“What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire: to look “behind the curtain,” to dig deeper into something that engages us. As we click and click, we are carried along by the exciting sensation of uncovering more secrets and deeper truths. YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales.

Human beings have many natural tendencies that need to be vigilantly monitored in the context of modern life. For example, our craving for fat, salt and sugar, which served us well when food was scarce, can lead us astray in an environment in which fat, salt and sugar are all too plentiful and heavily marketed to us. So too our natural curiosity about the unknown can lead us astray on a website that leads us too much in the direction of lies, hoaxes and misinformation.

In effect, YouTube has created a restaurant that serves us increasingly sugary, fatty foods, loading up our plates as soon as we are finished with the last meal. Over time, our tastes adjust, and we seek even more sugary, fatty foods, which the restaurant dutifully provides. When confronted about this by the health department and concerned citizens, the restaurant managers reply that they are merely serving us what we want.

This situation is especially dangerous given how many people — especially young people — turn to YouTube for information. Google’s cheap and sturdy Chromebook laptops, which now make up more than 50 percent of the pre-college laptop education market in the United States, typically come loaded with ready access to YouTube.

This state of affairs is unacceptable but not inevitable. There is no reason to let a company make so much money while potentially helping to radicalize billions of people, reaping the financial benefits while asking society to bear so many of the costs.”

via YouTube, the Great Radicalizer

“For now, it’s not clear what we can do, except take control of our own individual news consumption. Back in July, in fact, Ms. DiResta advised consumer restraint as the first line of defense, especially when encountering information that any passably intelligent person could guess might have been placed by a group seeking to manufacture discord.

“They’re preying on your confirmation bias,” she said. “When content is being pushed to you, that’s something that you want to see. So, take the extra second to do the fact-check, even if it confirms your worst impulses about something you absolutely hate — before you hit the retweet button, before you hit the share button, just take the extra second.” “

via How You Can Help Fight the Information Wars

“Northwestern’s experience is not uncommon among universities and is not happening in a vacuum, experts say, with students increasingly arriving on campus with mental health issues. Multiple schools nationally have experienced a series of deaths among talented students whose lives seemed so full of promise. National studies reveal an increasing demand for mental health services and growing proportions of students reporting suicidal thoughts, even though the actual rate of suicide has not grown much, experts say. 

“What’s increased more dramatically is more students both coming to campus with mental health issues and developing mental health issues while they’re in college,” said Nance Roy, chief clinical officer at Jed Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit for suicide prevention in young adults. “Certainly there’s a tremendous increase in the number of students who are seeking help, which is good news. The downside to that is it’s very hard to keep up with demand.”

via ‘I’ve watched this happen for four years’: Northwestern University grapples with string of suicides

The Wrath of the Sea - Existential Comics

“We have underestimated the power of social interactions. We see people who’ve been in the system for years, on every med there is. How is it possible that such people have recovered, through the process of talking with others? How has that occurred? That is the question we need to answer.”

via When Will We Solve Mental Illness?

“Tweeting and trolling are easy. Mastering the arts of conversation and measured debate is hard. Texting is easy. Writing a proper letter is hard. Looking stuff up on Google is easy. Knowing what to search for in the first place is hard. Having a thousand friends on Facebook is easy. Maintaining six or seven close adult friendships over the space of many years is hard. Swiping right on Tinder is easy. Finding love — and staying in it — is hard.”

via How Plato Foresaw Facebook’s Folly

“I stayed at my mother’s house for a few days after her death, and occurrences that spiritualists might classify as “phenomena” kept happening, often enough that my family and I began to talk about them to diffuse their eeriness. Securely hung pictures fell from the walls; doors slammed shut in empty rooms without drafts; and a bell that my mom had hung from a hallway ceiling, a folk superstition meant to alert the living to the presence of passing spirits, spontaneously dropped on my wife’s head. Of course, there are logical explanations for every one of these events, but it’s like the joke about how many Vietnam vets it takes to change a light bulb: You don’t know, you weren’t there, man.

At some point in the following weeks, my family and I also realized that her last online interactions — which all occurred within an hour or so of each other — were curt and rife with nonsense, misspellings, and grammatical errors, all of which were pretty out-of-character for someone who did the Saturday Times crossword in pen. A reply to an involved email from my niece simply read “no.” She posted the phrase “port richmond ,,” [sic] to Facebook, which, besides being a departure from her usual screeds about what were then still the gathering clouds of fascism, is the name of a neighborhood in Philadelphia to which, as far as I knew, she had little connection. This all made a stroke seem likely, and I began reconstructing a scene not of her body being found, but of these last minutes of her life in which she could still try to communicate. I wondered about when she had this stroke, and about how clearly she recognized what was happening to her. I wondered if she knew she wasn’t saying what she wanted to say.

