Gamification is the application of game elements into nongame spaces. It is the permeation of ideas and values from the sphere of play and leisure to other social spaces. It’s premised on a seductive idea: if you layer elements of games, such as rules, feedback systems, rewards and videogame-like user interfaces over reality, it will make any activity motivating, fair and (potentially) fun. ‘We are starving and games are feeding us,’ writes Jane McGonigal in Reality Is Broken (2011). ‘What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality?’
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Gamification has a dark side - 0 views
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But gamification’s trapping of total fun masks that we have very little control over the games we are made to play – and hides the fact that these games are not games at all. Gamified systems are tools, not toys. They can teach complex topics, engage us with otherwise difficult problems. Or they can function as subtle systems of social control.
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The problem of the gamified workplace goes beyond micromanagement. The business ethicist Tae Wan Kim at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh warns that gamified systems have the potential to complicate and subvert ethical reasoning. He cites the example of a drowning child. If you save the child, motivated by empathy, sympathy or goodwill – that’s a morally good act. But say you gamify the situation. Say you earn points for saving drowning children. ‘Your gamified act is ethically unworthy,’ he explained to me in an email. Providing extrinsic gamified motivators, even if they work as intended, deprive us of the option to live worthy lives, Kim argues. ‘The workplace is a sacred space where we develop ourselves and help others,’ he notes. ‘Gamified workers have difficulty seeing what contributions they really make.’
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Chinese researcher claims first gene-edited babies - 0 views
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“I feel a strong responsibility that it’s not just to make a first, but also make it an example,” He told the AP. “Society will decide what to do next” in terms of allowing or forbidding such science.
Links 8/3/17 | naked capitalism - 0 views
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uarterBack August 3, 2017 at 8:31 am Re NYT Hacking Wars story, I have long had the same “self-licking ice cream cone” concerns. The military industrial complex has been slowly shaping polic opinion to make “kenetic” response to cyber attacks palatable. Consider this 2013 article: https://armscontrolnow.org/2013/05/30/is-there-a-place-for-nuclear-deterrence-in-cyberspace/ Cyber as a Casus Belli has two inherent fatal flaws in its inability to accurately prove attribution and the extent of damage. The former makes it impossible to know if a counter attack is against a party that had any role in the original cyber attack, and the latter makes it impossible to prove or verify harm, which is the foundation of the “proportional response” required under the international laws of war. These two flaws can raise the potential of false flags to a new level. Do we really want to shed blood of untold numbers of military and civilian soles because of a report of a unattributable cyber attack on a purported “crital infrastructure component” that nobody every heard of,and that cannot be confirmed as existing in the first place? Gulf of Tonkin, eat your heart out. Look no further than our present history. We are slowly moving towards war with Russia based on the premise of a cyber attack that may, or may not, have actually happened, and no one has been allowed to inspect the physical servers related to the claimed attack. International laws of war should be clear that kenetic response to cyber attacks must be off the table. The only acceptable proportionate attacks should e economic or offensive cyber. Full stop.
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I am a data factory (and so are you) - 0 views
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Data is no less a form of common property than oil or soil or copper. We make data together, and we make it meaningful together, but its value is currently captured by the companies that own it. We find ourselves in the position of a colonized country, our resources extracted to fill faraway pockets. Wealth that belongs to the many — wealth that could help feed, educate, house and heal people — is used to enrich the few. The solution is to take up the template of resource nationalism, and nationalize our data reserves.
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Emphasising time well spent means creating a Facebook that prioritises data-rich personal interactions that Facebook can use to make a more engaging platform. Rather than spending a lot of time doing things that Facebook doesn’t find valuable – such as watching viral videos – you can spend a bit less time, but spend it doing things that Facebook does find valuable. In other words, “time well spent” means Facebook can monetise more efficiently. It can prioritise the intensity of data extraction over its extensiveness. This is a wise business move, disguised as a concession to critics. Shifting to this model not only sidesteps concerns about tech addiction – it also acknowledges certain basic limits to Facebook’s current growth model. There are only so many hours in the day. Facebook can’t keep prioritising total time spent – it has to extract more value from less time.
