Pre-Flight Safety Demonstration Gets Performed as a Modern Dance: A Creative Video from a Taiwanese Airline

in Comedy, Dance, Life, Travel | March 23rd, 2018

Tai­wanese air­line EVA Air’s pre-flight safe­ty video is a gen­uine odd­i­ty in a field lit­tered with cre­ative inter­pre­ta­tions.

Ten years ago, air­lines were straight­for­ward about com­ply­ing with the Inter­na­tion­al Civ­il Avi­a­tion Orga­ni­za­tion, the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion, and oth­er gov­ern­ing bod­ies’ require­ments.  These instruc­tions were seri­ous busi­ness. Chil­dren and oth­er first time trav­el­ers paid strict atten­tion to infor­ma­tion about tray tables, exits, and inflat­able life vests that jad­ed fre­quent fly­ers ignored, con­fi­dent that most take offs and land­ings tend to go accord­ing to plan, and the over­whelm­ing num­ber of planes tend stay in the air for the dura­tion of one’s flight.

What about the ones that don’t though? There are times when a too-cool-for-school busi­ness trav­el­er seat­ed next to an emer­gency exit could spell dis­as­ter for every­one onboard.

Vir­gin America’s 2007 ani­mat­ed safe­ty video, below, was the first to recap­ture pas­sen­gers’ atten­tion, with a blasé nar­ra­tive style that poked fun at the stan­dard tropes:

For the .0001% of you who have nev­er oper­at­ed a seat­belt before, it works like this…

The cocky tone was dialed down for more crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion, like how to assist the child in the seat next to you when the yel­low oxy­gen masks drop from the over­head com­part­ment. (Imag­ine the may­hem if indie ani­ma­tor Bill Plymp­ton had been in the pilot’s seat for this one…)

The irrev­er­ent approach was a hit. The FAA took note, encour­ag­ing cre­ativ­i­ty in a 2010 Advi­so­ry Cir­cu­lar:

Every air­line pas­sen­ger should be moti­vat­ed to focus on the safe­ty infor­ma­tion in the pas­sen­ger brief­ing; how­ev­er, moti­vat­ing peo­ple, even when their own per­son­al safe­ty is involved, is not easy. One way to increase pas­sen­ger moti­va­tion is to make the safe­ty infor­ma­tion brief­in­gs and cards as inter­est­ing and attrac­tive as pos­si­ble.

For a while EVA Air, an inno­va­tor whose fleet includes sev­er­al Hel­lo Kit­ty Jets, played it safe by stick­ing to crowd pleas­ing schtick. Its 2012 CGI safe­ty demo video, below, must’ve played par­tic­u­lar­ly well with the Hel­lo Kit­ty demo­graph­ic.

…looks a bit 2012, no?

A few months ago, EVA took things in a direc­tion few indus­try pro­fes­sion­als could’ve pre­dict­ed: mod­ern dance, per­formed with utmost sin­cer­i­ty.

Chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Bulareyaung Pagarla­va, a mem­ber of Taiwan’s indige­nous Pai­wan com­mu­ni­ty, and a small crew of dancers spent three months trans­lat­ing the famil­iar direc­tives into a vocab­u­lary of sym­bol­ic ges­tures. See the results at the top of the post.

You’ll find none of the stock char­ac­ters who pop­u­late oth­er air­lines’ videos here—no sneaky smok­ers, no con­cerned moms, no sleepy busi­ness­peo­ple. There’s bare­ly a sug­ges­tion of a cab­in.

Unfet­tered by seats or over­head bins, the bright­ly clad, bare­foot dancers leap and roll as they inter­act with 3D pro­jec­tions, behav­ior that would cer­tain­ly sum­mon a flight atten­dant if per­formed on an actu­al plane.

Does it work?

The answer may depend on whether or not the plane on which you’re trav­el­ing takes a sud­den nose dive.

In “No Jok­ing,” an essay about air­port secu­ri­ty, Uni­ver­si­ty of Ottawa pro­fes­sor Mark B. Salter writes that it is “dif­fi­cult to moti­vate pas­sen­gers to con­tem­plate their own mor­tal­i­ty.” The fash­ion for jok­i­ness in safe­ty videos “nat­u­ral­izes areas of anx­i­ety,” a men­tal trick of which Freud was well aware.

What then are we to make of the EVA Air dancer at the 4:35 minute mark, who appears to be falling back­ward through the night sky?

Would you show a jet’s worth of trav­el­ers the mod­ern dance equiv­a­lent of Air­plane 1975, Fear­less, or Snakes on a Plane before they taxi down the run­way?

Mer­ci­ful­ly, the nar­ra­tor steps in to remind pas­sen­gers that smok­ing is pro­hib­it­ed, before the dig­i­tal­ly pro­ject­ed dark waters can swal­low the writhing soloist up.

There’s also some ques­tion as to whether the video ade­quate­ly address­es the ques­tion of tray table oper­a­tion.

