Oxford University Press's Blog, page 173

The connection between online hate speech and real-world hate crime

Online hate speech is on the rise. All available academic and government sources indicate a year on year increase in the number of people being exposed to hateful content on social media, online news item comments, and websites. Over half (53%) of UK adult Internet users reported seeing hateful content online in 2018, an increase from 47% in 2017. In 2016, 34% of 12-15-year olds recalled seeing hateful content online.  This figure increased to 45% in 2018. Of those who witnessed online hate, less than half took action in relation to the most recent incident.

Survey data only captures a snap-shot of the online hate phenomenon. Data science methods assist in providing a real-time view of hate speech perpetration in action, generating a more complete picture.

In 2016 and 2017 the Brexit vote, and a string of terror attacks in the UK, were followed by significant and unprecedented increases in online hate speech and offline hate crime. Although the production of online hate speech increased dramatically in the wake of all these events, it was less likely to be retweeted in volume and to survive for long periods of time.  Where hate speech was re-tweeted, it emanated from a core group of like-minded people who seek out each other’s messages. Hate speech produced around the Brexit vote in particular was found to be largely driven by a small number of Twitter accounts. Around 50% of anti-Muslim hate speech was produced by only 6% of users, many of whom were self-declared anti-Islam.

Global anti-Muslim hate speech on Twitter during 2017 (gaps relate to breaks in data collection)
Graph provided by Professor Matthew Williams.

Many governments now recognise the pernicious problem of online hate speech, and how social media platforms are being manipulated by far-right groups and nefarious states to increase political polarisation to their advantage. If we are to understand our online activities as extensions of our offline lives, and not as some isolated virtual experience that has no consequence beyond the Internet, phenomena like online hate speech are likely reaching into physical space. But until recently there has been a lack of evidence on the effect of online hate speech and increasing online polarisation on community tensions on the streets.

To examine the link between online activity and offline consequences, researchers statistically modelled the effect online hate speech had on the incidence rate of hate crimes on the streets. It appears an increase in online anti-Muslim and anti-Black speech on Twitter is associated with an increase in racially and religiously aggravated violence, criminal damage, and harassment. This statistical association remained when controlling for factors known to predict hate crime, including educational attainment, age, employment, and race. Predictions showed that in an area with a 70% black and minority ethnic population and 300 hate tweets posted per month, the incidence rate of racially and religiously aggravated violence increased by up to 100%.

It’s not possible to conclude that online hate speech directly causes offline hate crime. What we do know is that social media is now part of the formula of hate crime. A hate crime is a process, not a discrete act, with victimisation ranging from hate speech through to violent attacks. This process is set in geographical, social, historical, and political context.   Technological context must now form part of this conceptualisation.

The big three social media companies introduced hate speech policies following pressure from national and supranational governments. But despite these efforts, it remains evident that social media, and in particular new platforms with strong free speech principles (such as Voat, Gab and 8chan), have been widely infected with a casual low-level intolerance for the racial Other. With interdisciplinary work researchers are now closer to showing when and where this online intolerance spills onto the streets in violent ways.

Featured Image Credit: “social media” by Pixelkult. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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Telling it like it is: opening up about my vulnerability

It was quite a shock for me when the independent psychiatrist asked me during my forced stay in the mental hospital what I thought of my diagnosis “schizophrenia”. It was the first time I heard my diagnosis. For the rest of our conversation the diagnosis “schizophrenia” echoed in my head. I associated “schizophrenia” with: being an outcast and violence. It was as if I was told that I was inferior and no longer part of society. Because of my illness, my husband wanted a divorce from me, I saw my child less, I quit my job at the university, and the side effects of the medicines I fell into a depression. I felt lonely and useless.

Hiding my mental illness 
In the beginning I had difficulties talking about my illness. I published writings about my experiences using a pseudonym. When I still worked at the university, I didn’t dare tell my colleagues that I had suffered from a psychosis. After I quit my job, I wanted to find a new job desperately. I was afraid that an employer wouldn’t hire me if I discussed my illness. That is why I didn’t mention it on job applications. I did mention it twice, for job applications in the mental health sector. For one position, they offered me a voluntary job instead of the paid job they advertised for in the ad.

A nurse of the mental hospital tried to help me by saying: “You better say that you have a burn-out. People might become shocked when you tell them you had a psychosis.” That made me sad, I suffered from psychosis, and I was instructed to come up with a different story. I always felt better by telling the truth, especially about something which nearly ruined my life and had a devastating impact on me and my family.

God encouraged me to be open about my mental illness 
Due to the heavy side effects of the medicines, such as contributing to my depression, lack of energy and weight gain, I stopped taking them. At that time, Edward Snowden was in the news talking about the National Security Agency spying  on American citizens. The feeling that the secret service spied on me again came back, and so did the idea that the news contained special messages for me. This ended in my second forced hospitalization. I had to go into the solitary room again and stayed for four months in the mental hospital. During my stay in the hospital, God gave me advice. He said to me: be open about your mental illness and come to my home.

