Reading On The Rise

According to this report, reading is on the rise in America for the first time in a quarter century. It's difficult for me to express how pleased this makes me. Civilization and its discontents have been in the back of my mind since I became aware of how little reading most people do. To go into a house---a nice house,well-furnished, a place of some affluence---and see no books at all has always given me a chill, especially if there are children in the house. Over the last 30 years, since I've been paying attention to the issue, I've found a bewildering array of excuses among people across all walks of life as to why they never read. I can understand fatigue, certainly---it is easier to just flip on the tube and veg out to canned dramas---but in many of these instances, reading has simply never been important. To someone for whom reading has been the great salvation, this is simply baffling. Reading, I believe, is the best way we have to gain access to the world short of physically immersing ourselves in different places and cultures. Even for those who have the opportunity and resource to travel that extensively, reading provides a necessary background for the many places that will be otherwise inaccessibly alien to our sensibilities.

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The age of agnotology: culturally constructed ignorance

Robert Proctor is a historian of science at Stanford who has pointed out a bizarre modern phenomenon: the coexistence of easily available factual information and ignorance. That is the subject of Clive Thompson's article in Wired:

He has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is "the study of culturally constructed ignorance."

As Proctor argues, when society doesn't know something, it's often because special interests work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he's a Muslim; church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it did before.

"People always assume that if someone doesn't know something, it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't yet figured it out," Proctor says. "But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not."

After years of celebrating the information revolution, we need to focus on the countervailing force: The disinformation revolution.

Thompson suggests that we need to develop more tools like Wikipedia to allow society as a whole to "build real knowledge through consensus," thereby allowing us to expose systematic lies for what they are.

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Why would an innocent person confess to a crime?

Today I read a 2005 Scientific American article that discussed why so many innocent people confessed to committing crimes.

The pages of legal history reveal many tragic miscarriages of justice involving innocent men and women who were prosecuted, wrongfully convicted, and sentenced to prison or to death. Opinions differ on prevalence rates, but it is clear that a disturbing number of cases have involved defendants who were convicted based only on false confessions that, at least in retrospect, could not have been true. Indeed, as in the case of the Central Park incident, disputed false confessions have convicted some people notwithstanding physical evidence to the contrary. As a result of technological advances in forensic DNA typing--which enables the review of past cases in which blood, hair, semen, skin, saliva or other biological material has been preserved--many new, high-profile wrongful convictions have surfaced in recent years, up to 157 in the U.S. alone at the time of this writing.

Typically 20 to 25 percent of DNA exonerations had false confessions in evidence. Why would an innocent person confess to a crime? A scan of the scientific literature reveals how a complex set of psychological factors comes into play . . . [One of those factors is the tendency] toward compliance or suggestibility in the face of two common interrogation tactics--the presentation of false incriminating evidence and the impression that giving a confession might bring leniency. In short, sometimes people confess because it seems like the only way out of a terrible situation.

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Should we slap warning stickers on our friends to avoid picking up their bad habits?

It seems to me that people who are obese seem to spend lots of time around with other people who are obese. Smokers tend to pal around with other smokers. This raises an important question: Do friends cause each other to pick up bad habits? Not that I’m claiming it to be intentional, but do people pass bad habits to their friends through some form of social osmosis? Allow me to begin with a story that embarrasses me. When I was 18, I met a guy named “Ray” who was smart, funny and an accomplished athlete. Ray also had a noticeable tic . He sporadically jerked his head whenever he talked with others—he did this several times per minute. I spent some time with Ray while visiting my then-girlfriend at college back in the 70's. After a few days up at her college, I noticed that I was starting to exhibit the same tic. I can assure you that I didn’t do this intentionally. When I noticed the problem I consciously forced myself to stop doing it, lest it became an ingrained habit. Did Ray’s bad habit cause me to pick up my new bad habit? Based on the timing, there’s not much doubt in my mind. Similarly, I’ve noticed that when I like someone and I’ve spent considerable time with them, I sometimes start talking like them, picking up their dialect, their expressions, their gestures and their vocabulary; the clues are usually subtle but often undeniable. I’ve caught myself doing this dozens of times over my life.

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Stay back because . . .

I saw the sign on the back of the van and I understood that I was to "Stay Back." I just didn't understand why. Not that I was tempted to disobey. I wondered, "Did they forget to lock the back door? Will a prisoner throw the door open and scratch my car's bumper?" I suppose the sign means that drivers should give the sheriff lots of room to get the prisoners in and out of the van. Perhaps the warning could be better phrased, though.

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