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THEFEDERALIST.COM -- The COVID-19 social stress test is exposing many Americans' lack of responsibility for their lives. Here are 7 long-term positive steps it could inspire. #1: Education. Parents are seeing what exactly their kids do all day. Some will discover that a layperson can do the job of a credentialed teacher in half the time and that learning outside the default is more refreshing, less stressful, less propagandistic [and without negative peer-pressure]. Higher education's bubble will likely finally pop. As Ben Domenech notes "What parent would be willing to plunk down a vast sum of cash given the damage to their portfolio and their livelihood?" Consequently more parents may detach from calcified education systems that often sponsor open hostility to them. #6: Learning How to Live through Deprivation. Let's face it: Most of us ...

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STATNEWS.COM -- "Contrary to the impression that if extremely ill patients with Covid-19 are treated with ventilators they will live and if they are not, they will die, the reality is far different," said geriatric and palliative care physician Muriel Gillick of Harvard Medical School. Researchers in Wuhan reported that, of 37 critically ill Covid-19 patients on ventilators, 30 died within a month. In a U.S. study of patients in Seattle, only 1 in 7 patients older than 70 on a ventilator survived. Gillic also said that older patients, who do survive, risk permanent cognitive and respiratory damage from being on heavy sedation for many days if not weeks and from the intubation, adding "we need to ask, are we using ventilators in a way that makes sense for other diseases but not for this one?" In a letter last week in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, researchers in Germany and Italy said ...

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ARTOFMANLINESS.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2020: "We must remain strong and prepare to build, and to build well, when this crisis passes."] ARTICLE: If you ask most people "What's the opposite of a fragile person or organization?", they'll likely say "robust" or "resilient." But Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say that's wrong. He argues that if fragile items break when exposed to stress, something that's the opposite of fragile wouldn't simply not break (and stay the same); rather, it should actually get stronger, and he coined "antifragile" for this quality. It's no longer enough to bounce back from adversity and volatility - to be resilient. You have to bounce back stronger and better. You have to become antifragile. In his book, "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder,", Taleb makes the case that people, systems, organizations, things, and ideas can be described in one of three ways: fragile, resilient, or antifragile. Now, what is fragile? The large, optimized, overreliant on technology, overreliant on the so-called ...

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LIBERATIONIST.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2006: "A vast decentralisation of decision-making is already occurring ... The key to future progress will lie less in traditional top-down systems of command and control -- and more in a broad, bottom-up spirit of coordination and cooperation."] ARTICLE: This new normal is here to stay and what kind of leadership do we need because it's not just that our leaders are failing; the leadership model is broken. The command-and-control approach has made things worse. We tend to choose leaders who are strong, determined, and look in control. Yet, research indicates that we need the opposite. Being confident doesn't make someone competent. The Great Man Theory still influences how we view leaders; we must get rid of it. We don't need a leader, but a network of leaders. Collective leadership is what we need to thrive in uncertain times. The first step is to let go ...

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THEFEDERALIST.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: For our other homeschooling articles, please search Ismaili Digest for "homeschool".] ARTICLE: Online schooling isn't homeschooling. It's worth pointing out that what parents and teachers are trying to do now hardly reflects what most homeschoolers do on a regular basis. I know very few homeschool families who put their children in front of computers, walk away, and call it homeschool. Younger children simply don't learn best when plopped in front of a computer all day. We've known this for a while. Younger children learn best through play, and essentially require movement to behave well and continue learning throughout the day. E-learning can work when paired with something tangible, like an instrument, or with movement, like a dance class. It doesn't work as well with basics, such as math, reading, and writing. When I homeschooled my children full time, we ...

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AEON.CO -- Now a lecturer at Yale University, I was homeschooled for eight years, from age 11 to college. Learning at home is different from learning at school. We need to reorient how we generally think about learning. Historically, education has been the parent's responsibility and, if nothing else, a few weeks or months of homeschooling is an opportunity to encourage our children to do something novel, different, unexpected. As a society, we have become exceptionally bad at encouraging our children to be idiosyncratic and independent. Forced to homeschool, for a few weeks or months, is a daunting prospect - but also a tremendous opportunity to cultivate children's independence and original thinking. There are four essential points that everyone now experimenting with homeschooling should bear in mind. First ...

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FS.BLOG -- Iatrogenics is when a treatment causes more harm than benefit. Treatment not by doctors, but anyone intervening to solve a problem: a thought leader, a CEO or a government. Nassim Taleb calls these people interventionistas. Today iatrogenics refers to any effect, resulting from an intervention, in excess of gain. Why would otherwise well intentioned people do something even when the evidence indicates doing something is actually causing more harm? I can think of a few reasons why: 1) an inability to think through problems, 2) separation from consequences, 3) a bias for action, and 4) no skin in the game. Let's flesh these out a little. The first flaw ...

