That is a slight understatement. Jonah cautioned against joining the UN, unless it’s out in the field. Today people work for the UN because it’s a job, not because it’s a passion and vocation. The good work done nowadays, he said, is by NGOs.
In 1963, men and women of his generation looked ahead to a booming Africa, an effective and hopeful UN, and an international civil service to be proud of. One can see how he would be disappointed.
Rather than steer young people away from public service, he wanted them to see it unadorned. “It’s a very brutal business being in politics,” he said, “You have to persevere, and idealism doesn’t take you anywhere.”
His mantra: Patience, thoughtfulness, and perseverence. “The world is a very difficult place,” he ended, “If you are tending sheep, it is better to know where the wolves are.”
via “The UN of today is not the UN I entered” – Chris Blattman.
rePost:: SF reading protocols
Fun read guys!!
We’ve all probably had the experience of reading a great SF novel and lending it to a friend—a literate friend who adores A.S. Byatt and E.M. Forster. Sometimes our friend will turn their nose up at the cover, and we’ll say no, really, this is good, you’ll like it. Sometimes our friend does like it, but often we’ll find our friend returning the book with a puzzled grimace, having tried to read it but “just not been able to get into it.” That friend has approached science fiction without the necessary toolkit and has bounced off. It’s not that they’re stupid. It’s not that they can’t read sentences. It’s just that part of the fun of science fiction happens in your head, and their head isn’t having fun, it’s finding it hard work to keep up.
via Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / SF reading protocols.
rePost :: Why are Congolese such bad shots?
This is actually cool to know, at least it makes a lot of the war movies we watch more believable in a not getting shot or killed by enemy fire viewpoint.
There may, however, be another reason. In his book On Killing, Lt Col Dave Grossman says that such behavior is typical of most armies. He quotes a US medic in Vietnam who had to crawl onto battle fields to help wounded soldiers, “What always amazed me is how many bullet can be fired during a firefight without anyone getting hurt.” Equipment can play a role, but there are also psychological factors, Grossman explains. Soldiers have an innate aversion to killing, he says, and will intentionally miss or just not shoot to avoid killing.
Might sound implausible, but there is quite a bit of data to back it up. During World War II, US General S.L.A Marshall interviewed soldiers after battles and found out that only 15 to 20 per cent even fired their weapons. Another amazing factoid: After the US civil war battle of Gettysburg 27,500 muskets were recovered from the battlefield. Ninety per cent of these were loaded, almost 50 per cent had more than one bullet and 25 per cent had 3-10 bullets in the barrel! In other words, instead of shooting, many soldiers just kept on loading. Another one: in World War II, less than 1 per cent of all US fighter pilots accounted for 30-40 per cent of all aircraft shot down.
Some of aversion could be defused through racism or prejudice – 44 per cent of Americans said they “would really like to kill” a Japanese soldier, but only 6 per cent said the same about Germans.
The US army has tackled this problem through socialization, conditioning and training. They now teach their recruits to kill, they desensitize them and dehumanize their enemies. Apparently, this has allowed them to boost firing rates from the 20 per cent in WWII to 50 per cent in Korea and 95 per cent in Vietnam. While I would be very careful about these stats, it looks like there is sufficient evidence there to be able to say that most people need copious coaxing and coercing to kill their fellow man/woman.
via Congo Siasa: Why are Congolese such bad shots?.
Love To Read::Cormac McCarthy on The Road – WSJ.com
WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?
CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.
WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?
CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
WSJ: The last five years have seemed very productive for you. Have there been fallow periods in your writing?
CM: I don’t think there’s any rich period or fallow period. That’s just a perception you get from what’s published. Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying bread crumbs. Someone asked Flannery O’Connor why she wrote, and she said, “Because I was good at it.” And I think that’s the right answer. If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, “The most significant thing in my life is that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.” And when you hear that you know you’re hearing the truth. It doesn’t diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.
via Cormac McCarthy on The Road – WSJ.com.
rePost :: The sweetest usurious bastards
Still we are talking about regulating credit cards – and nobody much seems to mention Rent-A-Center despite the far more usurious nature of the business.
