Category: Quick takes

Life expectancy has increased, and this demands a creative, new approach to employment.

• Living longer … but working longer: Humans may soon be able to live to reach 100, which clearly indicates extra years on the job. We may foresee to work 60 years or more in a 100-year life. For most individuals, 40 or so years of labour is more than enough, so the prospect of another 20 is unsettling.
  • Until the late nineteenth century, people normally worked until they were physically unable of doing so, at which point they believed their family would take care of them. On average, a 20-year-old worker in 1880 might expect to labour for less than two years before dying away.
• What changed? What has changed since then is that retirement has become financially feasible: in other words, individuals have quit working because they can afford to do so. Also, retirement is too binary—you either work a lot or you don’t.
• Here’s the plan: Instead of a fixed path through school, job, and retirement, the concept envisions individuals zipping in and out of those periods, as well as sprinkling in time for leisure and caring for loved ones as well. The goal is to continue working till later in life, but with longer periods of time spent working less (or not at all). This idea is appealing; it may even, astonishingly, make a 60-year professional career seem more reasonable.
  • Let’s start with midlife mania. What modern society asks of working parents is well nigh impossible. In order to care for their young children, two parents might temporarily cut their full-time work schedules by half and then gradually increase their hours again.
• A brave, new world: Higher pay, affordable housing policies, decoupling health insurance from work, and a variety of other proposals for enhancing people’s financial stability and job flexibility might all contribute to this option. Financial security for everybody and a more humanitarian approach to work might become the new standard.

Many obstacles stand in the path of this kind of change. Nevertheless, the society we live in today would have been incomprehensible to those of our forefathers who toiled away till the end of their days.

SOURCE LINK:  SOURCE: Works in Progress – Perry S | Year: 2022 Month: January

Trust is an absence of deliberative questioning – C. Thi Nguyen. People have implicit trust in science. Is it justifiable?

• Trust in Science – 101: The most fundamental degree of scientific trust is the belief that the experiment described truly occurred.
  • Joe Hilgard spoke about his attempts to disclose scientific misconduct at the level of faked trials, and how he discovered that most organizations were uninterested.
• The whole truth and nothing but …: Another degree of trust is the belief that a source’s citation correctly conveys the data found there. If you look at popular science books and review papers, it is more common than not for them to misrepresent the claims of their sources when they quote them.
• And also:
  • Trust that the data produced were not falsified or altered.
  • Trust that the data are meaningful in the first place (e.g., survey data).
  • Trust that the methods used actually support the general claims made
  • Trust that the effect is large enough to be meaningful or even detectable in context.
  • Trust that the mathematical analysis performed is appropriate to discovering truth from the data.

• First, if scientists questioned one another’s theories behind closed doors, there would be less need for outsider scepticism. The so-called “peer review” process is an old boy’s club, in most cases.
• Second, if a scientific assertion has evident real-world consequences, such as airline travel or high-speed internet, an uncritical approach is generally warranted.
• For the inexact sciences (psychology, sociology, behaviour, economics), this does not seem to be the case. Even if insiders are driven to reform, it is unclear if conventional scientific approaches are even practicable in the social and inexact sciences.

• Cold and hard or warm and fuzzy? The easiest approach to spot dubious scientific assertions is to look at how abstract they are. Happiness, relationships, sleep, nourishment, motivation, suffering, and belonging are the fundamental abstractions of daily life that are most susceptible to scientific abuse.
• So what? Another effective technique for successfully exiting the unquestioned mentality is to consider what else would be true if the claim were accurate in the first place. This is a twist on the classic as-if game: Break out from your unthinking mentality by over-trusting the assertion and considering the ramifications.
• You may see questions like: How large is the effect? Once you start examining how abstractions are paid out and what the consequences of the claim would be, you may notice questions like: How big is the effect?