How to “label” myself 
My diagnosis was changed into “schizo-affective disorder”. I do not only have a vulnerability for psychosis but also for mania. The diagnosis “schizo-affective disorder” gave me a bad feeling. I wanted to empower myself. Therefore I decided to label myself as “having a vulnerability to psychosis and mania.” I based this idea also on the research of Robert Scott, which is described by Arnhild Lauveng in her book “A Road Back from Schizophrenia”. She mentions that the diagnosis which is posed on you can form the role you play as patient and how you function.

The reactions when I started being open about my vulnerability to psychosis 
When I discussed my illness at the endowment on microcredits the reaction of a board member was: “My wife suffered from a psychosis as well. It is terrible indeed.” I was astonished. He was so compassionate, and his wife suffered from the same issue!

Later on I became a committee member of the city council. I was unsure about myself due to the stigma of my illness that I talked about it at an off-site day. The other committee members were all very understanding. The councilor shared his experiences about his past. Someone remarked afterwards that he found it a very special day since we had shared our experiences so openly.

Nowadays, I publicly share my experiences with psychoses to help patients, psychiatrists, nurses and all others working in the mental health sector and to inform the general public. My family and close friends know that it is important for me to take my medicines & discuss the dosage with my psychiatrist, to do sports, to walk in the heather fields with my friend, to visit the church and that I may need to cancel appointments if I made too many. In personal encounters with people, it is dependent on the situation if I talk about my mental vulnerability or not. I am following my calling and I am working with many people with the same ideals to contribute to world peace. Recently, I explained after a “peace meeting” that my psychoses were the driving force to become active for world peace and I founded the peace organization Peace SOS and hope to see: A World in Which All Children Can Play.

Featured Image by Daniel Reche from Pixabay

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Mary Astell on female education and the sorrow of marriage (philosopher of the month)

Mary Astell is widely considered one of the first and foremost English feminists. Her pioneering writings address female education and autonomy in the early modern period and had a profound influence on later generation of feminists.

Astell was born into a middle class family in 1666. Her father was Newcastle coal merchant who died when she was twelve, leaving the family debt-ridden. Though lacking formal academic training, she was educated by uncle, a former Anglican minister. In her teens, she suffered from a deep depression, writing poems to convey her melancholy and frustration at the limited prospects for academic careers women faced.  At twenty, she left home for London, where she lived mainly in Chelsea, with very little money. Falling into another depression, she wrote to William Sancrof, the archbishop of Canterbury, appealing for help. He was impressed by her intelligence and assisted her financially. He also gave her important contacts. She became acquainted with a circle of intelligent and aristocratic women including Mary Chudleigh, Judith Drake, Elizabeth Elstob, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Elizabeth Thomas, who became her friends, admirers and patrons.

Astell was influenced by French Platonist and Neo-Cartesian philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1714) and his English follower John Norris (1657–1711). She was also influenced by René Descartes (1596–1650). She engaged in the debates with the philosophical greats of her days such as John Locke, George Berkeley, John Norris, and Earl of Shaftesbury on major philosophical problems: epistemology, the existence of God, nature of soul and body and the boundary of faith and reason. She disagreed with John Locke on his empiricist conception of thought and was a critic of his philosophical and religious ideas in his famous work, Essay concerning Human Understanding.

Astell’s best-known feminist works are Serious Proposal to the Ladies (Part 1, 1694; Part 2, 1697) and Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700). The first work was an appeal for more education for women. She exhorted women to do their very best to gain knowledge, develop their own minds, and the ability to think for themselves, which would guide them in live virtuous lives. As she saw it, the problem was with the cultural assumptions about femininity and the popular attitude about women, according to which women did not demonstrate the same kinds of intellectual abilities as men because women were inherently more closely united to their bodies. The practices and fashions of seventeenth-century society turned women into ignorant and frivolous feminine beings, ill-prepared for life’s vicissitudes. They wasted their time acquiring graceful social skills and accomplishments to please men, and were given little education and training in reasoning. To overcome this, she proposed self-discipline and the establishment of an academy along Platonist lines where women could receive a proper and serious education in religion and philosophy. As Astell wrote in her first book, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies:

And since the French tongue is understood by most ladies, methinks they may much better improve it by the study of philosophy (as I hear the French ladies do) Descartes, Malebranch and others, than by reading idle novels and romances. ‘Tis strange we shou’d be so forward to imitate their fashions and fobberies, and have no regard to what is really imitable in them! And why shall it not be thought as genteel to understand French philosophy, as to be accoutred in a French Mode?

Her second book examined women’s subordination in marriage and their lack of freedom. She urged women to refrain from marrying if they were not prepared to take the vows of obedience and subservience. She spoke against domestic tyrants and recommended that women be better educated so they could choose their husbands wisely. She also believed that affection in marriage depended on benevolence and not physical desire, and urged the acquisition of virtue as the true means to women’s happiness.

Astell was an inspiration for a number of  eighteenth century women writers and intellectuals. She helped to convince Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to publish her Turkish Embassy Letters, and wrote the preface for them in 1724. Mary Chaudleigh acknowledged her intellectual debt to Astell and dedicated a poem to her (“To Almystrea”). Astell’s works enlightened women and transformed the way they saw themselves. She is an important figure for her contribution to an early feminist movement.

