| Link: "The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech" |
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Thursday, October 17th, 2019 01:46:04 GMT |
| Freedom |
Last modified Oct. 16, 2019 at 10:07 PM EDT.
Quotes:
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Here's an interesting article I found recently:
July 18, 2017 from Quillette.com
It even mentions sleep disorders, sleep deprivation, and fatigue.
Also, sleep disorders affect over 20% of people, and the resulting sleep deprivation reduces inhibition. These kinds of transient neurodiversity can also interfere with social sensitivity, Theory of Mind, and verbal inhibition, so can reduce the ability to comply with speech codes. Unless universities want to outlaw fatigue, hunger, heartbreak, meds and coffee it's hard to maintain the delusion that everyone's speech will be 100% inoffensive 100% of the time.
Campus speech codes discriminate against neurominorities. They impose unrealistic demands, fears, and stigma on the large proportion of students, staff, and faculty who have common mental disorders, or extremes on the Big Five personality traits, or transient disinhibition due to sleep deprivation or smart drugs. As a practical matter, it is virtually impossible for someone with Asperger's, bipolar, ADHD, low Agreeableness, low Conscientiousness, extreme fatigue, or Modafinil mania to understand what kinds of speech acts are considered acceptable, and to inhibit the production of such speech 100% of the time, in 100% of educational and social situations.
| On Neil Postman's book "Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology" |
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Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019 08:28:58 GMT |
| Books |
I recently read a fascinating book:
Hopefully, this book will be available on your local library's OverDrive website, which has legally free ebooks you can borrow and read on your computer or phone.
Among other things, the sample contains a paragraph about the origins of the mechanical clock, and the unintended, unpredicted side effects it had on the world, which I guess probably contributed a lot to our present-day predicament of being oppressed by strict, inflexible schedules.
If I recall correctly, the book doesn't mention sleep issues at all, but it does have a lot to say about the field of medicine and its history, among many other things.
I don't entirely agree with everything the book says, but it was still one of the most thought-provoking books I've read in a while (or ever), so I wanted to mention it.
The book is copyrighted 1992, but, I think much of what it says is still worth pondering even 27 years later, because our world's societies have become even more engulfed and transformed by technology than they already were when the book was written.