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MEDIUM.COM -- NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 1986: "For me the most important word is accountability. We must be accountable at all times to the organisations we serve and to the people we serve."] ARTICLE: Interventionistas not only lack practical sense, they make reasoning mistakes. Their thinking suffers three flaws: 1) thinking in statics, not dynamics -- even though everyone knows life has second, third, nth steps, 2) thinking in low, not high dimensions -- never understanding complex systems don't have obvious, one dimensional cause and effect relationships, 3) thinking in actions, never interactions -- never anticipating reactions to actions. So we end up with an intelligentsia of delusional people, who never pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating modernist slogans stripped of all depth. In general, when you hear someone using abstract modernistic notions, you can assume they have some education and too little accountability. We argue those who don't take risks should never be involved in making decisions. This idea is weaved into history ...

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[H/T MOHIB EBRAHIM] -- THEFEDERALIST.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2006: "Governments alone cannot meet the educational challenges of the 21st century. Nor can private institutions which are constrained by the necessity to earn a profit. The answer lies in the expanding role of civil society."] ARTICLE: The federal government's COVID-19 plan assumes the pandemic "will last 18 months or longer and could include multiple waves of illness." During this period, schools may close then reopen repeatedly requiring parents to be more involved in their children's education. With such uncertainty, conventional schools need to consider "hybrid homeschools" which are designed for just such an environment. In these students toggle between learning in school, 2-3 per week, and at home the other days. At their best, hybrid homeschools are an excellent example of civil society working with families to educate their children. What might interested parents consider about them as we close out this school year and head into the uncertainty of the next one? First, they teach students flexibility. Students ...

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STATNEWS.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine, epidemiology and population health, and statistics at Stanford University. Respected globally, he has spent his career challenging and exposing bad science.] ARTICLE: Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco. The data collected so far are utterly unreliable due to limited testing to date. The vast majority of infections are probably being missed and we don't know whether by a factor of 3 or 300. The Diamond Princess cruise ship is the only time an entire population was tested. The fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was largely an elderly population. Even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses have fatality rates as high as 8% amongst elderly people in nursing homes. Projecting the Princess mortality rate onto the the U.S. population, [and adjusting for various sources of uncertainty], reasonable fatality estimates vary from 0.05% to 1%. A fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. However, the most valuable piece of information ...

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SPECTATOR.CO.UK -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: John Lee is a recently retired professor of pathology and a former NHS consultant pathologist.] ARTICLE: There's another serious problem with COVID-19 UK mortality data: the way deaths are recorded. We don't really test for flu, or seasonal infections. This means respiratory infection deaths are under recorded. However, the list of notifiable diseases on death has now been amended to include COVID-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for COVID-19 must be notified, but not flu or most other infections. If we tracked flu or other seasonal viruses in the same way as COVID-19, they would show similar exponential increases in cases and deaths. For example, the US CDC publishes weekly estimates of flu cases. Since September, flu has infected 38 million Americans, hospitalised 390,000 and killed 23,000. This does not cause public alarm because flu is familiar. Much of the COVID-19 response seems due to ...

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VIDDLER.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Very highly recommended documentary. As you watch reflect on Hazar Imam's 2007 remark at the Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa: "A wise observer once said, it's not so much what we don't know that hurts us, but also all those things that we are sure we know -- but which are just not so."] ARTICLE: Darwin's Dilemma examines what many consider to be the most powerful refutation of Darwinian evolution - the Cambrian fossil record. Charles Darwin realized that the fossil evidence did not support his theory of gradual, step-by-step evolutionary development. He hoped that future generations of scientists would make the discoveries necessary to validate his ideas. Today, after more than 150 years of exploration fossil evidence of slow, incremental biological change has yet to be excavated. Instead, we find a picture of the rapid appearance of fully developed, complex organisms during the outset of the Cambrian geological era. Organisms that embody the major animal body plans that exist today. This remarkable explosion of life is truly Darwin's Dilemma and is best explained by intelligence. ...

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FIRSTTHINGS.COM -- The following is the most insightful statement of what is at issue in the evolution controversy that I have ever read from a senior figure in the scientific establishment. For scientific materialists, materialism comes first and the science comes thereafter: "We [i.e. the 'enlightned' elite] take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, ... in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, *because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.* ... We are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." The prior commitment explains why evolutionary scientists ...