These posts and emails were made online, so I didn’t think they bore much weight at first. I thought that their meaninglessness and ephemerality made them relevant only to what they revealed contextually about her last moments; the posts themselves were nothing. But there are two ways to think about nothing, and this is where I tell you how social media is a rehearsal for death. We generally think nothing means a lack of accumulation, something lost or never there. But there’s also the esoteric tradition of nothingness, in which it’s valuable — even holy — because it contains infinite potential; think of the Buddhist concept of sunyata or of the tarot’s Fool, assigned the number zero in the major arcana, who exists in a perfect, pre-big bang world of unregulated ecstasy. The digit “0” is a pictogram of this paradox — the circle shows completeness, the space inside, emptiness.

This paradox is at work in seltzer, too. One reason it was so easy for LaCroix to gain social currency is that it once had a profile so generic you might not even know what the can contained (it was described in the New York Times Magazine as looking like it should be filled with self-tanner or Axe Body Spray). This meant it could shed its Midwestern roots and be claimed from Florida to California. It wasn’t just nothing, it was a placeless nothing, so LaCroix was free to be anything to anyone, anywhere. In an age of personal branding, online self-realization, and individualized versions of truth, LaCroix could take on any qualities of its consumer. It became a mirror.

LaCroix’s over-filtered Instagram models and Polar’s fluorescent-lit college students show two different types of artifice in the service of creating a personal brand. It’s easy to make fun of social media trend-hopping, but these criticisms take as a given that there’s an essential depth to identity, and that a disconnect between your identity and your soul means there’s something wrong with you. But social media represents products, not souls. You can tell by how aesthetically flattened the platforms are: Your Facebook page, if you stand a few feet back, is virtually indistinguishable from LaCroix’s or Coca-Cola’s or your elementary school best friend’s or Kendall Jenner’s. A Twitter feed looks basically the same whether you’re stanning for Beyoncé or Lady Gaga. When a dictionary tweets a sick burn at a pedantic journalist, the underlying joke is that whoever runs @MerriamWebster is, shockingly, a human being. To use freshman-year Marxist terms, social media replaces interaction between people with interaction between objects. All content, from a selfie to my mom’s last words to this article, is nothing; it only becomes something when it’s seen by someone else.

If all these nothings only become something when they’re perceived, it makes a hashtag the essential tool of online interaction. The fact that you never know who a hashtag is going to hook makes it something more than a way to interact with brands — a hashtag is a seance, mediating the space between constructed identities. It’s a way of reaching out, in hope and longing, into the ether. In this way, it performs the same function as art or prayer, linking tangible worlds to transcendent ones, an invisible line cast out with the hope of connection and of becoming whole, if only for a moment, right before the bubble bursts.

I now see the connection between my mom’s last interactions and the strange occurrences that I’d experienced in her house. In a tangible sense, both of these attempts to communicate, the supernatural and the technological, were nothing. But whether you believe ghosts exist or are just constructions to make fears and emotions tangible, the logic behind them is the same as the logic that grounds the projection of identity through internet content. Content may be nothing, but nothing has two faces, emptiness and infinite potential, facts and ephemera. This duality shapes ideas of the afterlife, too. If we can’t quantify the difference between the medical definition of life and the spiritual concept of the soul, at least we know when there’s no good reason for a lamp to fall off a table.

When nothing becomes something, it defies death. It puts to rest our fear that all that awaits us is a void. This is the essential appeal of social media, that each of the internet’s billion hashtags is a tiny cri de coeur, a yooooooooooooo into a mirror world that we cannot touch, a door slamming in a draftless room.“

via Drink Seltzer, Live Forever

“The idea behind the class is deceptively simple, and many of the lessons — such as gratitude, helping others, getting enough sleep — are familiar.

It’s the application that’s difficult, a point Santos made repeatedly: Our brains often lead us to bad choices, and even when we realize the choices are bad, it’s hard to break habits.

All semester, hundreds of students tried to rewire themselves — to exercise more, to thank their mothers, to care less about the final grade and more about the ideas.

Did that lead to skepticism, snark and derision? Yes, lots.

But in ways small and large, silly and heartbreakingly earnest, simple and profound, this class changed the conversation at Yale. It surfaced in late-night talks in dorms, it was dissected in newspaper columns, it popped up, again and again, in memes.”

via  Less cramming. More Frisbee. At Yale, students learn how to live the good life.

