don’t necessarily go to school full time—they advertised aggressively to attract business, claiming to impart marketable skills that would lead to good jobs. They invested heavily in online learning, which enabled them to operate nationwide and to keep costs down. The University of Phoenix, for instance, enrolled hundreds of thousands of students across the country, earning billions of dollars a year. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of bachelors’ degrees that came from for-profit schools septupled.

Today, the for-profit-education bubble is deflating. Regulators have been cracking down on the industry’s misdeeds—most notably, lying about job-placement rates. In May, Corinthian Colleges, once the second-largest for-profit chain in the country, went bankrupt. Enrollment at the University of Phoenix has fallen by more than half since 2010; a few weeks ago, the Department of Defense said that it wouldn’t fund troops who enrolled there. Other institutions have experienced similar declines.

The fundamental problem is that these schools made promises they couldn’t keep. For-profit colleges are far more expensive than community colleges, their closest peers, but, according to a 2013 study by three Harvard professors, their graduates have lower earnings and are actually more likely to end up unemployed. To make matters worse, these students are usually in a lot of debt. Ninety-six per cent of them take out loans, and they owe an average of more than forty thousand dollars. According to a study by the economists Adam Looney and Constantine Yannelis, students at for-profit schools are roughly three times as likely to default as students at traditional colleges. And the ones who don’t default often use deferments to stay afloat: according to the Department of Education, seventy-one per cent of the alumni of American National University hadn’t repaid a dime, even after being out of school for five years.

Dependence on student loans was not incidental to the for-profit boom—it was the business model. The schools may have been meeting a genuine market need, but, in most cases, their profits came not from building a better mousetrap but from gaming the taxpayer-funded financial-aid system. Since the schools weren’t lending money themselves, they didn’t have to worry about whether it would be paid back. So they had every incentive to encourage students to take out as much financial aid as possible, often by giving them a distorted picture of what they could expect in the future. Corinthians, for instance, was found to have lied about job-placement rates nearly a thousand times. And a 2010 undercover government investigation of fifteen for-profit colleges found that all fifteen “made deceptive or otherwise questionable statements.” One told an applicant that barbers could earn up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. Schools also jacked up prices to take advantage of the system. A 2012 study found that increases in tuition closely tracked increases in financial aid.

For-profit colleges have capitalized on our desire to make education more inclusive. Students at for-profit schools are able to borrow huge sums of money because the government does not take creditworthiness into account when making most student loans. The goal is noble: everyone should be able to go to college. The result, though, is that too many people end up with debts they cannot repay. Seen this way, the students at for-profit schools look a lot like the homeowners during the housing bubble. In both cases, powerful ideological forces pushed people to borrow (“Homeownership is the path to wealth”; “Education is the key to the future”). In both cases, credit was cheap and easy to come by. And in both cases the people pushing the loans (mortgage brokers and for-profit schools) didn’t have to worry about whether those loans were reasonable, since they got paid regardless.

The government is finally making it harder for for-profit schools to continue to ride the student-loan gravy train, requiring them to prove that, on average, students’ loan payments amount to less than eight per cent of their annual income. Schools that fail this test four years in a row will have their access to federal loans cut off, which would effectively put them out of business. The crackdown is long overdue, but there’s an important consequence: fewer nontraditional students will be able to go to college. Defenders of the for-profit industry, including Republicans in Congress, have emphasized this point in order to forestall tougher regulation.

But if we really want more people to go to college we should put more money into community colleges and public universities, which have been starved of funding in recent years. We should also rethink our assumption that college is always the right answer, regardless of cost. Politicians love to invoke education as the solution to our economic ills. But they’re often papering over the fact that our economy just isn’t creating enough good jobs for ordinary Americans. The notion that college will transform your job prospects is, in many cases, an illusion, and for a while for-profit schools turned it into a very lucrative one. ♦

— Published in the print edition of the November 2, 2015, The New Yorker Issue.

