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The Myth of Education
The Myth of Education
The purpose of education is to socialise human beings into a life of complete institutional dependency. School teaches you that justice must come from someone in institutional authority, that meaningful activity must come from a ‘career path,’ that if you want to express yourself you must first gain access to centralised speech platforms,1 that if you want to do something, you must first of all gain a licence or a qualification and that, above all, your own desires and instincts are invalid.
·expressiveegg.org·
The Myth of Education
Culture is increasingly being used to treat mental health issues in Europe. Here's how | Euronews
Culture is increasingly being used to treat mental health issues in Europe. Here's how | Euronews
A growing number of initiatives across Europe are using access to the arts as a tool to improve health and well-being alongside classic medical treatment. In the Danish town of Silkeborg, a group of new mothers who suffered from postpartum depression reported feeling closer to their newborns, calmer and more optimistic after taking part in weekly singing sessions designed to improve their mental health.Similar results were also observed in groups also participating in the World Health Organisation's (WHO) Music for Motherhood project in four other cities in Italy and Romania. "Just like being physically active has health benefits, being culturally active also has health benefits," Nils Fietje, Technical Officer at the World Health Organisation and co-director of its Arts and Health Lab, told Euronews.
“Arts and culture are important in promoting the positive mental health and well-being of individuals and society in general by supporting social inclusion and reducing mental health stigma.”
·euronews.com·
Culture is increasingly being used to treat mental health issues in Europe. Here's how | Euronews
Branding a city: What makes a successful design?
Branding a city: What makes a successful design?
Jeremie and his team spent time in the city to understand its “soul”, and conducted surveys that asked thousands of businesses, residents and visitors about their aspirations and perceptions of Christchurch. They discovered that its image as the “Garden City” was important, as well as being a good place to balance work and leisure, leading them to create the promise: “Christchurch is a playground for people.”
·itsnicethat.com·
Branding a city: What makes a successful design?
Ron DeSantis is running for president.
Ron DeSantis is running for president.
"Even a cursory dip into the statistics of social and economic well-being reveals that Florida falls short in almost any measure that matters to the lives of its citizens. More than four years into the DeSantis governorship, Florida continues to languish toward the bottom of state rankings assessing the quality of health care, school funding, long-term elder care, and other areas key to a successful society," Kleinknecht said. Teacher salaries are among the lowest, unemployment benefits are stingier than any other state’s, and wage theft flourishes.
·readtangle.com·
Ron DeSantis is running for president.
“I can’t make products just for 41-year-old tech founders”: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is taking it back to basics
“I can’t make products just for 41-year-old tech founders”: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is taking it back to basics
Of course, you shouldn’t discriminate, but when we say belonging, it has to be more than just inclusion. It has to actually be the proactive manifestation of meeting people, creating connections in friendships. And Jony Ive said, “Well, you need to reframe it. It’s not just about belonging, it’s about human connection and belonging.”And that was, I think, a really big unlock. The next thing Jony Ive said is he created this book for me, a book of his ideas, and the book was called “Beyond Where and When,” and he basically said that Airbnb should shift from beyond where and when to who and what?Who are you and what do you want in your life? And that was a part of the inspiration behind Airbnb categories, that we wanted people to come to Airbnb without a destination in mind and that we could categorize properties not just by location but by what makes them unique, and that really influenced Airbnb categories and some of the stuff we’re doing now.
·theverge.com·
“I can’t make products just for 41-year-old tech founders”: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is taking it back to basics
Opinion | Why the New Obesity Guidelines for Kids Terrify Me
Opinion | Why the New Obesity Guidelines for Kids Terrify Me
In dozens of interviews with families I heard about doctors shaming low-income moms for buying dollar store ramen noodles instead of pricier fresh vegetables. I talked to teenagers who were gaining weight while dealing with depression or anxiety and whose doctors told them to cut carbs. Families described doctors who rushed conversations, grabbed bellies or made jokes about kids’ bodies.