Read­ers, what do you think? Does this new video make you feel secure about tak­ing flight?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sta­tis­tics Explained Through Mod­ern Dance: A New Way of Teach­ing a Tough Sub­ject

Artist Nina Katchadouri­an Cre­ates Flem­ish Style Self-Por­traits in Air­plane Lava­to­ry

NASA Puts 400+ His­toric Exper­i­men­tal Flight Videos on YouTube

Col­or­ful Maps from 1914 and 2016 Show How Planes & Trains Have Made the World Small­er and Trav­el Times Quick­er

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Bertrand Russell’s Advice to People Living 1,000 Years in the Future: “Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish”

in Life, Philosophy | March 21st, 2018

In these times of high anx­i­ety, bat­tles over “free speech”—on col­lege cam­pus­es, in cor­po­rate offices, on air­waves and the internet—can seem extreme­ly myopic from a cer­tain per­spec­tive. The per­spec­tive I mean is one in which a dis­turb­ing num­ber of mes­sages broad­cast per­pet­u­al­ly to mil­lions of peo­ple bear lit­tle rela­tion­ship to sci­en­tif­ic, his­tor­i­cal, or social facts, so that it becomes increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult for many peo­ple to tell fact from fic­tion. Debat­ing whether or not such speech is “free” out­side of any con­sid­er­a­tion for what pur­pose it serves, who it harms, and why it should drown out oth­er speech because it appeals to wide­spread prej­u­dices or pow­er­ful, monied inter­ests seems gross­ly irre­spon­si­ble at best.

Most philoso­phers who have con­sid­ered these mat­ters have stressed the impor­tant rela­tion­ship between rea­son and ethics. In the clas­si­cal for­mu­la, per­sua­sive speech was con­sid­ered to have three dimen­sions: logos—the use of facts and log­i­cal argu­ments; ethos—the appeal to com­mon stan­dards of val­ue; and pathos—a con­sid­er­a­tion for the emo­tion­al res­o­nance of lan­guage. While the force­ful dialec­ti­cal rea­son­ing of Pla­to and his con­tem­po­raries val­ued par­rhe­sia—which Michel Fou­cault trans­lates as “free speech,” but which can also means “bold” or “can­did” speech—classical thinkers also val­ued social har­mo­ny and did not intend that philo­soph­i­cal debate be a scorched-earth war with the inten­tion to win at all costs.

Bertrand Rus­sell, the bril­liant math­e­mati­cian, philoso­pher, and anti-war activist, invoked this tra­di­tion often (as in his let­ter declin­ing a debate with British fas­cist Oswald Mosley). In the video above he answers the ques­tion, “what would you think it’s worth telling future gen­er­a­tions about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned from it.” His answer may not val­i­date the prej­u­dices of cer­tain par­ti­sans, but nei­ther does it evince any kind of spe­cial par­ti­san­ship itself. Rus­sell breaks his advice into two, inter­de­pen­dent cat­e­gories, “intel­lec­tu­al and moral.”

When you are study­ing any mat­ter or con­sid­er­ing any phi­los­o­phy, ask your­self only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Nev­er let your­self be divert­ed either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have benef­i­cent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and sole­ly, at what are the facts.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very sim­ple. I should say love is wise, hatred is fool­ish. In this world, which is get­ting more and more inter­con­nect­ed, we have to learn to tol­er­ate each oth­er, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some peo­ple say things that we don’t like. We can only live togeth­er in that way. And if we are to live togeth­er and not die togeth­er, we should learn the kind of tol­er­ance which is absolute­ly vital to the con­tin­u­a­tion of human life on this plan­et.

The gist: our speech should con­form to the facts of the mat­ter; rather than wish­ful think­ing, we should accept that peo­ple will say things we don’t like, but if we can­not love but only hate each oth­er, we’ll prob­a­bly end up destroy­ing our­selves.

The video above, from the BBC pro­gram Face-to-Face, was record­ed in 1959.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell Writes an Art­ful Let­ter, Stat­ing His Refusal to Debate British Fas­cist Leader Oswald Mosley (1962)

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Bertrand Rus­sell: The Every­day Ben­e­fit of Phi­los­o­phy Is That It Helps You Live with Uncer­tain­ty

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Feel Strangely Nostalgic as You Hear Classic Songs Reworked to Sound as If They’re Playing in an Empty Shopping Mall: David Bowie, Toto, Ah-ha & More

in Life, Music, Psychology | March 19th, 2018

“…if he went away, as he had once upon a time, oth­er voic­es, oth­er rooms, voic­es lost and cloud­ed, strummed his dreams.” — Tru­man Capote, Oth­er Voic­es, Oth­er Rooms

Is there a word for the emo­tion­al flood­tide that wells up when a song from the past catch­es us alone and unawares?

The sen­sa­tion is too pri­vate to be writ­ten off as mere nos­tal­gia.

What­ev­er chem­i­cal phe­nom­e­non explains it, “Cecil Robert,” a 20-year-old from Kaukau­na, Wis­con­sin, has tapped into it in a big way, by mess­ing with the fre­quen­cies of pop songs from the 70s, 80s and 90s, until they sound like some­thing play­ing on the neighbor’s side of the wall, or the echo cham­ber of an emp­ty shop­ping mall.