I went to visit this company determined to short the stock. I did not. The company looked like a money-machine even if it appeared to breach the intention of pretty well every consumer protection law I had ever seen. I could not see what-if-anything broke the model. Moreover the customers understood just how usurious the business was. It was not like credit cards where the hidden overdrawn and late fees – things the consumer was suckered into – were the driver of the model. This was honest usury.
But it was the nature of the people I met that most stuck in memory. This was a business where if Jesus was alive he would pull down the Temple over them. It was precisely the sort of business the bible rails against. It offended my decency. But the people were lovely. I met management and a store owner – and – frankly they seemed exactly the sort of people you would like to have Friday drinks with. I liked them.
This alarmed me of course – because I expected them to be scum. And maybe they are – but I couldn’t tell. They were the sweetest usurious bastards (notwithstanding allegations in consumer complaints about the company).
via Bronte Capital: The sweetest usurious bastards.
You know what struck me with all the networking scams. They preyed on the people who can least afford it, and sadly used basic sales hacks that people less equipped to handle will fall for. Of course they do this with a big smile in their face, and one of the sweetest voice you’ll hear.
Research::Gratitude Enhanced by Focusing on End of Pleasurable Experience | PsyBlog
Six weeks isn’t long
In her study Dr Kurtz recruited participants who were about six weeks from finishing college and graduating. They were asked to write about their experiences at college in one of three conditions:
1. Encouraged to view 6 weeks as a long time.
2. Encouraged to view 6 weeks as not very long.
3. Just told to write about what they had done on a typical day (control group).
Then, over the next two weeks participants were asked to complete four surveys. Participants in the first two conditions were encouraged to think about what they were grateful for: things like friends, clubs and activities, but with their remaining time at college framed either as very short or relatively long. Participants in the final control condition continued describing their typical day.
As Dr Kurtz predicted it was those in the second group who were happier after the intervention; the other two groups showed no significant improvement. It seemed that just being encouraged to think grateful thoughts was not enough to increase happiness. What made the grateful thoughts beneficial was focusing on the imminent end of this pleasurable experience.
On top of being happier, students encouraged to think how little of college remained were more likely to take advantage of the time they had left. They displayed greater motivation by taking part in more college-related activities. Dr Kurtz suggests thinking about the end of their experience at college put them in a “now or never” frame of mind.
via Gratitude Enhanced by Focusing on End of Pleasurable Experience | PsyBlog.
We forget this often, we put death out of our minds and live as if we are going to forever. Its always about balance balance between the memories of the past, the wants of now and the preparations for tomorrow. If you can honestly say to yourself “Nothing”, When asked the Question”If you have one day to live and knew it, what would you change how you lived yesterday” most of the time,”Congratulations!!!!”
rePost::How America Lost the War on Drugs : Rolling Stone
frankly drugs scare me, it’s just that people on drugs cannot be reasoned with, they will probably kill you even if you do not have any plans on trying to fight back when being mugged, or the like. It’s like in poker, I actually don’t fear the rational players, it’s the irrational players who doesn’t have a lot of logic in their playing that is very hard to beat. This is because you get beaten by hands that you assume wouldn’t be possible because they would have folded already with such.
This is something concrete that can be asked to Presidential Aspirants. Do they even know of these almost 20 year recommendation? The Drug problem in the Philippines is worsening because poverty is worsening, producing a spiral of crime-poverty-addiction. We are a poor country and to not know what the most cost efficient way to combat the Drug Problem is a big question mark in any Presidential Candidates armor. We must be asking these questions.
PS: Legalize marijuana now!!!!
PSS: Notice that in a lot of our problems the Pareto Principle is at work 80-20 90-10;. For me at least someone worthy of leading our beautiful and somewhat seemingly damned country should know the those places where we could put the Pareto Principle to work.
“If you had asked me at the outset,” Everingham says, “my guess would have been that the best use of taxpayer money was in the source countries in South America” — that it would be possible to stop cocaine before it reached the U.S. But what the study found surprised her. Overseas military efforts were the least effective way to decrease drug use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively expensive. The only cost-effective way to put a dent in the market, it turned out, was drug treatment. “It’s not a magic bullet,” says Reuter, the RAND scholar who helped supervise the study, “but it works.” The study ultimately ushered RAND, this vaguely creepy Cold War relic, into a position as the permanent, pragmatic left wing of American drug policy, the most consistent force for innovating and reinventing our national conception of the War on Drugs.
