So there’s this experiment where researchers take a bunch of preschoolers and give them a marshmallow and they say, “ok, you can eat this now, or you can wait thirty minutes and then we’ll give you two marshmallows.”
And they leave them alone with hidden cameras and watch the struggle of willpower and it’s supposed to say something about delayed gratification.
And this thing gets used to explain why some people are better with money than others, or make various other better life choices. The Aesop here is if you can delay your satisfaction, you’ll get ahead.
But here’s a proposed version of that experiment that’s more realistic.
Give the kid the marshmallow and explain it all as above. Then come back 30 minutes later and say, “Sorry, actually we ran out of marshmallows, so even though you didn’t eat yours, you’re not getting a second one. Other kids got two, but you don’t. Also, every kid with fewer than two marshmallows has to give back their original marshmallow. Sorry we didn’t tell you that earlier now hand it over.”
Then call them back for a repeat experiment where you give them the same offer. See how many kids scarf that marshmallow down in two seconds flat because like hell they’ll trust you again.
If it’s the experiment I’m thinking of they did run the experiment again, and this time did take into account something they didn’t before: the socio-economic level of the children involved and if there had been broken promises made before to them. Children from lower socio-economic circumstances who had been let down in the past were far more likely to eat the marshmallow the first time around. The experimenters then showed the kids they had the two marshmallows to give them and let them out.
Then comes the fun part: they ran the experiment again.
This time, those kids who ate the marshmallow before waited. Without any further prompting than keeping their word, the scientists destroyed the notion that children in poverty are more prone to poor impulse control or are more likely to scarf down sugar than rich kids.
Oh now that is interesting! I’d never heard that follow-up before.
When I first learned about this case study in college, something about it felt incomplete, but I could never really put my finger on it. It seemed overly simplistic, but I couldn’t see the missing piece because in was in one of my cognitive blind spots.
Knowing about this follow up is incredibly valuable and insightful!
And this is why it’s vital for human beings to check our assumptions and always be on the lookout for cognitive blind spots. Because even one missing variable can mean the difference between transformative insight and generations of deeply embedded misconceptions.
This is also why it’s important for the scientific community to actively seek out scientists with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. It’s not about arbitrary “diversity quotas,” it’s about pursuing a diversity of insight.
:^)
Source?
I have a source, and not only does it key on the idea of the kids being more able to wait if they know the adults will be likely to keep their promises, but it also compares the waiting times of kids from Germany to kids from Cameroon, and found that the Cameroonian kids (unlike the German kids) almost all had absolutely no problems with the test, because they were raised in a completely differently way–a way that was based on their parents anticipating the children’s needs, so the kids already knew they adults would keep their promises and so the kids had no need to be upset (the report states that “being upset” is strongly discouraged in their culture) https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/07/03/534743719/want-to-teach-your-kids-self-control-ask-a-cameroonian-farmer SO YES no matter how you look at it, it’s really a test of the children’s parents, not the children.
I love this. I too had found the marshmallow experiment disappointing in some inexplicable way, and totally see that gap addressed in the follow up experiment. If I were those kids, I have no idea if I’d have eaten the marshmallow; it really would have depended on whether you caught me before or after adults proved to be tone deaf to my desires.
I’ll say this first: I’ve gone back and forth multiple times in the past year on whether there is such a thing as responsible (public) media criticism in the current climate. It’s difficult to give or receive criticism in a positive way when a huge swath of people are using “criticism” as justification for threats of violence and slander, among other unacceptable and scary things.
THAT SAID, at some point, it’s still gotta happen. Criticism isn’t dead, although the context and mediums through which it’s delivered are maybe up for debate. (If you post totally valid criticism but then cross-tag an anti tag or invade a space with it, then the nature of the criticism changes even if the content hasn’t. The medium is the message and all that.)
Ok, so, without further ado:
How can we criticize media in a constructive way?
Criticize the media, not the creator. This is the one that tends to go out the window first, and without it everything else is moot. If the creator’s behavior is also in question, critique it separately.
Related: criticize the media, not the consumer. Again, if the fandom is obnoxious, awful, genuinely a toxic waste dump, it’s still a separate issue. It’s not that the media might not influence their behavior; it’s that once you start criticizing consumers you’re attacking people, not media. (Sometimes that’s necessary, but these tips don’t really apply to that scenario.)
Consider the scale and context of the media. How many people are viewing it? Is it the first or second of its kind? When & where was it made? What kind of people are probably viewing it? Were there any warnings or context given to the content? These things matter a lot in how we view content (Consider how surprised we are to see a gay couple in a superbowl commercial vs. an adult netflix show) and so they also matter in how we critique media.
Critique what’s actually there. Be very careful that you’re not assuming or interpreting things into the media (based on, say, genre tropes, or just your fear of what COULD be done) in your criticism. Speculation isn’t criticism.