The New Yorker’s Jia Tolenti­no wrote that his far­away remix of Toto’s ear­ly 80s soft rock hit, “Africa,” above, sound­ed like “long­ing and con­so­la­tion togeth­er, extend­ed into empti­ness, a shot of warmth com­ing out of a void.”

Fun­ny. That pret­ty much sums up how I feel lis­ten­ing to Cecil Robert’s take on Nena’s “99 Luft­bal­lons”…

It was released in 1983, the year that I grad­u­at­ed high school and in which “Africa”—which I con­fess leaves me cold—hit Num­ber One on Billboard’s Hot 100 list.

Were it a mat­ter of sheer gen­er­a­tional nos­tal­gia, Tolenti­no (one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for 2017) should be laid flat by Mac DeMarco’s “My Kind of Woman” “play­ing slow­ly from anoth­er room.”

And I’d be get­ting all gooey over “Africa.”

It doesn’t work that way.

But it def­i­nite­ly works, as evi­denced by the pletho­ra of com­ments that greet every new Cecil Robert upload:

This is what plays when I’m cry­ing in a bath­room of a par­ty and my crush comes in and com­forts me…

This is the song you lis­ten to dur­ing the after­math of a par­ty while every­one is passed out and some­one left the music play­ing…

This real­ly evokes the feel­ing of slow­ly bleed­ing out alone on the kitchen floor & all your sens­es slow­ly blur­ring togeth­er under the glare of the flu­o­res­cent light over­head set to the tune of the muf­fled music com­ing from the record play­er in the next room…

Such a deep con­nec­tion begs that requests be tak­en, and Cecil Roberts does his best to oblige, pri­or­i­tiz­ing those who make a mod­est dona­tion on his Patre­on page:

I need “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia” play­ing at an air­port restau­rant bar late at night…

I need U2—“Beautiful Day”  play­ing in a din­er while it’s rain­ing in the after­noon…

I need “Com­ing of Age” by Fos­ter the Peo­ple being played in a din­er while I eat a hot­dog and wait for my car to get out of the shop across the street…

(For the record, Tolenti­no asked for an anoth­er-room edit of Jai Paul’s dreamy 2011 elec­tro-soul hit “BTSTU.”)

Some of Cecil Robert’s source mate­r­i­al—Julee Cruise’s Twin Peaks theme, “Falling,” for instance—is so ethe­re­al that plac­ing it at the oth­er end of the son­ic tele­scope almost feels like overkill.

On the oth­er hand, it could add a wel­come lay­er for fans sub­con­scious­ly pin­ing for that lost sense of anticipation—for ear­ly 90s girls in 50s sad­dle shoes and pen­cil skirts, for episodes doled out one week at a time…

Get in a weird mood on Cecil Robert’s YouTube chan­nel.

Fast track a request for $2 on his Patre­on page.

Lis­ten to his orig­i­nal ambi­ent com­po­si­tions on Sound­cloud.

via The New York­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Shift­ed from Minor to Major Key, and Radiohead’s “Creep” Moved from Major to Minor

The Orig­i­nal Noise Artist: Hear the Strange Exper­i­men­tal Sounds & Instru­ments of Ital­ian Futur­ist, Lui­gi Rus­so­lo (1913)

Down­load 10,000 of the First Record­ings of Music Ever Made, Thanks to the UCSB Cylin­der Audio Archive

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC this Tues­day, March 20 for the sec­ond install­ment of Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain at The Tank. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Stephen Hawking (RIP) Explains His Revolutionary Theory of Black Holes with the Help of Chalkboard Animations

in Life, Physics | March 14th, 2018

Stephen Hawk­ing died last night at age of 76. I can think of no bet­ter, brief social media trib­ute than that from the @thetweetofgod: “It’s only been a few hours and Stephen Hawk­ing already math­e­mat­i­cal­ly proved, to My face, that I don’t exist.” Hawk­ing was an athe­ist, but he didn’t claim to have elim­i­nat­ed the idea with pure math­e­mat­ics. But if he had, it would have been bril­liant­ly ele­gant, even—as he  used the phrase in his pop­u­lar 1988 cos­mol­o­gy A Brief His­to­ry of Time—to a the­o­ret­i­cal “mind of God.”

Hawk­ing him­self used the word “ele­gant,” with mod­esty, to describe his dis­cov­ery that “gen­er­al rel­a­tiv­i­ty can be com­bined with quan­tum the­o­ry,” that is, “if one replaces ordi­nary time with so-called imag­i­nary time.” In the best­selling A Brief His­to­ry of Time, he described how one might pos­si­bly rec­on­cile the two. His search for this “Grand Uni­fied The­o­ry of Every­thing,” writes his edi­tor Peter Guz­zar­di, rep­re­sent­ed “the quest for the holy grail of science—one the­o­ry that could unite two sep­a­rate fields that worked indi­vid­u­al­ly but whol­ly inde­pen­dent­ly of each oth­er.”

