Angela Merkel has called on major internet platforms to divulge the secrets of their algorithms, arguing that their lack of transparency endangers debating culture.
The German chancellor said internet users had a right to know how and on what basis the information they received via search engines was channelled to them.
Speaking to a media conference in Munich, Merkel said: “I’m of the opinion that algorithms must be made more transparent, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen about questions like ‘what influences my behaviour on the internet and that of others?’.
“Algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to a distortion of our perception, they can shrink our expanse of information.”
Angela Merkel: internet search engines are 'distorting perception' | World news | The G... - 0 views
The New Science of Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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This new science of mind is based on the principle that our mind and our brain are inseparable. The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions. It is responsible not only for relatively simple motor behaviors like running and eating, but also for complex acts that we consider quintessentially human, like thinking, speaking and creating works of art. Looked at from this perspective, our mind is a set of operations carried out by our brain. The same principle of unity applies to mental disorders.
What it feels like to be the last generation to remember life before the internet - Quartz - 0 views
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Harris takes a different path from those that have come before. Instead of a broad investigation into the effects on constant connectivity on human behaviour, Harris looks at a very specific demographic: people born before 1985, or the very opposite of the “millennial” demographic coveted by advertisers and targeted by new media outlets.
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It was neither better nor worse than the world we live in today. Like technology, it just was.
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That means being able to notice things like the reduction of interactions to numbers, and how that translates into quantifications of human worth. “I think it has to do with this notion of online accountability. That is, noticing that you actually count seems to be related to a sense of self worth,” he says over the phone from Toronto, where he is based. “So it’s like if a tweet gets retweeted a couple of hundred times, that must mean that my thoughts are worthy. If my Facebook photo is ‘liked,’ that must mean I am good looking. One of the things that concerns me about a media diet that is overly online, is that we lose the ability to decide for ourselves what we think about who we are.” +
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We are more rational than those who nudge us - Steven Poole - Aeon - 3 views
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We are told that we are an irrational tangle of biases, to be nudged any which way. Does this claim stand to reason?
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A culture that believes its citizens are not reliably competent thinkers will treat those citizens differently to one that respects their reflective autonomy. Which kind of culture do we want to be? And we do have a choice. Because it turns out that the modern vision of compromised rationality is more open to challenge than many of its followers accept.
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Modern skepticism about rationality is largely motivated by years of experiments on cognitive bias.
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