When Everingham’s team looked more closely at drug treatment, they found that thirteen percent of hardcore cocaine users who receive help substantially reduced their use or kicked the habit completely. They also found that a larger and larger portion of illegal drugs in the U.S. were being used by a comparatively small group of hardcore addicts. There was, the study concluded, a fundamental imbalance: The crack epidemic was basically a domestic problem, but we had been fighting it more aggressively overseas. “What we began to realize,” says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studied drug policy for RAND, “was that even if you only get a percentage of this small group of heavy drug users to abstain forever, it’s still a really great deal.”
Thirteen years later, the study remains the gold standard on drug policy. “It’s still the consensus recommendation supplied by the scholarship,” says Reuter. “Yet as well as it’s stood up, it’s never really been tried.”
To Brown, RAND’s conclusions seemed exactly right. “I saw how little we were doing to help addicts, and I thought, ‘This is crazy,'” he recalls. “‘This is how we should be breaking the cycle of addiction and crime, and we’re just doing nothing.'”
The federal budget that Brown’s office submitted in 1994 remains a kind of fetish object for certain liberals in the field, the moment when their own ideas came close to making it into law. The budget sought to cut overseas interdiction, beef up community policing, funnel low-level drug criminals into treatment programs instead of prison, and devote $355 million to treating hardcore addicts, the drug users responsible for much of the illegal-drug market and most of the crime associated with it. White House political handlers, wary of appearing soft on crime, were skeptical of even this limited commitment, but Brown persuaded the president to offer his support, and the plan stayed.
via How America Lost the War on Drugs : Rolling Stone.
rePost:Tragedy Of The War On Drugs:How America Lost the War on Drugs : Rolling Stone
Though many on the left suspected that things had gone seriously awry, drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a fog of ignorance. The kinds of long-term studies that policy-makers needed — those that would show what measures would actually reduce drug use and dampen its consequences — did not yet exist. When it came to research, there was “absolutely nothing” that examined “how each program was or wasn’t working,” says Peter Reuter, a drug scholar who founded the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp.
But after Escobar was killed in 1993 — and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels — doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn’t. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn’t been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn’t. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.
All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs — with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes — a twelvefold increase since 1980 — with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana — and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of human-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now repeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes.
via How America Lost the War on Drugs : Rolling Stone.
rePost::Overcoming Bias : Telescope Effect
Would they rather spend $10 million to save 10,000 lives from a disease that caused 15,000 deaths a year, or save 20,000 lives from a disease that killed 290,000 people a year? Overwhelmingly, volunteers preferred to spend money saving the 10,000 lives rather than the 20,000 lives. …
Slovic once told volunteers about a 7-year-old girl in Mali who was starving and in need of help. They were given a certain amount of money and asked how much they were willing to spend to help her. On average, people gave half their money to help the girl. … One group of volunteers was asked whether they would give money to the little girl; another was asked whether they would donate money to the little boy. A third group of volunteers was told about both the boy and the girl and asked how much they were willing to give. People gave the same amount of money when told about either the boy or the girl. But when the children were presented together, the volunteers gave less.
More here. If you want to care more about distant victims, set aside your mental image of a large tragedy, focus your mind on one particular victim, and open your heart. If you want to care less, instead of thinking about any one victim, try to visualize a much larger group of similar victims. Now here’s the key question: do you want to care more or less? Not sure? See which image you put in your mind, long enough to act on it.
This puzzles me a bit re near-far analysis. It suggests we help distant victims more in near mode, even though far mode is where we more express abstract ideals we want others to see. Do we not actually want others to think we help distant victims?
via Overcoming Bias : Telescope Effect.
rePost::Half-heartedly, Lessons About Life.
There are 50 lessons in this post read the whole thing in the linked post!!!
Lessons About Life.
1. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
4. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and parents will. Stay in touch!
5. Pay off your credit cards every month.
via Half-heartedly, Lessons About Life..