The physi­cist had to help Guz­zar­di trans­late rar­i­fied con­cepts into read­able prose for book­buy­ers at “drug­stores, super­mar­kets, and air­port shops.” But this is not to say A Brief His­to­ry of Time is an easy read. (In the midst of that process, Hawk­ing also had to learn how to trans­late his own thoughts again, as a tra­cheoto­my end­ed his speech, and he tran­si­tioned to the com­put­er devices we came to know as his only voice.) Most who read Hawking’s book, or just skimmed it, might remem­ber it for its take on the big bang. It’s an aspect of his the­o­ry that piqued the usu­al cre­ation­ist sus­pects, and thus gen­er­at­ed innu­mer­able head­lines.

But it was the oth­er term in Hawking’s sub­ti­tle, “from the Big Bang to Black Holes,” that real­ly occu­pied the cen­tral place in his exten­sive body of less acces­si­ble sci­en­tif­ic work. He wrote his the­sis on the expand­ing uni­verse, but gave his final lec­tures on black holes. The dis­cov­er­ies in Hawk­ing’s cos­mol­o­gy came from his inten­sive focus on black holes, begin­ning in 1970 with his inno­va­tion of the sec­ond law of black hole dynam­ics and con­tin­u­ing through ground­break­ing work in the mid-70s that his for­mer dis­ser­ta­tion advi­sor, emi­nent physi­cist Den­nis Scia­ma, pro­nounced “a new rev­o­lu­tion in our under­stand­ing.”

Hawk­ing con­tin­ued to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the­o­ret­i­cal physics through the study of black holes into the last years of his life. In Jan­u­ary 2016, he pub­lished a paper on arXiv.org called “Soft Hair on Black Holes,” propos­ing “a pos­si­ble solu­tion to his black hole infor­ma­tion para­dox,” as Fiona Mac­Don­ald writes at Sci­ence Alert. Hawking’s final con­tri­bu­tions show that black holes have what he calls “soft hair” around them—or waves of zero-ener­gy par­ti­cles. Con­trary to his pre­vi­ous con­clu­sion that noth­ing can escape from a black hole, Hawk­ing believed that this quan­tum “hair” could store infor­ma­tion pre­vi­ous­ly thought lost for­ev­er.

Hawk­ing fol­lowed up these intrigu­ing, but excep­tion­al­ly dense, find­ings with a much more approach­able text, his talks for the BBC’s Rei­th Lec­tures, which artist Andrew Park illus­trat­ed with the chalk­board draw­ings you see above. The first talk, “Do Black Holes Have No Hair?” walks us briskly through the for­ma­tion of black holes and the big names in black hole sci­ence before mov­ing on to the heavy quan­tum the­o­ry. The sec­ond talk con­tin­ues to sketch its way through the the­o­ry, using strik­ing metaphors and wit­ti­cisms to get the point across.

Hawk­ing’s expla­na­tions of phe­nom­e­na are as pro­found, verg­ing on mys­ti­cal, as they are thor­ough. He doesn’t for­get the human dimen­sion or the emo­tion­al res­o­nance of sci­ence, occa­sion­al­ly sug­gest­ing metaphysical—or meta-psychological—implications. Thanks in part to his work, we first thought of black holes as nihilis­tic voids from which noth­ing could escape. He left us, how­ev­er with a rad­i­cal new view, which he sums up cheer­ful­ly as “if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up, There’s a way out.” Or, even more Zen-like, as he pro­claimed in a 2014 paper, “there are no black holes.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D. The­sis, “Prop­er­ties of Expand­ing Uni­vers­es,” Now Free to Read/Download Online

Watch A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Errol Mor­ris’ Film About the Life & Work of Stephen Hawk­ing

The Big Ideas of Stephen Hawk­ing Explained with Sim­ple Ani­ma­tion

Free Online Physics Cours­es

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit”: A Toolkit That Can Help You Scientifically Separate Sense from Nonsense

in Education, Life, Politics, Science | March 6th, 2018

It’s prob­a­bly no stretch to say that mass dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns and ram­pant anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism will con­sti­tute an increas­ing amount of our polit­i­cal real­i­ty both today and in the future. As Han­nah Arendt wrote, the polit­i­cal lie has always been with us. But its glob­al reach, par­tic­u­lar vehe­mence, and bla­tant con­tempt for ver­i­fi­able real­i­ty seem like inno­va­tions of the present.

Giv­en the embar­rass­ing wealth of access to infor­ma­tion and edu­ca­tion­al tools, maybe it’s fair to say that the first and last line of defense should be our own crit­i­cal rea­son­ing. When we fail to ver­i­fy news—using resources we all have in hand (I assume, since you’re read­ing this), the fault for believ­ing bad infor­ma­tion may lie with us.

But we so often don’t know what it is that we don’t know. Indi­vid­u­als can’t be blamed for an inad­e­quate edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem, and one should not under­es­ti­mate the near-impos­si­bil­i­ty of con­duct­ing time-con­sum­ing inquiries into the truth of every sin­gle claim that comes our way, like try­ing to iden­ti­fy indi­vid­ual droplets while get­ting hit in the face with a pres­sur­ized blast of tar­get­ed, con­tra­dic­to­ry info, some­times com­ing from shad­owy, unre­li­able sources.

