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Shifty little bugger when all is said and done. :)
You know those people who use their mouths but not their brains, this video is for them. The gullible fall for conspiracy theories with alarming regularity and will attempt to suck you into their own vortex of stupidity. Potholer54 has the antidote to their claims – basic research and fact checking FTW!
I’ve almost finished Susan Jacoby’s book titled the Age of American Unreason. There are a few passages that wanted to make me stand up and cheer and qualified themselves as sharing material on the blog. Of course, I can never find them when I want to do the actual transcription, but here is one quote from the chapter on “junk thought’ stating how important grounding in scientific principles are.
“It ought to be unnecessary to have to state that scientific literacy and respect for the scientific method should not be equated with blind trust in experts and scientists and that antagonism toward evidence based science should not be confused with an entirely healthy concern about the need for ethical oversight of scientific research. But junk-thought has become so pervasive in the United States that as soon as someone criticized, say, religion-based restriction on stem cell research, the hucksters of illogic inevitably remind the public about Nazi doctors who performed cruel and scientifically useless experiments on human subjects; about Lysenkoist biology in the Soviet Union; and, last but not least, about the false and widely publicized claims of successful embryonic cloning by South Korean researches. The last were of course exposed by other scientists, because all real scientific research must be and is subjected to rigorous scrutiny by peers. That is what separates science for pseudoscience and junk thought. Without a basic understanding of what constitutes good science, neither ordinary citizens nor the politicians that represent them can hope to make thoughtful judgments separating quacks, con men, and practitioners of bad science from thoughtful experts whose advice ought to be taken seriously.”
-Excerpt from Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason. p.230
I’m not much for the whole hippy-dippy holistically “natural” nonsense that some people buy into, but the composition of processed foods does make one wonder what the goals of the food producers are.
A healthy society? A society based on consuming as much as possible? Some combination of the two?
The ‘pillars’ involved in the creation of fast food make me think that a healthy society isn’t much of a priority. This excerpt from the Alter.Net article:
“Processed-food companies increasingly turn to their legions of scientists to produce foods that we can’t resist,” he writes. McFedries notes that he is “indebted” to New York Times reporter Michael Moss, particularly for his fascinating new book Salt Sugar Fat, for many of the following terms:
- Pillar Ingredients—Salt, sugar, and fat are the Pillar Ingredients, and the industry strategically combines the three to keep you hooked.
- Bliss Point—If we crave pillar ingredients so much, why not just crank them up as much as possible? It turns out there is an optimum amount of salt, sugar, or fat the human brain likes best, and it is called the bliss point.
- Mouthfeel—This is literally the way food feels inside a person’s mouth; junk food industry scientists also adjust factors like crunchiness to produce a mouthfeel that consumer most crave.
- Flavor Burst—Technologists alter the size and shape of salt crystals, so that they induce a flavor burst that “can basically assault the taste buds into submission.”
- Vanishing Caloric Density—Underlying all junk-food science is vanishing caloric density, which is the process by which the food melts in your mouth so quickly that the brain is fooled into thinking it is consuming fewer calories than it actually is. The packaged-food scientists want to avoid triggering sensory-specific satiety, the brain mechanism that tells a person to stop eating when it is overwhelmed by flavors. The goals are either passive overeating, which is the excessive eating of foods that are high in fat because the human body is slow to recognize the caloric content of rich foods, or auto-eating: that is, eating without thinking or without even being hungry.
Sometimes “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” just isn’t strong enough. In one of my recent youtube sessions I ran quite the emotional gamut. Let’s start on a high note, shall we?
The Fantastic
First we have a long overdue “Hero of the Day”. For quite some time, the youtuber Vihart has been producing superb content that celebrates the wonders and joys of math. Irresistibly fun, endlessly charming, and mind-blowingly wondrous, Vihart’s videos present math in a delightful and accessible manner. I recommend that everyone take the time to watch as much Vihart as they can, especially educators. This is how math class ought to be. How marvellous it would be if more children played with mobius strips and wanted Mexa-hexa-flexa-gons for supper.
In her latest video, Vihart expands on one of her previous videos and makes a 3D audio braid. You’ll need earphones for this one, or surround sound. Watch, be amazed, delight in the sonic wonders of math.
The Wretched and The “Oh F*ck, No”
Whilst riding this emotional high of mathematical elation and renewed hope for future generations that will still care about math because of extraordinary projects like those by Vihart, I came across this next video. I crashed. I burned. I debated on whether ‘future generations’ was an option we really ought to pursue.