What should the obesity guidelines say instead? Stop classifying kids and their health by body size altogether. This would involve a paradigm shift to weight-inclusive approaches, which see weight change as a possible symptom of, or a contributing factor toward, a larger health concern or struggle. These approaches focus providers on addressing that issue rather than managing weight loss. This means looking less at the number on the scale and talking more to families about their health priorities and challenges. Can they add healthy foods rather than restrict calories?
We cannot solve anti-fat bias by making fat kids thin. Our current approach only teaches them that trusted adults believe the bullies are right — that a fat body is just a problem to solve. That’s not where the conversation about anyone’s health should begin.
·nytimes.com·
Opinion | Why the New Obesity Guidelines for Kids Terrify Me
The End of the English Major
The End of the English Major
. Perhaps you see the liberal-arts idyll, removed from the pressures of the broader world and filled with tweedy creatures reading on quadrangle lawns. This is the redoubt of the idealized figure of the English major, sensitive and sweatered, moving from “Pale Fire” to “The Fire Next Time” and scaling the heights of “Ulysses” for the view. The goal of such an education isn’t direct career training but cultivation of the min
Or perhaps you think of the university as the research colony, filled with laboratories and conferences and peer-reviewed papers written for audiences of specialists. This is a place that thumps with the energy of a thousand gophers turning over knowledge. It’s the small-bore university of campus comedy—of “Lucky Jim” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—but also the quarry of deconstruction, quantum electrodynamics, and value theory. It produces new knowledge and ways of understanding that wouldn’t have an opportunity to emerge anywhere else.
English professors find the turn particularly baffling now: a moment when, by most appearances, the appetite for public contemplation of language, identity, historiography, and other longtime concerns of the seminar table is at a peak.
“Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall.
In a quantitative society for which optimization—getting the most output from your input—has become a self-evident good, universities prize actions that shift numbers, and pre-professionalism lends itself to traceable change
One literature professor and critic at Harvard—not old or white or male—noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for students to critique something as “problematic” than to grapple with what the problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay them
·newyorker.com·
The End of the English Major
How DAOs Could Change the Way We Work
How DAOs Could Change the Way We Work
DAOs are effectively owned and governed by people who hold a sufficient number of a DAO’s native token, which functions like a type of cryptocurrency. For example, $FWB is the native token of popular social DAO called Friends With Benefits, and people can buy, earn, or trade it.
Contributors will be able to use their DAO’s native tokens to vote on key decisions. You can get a glimpse into the kinds of decisions DAO members are already voting on at Snapshot, which is essentially a decentralized voting system. Having said this, existing voting mechanisms have been criticized by the likes of Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, the open-source blockchain that acts as a foundational layer for the majority of Web3 applications. So, this type of voting is likely to evolve over time.
·hbr.org·
How DAOs Could Change the Way We Work
Non-linear career paths are the future | Hacker News
Non-linear career paths are the future | Hacker News
Women and marginalized people who change jobs: Flakey and incapable. Unable to handle a job. Something must be wrong. Clearly a sign of caution to be taken as a reason not to work with them.Men who change jobs: literally articles inventing new vernacular stemming from the mental gymnastics required to justify the hypocrisy — men aren’t incapable because they change jobs — they are prodigy — men aren’t untrustworthy for changing jobs — they are taking nonlinear career paths because of the uncertainty in the market
·news.ycombinator.com·
Non-linear career paths are the future | Hacker News
Max Pain (A Recent History)
Max Pain (A Recent History)
In The Umami Theory of Value, the authors discussed how entities create illusory value without improving material conditions. In 2020, they predicted a repulsive turn and a violent recoupling of value and material reality. However, the surreal crescendo of decoupling between value and reality that followed, which peaked in late 2021, saw incredible returns on random things and mainstreaming of risk. This period, which the authors call Clown Town, saw people taking risks they barely believed in and mistaking risk for opportunity. The authors then discuss the current era, Max Pain, in which everyone's opinion is right at some point, but never at the right time, and those who control the flows of information and capital are able to systematically profit while regular people struggle.
Money became increasingly fake-seeming as it diverged more and more from a hard day’s work and most conventional wisdom.