Carl Sagan under­stood the dif­fi­cul­ty, and he also under­stood that a lack of crit­i­cal think­ing did not make peo­ple total­ly irra­tional and deserv­ing of con­tempt. “It’s not hard to under­stand,” for exam­ple, why peo­ple would think their rel­a­tives are still alive in some oth­er form after death. As he writes of this com­mon phe­nom­e­non in “The Fine Art of Baloney Detec­tion,” most super­nat­ur­al beliefs are just “humans being human.”

In the essay, a chap­ter from his 1995 book The Demon-Haunt­ed World, Sagan pro­pos­es a rig­or­ous but com­pre­hen­si­ble “baloney detec­tion kit” to sep­a­rate sense from non­sense.

  • Wher­ev­er pos­si­ble there must be inde­pen­dent con­fir­ma­tion of the “facts.”
  • Encour­age sub­stan­tive debate on the evi­dence by knowl­edge­able pro­po­nents of all points of view.
  • Argu­ments from author­i­ty car­ry lit­tle weight — “author­i­ties” have made mis­takes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Per­haps a bet­ter way to say it is that in sci­ence there are no author­i­ties; at most, there are experts.
  • Spin more than one hypoth­e­sis. If there’s some­thing to be explained, think of all the dif­fer­ent ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly dis­prove each of the alter­na­tives.
  • Try not to get over­ly attached to a hypoth­e­sis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way sta­tion in the pur­suit of knowl­edge. Ask your­self why you like the idea. Com­pare it fair­ly with the alter­na­tives. See if you can find rea­sons for reject­ing it. If you don’t, oth­ers will.
  • If what­ev­er it is you’re explain­ing has some mea­sure, some numer­i­cal quan­ti­ty attached to it, you’ll be much bet­ter able to dis­crim­i­nate among com­pet­ing hypothe­ses. What is vague and qual­i­ta­tive is open to many expla­na­tions.
  • If there’s a chain of argu­ment, every link in the chain must work (includ­ing the premise) — not just most of them.
  • Occam’s Razor. This con­ve­nient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypothe­ses that explain the data equal­ly well to choose the sim­pler. Always ask whether the hypoth­e­sis can be, at least in prin­ci­ple, fal­si­fied…. You must be able to check asser­tions out. Invet­er­ate skep­tics must be giv­en the chance to fol­low your rea­son­ing, to dupli­cate your exper­i­ments and see if they get the same result.

Call­ing his rec­om­men­da­tions “tools for skep­ti­cal think­ing,” he lays out a means of com­pen­sat­ing for the strong emo­tion­al pulls that “promise some­thing like old-time reli­gion” and rec­og­niz­ing “a fal­la­cious or fraud­u­lent argu­ment.” At the top of the post, in a video pro­duced by Big Think, you can hear sci­ence writer and edu­ca­tor Michael Sher­mer explain the “baloney detec­tion kit” that he him­self adapt­ed from Sagan, and just above, read Sagan’s own ver­sion, abridged into a short list (read it in full at Brain Pick­ings).

Like many a sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor after him, Sagan was very much con­cerned with the influ­ence of super­sti­tious reli­gious beliefs. He also fore­saw a time in the near future much like our own. Else­where in The Demon-Haunt­ed World, Sagan writes of “Amer­i­ca in my children’s or grandchildren’s time…. when awe­some tech­no­log­i­cal pow­ers are in the hands of a very few.” The loss of con­trol over media and edu­ca­tion ren­ders peo­ple “unable to dis­tin­guish between what feels good and what’s true.”

This state involves, he says a “slide… back into super­sti­tion” of the reli­gious vari­ety and also a gen­er­al “cel­e­bra­tion of igno­rance,” such that well-sup­port­ed sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries car­ry the same weight or less than expla­na­tions made up on the spot by author­i­ties whom peo­ple have lost the abil­i­ty to “knowl­edge­ably ques­tion.” It’s a scary sce­nario that may not have com­plete­ly come to pass… just yet, but Sagan knew as well or bet­ter than any­one of his time how to address such a poten­tial social epi­dem­ic.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

Carl Sagan’s Syl­labus & Final Exam for His Course on Crit­i­cal Think­ing (Cor­nell, 1986)

Carl Sagan’s Last Inter­view

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Much Money Do You Need to Be Happy? A New Study Gives Us Some Exact Figures

in Economics, Life, Psychology | March 2nd, 2018

“If I gave you a mil­lion dol­lars, would you…?” (insert pos­si­bly life-alter­ing risk, humil­i­a­tion, or soul-sell­ing crime here). What about ten mil­lion? 100 mil­lion? One BILLION dol­lars? Put anoth­er way, in the terms social sci­en­tists use these days, how much mon­ey is enough to make you hap­py?

If you’re Mont­gomery Burns, it’s at least a bil­lion dol­lars, lest you be forced to suf­fer the tor­ments of the Millionaire’s Camp. (“Just kill me now!”) As it tends to do, The Simp­sons’ dark humor nails the insa­tiable greed that seems the scourge of our time, when the rich­est 1 per­cent take 82 per­cent of the world’s wealth, and the poor­est 50 per­cent get noth­ing at all.

