a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
illu45's comments
activity:
illu45  ·  1960 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why are Young People Having so Little Sex?

I think that the first time you have sex is likely to be an awkward fumbling affair no matter how old you are.

Good gifts are ultimately personal, so it's hard to give general advice. For guys who wear dress shirts to work, a set of metal collar stays can be a great inexpensive gift if they don't have some already. Household items like Dryer Balls can be nice. Things that aren't necessities but add convenience can be good gifts--something like a Chromecast or an Echo Dot. Ultimately, though, it really depends on what the person is into.

illu45  ·  3187 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why I Defaulted on My Student Loans

There was a fairly aggressive response to this article from a Slate writer here

As TeaMistress pointed out below, I would say that this really depends on the community. Smaller subreddits definitely provide much better spaces for lengthy responses and discussion, and places like AskHistorians are able to maintain an emphasis on long-form responses through careful moderation.

I mean, it is called /r/all for a reason, though I'm not sure what algorithm is used to determine what actually shows up. I try to avoid /r/all, since it seems to basically be a hub of shitposting, low-effort content, and random vitriol. If you do want to use it, you can try blocking particular subs using RES, making your own multireddit, or following a multireddit made by someone else.

Link to the actual study (Full text requires free registration, but abstract is viewable without it).

This is neat, but worth noting that it seems to be based purely on mathematical modelling, rather than any actual archaeological evidence, so the study's title of "Sex equality can explain the unique social structure of hunter-gatherer bands" (emphasis added) seems like a more apt title than the Guardian headline (which is pretty much par for the course when it comes to Science reporting, sadly).

illu45  ·  2816 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Bill Nye visits a guy that built Noah's Ark in Kentucky

In fairness, you could say the same thing about state funding for the Smithsonian or the Metropolitan Opera. While obviously there is competition between funding agencies, it's rare that a museum would be directly competing for funding with soup kitchens or hospitals.

illu45  ·  2826 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Brexit vote could mean US real estate boom as investors look outside London

If there's one thing that we can confidently say Brexit has led to, it is a new outlet for (largely unsubstantiated) speculation-based journalism.

illu45  ·  2829 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Not sure how this website works but here are todays thoughts

Ideology is in the obvious, which can make it simultaneously powerful and blinding. Personally, I've always enjoyed finding out about how others think, so I'd probably take the 'peek into each door without entering any' option, but I think all of the choices are equally valid.

illu45  ·  2835 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Brexit looks likely.

    HOWEVER a whole bunch of people who firmly believe they have better shit to do are now going to have to burn a shit ton of blood and treasure on treaties and trade agreements and boring shit like that while the rest of the world aren't.

I highly doubt that Brexit will set the EU back ten years compared to the rest of the world. The EU has always been intensely bureaucratic, and negotiations about trade and immigration are pretty routine. Even if the vote had gone the other way, I expect that the UK would have wanted to renegotiate some of its agreements with the EU. While EU bureaucracy is likely to be focused on signing new agreements with the UK for the next little while, I doubt that the EU will actually become significantly more bureaucratic as a result. It may even become less bureaucratic in the long run if members see Brexit as a sign that the EU needs to be more agile.

illu45  ·  2611 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Books you just couldn't fucking get into?

This probably isn't worth writing, given that your perspective is so very different from mine, but I feel the need to rebut some of your claims.

    The truths they wish to expose are lies, the perspectives they grant are flawed, and the characters mouthing the prose are repellant.

Well, these are very broad claims. I would start by pointing out that searching for "truth" via novels is usually an ill-fated endeavour. It's even one that Austen herself mocks and cautions against. Rather, novels offer ideas and arguments about those ideas. Reading a novel doesn't mean you have to agree with it. You just have to think about the ideas it presents. And that's what great novels do: they make you think. They absolutely offer flawed perspectives and loathsome characters, but hopefully those flaws and characters are rendered in ways that are at least interesting (and might get readers to see things from a different perspective).

"Great Books" programs and "the canon" certainly have problems. But books do not survive simply because instructors wish to use them to prove a specific point (which really isn't really what instruction in literature aims to do). I think Barbara Herrnstein Smith is quite apt in pointing out that books survive the "test of time" because they are able to offer different readings that are of interest to different generations of readers. Today, we venerate Shakespeare because of the psychological depth of his characters. Restoration audiences liked his complex plots (and would often cut out soliloquies in order to place more emphasis on plot). Early Modernists enjoyed his jokes and his class subversiveness. Tastes change over time. Multi-dimensional works are able to survive because they remain interesting despite changes in taste.