The growing number of people taking chances that they barely believed in (starting an Onlyfans, going all in on a memecoin, becoming a performative racist for clicks) reflected a rational response to seeing absurd and/or conventionally shitty ideas have outsized success (Bored Apes, Trump, the Babyccino).
bucking conventional wisdom in any direction became the order of the day. Contrarianism became incredibly popular. Taking the diametrically opposed position to consensus as a shortcut to standing out in a crowded and volatile field was a key Clown Town strategy.
As a subset of contrarianism, Hot Sauce Behavior became especially popular. Hot Sauce involves taking something basic or mid and applying a socially forbidden or mysterious spice to it (in place of, or to function as, the X factor or the je ne sais quoi). This element had to be shocking, bad, atavistic, or otherwise “not normal”—it could be Nazism, grooming, the Occult, Catholicism, outright aggression, the threat of violence, or the attitudes of obscure-to-you political groups—but in smallish amounts. It made peoples’ hearts race and adrenaline pump while they consumed something otherwise bland. (This was the Tension Economy as the new Attention Economy.)
If the 2020 degen was a gambler willing to go all in on a whim… …the 2023 degen is a sophisticated risk manager We have found ourselves in a new cultural era in which multiple overlapping crises and rising interest rates have led to an emergent reckoning. It is now widely understood that it was very stupid to play crazy games with tons of excess money instead of actually improving material reality. But certain questions remain: What the fuck is anything worth today? What’s the best way to manage risk while it all comes falling down?
In chess, today’s average player is more skilled than the one from yesteryear because online exposure of advanced theory has led to regular players making the moves of masters. As Virgil once said, “One kid does a new skateboard trick, then hundreds more can do it the next day around the world.”
Everyone should be able to use their increased intelligence and awareness to better navigate the world. In reality, the irony is painful: When everyone gets smarter, things get harder. If everyone is reassessing the most-effective-tactics-available all the time, it gets harder and harder to win, even though you’re smarter and “should be in a better position.” The Yale admissions office realizes thousands of applicants have watched the same obscure how-to-get-into-Yale TikTok, and decides to change the meta: Leadership is no longer a valuable quality.
Max Pain means, even when you’re right, you’re wrong; it describes a climate in which everyone’s opinion is right at some point, but never at the right time.
·nemesis.global·
Max Pain (A Recent History)
Why education is so difficult and contentious
Why education is so difficult and contentious
This article proposes to explain why education is so difficult and contentious by arguing that educational thinking draws on only three fundamental ideas&emdash;that of socializing the young, shaping the mind by a disciplined academic curriculum, and facilitating the development of students' potential. All educational positions are made up of various mixes of these ideas. The problems we face in education are due to the fact that each of these ideas is significantly flawed and also that each is incompatible in basic ways with the other two. Until we recognize these basic incompatibilities we will be unable adequately to respond to the problems we face.
·sfu.ca·
Why education is so difficult and contentious
Introducing metalabel | Metalabel
Introducing metalabel | Metalabel
Record and fashion labels use the actual word “label,” but publishing houses, art galleries, filmmakers, and other collectives are all examples of a category we might call “culture labels” — entities that exist to fund, distribute, and promote culture of one kind or another.Most culture labels exist to promote a specific aesthetic, region, or point of view. A punk label flies the flag for punk rock with every record it puts out. A postcolonial fiction publisher creates space for marginalized voices in wider culture. These labels establish this perspective incrementally, release by release.
Labels provide seed funding to new ideas. Labels find, sign, and support talent. Labels signal to the rest of their ecosystem what matters. Taken all together, we can better appreciate what labels are. Labels are startups and institutions for culture.
It’s no coincidence that the push against labels coincided with the rise of the so-called “Creator Economy” and its new heroic myth of the independent creator who out-hustles and out-competes their way to millions of subs and riches. But the truth of the Creator Economy myth has become clear: billion-dollar platforms turning people into content factories and offering little in the way of creative support, financial security, or context in return.
·releases.metalabel.xyz·
Introducing metalabel | Metalabel