Hypo­thet­i­cal wind­falls aside, the ques­tion of how much is enough is an urgent one for many peo­ple: as in, how much to feed a fam­i­ly, sup­ply life’s neces­si­ties, pur­chase just enough leisure for some small degree of per­son­al ful­fil­ment?

As the mis­ery of Mon­ty Burns demon­strates, we have a sense of the 1% as eter­nal­ly unful­filled. He’s the wicked heir to more seri­ous trag­ic fig­ures like Charles Fos­ter Kane and Jay Gats­by. But satire is one thing, and desire, that linch­pin of the econ­o­my, is anoth­er.

“What we see on TV and what adver­tis­ers tell us we need would indi­cate there is no ceil­ing when it comes to how much mon­ey is need­ed for hap­pi­ness,” says Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty psy­chol­o­gist Andrew T. Jebb, “but we now see there are some thresh­olds.” In short: mon­ey is a good thing, but there is such a thing as too much of it.

Jebb and his col­leagues from Pur­due and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia addressed ques­tions in their study “Hap­pi­ness, income sati­a­tion and turn­ing points around the world” like, “Does hap­pi­ness rise indef­i­nite­ly with income, or is there a point at which high­er incomes no longer lead to greater well­be­ing?” What they found in data from an inter­na­tion­al Gallup World Poll sur­vey of over 1.7 mil­lion peo­ple in 164 coun­tries varies wide­ly across the world.

Peo­ple in wealth­i­er areas seem to require more income for hap­pi­ness (or “Sub­jec­tive Well Being” in the social sci­ence ter­mi­nol­o­gy). In many parts of the world, high­er incomes, “beyond satiation”—a met­ric that mea­sures how much is enough—“are asso­ci­at­ed with low­er life eval­u­a­tions.” The authors also note that “a recent study at the coun­try lev­el found a slight but sig­nif­i­cant decline in life eval­u­a­tion” among very high earn­ers “in the rich­est coun­tries.”

You can see the wide vari­ance in hap­pi­ness world­wide in the “Hap­pi­ness” study. As Dan Kopf notes at Quartz, these research find­ings are con­sis­tent with those of oth­er researchers of hap­pi­ness and income, though they go into much more detail. Prob­lems with the method­ol­o­gy of these studies—primarily their reliance on self-report­ed data—make them vul­ner­a­ble to sev­er­al cri­tiques.

But, assum­ing they demon­strate real quan­ti­ties, what, on aver­age, do they tell us? “We found that the ide­al income point,” aver­aged out in U.S. dol­lars, “is $95,000 for [over­all life sat­is­fac­tion],” says Jebb, “and $60,000 to $75,000 for emo­tion­al well-being,” a mea­sure of day-to-day hap­pi­ness. These are, mind you, indi­vid­ual incomes and “would like­ly be high­er for fam­i­lies,” he says.

Peter Dock­rill at Sci­ence Alert sum­ma­rizes some oth­er inter­est­ing find­ings: “Glob­al­ly, it’s cheap­er for men to be sat­is­fied with their lives ($90,000) than women ($100,000), and for peo­ple of low ($70,000) or mod­er­ate edu­ca­tion ($85,000) than peo­ple with high­er edu­ca­tion ($115,000).”

Yes, the study, like those before it, shows that after the “sati­a­tion point,” hap­pi­ness decreas­es, though per­haps not to Mon­ty Burns lev­els of dis­sat­is­fac­tion. But where does this leave most of us in the new Gild­ed Age? Giv­en that “sati­a­tion” in the U.S. is around $105K, with day-to-day hap­pi­ness around $85K, the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans fall well below the hap­pi­ness line. The medi­an salary for U.S. work­ers at the end of 2017 was $44, 564, accord­ing to the Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics. Man­agers and pro­fes­sion­als aver­aged $64,220 and ser­vice work­ers around $28,000. (As you might imag­ine, income inequal­i­ty diverged sharply along racial lines.)

And while the mid­dle class saw a slight bump in income in the last cou­ple years, medi­an house­hold income was still only $59,039 in 2016. How­ev­er, we mea­sure it the “mid­dle class… has been declin­ing for four decades,” admits Busi­ness Insid­er—“iden­ti­fy­ing with the mid­dle class is, in part, a state of mind” rather than a state of debt-to-income ratios. (One study shows that Mil­len­ni­als make 20% less than Baby Boomers did at the same age.) Mean­while, as wealth increas­es at the top, “the country’s bot­tom 20% of earn­ers became worse off.”

This may all sound like bad news for the hap­pi­ness quo­tient of the major­i­ty, if hap­pi­ness (or Sub­jec­tive Well Being) requires a cer­tain amount of mate­r­i­al secu­ri­ty. Maybe one pos­i­tive take­away is that it doesn’t require near­ly the amount of vast pri­vate wealth that has accu­mu­lat­ed in the hands of a very few peo­ple. Accord­ing to this research, sig­nif­i­cant­ly redis­trib­ut­ing that wealth might actu­al­ly make the wealthy a lit­tle hap­pi­er, and less Mr. Burns-like, even as it raised hap­pi­ness stan­dards a great deal for mil­lions of oth­ers.

