2273 본문읽기 15
카테고리 없음2023. 5. 17. 12:13
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2273-30
In poorer countries many years of fast growth may be necessary to bring living standards up to acceptable levels. But growth is the means to achieve desired goals, not the end in itself. In the richer world the whole idea of growth ─ at least as conventionally measured ─ may need to be revised. In economies where services dominate, goods and services tailored to our individual needs will be what determine the advance of our societies. These could be anything from genome-specific medicines to personalized care or tailored suits. That is different from more and more stuff, an arms race of growth. Instead, it means improvements in quality, something that GDP is ill equipped to measure. Some fifty years ago one US economist contrasted what he called the "cowboy" economy, bent on production, exploitation of resources, and pollution, with the "spaceman" economy, in which quality and complexity replaced "throughput" as the measure of success. The move from manufacturing to services and from analog to digital is the shift from cowboy to spaceman. But we are still measuring the size of the lasso.
2273-31
There is a difference between a newsworthy event and news. A newsworthy event will not necessarily become news, just as news is often about an event that is not, in itself, newsworthy. We can define news as an event that is recorded in the news media, regardless of whether it is about a newsworthy event. The very fact of its transmission means that it is regarded as news, even if we struggle to understand why that particular story has been selected from all the other events happening at the same time that have been ignored. News selection is subjective so not all events seen as newsworthy by some people will make it to the news. All journalists are familiar with the scenario where they are approached by someone with the words 'I've got a great story for you'. For them, it is a major news event, but for the journalist it might be something to ignore.
2273-32
Infants' preference for looking at new things is so strong that psychologists began to realize that they could use it as a test of infants' visual discrimination, and even their memory. Could an infant tell the difference between two similar images? Between two similar shades of the same color? Could an infant recall having seen something an hour, a day, a week ago? The inbuilt attraction to novel images held the answer. If the infant's gaze lingered, it suggested that the infant could tell that a similar image was nonetheless different in some way. If the infant, after a week without seeing an image, didn't look at it much when it was shown again, the infant must be able at some level to remember having seen it the week before. In most cases, the results revealed that infants were more cognitively capable earlier than had been previously assumed. The visual novelty drive became, indeed, one of the most powerful tools in psychologists' toolkit, unlocking a host of deeper insights into the capacities of the infant mind.
2273-33
Imagine there are two habitats, a rich one containing a lot of resources and a poor one containing few, and that there is no territoriality or fighting, so each individual is free to exploit the habitat in which it can achieve the higher pay-off, measured as rate of consumption of resource. With no competitors, an individual would simply go to the better of the two habitats and this is what we assume the first arrivals will do. But what about the later arrivals? As more competitors occupy the rich habitat, the resource will be depleted, and so less profitable for further newcomers. Eventually a point will be reached where the next arrivals will do better by occupying the poorer quality habitat where, although the resource is in shorter supply, there will be less competition. Thereafter, the two habitats should be filled so that the profitability for an individual is the same in each one. In other words, competitors should adjust their distribution in relation to habitat quality so that each individual enjoys the same rate of acquisition of resources.
2273-34
Neither Einstein's relativity nor Bach's fugues are such stuff as survival is made on. Yet each is a perfect example of human capacities that were essential to our having prevailed. The link between scientific aptitude and solving real-world challenges may be more apparent, but minds that reason with analogy and metaphor, minds that represent with color and texture, minds that imagine with melody and rhythm are minds that cultivate a more flourishing cognitive landscape. Which is all just to say that the arts may well have been vital for developing the flexibility of thought and fluency of intuition that our relatives needed to fashion the spear, to invent cooking, to harness the wheel, and, later, to write the Mass in B Minor and, later still, to crack our rigid perspective on space and time. Across hundreds of thousands of years, artistic endeavors may have been the playground of human cognition, providing a safe arena for training our imaginative capacities and infusing them with a potent faculty for innovation.
In poorer countries many years of fast growth may be necessary to bring living standards up to acceptable levels. But growth is the means to achieve desired goals, not the end in itself. In the richer world the whole idea of growth ─ at least as conventionally measured ─ may need to be revised. In economies where services dominate, goods and services tailored to our individual needs will be what determine the advance of our societies. These could be anything from genome-specific medicines to personalized care or tailored suits. That is different from more and more stuff, an arms race of growth. Instead, it means improvements in quality, something that GDP is ill equipped to measure. Some fifty years ago one US economist contrasted what he called the "cowboy" economy, bent on production, exploitation of resources, and pollution, with the "spaceman" economy, in which quality and complexity replaced "throughput" as the measure of success. The move from manufacturing to services and from analog to digital is the shift from cowboy to spaceman. But we are still measuring the size of the lasso.
2273-31
There is a difference between a newsworthy event and news. A newsworthy event will not necessarily become news, just as news is often about an event that is not, in itself, newsworthy. We can define news as an event that is recorded in the news media, regardless of whether it is about a newsworthy event. The very fact of its transmission means that it is regarded as news, even if we struggle to understand why that particular story has been selected from all the other events happening at the same time that have been ignored. News selection is subjective so not all events seen as newsworthy by some people will make it to the news. All journalists are familiar with the scenario where they are approached by someone with the words 'I've got a great story for you'. For them, it is a major news event, but for the journalist it might be something to ignore.
2273-32
Infants' preference for looking at new things is so strong that psychologists began to realize that they could use it as a test of infants' visual discrimination, and even their memory. Could an infant tell the difference between two similar images? Between two similar shades of the same color? Could an infant recall having seen something an hour, a day, a week ago? The inbuilt attraction to novel images held the answer. If the infant's gaze lingered, it suggested that the infant could tell that a similar image was nonetheless different in some way. If the infant, after a week without seeing an image, didn't look at it much when it was shown again, the infant must be able at some level to remember having seen it the week before. In most cases, the results revealed that infants were more cognitively capable earlier than had been previously assumed. The visual novelty drive became, indeed, one of the most powerful tools in psychologists' toolkit, unlocking a host of deeper insights into the capacities of the infant mind.
2273-33
Imagine there are two habitats, a rich one containing a lot of resources and a poor one containing few, and that there is no territoriality or fighting, so each individual is free to exploit the habitat in which it can achieve the higher pay-off, measured as rate of consumption of resource. With no competitors, an individual would simply go to the better of the two habitats and this is what we assume the first arrivals will do. But what about the later arrivals? As more competitors occupy the rich habitat, the resource will be depleted, and so less profitable for further newcomers. Eventually a point will be reached where the next arrivals will do better by occupying the poorer quality habitat where, although the resource is in shorter supply, there will be less competition. Thereafter, the two habitats should be filled so that the profitability for an individual is the same in each one. In other words, competitors should adjust their distribution in relation to habitat quality so that each individual enjoys the same rate of acquisition of resources.
2273-34
Neither Einstein's relativity nor Bach's fugues are such stuff as survival is made on. Yet each is a perfect example of human capacities that were essential to our having prevailed. The link between scientific aptitude and solving real-world challenges may be more apparent, but minds that reason with analogy and metaphor, minds that represent with color and texture, minds that imagine with melody and rhythm are minds that cultivate a more flourishing cognitive landscape. Which is all just to say that the arts may well have been vital for developing the flexibility of thought and fluency of intuition that our relatives needed to fashion the spear, to invent cooking, to harness the wheel, and, later, to write the Mass in B Minor and, later still, to crack our rigid perspective on space and time. Across hundreds of thousands of years, artistic endeavors may have been the playground of human cognition, providing a safe arena for training our imaginative capacities and infusing them with a potent faculty for innovation.
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