“Unfortunately, if those of us who work in higher education promise too much when it comes to suicide prevention, we risk producing a number of unintended negative consequences. Language in awareness campaigns that suggests all suicides can be prevented encourages people to believe that all suicides therefore ought to be prevented. Persons who struggle with suicidality and those who care for, and about, them can be lured to false hopes about the powers of the professionals to treat suicidal students. Some mental health practitioners now avoid working with suicidal clients for fear of being blamed for a death by suicide.

We must also consider professional ethics issues. If a psychologist were to assert that suicide can be completely eradicated, that position would be widely regarded as unethical. Psychologists are legally and ethically bound not to make exaggerated or unfounded claims of the effectiveness of their services or to misrepresent scientific knowledge. A campus that promises 100 percent suicide prevention risks putting the frontline staff in an ethical dilemma.

There are legal risks associated with overpromising, as well, including the risk that attempts to eliminate suicidality from the college environment might interfere with the rights of students entitled to protection from unlawful discrimination. For example, institutions might be tempted to seek to remove a suicidal student from campus without legally required individual assessment of a student’s rights to continue in a program or activity. And colleges may ultimately come to view suicidal students as costly potential legal adversaries rather than sufferers with whom helpers must try to collaborate.

Yet perhaps the most pernicious problem with messages that present suicide as completely preventable is the implication that when a suicide does occur it must be the result of some type of failure, neglect or negligence – that a completed suicide always involves fault, and someone must be blamed. Well-meaning campaigns can be iatrogenic – actually creating more risk for colleges by reinforcing a stereotype that suicide is inherently connected to wrongdoing.

The legal system is in part responsible for perpetuating the myth that suicide and fault are inherently connected. The law’s long-standing approach was that the suicidal individual was morally reprehensible and that attempting suicide was a crime. Today, defecting blame to others is only an evolution of primitive legal attitudes about suicidality – perpetuating the stigma surrounding suicide and creating chilling impacts on intervention.

The fact is that the suicide by a person in treatment is not necessarily a failure on the part of mental health professionals or care teams. Yet when a death by suicide or even an attempt occurs, the people who have endeavored to assist a suicidal individual are likely to suffer guilt, self-blame and even despair. In most instances, those predictable responses occur with helpers who have done nothing wrong or legally indefensible. And a system that implicitly suggests that they have done so or are to blame could easily serve to accelerate their issues.”

…

Assertions that all suicides are preventable also convey an erroneous message to the individuals who struggle with suicidality, giving the impression that their own volition is less consequential and that an external person or organization can successfully control them. When suicide is successfully prevented, it almost always occurs with the collaboration and cooperation of the suicidal person. Perhaps the law’s traditional yet problematic view to blame suicidal individuals was a recognition, in some convoluted way, of the importance of personal agency in suicide prevention.

Our opportunity in higher education going forward is to enhance that agency, as opposed to recreating the blame game in a new form. Legally, that means searching for accountability approaches that improve rather than undermine our prevention and intervention efforts. From the perspective of the counseling center, that means listening to the best instincts of the people who are trained in this work.”

via Colleges should not expect suicide to be 100 percent preventable

“The wonder of Skittles, to me, is how clearly it articulates the interconnectedness of taste. It is one of our four basic senses, yes, but it is also the only one of them that is inherently multidisciplinary—synesthetic, even. We taste color; we taste sounds. It’s all a part of the whole. So the idea of doing blind Skittles taste tests to prove a point … seemed to be missing the point. The flavor of Skittles isn’t one big lie; it’s one sensory experience that contains many disparate elements. Depriving oneself of one of them isn’t setting up an exposé, it’s throwing away a puzzle piece.”

via Tasting the Rainbow in 2018 or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Skittles

“Mars was not immune to the conventional wisdom. Before making the commitment to study collaboration intensively, we also did things like this. Once, we spent thousands of dollars to hire an orchestra to spend an hour with a group of senior leaders at an offsite retreat and help them work together in harmony. It was a nice metaphor and an interesting experience. It did nothing, though, to change how that group of leaders worked together.

Events like these may get people to feel closer for a little while; shared emotions can bond people. Those bonds, though, do not hold up under the day-to-day pressures of an organization focused on delivering results.“

…

“It occurred to us that their failure to collaborate was, ironically, a function of their excelling at the jobs they were hired to do and of management reinforcing that excellence. Collaboration, on the other hand, was an idealized but vague goal with no concrete terms or rules. What’s more, collaboration was perceived as messy. It diluted accountability and offered few tangible rewards.”

via Stop Wasting Money on Team Building