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But let’s assume that our vast data collective is secure, well managed, and put to purely democratic ends. The shift of data ownership from the private to the public sector may well succeed in reducing the economic power of Silicon Valley, but what it would also do is reinforce and indeed institutionalize Silicon Valley’s computationalist ideology, with its foundational, Taylorist belief that, at a personal and collective level, humanity can and should be optimized through better programming. The ethos and incentives of constant surveillance would become even more deeply embedded in our lives, as we take on the roles of both the watched and the watcher. Consumer, track thyself! And, even with such a shift in ownership, we’d still confront the fraught issues of design, manipulation, and agency.
People Suck At Decision Making - Corsair's Business - 0 views
Making a Living With Airbnb - The New York Times - 0 views
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Exchange platforms as user-ownered cooperatives?
Creating robots capable of moral reasoning is like parenting | Aeon Essays - 0 views
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Intelligent machines will be our intellectual children, our progeny. They will start off inheriting many of our moral norms, because we will not allow anything else. But they will come to reflect on their nature, including their relationships with us and with each other. If we are wise and benevolent, we will have prepared the way for them to make their own choices – just as we do with our adolescent children.What does this mean in practice? It means being ready to accept that machines might eventually make moral decisions that none of us find acceptable. The only condition is that they must be able to give intelligible reasons for what they’re doing. An intelligible reason is one you can at least see why someone might find morally motivating, even if you don’t necessarily agree.
Facebook, I'm Begging You, Please Make Yourself Better - 0 views
How to improve productivity? Make sure it's shared broadly. - 0 views
Jane Jacobs's Theories on Urban Planning-and Democracy in America - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.
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I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas. I was taught that the American’s right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant.
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Her 1,500-word speech, a version of which appears in Vital Little Plans, became the basis for The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her main argument was Kirk’s: Small neighborhood stores, ignored by the planners in their grim demolition derby, were essential social hubs. She added that sidewalks, stoops, laundries, and mailbox areas were also indispensable centers of community activity, and that sterile, vacant outdoor space served nobody. “The least we can do,” she said, “is to respect—in the deepest sense—strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own.”
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Rebuilding our Civic Muscles - 0 views
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Voting in elections every four years is not enough. Sometimes, working in policy makes me forget the value of direct service and volunteering. There are civic institutions throughout each and every community, from homeless shelters to schools and community centers, that need support. These spaces present us with countless opportunities for direct human interaction, and they allow us to strengthen our communities in the process. Use your hands to make something. Civic organizations provide critical infrastructure in our communities.
The Archdruid Report: When The Shouting Stops - 0 views
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"That said, there's another factor driving the reaction of Clinton's supporters, and the best way I can find to approach it is to consider one of the more thoughtful responses from that side of the political landscape, an incisive essay posted to Livejournal last week by someone who goes by the nom de Web "Ferrett Steinmetz." The essay's titled The Cold, Cold Math We'll Need to Survive the Next Twenty Years, and it comes so close to understanding what happened last Tuesday that the remaining gap offers an unsparing glimpse straight to the heart of the failure of the Left to make its case to the rest of the American people. At the heart of the essay are two indisputable points. The first is that the core constituencies of the Democratic Party are not large enough by themselves to decide who gets to be president. That's just as true of the Republican party, by the way, and with few exceptions it's true in every democratic society. Each party large enough to matter has a set of core constituencies who can be counted on to vote for it under most circumstances, and then has to figure out how to appeal to enough people outside its own base to win elections. That's something that both parties in the US tend to forget from time to time, and when they do so, they lose. The second indisputable point is that if Democrats want to win an election in today's America, they have to find ways to reach out to people who don't share the values and interests of the Left. It's the way that Ferrett Steinmetz frames that second point, though, that shows why the Democratic Party failed to accomplish that necessary task this time. "We have to reach out to people who hate us," Steinmetz says, and admits that he has no idea at all how to do that. "
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