Featured Image: Vermeer, Johannes. (c. 1670). Woman writing a letter, with her maid (oil on canvas). Dublin:National Gallery of Ireland

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Monthly gleanings for September 2019

Some more finger work

In the posts for September 25 and October 2, 2019, the etymology of the word finger was discussed. Some comments on the first one require further notice.

Final –r. I deliberately stayed away from the origin of –r in fingr-, though I did mention the problem. This -r is not a suffix of a “doer” (nomen agentis “agent noun,” as in catch-er or sing–er). The verb fing– did not exist (that is why even in Modern English finger rhymes with linger, rather than ringer). If it had existed, the Gothic word would have ended in –āreis, the oldest German word would have been fingāri, and so on. Consequently, we have to deal with the root fingr-, and the status of final -r remains a matter of controversy. The details of this controversy are of little interest to us, and I passed them by.

Deceptive Latin correspondences. Pingo (pinxi, pictum, pingere; from the root pict– we have depict, picture, and so forth) “to paint” only looks like a good match for finger. First, –r still remains unexplained. Second, how can the mental process be reconstructed? No one paints with a finger, so that the association appears unrealistic. Finger never meant “brush” or any other implement, and among the many words having the root ping- ~ pict- not a single one designates a body part.

Pingo rhymes with fingo “to shape, adorn,” and, at least in Latin, those near-synonyms and near-homonyms appear to have influenced each other. But finger can be neither a borrowing of the Latin root (the word is undoubtedly native Germanic) nor its cognate (both begin with f’; by the First Consonant Shift, Latin p should correspond to Germanic f). Consequently, this approach also fails.

Engl. pinky ~ pinkie. The word is a borrowing of Dutch pinkje, via Scottish (the same meaning, and in Dutch it is perhaps a diminutive of pin “a small object”). The not uncommon statement that the meaning of pinkie was influenced by the color word pink looks like an exercise in folk etymology. Is the little finger pinker than its bigger brothers?

Do pinkies, even when locked, resemble the pink of perfection? Images by Luisella Planeta Leoni and skeeze from Pixabay.Many nails produce a superb foot. Lion Paw by Barney Moss, CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

Finger and the word for five. The deservedly most authoritative book on Indo-European antiquities (Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, p. 746) states that the numeral “five” can be etymologized as “hand, five fingers,” which, allegedly, points to an archaic system of counting on the fingers. The authors compare finger and Hittite pankur “total, clan” and refer to two influential predecessors. Yet this reconstruction has no support in the rich ethnographic material on the subject, for in counting, individual fingers appear more important than their sum viewed as a whole. I am not aware of any case in which the hand is named after the fingers. And of course, the troublesome r is ignored in this etymology. See also the section on nail below.

Toe. The idea that toe is the last syllable of Latin digitus strikes me as bizarre. How could two thirds of digitus be amputated under stress, to produce a full-fledged Germanic noun, whose original form was approximately taihwōn? Equally improbable is the derivation of grass, so obviously related to green and grow, from a Greek word. The most recent DNA research, I am constantly reminded by our correspondent, sheds light on the movement of the Neolithic population and supports the origin of our basic words directly from Greek, thus bypassing the hassle with cognates. According to this opinion, even eeny-meeny is from Greek. Though the counting out rhyme emerged in texts very late, it is of course much older than its first attestation. But is it pre-historic, that is, many thousand years old? If such is the fruit of this cutting edge research, I’d rather keep my distance from it, at least for a while. A phrase from an old novel surfaced in my mind: “The futile pastime of misguided acumen.”

Finger as metaphor. Ion Carstoiu, an active and prolific Rumanian etymologist, called my attention to Max Müller’s observation that “finger” is a widespread metaphor for sunrays, tree branches, etc. (compare what was said on toe and mistletoe in the previous post). He believes that this fact can also throw light on the origin of the word for “finger” in various languages. In his research, he casts the net widely and, among other things, concentrated on the “finger/sun” connection. As far as the etymology of Germanic fingraz is concerned, the paths of fingers and sunrays do not seem to cross.

The finger nail, as opposed to the finger, is indeed pink. Hence the Greek name of the onyx. This agate is a similar color. Agate 12 by James St. John, CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

Nail (Dutch nagel, German Nagel, etc.). The distant origin of this word, whose congeners can be found in many languages, is unknown. The root was nog-, with o sometimes preceding n (as in Greek: compare Engl. onyx). In the context of the present discussion, only one detail should be mentioned. If Lithuanian has preserved the most ancient meaning of the word, this meaning was “claw.” A look at the claws in their entirety produced the idea of a foot. Hence Proto-Slavic noga– “foot” (Russian noga, stress on the second syllable, still has the same meaning, except that Slavic does not distinguish between “foot” and “leg”). But such a collective meaning is hardly probable for “hand,” because toes are seldom or never thought of as individual entities, while fingers are. That is why I find the comparison of Hittite pankur and Germanic fingraz unrevealing.