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YOUTUBE.COM -- TEDX: SALMAAN KESHAVJEE (DIRECTOR, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL CENTER FOR GLOBAL HEALTH DELIVERY)-- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Dr. Keshavjee's TEDx talk was just published, 4 days ago.] ARTICLE: In this enthalling talk, Dr. Salmaan Keshavjee takes us through an understanding of how we can stop the spread of infectious disease, like COVID-19, having developed a global platform for eradicating Tuberculosis. By looking at community based health care delivery platforms in vulnerable communities, he helps us to explore how this model is replicable across different geographies and can be used in the future to tackle other health problems. Dr. Salmaan Keshavjee, MD, PhD, ScM,is the Director of Harvard Medical School's Center for Global Health Delivery since 2014. He is currently leading an initiative at Harvard Medical School on how to achieve zero deaths from tuberculosis. In 2005, he became a member of the World Health Organization/Stop TB Partnership's Green Light Committee for MDR-TB Treatment. From 2007 to 2010, he was the committee's chair. He has ...

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THEFEDERALIST.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: For our many past articles on this subject, please search Ismaili Digest for "homeschooling".] ARTICLE: Parents across the country took a deep dive over the last two weeks as home educators. How ya'll doing? Many others have gone before you and, through trial and error, have grown and picked up many tips to pass along. After 25 years of teaching my four kids, all with very unique needs and learning styles, I'll give you my top 10 suggestions to help you get through this. Maybe you'll even discover some lifelong bonuses for your family, like I did. #2: Don't feel you have to mimic school hours; chances are you will finish in way less time. #9: Study something new to you. The first two weeks are always the hardest. Every year, my kids ...

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MINDMATTERS.AI -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2002: The only thing that makes us different from animals and plants [is] our human intellect.] ARTICLE: Have you noticed the remarkable cluelessness in atheist arguments about science and metaphysics? It's really on display in atheist and professor of philosophy Justin E. H. Smith's essay where he argues that reason is inferior to the non-rational behavior of animals. Think of the irony: a professor of philosophy, who is paid only to reason, uses reason to argue against reason. Why would he choose an inferior method -- reasoned argument -- when he could simply bash his listener over the head? Welcome to the bowels of atheist metaphysics. It would be funny if it were not so dangerous to our culture and to our souls. Reason is an immaterial power of the soul and is precisely what makes man qualitatively different from every other living thing. Reason has nothing to do with ...

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THEHOMESCHOOLMOM.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: For our many past articles on this subject, please search Ismaili Digest for "homeschooling".] ARTICLE: Social distancing requirements, closed school systems, and working from home have combined to bring families suddenly together in a way they may never have experienced. We are seeing lots of parents asking about how to homeschool or help their children learn at home. These resources can help with scheduling, keeping kids engaged, and staying sane during social distancing. Be sure to check out our complete household planner and unit study downloads! Have grace with yourself and your kids--this is ...

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THEHOMESCHOOLMOM.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: For our many past articles on this subject, please search Ismaili Digest for "homeschooling".] ARTICLE: Although this unusual situation is being called homeschooling, it's really not. It can be scary to homeschool even after much research and preparation but suddenly finding yourself in charge of your children's learning, without choosing to be, may seem overwhelming or even terrifying. If your child is staying connected with the public school during their time at home, just follow the school's academic plan. But when it comes to organizing your days, homeschool schedules come in all shapes and sizes and it can be confusing to decide how to schedule your child's day when you have never homeschooled. The truth is that there is no typical homeschool day; homeschool schedules are as varied as homeschool families. Sometimes the order of the homeschooling schedule is less important than ...

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INTROVERTDEAR.COM -- We're living in uncertain and even scary times right now. Many of us are stuck in our own homes, unable to go out and do the things we're so used to doing. A coworker was telling me how her extroverted son is going crazy right now because he can't go out and do anything. Since we introverts are wired to handle being by ourselves, we're much better able to handle forced social isolation. The world is turning to us to learn how to best handle this crisis and we have a unique opportunity to show the world not only how to be an introvert, but that introversion is a great thing -- not just during times of crisis, but all the time. Here are five things I believe we as introverts should be showing everyone: 1. Spending time alone helps ...

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EVIEMAGAZINE.COM -- Most of us assumed education could only be done one way: in school. However, besides "normal" schools, some parents educate their children in their homes. And now that coronavirus has put normal day to day activities, like going to school, on hold parents of school kids are getting a taste of what homeschooling is really like. As homeschooling becomes the norm for the next few weeks, it's becoming clear just how much homeschooling moms deal with at home with the kids every single day. Mothers who choose to homeschool are warriors in their own right, giving up much of their own personal freedom for the betterment of the next generation. Watching parents gain a deeper respect for these homeschooling moms is heartening. Homeschooling has been shown to ...