[streamdone]

New top story on SPARTA NEWS: Geoff Dyer: The essayist on not having a career James Surowiecki https://ift.tt/lBcLzp1

[sanjosenewshq]

Tucker Carlsons Newest Assault On Democrat John Fetterman Comes Again To Chunk Him

Tucker Carlson, who has a historical past of attacking U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman, is drumming up a brand new idea to come back after the Pennsylvania Democrat once more over an NBC Information interview on his post-stroke well being. The Fox Information host, who has padded his exhibits with conspiracy theories prior to now, claimed that Fetterman merged “with a pc” and might be “hacked” as a result of his use of an digital captioning system within the interview. Fetterman, who spoke to NBC Information reporter Dasha Burns this week in his first sit-down interview since his stroke in Might, “often stuttered and had bother discovering phrases” throughout his interview, the information outlet stated. Burns claimed “it wasn’t clear” that Fetterman was understanding the dialog whereas partaking in small speak earlier than the interview. The reporter’s feedback drew criticism, The Related Press famous, and BuzzFeed Information, which is owned by HuffPost’s mother or father firm, reported that incapacity advocates referred to NBC’s protection as “deeply upsetting” and stigmatizing. Carlson deemed Fetterman’s use of the system as “thrilling” for trans-humanists. “However for everybody else, for the voters of Pennsylvania, for instance, it does elevate some apparent questions. For instance, the place precisely does the software program finish and John Fetterman’s consciousness start?” Carlson requested. “We don’t know, we will’t know. But it surely’s apparent that Pennsylvania might very nicely be sending a pc program to the U.S. Senate the place inevitably it will likely be hacked.” Tucker Carlson is speaking about John Fetterman like he is a cyborg: “The place precisely does the software program finish and John Fetterman’s consciousness start? We do not know. We won’t know.” pic.twitter.com/hKcSxLOF2o — Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) October 13, 2022 Carlson later remarked that issues could be “high quality” within the Senate so long as there wasn’t an influence outage within the Capitol. Twitter customers criticized Carlson’s “laptop program” feedback on Wednesday, with some noting that the Fox Information host was studying off a teleprompter. Tucker Carlson is studying this off a teleprompter. The place precisely does the teleprompter finish and Tucker Carlson’s consciousness start? We do not know. We won’t know. https://t.co/B9cc9IJpGl — James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) October 13, 2022 Did Tucker Carlson speak like this about Rush Limbaugh when he went deaf and used a transcription service to do his radio present? Or is ableism only a software he makes use of towards political adversaries? https://t.co/l4qnQjviEm — Ben Adler (@badler) October 13, 2022 It is genuinely superb to me that there is all this fuss over closed captioning, which has been a traditional expertise for… a long time. I’ve closed captioning turned on for each film and TV present I watch. It would not interface with my consciousness! https://t.co/mUvtTYYzUR — ethelred (@aethelred) October 13, 2022 You’d suppose Tucker would notice a lot of his viewers have both had strokes or love somebody that had a number of. — stilldigressing (@friendoflyover) October 13, 2022 Originally published at San Jose News HQ

[isomorphismes]

Sooner or later, Europe was bound to break the American monopoly in the manufacture of new social theories and facts. Since the war the study of society has become an American industry, and though the sociologists have naturally been the biggest producers, a few historians, some glossy journalists, and a number of freelance thinkers have also made their contribution to the national effort. … most of the new studies were little more than progress reports on the growth of American society. They claimed to be empirical and open-minded, but what they really did was to create a new style of observation that made their theories and insights look like facts. Some of these studies used the new style for cultural apologetics instead of analysis. Others seemed to be more critical, and many of them complained about the slickness of the culture. But their complaints were themselves so slick that they immediately became fashionable. The result of all these advances in social thought was that the thing criticized became indistinguishable from the criticism of it, and soon both became part of the same cultural package. … … the value of … an insight [such as "the rulers deceive the ruled"] depends on how it is … developed. But [Elias] Canetti does not really develop the idea; what he does instead is to spin a web of … associations and analogies. In [some] sense, he has written a poem. The trouble, however, is that it is a bad poem, far too long, cluttered up with home-made jargon, and much too pretentious. Its method is to convert truisms into metaphors, to state a fact as though it were a discovery, such as that “a soldier on duty acts only in accordance with commands,” or that war consists of one crowd fighting another, or that “in revolutionary periods executions are accelerated”; and then to give these inflated facts all kinds of historical resonance. Frequently, the idea itself is a bad metaphor: the most picturesque example is Canetti’s description of spermatozoa as a crowd, with one survivor. Sometimes the metaphor is purely verbal, as when Canetti says that in an inflation the “unit of money loses its identity.” Here we have just the opposite of what goes on in a good poem: instead of an original and concrete association that puts things in a new light or makes for a new experience, an ordinary observation is given “poetic” overtones, and made to sound more suggestive. And unlike good poetry which loses in paraphrase, some of Canetti’s inspired rhetoric might easily gain by a paraphrase.