Around the word for “man”

The Irish word bean ~ ben “woman” has the plural man, and the group mn appears in the declension of this noun. The question was whether this man is related to Germanic man-. No, it is not. Bean is related to the word for “woman” all over Indo-European: Gothic quino and qens, Greek gunē (compare gynecology), etc. The most ancient form of this word must have sounded approximately as gwen ~ gwēn. In the further development of the Indo-European languages, the initial group gw sometimes survived (English still has quean and queen, with k from g by the First Consonant Shift; Gwendolen ~ Gwendolyn has nothing to do with it: gwen means “white”), and in others lost the first or the second element. Greek has g-, while Irish preserved w and changed it to b. But when Old Irish b came in contact with n, it was assimilated to m. Hence Old and Modern Irish mna, man, and so forth, looking deceptively like English man.

Swedish gumma “Granny, etc.” is another product of assimilation: the original form was gudmoder, literally, “good mother.”  This is how Engl. gossip, which meant “familiar acquaintance; old garrulous woman,” from god- and -sib (sib, as in sibling, god “God”), acquired its present form. Thus, in gumma, once again, ma– is not related to man. (Thank you for two such interesting questions!).

Swedish gumma: certainly not a man! Happy Birthday Gumma by shannonpatrick17, CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

Sour grapes. It is quite true that the English word sour furnishes no information about the use of the relevant epithet in Hebrew and Greek. I only wanted to note that sour is an extremely rare epithet in the King James Bible. As regards the idiom sour grapes, the languages that follow La Fontaine speak about green, rather than sour, grapes. Caxton (1484) wrote sour. Aesop’s epithet seems to mean “unripe.”

Usage

Mr. Paul Alpers has pointed to the curious difference in usage between support and sponsor when used as noun and verb. The program, we say, is supported by…, but those who support it are sponsors, not supporters. (Compare the phrase sponsored ad.) Can anyone explain why the verb sponsor seems to have some unwanted connotations that the noun does not?

Question to our readers: balapong

I received a question about the origin of the word balapong “soap stone.” The word has been around since at least 1838, but I could not find any information on the etymology of the term. Please help.

Feature image credit: user1496664293 from Pixabay.

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The journalist who created Jack the Ripper

Many of us know the name Jack the Ripper. Perhaps we associate it with a dark shadow wearing a top hat and holding a knife in the middle of a foggy street in Victorian London. But not many of us know that this image is very far away from any reliable fact that has reached us about the 1888 tragic events that took place in Whitechapel. One of the most fascinating aspects of the Whitechapel murders is indeed how long they survived in the collective imagination and how distant their recollection is from anything we know to be true.

Between 1888 and 1891 there were between 5 and 11 unsolved murders of women in Whitechapel, most of them with distinctive features such as the removal of organs.

Traditionally, only five of these murders are attributed to Jack the Ripper. However, the reality is that there is no hard evidence that any of these murders were connected. With so little evidence to speculate on, why are we then still interested in this case and why is there a new book, film, or documentary every year? The answer is not just because it is a mystery. There are so many other fascinating and equally gruesome mysteries from Victorian London that most people have never heard about (e.g. the Thames torso murders).

I believe that the answer lies in the Jack the Ripper letters, which painted a persona of this killer that is responsible for its long-lasting legacy. The name “Jack the Ripper” appears for the first time in the Dear Boss letter, dated 25 September 1888 and addressed to the Central News Agency in London.

Image credit: Dear Boss letter part one. Photo provided by Andrea Nini. Used with permission.Image credit: Dear Boss letter part two. Photo provided by Andrea Nini. Used with permission.

Written in red ink, the letter is distinctive for its style and tone and is characterised by a certain arrogance in taunting the police for their failures. The letter was regarded as a hoax until a double murder of two women on the 30 September. The following morning a postcard, the Saucy Jacky postcard, reached again the Central News Agency.

Image credit: Saucy Jack postcard. Photo provided by Andrea Nini. Used with permission.

Due to lack of leads and the timing and content of these letters, the police decided to make these two texts public. Once these texts were published, hundreds of hoaxers pretending to be Jack the Ripper sent letters to various recipients across the UK, to the police, the press, or simply their neighbours.

At a time in which newspapers was running out of new things to say about the Whitechapel murders, these two letters became pure gold for the press. They offered new clues for any interested reader and, most importantly, it was finally possible to call this murderer by name.

However, the receipt of these letters was perhaps not just a stroke of luck. In all likelihood, the original two letters were in fact crafted by a journalist. A letter written by Detective Chief Inspector John George Littlechild famously wrote that Dear Boss was “a smart piece of journalistic work.” If this is true, then the Jack the Ripper letters are probably the most successful case of fake news in history. Whoever was behind it created a fictional character that is still being commercially exploited, not too differently from other unquestionable works of fiction.

If the theory is correct, the real question is therefore not who was Jack the Ripper, but who created Jack the Ripper. One theory connects the letters to a reporter called Frederick Best, who worked for one of the very first tabloids, The Star. Another theory comes from Inspector Littlechild himself, who wrote that “it was generally believed at the Yard that Tom Bullen of the Central News was the originator, but it is probable Moore, who was his chief, was the inventor.” This theory is quite credible since the Central News Agency had a well-known habit of fabricating news.