Orientalism is certainly an issue of concern to many academics and readers. Orientalist depictions of 'the East' still being created in all sorts of media. Are you going to "cast aside" newspaper articles about the US invasion of Iraq because they "other" the East, or are you going to accept that the articles have a flawed viewpoint but still treat them as worthwhile texts?

I absolutely agree with you that we bring our baggage to the books we read, just as we do with pretty much anything we consume (from the food on our plate to the music we hear and even the people we meet). Good critics are able to separate their baggage from the text. The rest of us just enjoy what we enjoy and don't enjoy what we don't, and there's nothing wrong with that. I think it's foolhardy to try to tell someone that they have to like a book, whether it be Pride and Prejudice or Gormenghast.

Absolutely.

Video game violence continues to be a topic of debate, for better and worse. Recent studies continue to show that it's possible that violent video games have some impact on the brain and/or body, although most recent studies also suggest that playing violent video games doesn't have much of an impact on real-world behaviour. As the article says, Bushman is still last-authoring studies about video game violence. Most of the studies with Bushman's name on them suggest links between violent video games and aggression. Quite a few have had errata published about them. That's obviously concerning, although not being a cognitive science person, I have no idea how standard (or non-standard) errata are in that field. FWIW, Bushman isn't the only one whose name comes up in studies that link violent video games to aggression.

Measuring things like "aggression" will always involve some level of subjectivity. How you define "aggression" can have a significant impact on your findings. Is it increased cortisol levels? Where people aim if asked to shoot a gun with rubber bullets? What words people choose if asked to complete a story? Each of these offers an incomplete picture of aggression, at best, and pretty much any good study on this topic suggests that more work needs to be done.

illu45  ·  2824 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Nigel Farage resigns as Ukip leader after 'achieving political ambition' of Brexit

If anyone has a different view, I'm all ears, but I'm finding it hard to see this as anything other than ridiculous. It's as if Farage and Johnson won an election and now that it's come time to implement their policies, they've decided they would rather step down. I don't think they can honestly believe that winning the referendum was all that they needed to do. If anything, winning the referendum was the easy part, and now the real work is about to start. Hard to see these resignations as anything but cowardly in this context. As I said, though, I'm open to other interpretations.

illu45  ·  2829 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 29, 2016

If you haven't tried it already, I would recommend cutting down on gaming. There's nothing wrong with gaming as a hobby, but, at least personally, I've found that gaming doesn't help me feel productive or self-confident. If you can, try to take a day or two off from gaming completely. Work on an old project, or (even better) start a new one. Go out for a walk or visit a new place nearby, read that book that's been on your shelf for months, or look over your notes and see what you should brush up on for next year. I've always found that doing those sorts of things makes me feel much better about myself than playing games, even if they aren't necessarily things that are productive.

illu45  ·  2851 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 8, 2016

So, I totally thought Father's Day was this Sunday. That's why I spent two hours of my Tuesday afternoon in one of the country's largest shopping malls, trying to strike a balance between a gift so bland that it might as well be a pair of brown socks and a gift so zany it would never leave the back of a closet. It was only when I got home that I realized that Father's Day is on June 19th, not June 12th. At least the mall was fairly quiet, and I've (accidentally) done my shopping somewhat in advance, which is a rare enough feat for me.

illu45  ·  2851 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: An Analysis of Gender in Films Based on Scripts (Male vs. Female Lines)

Do you have some links that aren't out-of-context Imgur graphs? The FBI stats are a good start, but stats rarely tell the whole story, and crime statistics in particular are often skewed by issues such as structural inequality. For instance, here's one recent (2009) study that concludes:

    In this Article, we sought to articulate and empirically explore how this dramatic pattern of inequality in one visible aspect of the urban experience is intricately interconnected with the ways in which the structure of U.S. society is broadly racialized. We contend that the privilege of low levels of violence in white communities versus the peril of oppressively high levels of violence in black (and to some degree other) neighborhoods is not a product of individual differences in tendencies toward violence. Rather, these inequalities are outgrowths of structural arrangements that favor whites and subordinate other racial groups, especially blacks.

Here's another study that posits that segregation, rather than race, is the main predictor of violent crime for neighborhoods, particularly for (non-affulent) blacks. And here is a study that concludes that interracial economic inequality "had a strong positive effect on the overall violent crime rate, and more specifically, on the Black-on-Black crime rate."

And let's not even get into the issue of defining 'race'...