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WATTSUPWITHTHAT.COM -- The most surprising finding of the Italian Government report was that of the 355 people who died (at the time of the report), only 3 didn't have any of the diseases listed above [hypertension, diabetes, ischemic heart disease, atrial fibrillation, etc.]). Three! Consider the people who died: - More were over 90 than under 60. - The average age was 79 years. - All but three had at least one other disease, so basically all were already sick. - 75% had two other diseases, and half of them had 3 or more other diseases. Half! That's not a sample of the people in the street or an Italian family. That's a sample of a totally different population. I was forced to a curious conclusion, both discouraging and encouraging. It is that most of these COVID-19 cases were probably not community-acquired. Instead, I would hazard a guess that most of them go by the curious name of "nosocomial" infections which originate in a hospital. Here's what I suspect. I think ...

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PSYCHOLOGYTODAY.COM -- There are intriguing positives to boredom: "By encouraging contemplation and daydreaming, it can spur creativity," writes Stewart in "The Atlantic". In a couple of different studies people who were bored before being given a creative task did better on the task. Is boredom good for kids? It depends on what happens when they are bored. Do they plug in? Then no. Or does it spur them to creative play? Then yes. Do they get frustrated and have to figure it out? Then also, yes. Your kids can definitely handle boredom. Just wait and see what they do. If you doubt your child's creativity, just hang out in the doctor's office. Ignored, even briefly, kids find lots of creative ways to deal with boredom. They ...

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QUILLETTE.COM -- "In Praise of Boredom" was Joseph Brodsky's 1989 Dartmouth College commencement address. Here is his opening sentence: "A substantial part of what lies ahead of you is going to be claimed by boredom." As a child I was well acquainted with boredom. It was there when I woke up in the morning and it stretched out over the landscape. Boy, did I feel small. But I learned humility and curiosity. I recently heard a friend planning a few days her daughter had off school. Barricade after barricade was erected against boredom. A tight schedule of activities, each more stimulating than the last. I have friends who, when they drive their small daughters half an hour across town, plug them both in to separate iPads. I quite often travel long distances on trains. I don't think ...

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NYPOST.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: For our many past articles on this subject, please search Ismaili Digest for "homeschool".] ARTICLE: "To be honest, I didn't really have a clue what I was doing, but we muddled through," says Falik, 41. "It wound up being a fun, successful morning." Muddling through -- at least during the early days of home education -- is exactly what expert Courtney Ostaff, recommends to parents considering that option. What about simulating that classroom experience? Do kids really need a separate learning space? Ostoff says parents shouldn't worry about it. "All you really need is a flat surface like a kitchen or dining table," she says. Her general rule of thumb regarding time spent homeschooling is 15 minutes for each year of a child's life. Therefore a 6-year-old would receive tuition for 90 minutes, while an 8-year-old would get two hours. For established homeschoolers ...

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DISCOVERY.ORG -- VIA THE WALL STREET JOURNAL -- A Chinese paleontologist lectures around the world saying that recent fossil finds in his country are inconsistent with the Darwinian theory of evolution. His reason: The major animal groups appear abruptly in the rocks over a relatively short time, rather than evolving gradually from a common ancestor as Darwin's theory predicts. When this conclusion upsets American scientists, he wryly comments: "In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin." The reason evolution is so controversial is that it is the main scientific prop for scientific naturalism. All the most prominent Darwinists proclaim naturalistic philosophy. Richard Dawkins exults that Darwin "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist" ... Here's just one example of how real science is replaced by flim-flam. The standard textbook example of natural selection involves a species of finches in the Galapagos ...

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DISCOVERY.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Mawlana Sultan Muhammad Shah, 1956: "The young Waezin should each try and find new arguments based on the discoveries in all branches of science for keeping the human soul like [sic] the ocean with the Divine wisdom and power."] ARTICLE: Although naturalistic dogma has dominated public education for a half century, its mandarins have failed to convince. I receive regular inquiries even from some of the world's most thoroughly secularized nations that indicate skepticism toward evolutionary naturalism. Clearly, reports of the death of God have been greatly exaggerated. That Darwinist authorities find public scrutiny of their theory so threatening indicates to me that there is a hidden insecurity in their intellectual position which will eventually become so visible it can no longer be concealed. One early sign of that came in December 2004 when the famed atheist philosopher Anthony Flew announced that he had converted to philosophical theism [and then published "There is a God: How the world's most notorious atheist changed his mind"]. Scientific discoveries and related reasoning had convinced him that there is an intelligent designer of the natural universe. A genuinely confident scientific culture ...

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