After more than one hundred years, physical evidence cannot offer much help because it is too corrupted. However, the language of these letters has reached us unchanged and the new discipline of forensic linguistics can be used to discover new evidence.

One of the contributions of forensic linguistic evidence is to settle a debate on whether the two letters were indeed written by the same author. There are substantial and distinctive linguistic similarities between them, such as the use of the rare structure [to keep a letter back till], that constitute solid evidence of common authorship. However, the question of whether the author could have been Best or Bulling cannot be answered without enough comparison material from these two journalists, which so far was not possible to find.

A mystery within the mystery could however lead to the answer. The Dear Boss letter and the Saucy Jacky postcard are the most linguistically similar to one of the 200 and more letters allegedly from Jack the Ripper: the Moab and Midian letter, the third letter ever received by the Central News Agency. This letter is also quite peculiar, because nobody except Tom Bulling has ever seen it. For reasons still unclear, the journalist received it and thought it would be better to copy it word for word and send it to the police, as opposed to just sending the original. Because the linguistic evidence suggests that the same person who wrote Dear Boss also wrote Moab and Midian, if this person was Bulling, we then have evidence that he, or the Central News Agency, was responsible for creating Jack the Ripper.

Besides the murders and the authorship question, the media exploitation of these events to sell newspapers is an interesting academic case study that deserves more attention. In our quest to understand the birth of tabloid journalism and fake news, maybe Jack the Ripper can help.

Featured Image Credit: ‘Shallow Focus Photography of Magazines’  by Digital Buggu. CCO public domain via  Pexels .

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Natural disasters make people more religious

Philosophers once predicted that religion would die out as societies modernize. This has not happened. Today, more than four out of every five people on Earth believe in God. Religion seems to be serving a purpose that modernization does not replace.

New research finds that people become more religious when hit by natural disasters. They are more likely to rank themselves as a religious person, find comfort in God, and to state that God is important in their lives. This increase in average religiosity occurs on all continents, for people belonging to all major religions, income groups, and from all educational backgrounds.

Religiosity has increased nine times more in districts across the globe hit by earthquakes compared to those that were spared over the period 1991-2009. This is mainly because believers become more religious. It’s not that non-believers tend to take up religion in the aftermath of a natural disaster. They also generally do not go to church much more often. Rather, their existing personal beliefs intensify. Believers pass on some of this increased religious intensity through generations: Children of immigrants are more religious when their parents came from earthquake-prone areas.

Comparing religiosity across the globe is difficult. It’s difficult to compare the religiosity of a Muslim from Indonesia with the religiosity of an American Protestant. Instead, new research compares religiosity of the American Protestant only to other American Protestants and the Muslim Indonesian to other Muslim Indonesians. The main measures of religiosity used are based on surveys of more than 200,000 people across the globe. Sociologists have identified six particular questions that together span global religiosity: “How important is God in your life?”, “Are you a religious person?”, “How often do you attend religious services?”, “Do you find comfort in God?”, “Do you believe in God?”, and “Do you believe in life after death?”

The link between disasters and religiosity is also there for alternative measures of religiosity. In particular, google searches on religious terms, such as “God” or “Pray” increase with higher disaster risk. These measures may not be exact, which is not a problem for the methodology used. The methodology does not depend on exact measures of religiosity, but rather on a correct ranking of religiosity between societies.

The explanation for why religiosity increases in the face of disasters could be that people go to church for material aid, that people move in the face of disasters, or that disasters also affect development or other cultural values. However, it turns out that one main reason for the impact of disasters on religiosity is religious coping. The theory of religious coping states that people use religion as a means to cope with adversity and uncertainty. Empirical evidence suggests that people hit by various adverse life events, such as cancer, heart problems, death in close family, alcoholism, divorce, or injury are more religious than others.

Disasters provide a shock to adversity and uncertainty. Research shows that adversity and uncertainty can make people across the globe more religious. People do not necessarily think that God made the earth shake, but they might use their religion to deal with the situation. It is mainly Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews who use their religion to cope with the experiences after natural disasters. Buddhists seem to be less affected. There are not enough people from other religions or spiritual groups in the data to draw any conclusions for their particular experience with coping.

What types of disasters increase religious beliefs? According to the theory on religious coping, people mainly use religion to cope with large, negative, and unpredictable events. Using religion for coping is part of what is termed emotion-focused coping, in which people aim to reduce the emotional distress arising from a situation. When people face perceived negative, but predictable events, such as an approaching exam or a job interview, they are more likely to engage in problem-focused coping, where they aim to tackle directly the problem that is causing the stress. Likewise, religiosity increases more in response to unpredictable disasters, compared to predictable ones. Of the four main geophysical and meteorological disasters, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions elevate peoples’ beliefs, while tropical storms do not. Indeed, meteorologists have a much easier time predicting storms than seismologists have in predicting earthquakes. Further, earthquakes in areas that are otherwise rarely hit increase religiosity more than earthquakes in areas that are often hit. In addition, larger earthquakes increase religiosity more than smaller earthquakes.