William Phillips, 1963, reviewing Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power

[ianchisnall]

Does the Government set internal deadlines?

Does the Government set internal deadlines?

Back on the 1st April my MP, Caroline Ansell sent up a written question to the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). The question was responded to by Rebecca Pow who is a DEFRA Minister and the MP for Taunton Deane. The question is very straight forward and yet the response seems very unclear. If this was the first time the current Government has not bothered to provide a…

[yesadanlerma]

Election 2020 - 2 Days to Election Day

Election 2020 – 2 Days to Election Day

US Flag

It’s very sad to even have to post stuff like this below, much less after a wonderful social distancing evening celebrating Halloween with the youngest grandchild. I literally don’t have words for this happening, both here in Texas, and other states. It’s not even a purely Republican vs Democrat issue – Republicans of integrity from all levels (Texas Supreme Court, Texas Secretary of…

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[...]when I was doing my early books, like The Missing of the Somme, they were highly unusual (though there were precedents, such as And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos by John Berger). And because those books were often judged by a system of ranking pre-calibrated with certain established genres in mind, they could be deemed inadequate, even though on their own terms they were fine. Nowadays, as you say, there’s an awful lot of this stuff about, much of it thoroughly conventional; the software is now available for free download. I think the key ingredient, always, is the quality of the author’s consciousness, which is inseparable from his or her style. In my case, the interest of the books derives from a combination of subject matter saturated with authorial consciousness, style, and form. One of the books that I had in mind before setting out on The Last Days, for instance, was Adam Zagajewski’s Slight Exaggeration, a book that was not about anything in particular, though it was about a great many things. The key thing is that it was held together purely by his consciousness and style.

Geoff Dyer, from “The essayist on not having a career”, Interview between Geoff Dyer and James Surowiecki, The Yale Review, December 6, 2022

[azspot]

Musk is taking on $25 billion in debt financing to acquire Twitter, at an avg interest rate of between 4.5-5%. That means Twitter's going to have to pay $1.15-$1.3 billion a year in interest alone, which is more than it made before interest and taxes last year.

James Surowiecki

[bookmarkquotes]

'The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.' -James Surowiecki | Visit Bookmark Quotes for more attitude quotes.

[thebjornidentity-blog1]

It’s interesting look back at James Surowiecki’s TED Talk “The Power and the Danger of Online Crowds”, which was delivered in 2005. In many ways, James accurately predicted both the negative and the positive outcomes of the social medias. 

The talk begins with an analysis of blog responses to the Tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004. James notes that this is one of the first instances where blogs were able to accurately capture and respond to an event faster than the mainstream media. He talks about how their portrayals were often more helpful and authentic than what the mainstream media was able to deliver. 

At the same time, James notes that as digital social networks grow stronger, they pose a threat to individual thought. He uses an analogy of lost ants following each other in a giant circle until they die. This analogy has been incredibly prophetic, as it highlights the rise of fake news and groupthink online. In 2005 it was hard to imagine the power that the internet could have on changing societal views. However, we now know that unrestricted access to the internet has allowed for the rise of fake news.

One aspect that I think James didn’t foresee is the financial and corporate capability to manipulate the information that gets put on the internet. He speaks about the web as a sort of democratic, bottom up network. However, we now know that corporations like google and Facebook have the ability to control what we see and when we see it, which gives them enormous power to manipulate public opinion. At the same time, these companies are motivated by financial interests, which means that they can and have been swayed by money. While they are now trying to enforce tighter regulations, the damage has already been done (and continues to be done). 

If anything, I believe we now have a need for traditional journalism more than ever before. Sources like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have extremely thorough protocol when reporting a story to ensure that the stories are factual. Nonetheless, these media organizations are able to use the internet in new ways to further their journalism and take advantage of the positive aspects of group think on the internet. For example, social media helped inform and share stories about #BlackLivesMatter and Police Violence, as well as the stories around the #MeToo movement. 

It’s important to remember that there doesn’t need to be a dichotomy between traditional journalism and modern digital networks.