The two stories presented in this video are beyond ludicrous. The staggering amount of harmful stupid and horrific wrongness exposed here boggle the mind. It’s like I’ve been slapped in the face, but the stunned shock will not wear off. Just watch.
If humanity has any hope at all, it is with educators like Vihart. People who make curiosity, learning, science, and math fun. People who find their passion and wonder in reality and share it with the rest of us. The more children (and in turn, the public) are inspired to think, to be inquisitive, to actually care what is real, the less idiocy like that in the last video will be a part of our society.
If you haven’t checked out all the Vihart links in the first part of this post, now is probably a good time. It will make you feel better.
I would recommend adding this to your reading lists, I’m only a third of the way though, but it has been a detailed and interesting account of genesis and growth of the large mean streak of anti-intellectualism that is currently dominating the zeitgeist of American society. Jacoby was interviewed by Bill Moyers and thus, allow me to wet your whistle with an excerpt from the transcript.
SUSAN JACOBY: Now, this was not always the case in our country. In the 19th century Robert Ingersoll, whom we’ve talked, who is known as the great agnostic, had audiences full of people who didn’t agree with him. But they wanted to hear what he had to say. And they wanted to see whether the devil really has horns. And now what we have is a situation in which people go to hear people they already agree with. What’s going on is not so much education as reinforcement of the opinions you already have.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, why is it we’re so unwilling to give, as you say, a hearing to contradictory viewpoints? Or to imagine that we might learn something from someone who disagrees with us?
SUSAN JACOBY: Well, I think part of it is part of a larger thing that is making our culture dumber. We have, really, over the past 40 years, gotten shorter and shorter and shorter attention spans. One of the most important studies I’ve found, and I’ve put in this chapter, they call it Infantainment– on this book. It’s by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And they’ve found that children under six spend two hours a day watching television and video on average. But only 39 minutes a day being read to by their parents.
Well, you don’t need a scientific study to know that if you’re not read to by your parents, if most of your entertainment when you’re in those very formative years is looking at a screen, you value what you do. And I don’t see how people can learn to concentrate and read if they watch television when they’re very young as opposed to having their parents read to them. The fact is when you’re watching television, whether it’s an infant or you or I, or staring glazedly at a video screen, you’re not doing something else.
BILL MOYERS: What does it say to you, Susan, that half of American adults believe in ghosts? Now I take these from your book. One-third believe in astrology. Three quarters believe in angels. And four-fifths believe in miracles.
SUSAN JACOBY: I think even more important than the fact that large numbers of Americans believe in ghosts or angels, that is part of some religious beliefs. Is the flip side is of this is that over half of Americans don’t believe in evolution. And these things go together. Because what they do is they place science on a par almost with folk beliefs.
And I think– if I may inveigh against myself, ourselves, I think the American media in particular has a lot to do with it. Because one of the things that really has gotten dumber about our culture the media constantly talks about truth as if it– if it were always equidistant from two points. In other words, sometimes the truth is one-sided.
I mentioned this in THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks there was a huge cover story in TIME Magazine in 2002 about the rapture and end of the world scenarios. There wasn’t a singular secular person quoted in it. They discussed the rapture scenario from the book of Revelation as though it was a perfectly reasonable thing for people to believe. On the one hand, these people don’t believe it. On the other it’s exactly like saying– you know, “Two plus– two plus two, so-and-so says, ‘two plus two equals five.’ But, of course, mathematicians say that it really equals four.” The mathematicians are right. The people who say that two plus two equals five are wrong. The media blurs that constantly.
BILL MOYERS: You call that a kind of dumb objectivity.
SUSAN JACOBY: Yes. Dumb objectivity. Exactly.
As an educator I find Jacoby’s work illuminating and depressing at the same time. We have such a large hill to climb in the struggle to reclaim children’s minds from the media.
An interesting talk about changing the cultural values that are toxic in nature. He didn’t mention patriarchy, but was alluding to the concept throughout his entire talk. I’m not sure if this was a conscious choice or not, but it is interesting that a speaker who is talking explicitly about patriarchy and its effects doesn’t use the term once.
Patriarchy needs to be discussed, debated and dismantled. There is no way around this if we want a to live in recognizable, hopefully advanced, society.
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