Other disasters, such as wars and conflict, may potentially have similar effects on religiosity as natural disasters. After the September 11 attack, nine out of ten Americans reported that they coped with their distress by turning to their religion. Further, research finds that people that have been more exposed to conflict are more likely to participate in religious groups.

Featured image credit: Praying Hands by  Couleur. Public Domain via  Pixabay .

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The moral mathematics of letting people die

Imagine that, while walking along a pier, you see two strangers drowning in the sea. Lo and behold, you can easily save them both by throwing them the two life preservers located immediately in front of you. Since you can’t swim and no one else is around, there is no other way these folks will survive.

To throw in just one life preserver would be to save one person while allowing the other to die pointlessly. That would be morally wrong. Though you’d have saved someone you could have allowed to die, that does not make it permissible to let the other person die. You would be morally blameworthy, not praiseworthy, for throwing in one rather than both life preservers.

Now imagine you are in a different situation. Again you are on a pier. There is one stranger drowning to your left, and two others drowning to your right. You have no life preservers to throw in, only a single life raft. You can easily push the raft into the water to your left, saving the one person, or to your right, saving the other two. There is no other way any of these folks will survive, and, tragically, there is no way all three will.

Suppose that, in full awareness of the situation, and without prejudice towards anyone in particular, you decide to help the one stranger over the two – you are an “innumerate altruist” in that you simply want to help someone, but without regard for who or how many. In saving the one over the other two you are not letting the two die pointlessly. You are saving someone who would have died if you had instead saved the two to your right.

What you do is nonetheless wrong. Since you cannot save all three strangers, you must balance their competing claims to your help. The left person’s claim to be helped is balanced by one claim on the right, leaving one other claim on the right unbalanced. You are thereby morally required to save those on the right side of the pier, and are morally blameworthy for failing to give due weight to each person’s claim. Even if your heart is in the right place, morality also requires you to use your head.

Similar claims hold in other cases. Suppose two strangers are stuck on a subway track, and the train is approaching. If you do nothing, one person will be killed and the other will lose a leg. You cannot pull both out of the way in time, but can easily rescue one or the other. The one person’s life must take precedence over the other’s leg. (This example may remind some of the well-known “Trolley Problem” in which you can decide whether to redirect a runaway trolley so that it kills one person instead of five – the present example is different both with respect to the harms at stake and your causal relation to them.)

In another scenario, two strangers would each face a significant chance of dying were they struck by the oncoming train. One would face a one in two chance of dying, the other only one in a hundred. You must help the former over the latter, other things being equal. These cases call not only for altruism, but numerate altruism.

Why should the numbers matter only when easily rescuing people who are nearby? It seems they should matter, in some shape or form, in many other contexts too: when rescue is costly to us in terms of money, time, or effort; when those we can rescue are distant and unidentifiable; when there are many potential rescuers; when the plights of those we can help are the result of social injustice rather than natural accidents; when those we can help are nonhuman animals; and when we can affect the quality of life of future individuals, whoever in particular they may be.

This is not to say there are no moral differences between these various contexts. But in all of them it is a moral mistake not to take account of the number of individuals we can help, the degree to which we can help them, and the probability our acts will actually help.

Taking account of all these numbers leads to increasingly challenging questions. Must we save two lives or prevent a thousand people from losing their sight? Can avoiding tiny chances of future catastrophes take precedence over helping folks right here and now? Because resources are limited, we cannot respond fully to every morally serious consideration. As with deciding whether to push the only raft left or right, we must face our situation of scarcity head-on.

The trillion-dollar question is how to balance all the morally relevant numbers that come into competition in the real world, be it when giving to charities, deciding between careers, or adopting public policies. This question is what drives effective altruism. It is unclear to what extent such a grand question is answerable, but we can make some progress.

Featured Image: Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

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Reading, writing and readability—appreciating Rudolph Flesch

This October marks the thirty-third anniversary of the passing of Rudolph Flesch, the patron saint of brevity.

Born in 1911, Flesch was an Austrian lawyer who fled the Nazis in 1938, finding his way to New York City. There he completed a PhD in library science at Columbia University, studying the factors that make a text easy or difficult to read. His 1943 PhD dissertation, Marks of a Readable Style, provided a mathematical formula to predict the difficulty of adult reading material. The formula included such variables as the number of names and personal pronouns, which enhanced readability, and the number of prefixes and suffixes, which did the opposite. A later article proposed a somewhat simplified formula based on average sentence length and average word length. Flesch’s Reading Ease formula, still in use today, assigned a number from 0 to 100 to a text. (This paragraph has a score of 45.7, about high school level.)

Publishers soon applied the research of Flesh and other readability experts to books, magazines and newspapers. Flesch also turned his attention to freelance writing, following up his academic studies with lively, user-friendly books like The Way to Write, a co-authored volume published in 1947, and The Art of Readable Writing, published in 1949. He took particular aim at inflated, wordy exposition and the use of high-falutin’ words, favoring spare, simple prose.