EDIT: I was wrong about the Imgur link being unsourced. It actually does list its source, which is The Colour of Crime by Jared Taylor (not to be confused by the book of the same name by Katheryn Russell-Brown). I think it's worth noting that the publication that the Imgur graph is from (as well as its author) has received some pretty heavy criticism. Indeed, the publication's wikipedia page has a criticism section that is longer than the synopsis. Tim Wise has written a sourced and readable rebuttal to this publication, which is available here.

| we've created a system where students are clients, and they're paying for an extravagant 4-year vacation that will do precious little, comparatively speaking, to augment their autonomy, earning potential or place in society.

The "students as clients" issue is becoming increasingly common in higher ed, and it really is up to administrative staff to stand up to requests that interfere with academic integrity on the basis of "I'm paying for it". If you want to spend 40-60 hours a week on activism, all the more power to you. But your essay is still going to be assessed on the same criteria as everyone else's. Or, to put it more bluntly, you pay to take a class, not to pass it (or to get an A in it). Of course, that doesn't always happen.

As for the "extravagant 4-year vacation", that's more debatable. I do think there are significant benefits to receiving an education at a college/university in terms of income, employment options, and cultural capital, as well as in developing certain things like critical thinking (which is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but still means quite a bit).

illu45  ·  2309 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A brutal blast of winter straight out of the Arctic appears to be on its way

It has been a bit eerily warm up in the East, although I can't say I'm particularly keen on cold weather arriving any earlier than i has to.

illu45  ·  3168 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski, I think today we should all go out and do something fun

The Getty is awesome! I really enjoyed the architecture and the design of the place when I went. All the gardens/fountains/cactii were lovely. Hope you have a great time in the city!

illu45  ·  3186 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: "Why We Shut Down /r/IAmA" - Op/Ed in the New York Times

As with everything, I think that there is a balance to be struck about how seriously one should take internet drama. On the one hand, dismissing something just because it's on the Internet is obviously not a good approach, and I think this is changing (with laws against cyberbulling becoming more prominent, for instance). On the other hand, I think it is also possible to go too far in getting 'outraged' about things that happen on the Internet, and I think there's been a fair bit of that with Reddit's latest blunder -- lots of anger about subreddits "falling prey" to the "empty promises" of Reddit admins, downvote brigading and nasty comments on said subreddits, the portrayal of Ellen Pao, and so on seem vastly disproportionate to me considering the issues at stake.

illu45  ·  2592 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski, Where Do You Buy Art?

Most recently I've bought prints from the Ballerina Project. In the past, I've gotten prints from Etsy, AllPosters, Art Gallery gift shops, and bookstores. I'm rarely unhappy with the prints I buy, although I occasionally make the mistake of buying something I don't have room to actually put up anywhere.

illu45  ·  2606 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: February 7th seems like a good day for a book thread.

Read Watchmen for the first time, embarrassingly enough. It's certainly an interesting novel, and has a somewhat surprising (for me, at least) number of parallels to The Brothers Karamazov.

illu45  ·  2610 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Life, and Dying

Sorry about the loss, both to your department and (more importantly) the people in it. At the very least, it sounds like you have the kind of department whose members really care about one another, which I think is something worth celebrating.

illu45  ·  2610 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Books you just couldn't fucking get into?

    I stopped writing for ten years because I was required to 'give authors credit for having something interesting to say.'

    I stopped writing for ten years because I was required to find something nice to say about Aldo Fucking Leopold.

    I stopped writing for ten years because Willa Fucking Cather was held up as someone worth studying while Rudyard Kipling was held up as someone to mock.

I'm sorry that you've had bad experiences with how literature was taught to you. Unfortunately, lots of subjects are taught very poorly, especially at the secondary level. The way that literature was taught to you is not how I teach. Nor is it the way that everyone I know in academia teaches.

    Riddle me this: one of your students hands in a report on, say, the scarlet letter that argues the protagonist is passive, the narrator is sexist even within his own time and the message of the book is 'don't make waves.' Do you consider that student's points? Or do you immediately go to where he misinterpreted things?

Of course I consider the student's points. I am paid to consider the points made by every single student in my class, in their essays, in their discussions with their peers, and in their talks with me in my office. That's my job. I consider the points my students make and the evidence that they use to support those points. If the points are well-made and the evidence is well-presented, the student gets a good mark. Though I realize you may not believe me when I say this, whether or not I personally agree with the points being made really isn't relevant if the evidence is there. I (and every other literature educator I know) isn't trying to get kids to say the 'right thing' about texts. If that was all there was to it, we'd just give everyone multiple choice tests rather than making them slog through essays that they find difficult to write and we find time-consuming to mark. We're trying to get them to engage and think carefully about the texts we read. I yearn for my students to come up with their own arguments about texts rather than just parroting what I've said back to them. Often those arguments are weak (or sometimes actually wrong in the sense of being completely contradicted by the text), and that's when I try to get the students to consider the text in more depth, pointing out what I think are relevant passages and helping them think of ways to make their arguments stronger.