Not only are high­er incomes “usu­al­ly accom­pa­nied by high­er demands,” as Jebb and his col­leagues conclude—on one’s time, and per­haps on one’s conscience—but “addi­tion­al fac­tors” may also play a role in decreas­ing hap­pi­ness as incomes rise, includ­ing “an increase in mate­ri­al­is­tic val­ues, addi­tion­al mate­r­i­al aspi­ra­tions that may go unful­filled, increased social com­par­isons,” etc. The long­stand­ing tru­ism about mon­ey not buy­ing love—or ful­fill­ment, mean­ing, peace of mind, what-have-you—may well just be true.

You can dig fur­ther into Andrew T. Jeb­b’s study here: “Hap­pi­ness, income sati­a­tion and turn­ing points around the world.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness?: Take “The Sci­ence of Well-Being,” a Free Online Ver­sion of Yale’s Most Pop­u­lar Course

Albert Einstein’s Ele­gant The­o­ry of Hap­pi­ness: It Just Sold for $1.6 Mil­lion at Auc­tion, But You Can Use It for Free

Will You Real­ly Achieve Hap­pi­ness If You Final­ly Win the Rat Race? Don’t Answer the Ques­tion Until You’ve Watched Steve Cutts’ New Ani­ma­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Maya Angelou’s Secret to Living Your Best Life

in Life, Literature | February 28th, 2018

Humans are proud of ratio­nal­i­ty, maybe to a fault. It can come at a sig­nif­i­cant cost: the ten­den­cy to over­com­pli­cate the sim­plest of tasks, not the least being the task of life itself. Trea­tise after trea­tise, dis­course after dis­course, book after book, lec­ture after lec­ture appears over the cen­turies, promis­ing to show us how to live the good life. We strug­gle, amidst the hun­dreds of oth­er oper­a­tions we must per­form at any giv­en time, to remem­ber com­plex eth­i­cal sys­tems in the moment, to incor­po­rate new pos­tures and rou­tines.

Per­haps this is why we have mys­tics and poets, to cut through the tan­gles of log­i­cal thought, to remind us of the unchang­ing essen­tials: Rumi and Rilke, William Blake, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, and Maya Angelou, who daz­zled read­ers and audi­ences with advice both elo­quent and plain­spo­ken, tran­scen­dent and imma­nent­ly down-to-earth. Angelou’s impas­sioned, warm deliv­ery and hard-won wis­dom made her an excel­lent spokesper­son for some uni­ver­sal truths that get glossed over or explained away in the scram­ble to improve and enrich our­selves, such as the advice she gives on Oprah’s OWN net­work, above: “Just do right.”

We might recoil at the seem­ing naiveté: “who is right?,” “what is right?,” “how does any­one know what is right?,” “what if your right is my wrong?” etc. All rea­son­able ques­tions up for rea­son­able debate. But Angelou isn’t inter­est­ed here in phi­los­o­phy but in life. “Just do right” speaks to a deep­er part of us, the part we col­lo­qui­al­ly call a con­science, though maybe no such thing appears in an fMRI scan. “Just do right,” she says, and you pret­ty much know what that is. “You don’t real­ly have to ask any­body,” she says. “The truth is, right may not be expe­di­ent, it may not be prof­itable, but it will sat­is­fy your soul. It brings you the kind of pro­tec­tion that body­guards can’t give you.”

Com­pas­sion, a clean con­science, a good rep­u­ta­tion: this is the stuff of the good life, dis­tilled down to its essence, at the heart of Greek, Roman, African, Chi­nese, Indi­an, Native Amer­i­can, and every oth­er world phi­los­o­phy and reli­gion. We may find no more a suc­cinct uni­ver­sal encour­age­ment, and warn­ing, than in Angelou’s advice:

Try to live your life in a way that you will not regret years of use­less virtue and iner­tia and timid­i­ty…. You make your own choic­es… pick up the bat­tle and make it a bet­ter world, just where you are.

This wis­dom requires no high the­o­ry and is avail­able to every­one free of charge—find out how you can make things bet­ter in your com­mu­ni­ty, stop ago­niz­ing over pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and mon­ey, and “just do right” right where you are. If this sounds too easy or too hard, lis­ten to Angelou describe in brief what it takes in the clip above, and why “courage is the most impor­tant of the virtues.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Maya Angelou Reads Her Poem “On the Pulse of Morn­ing” (1993) 

Maya Angelou Tells Studs Terkel How She Learned to Count Cards & Hus­tle in a New Ani­mat­ed Video

What is the Good Life? Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, Niet­zsche, & Kant’s Ideas in 4 Ani­mat­ed Videos

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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What Ancient Chinese Philosophy Can Teach Us About Living the Good Life Today: Lessons from Harvard’s Popular Professor, Michael Puett

in Life, Philosophy, TED Talks | February 26th, 2018

It has at times been con­cern­ing for some Bud­dhist schol­ars and teach­ers to watch mind­ful­ness become an inte­gral part of self-help pro­grams. A casu­al atti­tude toward the prac­tice of mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion can make it seem acces­si­ble by mak­ing it seem relax­ing and effort­less, which often results in miss­ing the point entire­ly. What­ev­er the school, lin­eage, or par­tic­u­lar tra­di­tion from which they come, the source texts and sages tend to agree: the pur­pose of med­i­ta­tion is not self improvement—but to real­ize that there may, indeed, be no such thing as a self.