Criticize what you like, or find something to like in what you criticize. This isn’t really a law, but if you want to be effective, it helps. It is difficult to understand the full context of a piece that you hate, after all. Also, you’ll be miserable, and the creator and consumers may very well not take you seriously and dismiss you as not understanding the media – and they may be right.
The goal of criticism is discussion, not silence. It is, in the end, media. At best, it can be a springboard to talk about more serious and pressing topics through a common medium – think about how much there is to be learned by discussing why a movie doesn’t pass the bechdel test. If the exclusive goal of your criticism is to destroy the media and silence the creators and consumers, you’re probably destined to fail, and you’re not even going to be give good criticism, either.
When I’m making a religion, there’s several bases that I consider necessary to cover. It sounds like you’ve already got some of it down, since you specified a pantheon and an aesthetic of light/dark.
Here’s some other things to consider to flesh out your religion:
1) Ideals. What are the teachings of your gods? How do they want mortals to behave? Do any gods in your pantheon have contradicting ideals?
2) Age. How long as this religion been around? How established is it?
3) Methods of worship. Are there temples, churches? Shrines at home? Religious accessories that people carry around? Prayer, sacrifice, fasting, donations?
4) Structure of the church. Is there anyone who has religious authority who can “speak for the gods?” Is there a hierarchy of worshippers? Or are things pretty equal across all followers?
4.5) If there’s a high authority of the religion, how much power do they have outside their religious duties? Do they have influence in politics, government, foreign relations?
5) What phenomena does your religion attempt to explain through its stories? Is there mythos for the creation of the world? For natural disasters? Shooting stars? The turning of the seasons? The sun and the moon?
5.5) How did the gods come to be? How does the religious mythos SAY the gods came to be? These can be two different things.
6) Since you have a pantheon, what’s the dynamic between the gods? Do they all get along? Are there some black sheep among the pantheon? Are there any gods that were kicked out? Who likes who, and who clashes with who?
7) Are there other religions? How legitimate are they compared to this one? How popular? How do the followers of different religions feel about each other?
8) How do the gods interact with mortals? Are they known by name and myth only? Do they manifest in front of mortals on occasion? How much do they actively influence the physical world?
9) Where do the gods reside? Is it any place reachable by adventurous mortals? Is it an abstract plane of existence?
In addition to Bina’s wonderful questions regarding how the people worship their gods, here are some things to consider regarding who they worship as their gods:
I like the idea of a light/dark axis that isn’t good/bad, but since those are really abstract, you might want to consider another axis – not one you need to address in the text, just one to help you sort things so no learned biases regarding light and dark creep in. For example, god-made (natural) vs. man-made (constructed). This can give you some valuable into how the society perceives certain things – are government and war ordained by the god(s) of government and war or are they man-made things blessed by the god(s) of government and war? Another example might be the four elements with 2 elements combined on the light side and 2 on the dark side. Again, this gives you some interesting philosophical questions to answer – what element is government? what element is war?
In addition to taking care not to make this a good/bad dichotomy, also pay attention to the genders of your gods (if they have gender). Keep in mind tropes like the Femme Fatale vs. the Virgin in White and the Brooding Bad Boy vs. the Knight in Shining Armor.
Saphira:
I have been presented with religious ideology in two formats over my lifetime.
1. Personal relationship with higher/other entities
2. Social Order
Best part, they’re rarely separate. They are often knitted together to create a uniform mentality about the faith system itself. “This is your relationship with the higher being, so this is how you need to behave.”
In building my own deities, they are active and material participants in the world. That defines the relationship as dynamic- the same as interacting with any other character in the book. The difference is the societal view, the common opinion, of these Otherwise Regular Characters (We call them Gods, treat them with respect. This god is one of knowledge, when speaking to them pursue wisdom and advancement.).
That being said, consider who has the authority in your religion. Who is the mouthpiece of the gods? Is a ruler? Is it a priest? Does praise come from unlikely places? Do the gods speak for themselves?
Then once you have an idea of that; What do they want? How have they influenced the faith?
Granted these are some messy topics to work with for religion, and frequently unpleasant; but they need not be.
Miri: I’ll toss out a recommendation here to check out @scriptpastor as well!
Even without changing the horribly designed production systems, there is no real shortage. People don’t starve, have no fresh water, have no houses to live in, etc. because there are not enough of these things. People don’t have access because capitalism denies them it.
There’s enough to share for everyone. It’s not a zero sum game for poor and oppressed peoples.
I known the argument that only GMOs can save us is untrue for the reasons above, but is overpopulation draining resources and killing the earth a lie promulgated by capitalists as a diversion as well? Would we be fine with this many people under a different economic/social system?