I'm not hoping to convince you of the value of literary analysis or of 'great books' here. It was clear before I wrote my first post that we've had very different experiences when it comes to literature and education. I have no doubt that your writing has served you well. I'm not here to denigrate or dismiss your books. Would you please stop trying to denigrate and dismiss mine?

illu45  ·  4219 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why I Pay for Content (And Why That Makes Me Feel Like a Sucker)

I can't really see piracy as being a morally defensible act. If you want to disrupt the distribution of content, stop buying it, but don't start pirating it. Instead, write to content creators explaining why you don't want to buy their content despite thinking that they are talented etc. Buy content from people willing to take risks with newer distribution models. Go to shows, readings, etc. No one benefits from you pirating content except for you.

illu45  ·  2828 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Unilever wants to ban sexist ads

Dove has done some interesting things with their 'campaign for real beauty', although those haven't been free of controversy either. Their MenPlus Care line is also an interesting exercise in gender branding that I personally find pretty refreshing insofar as it isn't using sex and/or athleticism to sell shaving/beauty products to men. Also, I think the connotations for the two taglines you quote are actually quite different, and the second seems much less problematic than the first IMO. I have always found it strange that Dove and Axe share a parent company, though.

As you say, we'll have to see what the follow-through on this is like. The headline should really be 'Unilever says they will stop making sexist ads' rather than trying to ban them, since the latter really isn't up to Unilever on any significant scale.

I agree with you that lots of things are needlessly gendered. Skis, perfumes, vitamins, etc. etc. The reason these gender divides exist is, I think, two-fold. Firstly, they provide an easy way for companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors ("Oh, these vitamins are specifically made for my gender? I guess I should take those instead of the generic ones, then"). The other issue is the cyclical nature of gendered advertising responding to and simultaneously reinforcing gender norms, which I think companies like Unilever are only partly responsible for.

illu45  ·  2829 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 29, 2016

Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest it was, although I realize my post probably came off that way. I just meant that, in general, I found it easier to feel productive and generally positive if I'm not gaming much (even if I'm not actually being productive in a traditional sense), so I suggested it might be worth trying to not game as much, but obviously I don't know whether or not that's something that would help you with the issues you've been facing.

illu45  ·  2834 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Nicola Sturgeon says a new Scottish Independence vote is 'highly likely'

Technically the Remain vote was 62% in Scotland, although it is true that 100% of Scottish districts had a Remain majority. Obviously that's still quite a difference from the voting across the UK.

illu45  ·  2857 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

    guys like de Botton were starting to look at the atheism and skeptic communities as a new, secular faith. They were trying to turn atheism into a church.

I don't really understand why this is such a terrible thing. I mean, I wouldn't be part of an atheist church, but if others do, what's wrong with that? Surely there are enough atheists nowadays that there's room for more than one varietal/expression of atheism.

illu45  ·  2878 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The horrors of speeches

An instructor I have a lot of respect for once told me "the only two places where people seem happy to get less than what they pay for are the dentist's chair and the classroom". I've seen some phenomenal lecturers who have spent 30-40 hours putting together a 3-hour lecture and students will still be on facebook/twitter/reddit/snapchat/whatever in class. In my tutorials I have the ability to control cell phone use, but I'm not about to ban laptops. At the end of the day, I've found it easier to make peace with the fact that, no matter how good your presentation is, it's impossible to get everyone to pay attention all of the time. If someone wants to look at their phone rather than listen to me, I'm pretty much okay with that, so long as they aren't distracting others.

I've found openings to be really key to getting people to pay attention. In the first ~10-25% of the presentation, I try pretty hard to get the maximum number of people on board. Some will stop focusing at some point along the way, and there will be some people who will never start paying attention, regardless of what I do, but I like to spend the first little while trying to engage the audience as much as possible. Humour is super effective in short bursts, but difficult to sustain. Setting the stakes is always key. Narrative can really keep things moving and keep people engaged in the longer term.

Public speaking is definitely a tough skill, and not one that's easy to develop without putting yourself out there and failing spectacularly at least a few times. Lots of people suffer from pretty intense anxiety about it, and different people deal with it differently, but "nerves" can be paralyzing for some, particularly if they're coming from environments where being outspoken is shunned in some way.