#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

[kitchen-light]

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

[cherryblossomshadow]

[Image ID: Two tweets -

Clay Travis (@/ClayTravis) tweeted:

ABC’s rig job is THE story here. This is like a game when an obvious and clear officiating error is the primary story after the game. It’s all that is going to be talked about.

James Surowiecki (@/JamesSurowiecki) quote-retweeted with:

The ABC moderators have let Trump speak for 9 minutes longer - roughly 30% more - than Harris. The way they've "rigged" the debate is by letting him hang himself with his own stream-of-consciousness rambles.

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Debate summary.

[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

[harmonic-psyche]

"The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group...

The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members).

The book['s]...central thesis [is] that a diverse collection of independently deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts...

Not all crowds (groups) are wise. Consider, for example, mobs or crazed investors in a stock market bubble. According to Surowiecki, these key criteria separate wise crowds from irrational ones:

1. Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it is just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.

2. Independence: People's opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.

3. Decentralization: People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.

4. Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgements into a collective decision.

5. Trust: Each person trusts the collective group to be fair." —Wikipedia

I am truly in awe of the penis poll and the snail race (aiming to draw) and stuff like that. Not because Tumblr finally gave us polls and the first thing we did was use them as a medium for cooperative games that aren’t polls. But because they keep succeeding! The E poll aside (excused because I think a lot of the respondents didn’t understand the aim), these polls are really really good at getting the desired result.

Which is amazing when you think about it, because the respondents don’t see the result until they click. Until we participate, we don’t know how long the dick is! We don’t know how big the balls are! We have no idea which snail is ahead! We have to make a guess on what other users have done and behave accordingly. “Oh yeah, but there’s a lot of respondents, just using probability you can – ” do you know how much variation you get in probability? And yet every time I see those snails, they are NECK AND NECK. That penis always has appropriately sized balls that are approximately the same size, to within about 4% of the poll! You’d think everyone would play it safe and just make a dick, but no – people knew it needed balls, they made a guess as to whether other people were giving it balls, and the proportions worked out! It could’ve gone the other way; lots of people could’ve been like ‘oh I be no one is doing the balls’ and they could be massive balls with a micropenis. Or one testicle could’ve gotten all the attention by accident, and we could’ve had a single-ball cock on our hands. But respondents are predicting each others’ behaviour with amazing precision, giving us results far more precise than you’d expect from random generation over so many different polls! Those snails are at EXACTLY FIFTY PER CENT every time I see them!

I am so proud of our collectively drawn dick and balls you guys.

[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…

[2bpoliticallycurious]

On Democracy In one small paragraph, Kahn outdid himself. He: *Dismissed the importance of democracy as a political issue. *Disclosed that the Times coverage is poll driven. *Asserted that coverage of the economy and immigration is favorable to Trump. *Whined that more coverage of democracy was tantamount to becoming a partisan publication.

Here’s what [Joe Kahn, executive editor of The New York Times] said: "It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign?" [color/emphasis added] (Smith had asked Kahn to respond to Pfeiffer, a former Obama official, who recently complained that the editors at the Times  “do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.”)

That one paragraph, posted on social media by NYU professor Jay Rosen, elicited a storm of critiques.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling was among those upset by Kahn’s dismissal of democracy as a key issue. [emphasis added] "Hate to Godwin’s Law this, but what if the Berlin Bugle in 1931 said, Hitler may be a threat to democracy, but polls show that most Germans are most concerned about Communism and the Jewish problem. A journalist’s job is not to reflect the polls, but to cover the objectively important stories." [color/emphasis added]

University College London professor Brian Klaas wrote: "It is insane to me that someone in this role doesn’t understand that democracy is the superstructure for literally everything else. Democracy isn’t an issue that matters because of public opinion. It’s *the* issue that makes free public opinion possible." [color/emphasis added]

Veteran political observer Norm Ornstein wrote: "This is both cringeworthy and frightening. I can’t say it is sleepwalking to dictatorship. He is not sleeping. It is marching in that direction." [color/emphasis added]

I have been very frustrated by the The New York Times election coverage. Now I know why.

It is beyond absurd that Kahn thinks that if the NY Times informs its readers about the current attempts by the right to destroy our democratic republic, it would somehow make the NY Times an "instrument of the Biden campaign."

No, it would be fulfilling one of the major purposes of a free press in a democratic republic--to speak truth to power and to inform the populace of real dangers to our democratic institutions.

[edited]

[See more quotes from the article about Kahn's quote under the cut.]

Entrepreneur and writer Anil Dash concluded: "Just so you know, NYT fully believes they have no obligation to stop the fascist attack on America. They’ve finally said so explicitly. Act accordingly." [color/emphasis added]

Many objected to Kahn’s argument that democracy is a partisan issue. [emphasis added] Extremism researcher Mark Pitcavage wrote: "This quote strongly suggests the exec editor of the NYT can’t even think of democracy as an issue other than as a Biden campaign strategy." [color/emphasis added]

OG blogger Heather “Digby” Parton wrote: "This is so, so tiresome. Nobody says it’s his job to “help” Joe Biden. It would be nice if they could find it in their hearts not to sabotage him though." [color/emphasis added]

Others were horrified that Kahn breezily suggested that the economy and immigration were favorable stories for Trump. [emphasis added] Journalist and author James Surowiecki wrote: "If the NYT covers it accurately, the economy is not an issue that is 'favorable to Trump.'” [color/emphasis added]

A Twitter user named Hank Hoffman wrote: "The Exec. Editor of @nytimes  believes immigration, the economy, & inflation are issues 'favorable to Trump.' "Just to take immigration, why would a plan for militarized mass deportations & concentration camps be 'favorable to Trump?' How’s a STRONG economy 'favorable to Trump?'" [color/emphasis added]

Some took offense at the notion that the Times was so poll driven. [emphasis added] Journalist Reed Richardson wrote: "Conceptualizing democracy as a kind of niche issue that a free press should only prioritize in coverage according to how many people rate its importance in a poll is a huge tell about why the NYTimes’s current election coverage has been so myopic, timid, and consistently unable to meet the moment." [color/emphasis added]

Others thought that was just a cop-out of an excuse. [emphasis added] University of Illinois professor Nicholas Grossman wrote: "Biden’s age isn’t among voters’ top issues in polls, but the NY Times made it a recurring top story anyway Voters sure didn’t say they care about the president of Harvard, but the Times made that the number one story for days. When NYT editors care, they don’t defer to polls." [color/emphasis added]

I encourage people to read the entire article. It is worth it.

“But critics like me aren’t asking the Times to abandon its independence. We’re asking the Times to recognize that it isn’t living up to its own standards of truth-telling and independence when it obfuscates the stakes of the 2024 election, covers up for Trump’s derangement, and goes out of its way to make Biden look weak.”

— New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won’t do it

[kitchen-light]

[...]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]

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

[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.

[stresemann12]

#WMDEDGT Dezember 2018

Vor fünf Jahren hat Frau Brüllen in ihrem Blog den Anfang mit einer Tagbuchblog-Woche gemacht und seitdem kann jeder der möchte einmal aufschreiben, was genau er am 5. des Monats gemacht hat. Abends wird das dann im Blog von Frau Brüllenverlinkt und so lässt sich dann auch bei anderen lesen, was die denn am 5. des Monats gemacht haben. Das Ganze läuft unter der gemeinsamen Überschrift: #WMDEDGT?…