In 1955, Flesch approached readability from another direction. He wrote the bestselling Why Johnny Can’t Read, and What You Can Do About It. Known simply as Why Johnny Can’t Read, the book created the why-Johnny-can’t meme borrowed endlessly by later writers.  Why Johnny Can’t Read was a critique of the look-say method of teaching reading used in the Dick and Jane books. Flesch called the look-say method “totally wrong,” because it required children to memorize each word. According to Flesch, that method was like teaching Chinese characters. The better way to teach reading, Flesch said, was by teaching an alphabet-based writing system known as phonics.

Flesch called the look-say method “totally wrong,” because it required children to memorize each word.

Flesch was denounced by many education professionals hooked on the look-say method. Time magazine reported in its January 9, 1956, issue that “American education closed ranks against Flesch,” attacking the “Devil in the Flesch” and “Flesch peddlers.” While Flesch did not succeed in convincing educators, he won a convert in William Spaulding, the Houghton Mifflin publishing executive who commissioned Theodore Geisel to write The Cat in the Hat. As Rebekah Fitzsimmons notes in her “Creating and Marketing Early Reader Picture Books,” the publisher of The Cat in the Hat advertised the book as using a vocabulary list “drawn up by experts,” and it was marketed to busy parents as one that children could read by themselves. And Dr. Seuss himself wrote to a friend that he expected the book to “make a tremendous noise in the discussion of Why Johnny Can’t Read.”

In the 1970s, Flesch’s work on readability found renewed interest from the Plain Language Movement, which arose in the wake of the Truth in Lending Act. Flesch was a consultant for the Federal Trade Commission and he published How to Write Plain English: A Book for Lawyers and Consumers in 1979.  His advice: “Use nothing but Plain English.” And he offered examples such as this one, from a Federal Trade Commission rule:

It is an unfair or deceptive practice for any funeral service industry member, whose establishment contains one or more casket selection rooms, to fail to display the three least expensive caskets offered for sale for the use in adult funeral service, in the same general manner as the other caskets displayed. Provided, that if fewer than twelve (12) caskets are displayed, only one of the three least expensive caskets must be displayed.

Flesch’s Plain English version went this way:

You must display the three least expensive adults’ caskets you offer just like the others. If you display less than 12 adults’ caskets, you must display the least expensive one you offer.

Flesch even revisited his famous title and topic himself in a 1981 follow up called Why Johnny Still Can’t Read: A New Look at the Scandal of Our Schools, continuing his critique of the look-say method and suggesting that education publishers and professors were engaged in a “great cover up” concealing the findings of recent research.  Reviews by principals and professors dismissed Flesch as a single-minded polemicist. Nevertheless, Flesch’s work spurred others to take phonics seriously. And as studies by federal education agencies and psychologists continued to confirm the importance of phonics, it made its way into more state reading standards and curricula.

Flesch did not live to claim victory. He died in 1984 at the age of 75. But his influence is felt by just about every reader and writer.

Featured image credit: Girl sitting whilst reading Dr Seuss book, ‘Hop on Pop’. Photo by Josh Applegate. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Nine articles on problems in access to mental health services [reading list]

Mental Illness Awareness Week occurs in the first full week of October. This year, we’re focusing on the breaking down the barriers that prevent people with mental health issues from receiving adequate treatment. One in three people worldwide will experience disruptions in their mental health over the course of their lives. Yet most people in need of psychological services do not receive professional help.

We’ve put together a reading list of articles which expose a number of barriers to treatment of mental illness – including stigma, financial constraints, and global inequalities – and explore potential strategies to overcome these obstacles.

Treatment gap: barriers to providing and receiving services

This article exposes the gap between mental health services that are needed and those that are provided. It examines the key problems and impediments that currently exist, and which new models of treatment and delivery could help surmount current barriers.

Barriers and facilitators to acceptance of mental illness

In this piece, the authors ask people with serious mental illness to talk about what has helped them feel acceptance, and what tends to stand in their way.

Stigma

The stigma attached to mental illness can prevent people from seeking treatment. Fear of disclosing one’s mental or substance use disorder is the most commonly reported reason for people, especially youth, not seeking help. This piece summarizes research on stigma for the general population, and addresses specific issues facing young people.

In my voice: speaking out about mental health and stigma 

In his stirring contribution, psychologist Jeffrey Liew tackles the shame and stigma of admitting mental illness in Chinese-American culture.

Overcoming stigma II: media and mental health professionals

This piece discusses strategies geared toward altering negative portrayals of mental illness in various forms of public media. Such strategies are important for those interested in stigma reduction. The article addresses the need for mental health professionals to confront their own views toward mental illness and promote change.

Cultural competency in mental health services

Disparities in access and quality in health and mental health services and treatment outcomes among racial and ethnic minorities have been well documented. This entry chronicles the history of mental health services and the development of cultural competency in social work practice. It then discusses mental health services use and barriers to access among racial and ethnic minorities.