Instead, we are all epiphe­nom­e­non aris­ing from com­bi­na­tions of ever-shift­ing ele­ments (the aggre­gates, or skand­has). The self is a con­ven­tion­al­ly use­ful illu­sion. This notion in the ancient Indi­an texts has its echo in Scot­tish enlight­en­ment philoso­pher David Hume’s so-called “bun­dle the­o­ry,” but Hume’s thoughts about the self have most­ly remained obscure foot­notes in west­ern thought, rather than cen­tral premis­es in its philoso­phies and reli­gions. But as thinkers in India took the self apart, so too did philoso­phers in ancient Chi­na, before Bud­dhism reached the coun­try dur­ing the Han Dynasty.

Har­vard Pro­fes­sor Michael Puett has been lec­tur­ing on Chi­nese phi­los­o­phy to audi­ences of hun­dreds of students—and at 21st cen­tu­ry tem­ples of self-actu­al­iza­tion like TED and the School of Life. He has co-authored a book on the sub­ject, The Path: What Chi­nese Philoso­phers Can Teach Us About the Good Life, drawn from his enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar uni­ver­si­ty cours­es, in which he expounds the philoso­phies of Con­fu­cius, Men­cius, Zhuangzi, and Xun­zi. The book has found a ready audi­ence, and Puett’s “Clas­si­cal Chi­nese Eth­i­cal and Polit­i­cal The­o­ry” is the 3rd most pop­u­lar class among Har­vard under­grad­u­ates, behind intro to eco­nom­ics and com­put­er sci­ence. What Pro­fes­sor Puett offers, in his dis­til­la­tion of ancient Chi­nese wis­dom, is not at all to be con­strued as self-help.

Rather, he says, “I think of it as sort of anti-self-help. Self-help tends to be about learn­ing to love your­self and embrace your­self for who you are. A lot of these ideas are say­ing pre­cise­ly the opposite—no, you over­come the self, you break the self. You should not be hap­py with who you are.” Lest this sound like some form of vio­lence, we must under­stand, Puett tells Tim Dowl­ing at The Guardian, that in “break­ing” the self, we are only doing harm to an illu­sion. As in the Bud­dhist thought that took root in Chi­na, so too in the ear­li­er Con­fu­cian­ism: there is no self, just a “a messy and poten­tial­ly ugly bunch of stuff.”

While our cur­rent cir­cum­stances may seem unique in world his­to­ry, Puett shows his stu­dents how Chi­nese philoso­phers 2,500 years ago also expe­ri­enced rapid soci­etal change and upheaval, as his co-author Chris­tine Gross-Loh writes at The Atlantic; they nav­i­gat­ed and under­stood “a world where human rela­tion­ships are chal­leng­ing, nar­cis­sism and self-cen­tered­ness are on the rise, and there is dis­agree­ment on the best way for peo­ple to live har­mo­nious­ly togeth­er.” A major­i­ty of stu­dents at Har­vard are dri­ven to pur­sue “prac­ti­cal, pre­de­ter­mined” careers. By teach­ing them Con­fu­cian and Daoist phi­los­o­phy, Puett tries to help them become more spon­ta­neous and open to change.

What­ev­er we call it, the inter­act­ing phe­nom­e­non that give rise to the self can­not, we know, be observed in any­thing resem­bling an unchang­ing steady state. Yet West­ern cul­ture (for sev­er­al moti­vat­ed rea­sons) has lagged far behind both intu­itive and sci­en­tif­ic obser­va­tions of this fact. Puet­t’s stu­dents have been told, “’Find your true self, espe­cial­ly dur­ing these four years of col­lege,’” and “try and be sin­cere and authen­tic to who you real­ly are” in mak­ing choic­es about careers, part­ners, pas­sions, and con­sumer prod­ucts. They take to his class because “they’ve spent 20 years look­ing for this true self and not find­ing it.”

In the two lec­tures above—a short­er one at the top from TEDx Nashville and a longer talk above for Ivy, “The Social Uni­ver­si­ty”—you can get a taste of Puett’s enthu­si­as­tic style. Chi­nese phi­los­o­phy, “in its strong form,” he says above, “can tru­ly change one’s life.” Not by mak­ing us more empow­ered, per­son­al­ly-ful­filled agents who re-cre­ate real­i­ty to bet­ter meet our nar­row specs. But rather, as he tells Dowl­ing, by train­ing us “to become incred­i­bly good at deal­ing with this capri­cious world.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Con­fu­cius’ Life & Thought Through Two Ani­mat­ed Videos

The Philo­soph­i­cal Appre­ci­a­tion of Rocks in Chi­na & Japan: A Short Intro­duc­tion to an Ancient Tra­di­tion

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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