Popular Personality Tests, Public Radio & Permissions All the Way Down
Here’s your weekly roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, April 7–13, 2024.
Thought-Provoking Content
How Accurate Are Popular Personality Test Frameworks at Predicting Life Outcomes? A Detailed Investigation by André Ferretti, Spencer Greenberg, and Emmanuel Nnaemeka in Clearer Thinking:
If you care about how well a personality test can predict outcomes about people's lives, then the Big Five test is superior to a Jungian (MBTI-style) and Enneagram approach.
The Foot Washing I Most Remember by Anthony Robinson in Mockingbird:
The foot washing I remember most wasn’t, technically, a foot washing at all.
I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years: Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust by Uri Berliner in The Free Press:
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
The Architecture of Authority: Why the Church Must Resist the Lure of Coercion by Mike Cosper in Comment:
If our reaction to feeling threatened is to cling to authority by means of power and the influence it gives us, we will accelerate the crisis and open the door to ever-deepening distrust.
Yes, Social Media Really Is a Cause of the Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness by Jon Haidt in After Babel:
1. No smartphones before high school (as a norm, not a law; parents can just give younger kids flip phones, basic phones, or phone watches).
2. No social media before 16 (as a norm, but one that would be much more effective if supported by laws such as the proposed update to COPPA, the Kids Online Safety Act, state-level age-appropriate design codes, and new social media bills like the bipartisan Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, or like the state level bills passed in Utah last year and in Florida last month).
3. Phone-free schools (use phone lockers or Yondr pouches for the whole school day, so that students can pay attention to their teachers and to each other)
4. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
What irreversible harm will be done to children who spend more time listening to their teachers during class, more time playing and exploring together outdoors, and less time sitting alone hunched over a device?
Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet by L. M. Sacasas in The Convivial Society:
In a culture of information superabundance, we need above all else the discipline to say 'no' or to set limits upon our engagement with the vast proliferation of digital media. But the anti-cultural spirit [of permissions all the way down] has left us ill-prepared to say 'no' to anything.
Music
A Psalm of David ...
These tunes are based on a reconstruction of Masoretic cantilation markings as musical notation. That means that the attributions, which we usually think of as non-musical, are sung as the first lines of the Psalms.
Thou shalt prepare a table before me against them that trouble me.
Many who have a passing familiarity with various Christian traditions of chant in other languages (e.g. Gregorian) have overlooked English plainsong.
Fragments
On the Solar Eclipse
On Calling White People “Caucasian”
Can we please retire the term “Caucasian” for people who are not from places like Georgia?
(And I don't mean the US state.)
I know you're just trying to find a sensitive way to say “white” to people who don't know what to do with their racial identity, but reusing a euphemism that comes from a debunked ethnic theory of racial origins dresses the emperor in imaginary clothes.
Maybe it's just me, but as a white person when I hear that term used in that way, I feel that I am being patronized—handled with kid gloves, if you will. I don't like it, but I try not to judge the speaker's motives.