The Compulsive Explainer

The Deterioration of the American Mind

America has fallen both externally and internally. Our external situation, our pecking order in the world, is well-known to everybody. Our internal situation, the state of our minds, is practically unknown - especially to us, the people who should be thinking the most about it. This is probably because we don't do much thinking about anything - our thinking skills have deteriorated dramatically - and we could care less.

We seem to think that thinking is only for stupid people - people who aren't already in the know. People who know the right way to be intuitively. People who know nothing, and don't want to know. The perfect people for today's world - at least in America.

I have an expert to back me up: Maggie Jackson in her book Distracted. From page 233:

The American Philosophical Association in part defines critical thinking as purposeful self-regulatory judgment. Americans are missing the self-regulation part. 

Unless people develop the competencies to sustain delay and continue to exercise their will when they want and need to do so, the choice itself is lost.

Perhaps attention is the true missing key to better learning. Without the powers of focus, awareness, and judgment that fuel self-control, we cannot fend off distractions, set goals, manage a complex, changing environment, and ultimately shape the trajectory of our lives.

We should be concerned by the fact that most campuses are plagued by high dropout rates, lukewarm gains in critical thinking and reflective judgment, and low engagement with the life of the mind.

A disturbing 35-year old longitudinal study by Alexander Astin reports that 80 percent of incoming college students in the 1960s called "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" their most essential goal, while 45 percent chose "being very well off" as their primary aim. Today, their values have shifted markedly. Nearly 74 percent of freshmen rate being wealthy as essential, while 43 percent chose life philosophy as most important.

Most Americans agree that ADHD is an American disease, as I wrote earlier.

Those with ADHD suffer from forgetfulness and impulsivity, traits that impair their ability to shape the course of their lives."The child with ADHD will be more under the control of external events that of mental representations about time and future, under the influence of others rather than acting to control the self, pursuing immediate gratification over deferred gratification and under the influence of the temporal now more than of the probable social futures that lie ahead."

ADHD is a disorder of "attention to the future and what one needs to do to prepare for its arrival. It is a disorder of time."

I suffer from this too. My stomach walks in the door before I do, fed by lots of instant gratification. My bank account is just the opposite.

The Internet Helps Iran Silence Activists

From Slashdot

"Over the last couple of weeks, those who believe in the transformative power of technology to battle an oppressive state have pointed to Iran as a test case. However, as Farhad Manjoo writes on Slate, the real conclusion about news now coming out of Iran is that for regimes bent on survival, electronic dissent is easier to suppress than organizing methods of the past. Using a system installed last year, built in part by Nokia and Siemens, the government routes all digital traffic in the country through a single choke point, using the capabilities of deep packet inspection to monitor every e-mail, tweet, blog post, and possibly even every phone call placed in Iran. 'Compare that with East Germany, in which the Stasi managed to tap, at most, about 100,000 phone lines — a gargantuan task that required 2,000 full-time technicians to monitor the calls,' writes Manjoo. The effects of this control have been seen over the past couple days, with only a few harrowing pictures and videos getting through Iran's closed net. For most citizens, posting videos and even tweeting eyewitness accounts remains fraught with peril, and the same tools that activists use can be used by the government to spread disinformation. The government is also using crowdsourcing by posting pictures of protesters and asking citizens for help in identifying the activists. 'If you think about it, that's no surprise,' writes Manjoo. 'Who said that only the good guys get to use the power of the Web to their advantage?'"