Ethics in mental health care: a public health perspective

This chapter explores ethical issues in mental health policy from a public health perspective. It shifts the focus of ethical discourse to the population level and to the values that ought to be sought in a system for delivering mental health services, such as enhancing access, promoting recovery and empowerment, and nurturing community integration.

Global perspectives on mental health care

There is a large disparity in the degree to which countries acknowledge the importance of mental health and support work in this area. While no country has exemplary mental health care, this article reviews how various nations have worked to improve mental health for their citizens.

Mental illness: worldwide 

Mental health issues are a major public health concern. The indirect costs to the global economy of mental illness—encompassing productivity and the spending on mental health services and other direct costs—amount to approximately $2.5 trillion a year. By 2030 it is expected that depression will be the leading cause of the global disease burden.  This article outlines the scope of the problem and possible interventions to help combat this health crisis.

These articles show the many barriers to mental health services. The magnitude of these barriers is particularly concerning given the high prevalence of depression and other mental disorders across the world. Many of these barriers are  ingrained deeply in the fabric of socio-economic life, and will take considerable efforts to overcome. With some of the solutions here, we can began to address these issues.

Featured image: “Silhouette” by Gift Habeshaw. Public domain via Unsplash.

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The underrated value of stargazing

When did you last look up at the night sky? Before the advent of streetlights, paying attention to the heavens above us would have been an everyday part of existence, as commonplace as noticing the weather. Now, as many of us hurry from brightly lit office buildings to the cosy lights of home, few remember to look up and notice the celestial spectacles above our heads. Stargazing – if it’s thought of at all – is regarded as something left for a bucket list trip; it’s a special evening spent under the dark skies of New Zealand, or a chilly cruise to northern Norway to see the Northern Lights. A once in a lifetime treat, not part of our real lives.

It’s true that the wonder of a truly dark sky, where the stars are so numerous that the gaps between them seem to disappear, is worth seeking out. But even in urban settings, in the middle of lives lit by the glow of screens from dawn to dusk, I recommend taking the time to look up now and then – there’s much to see. Take the Moon, for example. Noticing its changing phases helps marks the passage of time, and there’s a satisfaction in spotting the thin crescent of each new lunation against a twilight sky.

I’m writing this the morning after a night brightly lit by September’s full Moon, which seemed to shrink in size as it rose up, away from the horizon. This curious effect isn’t astronomical, but rather psychological. Our brains and visual system aren’t good at dealing with distances, and so when the Moon is low, a comparison with nearby objects makes it seem enormous. The full Moon can be covered by a pea, held at arm’s length (an experiment I recommend), but it’s incredibly hard to convince yourself of this fact when it hangs heavy and low over the skyline.

Having started to notice our celestial neighbour, the next stage is to watch how it changes. The line dividing bright and dark parts of the Moon represents sunrise or sunset on the lunar surface, and as the shadows lengthen, different features can look surprisingly prominent. At full Moon, for example, look for the bright rays that lead away from the crater Tycho, which stand out under the overhead Sun.

If connecting with the Moon isn’t personal enough for you, a more human connection to space is available. The International Space Station passes over the UK at least a few times every month, appearing after sunset or before dawn as a rapidly moving bright star, taking perhaps 90 seconds to cross from one side of the sky to another. Though a multitude of satellites can be seen crossing the sky on any given night, there’s something special about waving at this small outpost of humanity as it carries its crew of astronauts rapidly overhead.

Look further afield, and the slow turn of the Solar System’s gears becomes visible. Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are all, at times, brilliantly visible; each can shine brightly enough to be seen from even the most light-polluted location. Start paying attention to them and the routine of Earth’s daily grind can seem to disappear for a moment into the long time of the cosmos. It’s that feeling – of reducing ourselves and our problems to just a small speck in an infinitely grand whole – that even city-bound stargazers reach for, and to my surprise, it’s also available online…

When we launched the Galaxy Zoo project on the Internet in 2007, we were thinking of astrophysics, not of connecting to the cosmos. The project, which still runs today, asked people worldwide to log in and help in classifying galaxies, sorting them by their shapes, which in turn reflect their histories. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to our aid, and some came for surprising reasons. When we carried out a survey, a significant number of participants in the Galaxy Zoo project told us that they were seeking a way of contemplating the vastness of the Universe!

Over the years since that initial project, we’ve turned Galaxy Zoo into the Zooniverse, a collection of projects that ask volunteers to do everything from counting penguins to transcribing ancient papyri. Despite the obvious appeal of Disney-friendly animals like penguins, the astronomical projects on the Zooniverse remain our most popular. As an astronomer, I’d like to believe that’s because of the passion with which my colleagues share their excitement about our subject, or because I find it hard to imagine that anyone wouldn’t be interested in spotting a distant star’s supernova explosion, or spending time exploring the stellar nurseries in our galactic neighbourhood. In reality, though, I think these projects reach back to the same instinct that leads many of us to look up when leaving a building after sunset: spotting something that reminds us of our place in the cosmos – whether in the sky or on the screen – provides a jolt of cosmic perspective you just can’t get any other way.

Featured image: ‘Starry Night‘ by Paul Volkmer, public domain via Unsplash

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