Yes, overpopulation is a capitalist/racist myth too. It originated in racist eugenics theory and ignores issues of distribution, infrastructure/technology, and disparate impact in favor of fearmongering about poor/brown people having too many babies.
This one pops up a lot, so I’m going to post some links on it here:
So, yes, it’s absolutely not the number of people that’s the main problem, but how resources are used and environmental management practices are done. If you were going to get rid of people to fix environmental problems, you would start with rich white Westerners, the opposite of who gets targeted by “overpopulation” panics.
I’m reblogging this post from last year, because I see so many opinions about the environment that repeat this nonsense.
It’s racist imperialist capitalist bullshit, and it leads to the exact opposite of real solutions.
Capitalism doesnt create artificial scarcity, corporatism does that
Not to pick on this individual, but I want to address this argument because it pops up a lot.
There is no such thing as “corporatism” separate from capitalism, corporations exist because of capitalism and to maintain capitalism.
Corporations are not somehow a natural universal constant. They are social and legal fictions created to enable the mechanics of industrial capitalism, and they essentially did not exist at all prior to around the mid 1800s. A lot of early Marxist theory predates corporations.
The older Marxist arguments against this “overpopulation” line also largely predates the large scale rise of modern corporations, and certainly predates their current form that Lenin addresses. Engels wrote a critique of Malthus in 1845.It’s a very dense work, and one that probably won’t make a ton of sense to people who don’t have any background understanding of communist theory, but addresses roughly similar points to the ones I made above. The argument that production geared towards accumulating capital for the bourgeouisie is what is the cause of scarcity isn’t just about corporations, it was already being made before corporate power was well established.
Okay, sorry, this is getting complicated, but I just want people making this sort of “it’s corporatism not capitalism!” argument to think of what a corporation is, where they come from, when corporations first developed, who benefits and who suffers from them, why corporate laws exist and why the state maintains them, etc. Because I think that if people actually start to investigate this even a bit I think they would recognize that there is no corporation without capitalism.
cops to judge: anyway the suspect was unhelpful the whole time, they didnt say anything, I’m pretty sure theyre guilty based on that.
Don’t say shit. Get a lawyer.
the cops will try shit like “Oh if you aren’t guilty why do you need a lawyer? only guilty people need lawyers.”
Its not true. Get a fuckin lawyer
Guys, guys, both the right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer HAVE TO BE INVOKED. Sitting silently is not considered an unambiguous invocation of the right since Berghius v. Thompkins in 2010 (while under arrest) and Salinas v Texas in 2013 (when not under arrest). There’s no magic words, but be clear, be explicit. Say something to the effect of “I am exercising my right to remain silent and I want to speak to an attorney” and then DON’T SAY ANYTHING ELSE (speaking up again, even to ask for a fsking drink, may indicate you are waiving the right until you once again invoke).
Say that and get a lawyer EVEN IF you know you broke the law and intend to plead guilty in court. Police make mistakes, police try to charge you with more than you actually did, and whether they’re fucking up honestly or deliberately being nefarious you need a professional on your side when dealing with them.
You can even tell he’s not doing this just for the camera because when
he says “You!” in the beginning the kid doesn’t get scared! The way he’s smiling brings me SO MUCH joy.
This is great motivation he is a great father and even better example for black men
“I earned more money than I knew what to do with, and I didn’t want to forget my roots. So I paid back the people who helped me and my family.” He’s also giving elderly and low income people three free meals a day.
Past a certain point, extra money doesn’t really benefit you, so give it those that would benefit. Quit letting people hoard ludicrous amounts of money out of vanity when others need it so much more.
No, that is NOT what this is. You’ve taken an amazing medical invention, a total game changer, and made up some stupid, faux-deep sentence fragment for it that is a complete falsehood. You should be embarrassed and ashamed, honestly.
This is a ghost heart. What they’ve done is taken a pig heart and stripped it down to, basically, a cell framework that they can use to BUILD A NEW HEART UPON. You could inject stem cells into this framework so that a newly formed personalized heart can be transplanted into a donor with a significantly reduced chance of rejection. FUCKING AMAZING. It’s not been done with human tissue yet, but the promise this given to people who need hearts – or kidneys or livers or whatever – is beautiful. Science is beautiful.
And it’s IMPERATIVE to mention that a woman, Doris Taylor, at the Texas Heart Institute developed this. And she started with a rat heart and worked up to he bigger, more complex (and more human) pig heart. What a total bad ass.
So look, quit making shit up, learn to do a reverse image search on stuff you find on the internet, and STOP ERASING WOMEN IN SCIENCE.
Reblogging for:
The corrected information
WOMEN IN SCIENCE
The fact that rejection rate would be LESS which is VITAL
Reblog for science communication
To be honest ghost heart sounds way more badass then a drained heart
Stressed, Depressed, and Story Obsessed 