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sissij

What Facebook Owes to Journalism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cebook-owes-to-journalism.html

new york times social media language

shared by sissij on 22 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • declared that “a strong news industry is also critical to building an informed community.”
  • Unfortunately, his memo ignored two major points — the role that Facebook and other technology platforms are playing in inadvertently damaging local news media, and the one way they could actually save journalism: with a massive philanthropic commitment.
  • As advertising spending shifted from print, TV and radio to the internet, the money didn’t mostly go to digital news organizations. Increasingly, it goes to Facebook and Google.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But just because the result is unintentional doesn’t mean it is fantasy: Newsrooms have been decimated, with basic accountability reporting slashed as a result.
  • I’m not saying that the good stuff — the mobile revolution, blocking intrusive ads, better marketing options for small businesses — doesn’t outweigh the bad. And local news organizations absolutely contributed to the problem with their sluggish and often uncreative reaction to the digital revolution.
  • sissij on 22 Feb 17
     
    This article discuss the impact of internet on local news organizations. I agree with the author that the internet do get a lot of ad money and make local news organizations have less funding. Although there are donations, it is still very little compare to what local news organizations used to have. This might be part of the reason why local news organizations don't do well on giving great informations.But I think the time is moving forward, Facebook and google should take some of the responsibility as they get more funding and resources. This article is very persuasive as it has many data and evidence in support. I really like that the author acknowledge the counterargument in his article to make it more reliable. --Sissi (2/22/2017)
summertyler

Why Facebook's News Experiment Matters to Readers - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...he-news-and-how-it-doesnt.html

facebook news experiment nytimes

shared by summertyler on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Facebook’s new plan to host news publications’ stories directly is not only about page views, advertising revenue or the number of seconds it takes for an article to load. It is about who owns the relationship with readers.
  • Tech companies have always stepped on one another’s toes to try to become people’s gateway to the digital world — the only place people need to go to get what they want.
  • all kinds of companies are now becoming tech companies
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Facebook’s experiment, called instant articles, is small to start — just a few articles from nine media companies, including The New York Times. But it signals a major shift in the relationship between publications and their readers. If you want to read the news, Facebook is saying, come to Facebook, not to NBC News or The Atlantic or The Times — and when you come, don’t leave. (For now, these articles can be viewed on an iPhone running the Facebook app.)
  • The front page of a newspaper and the cover of a magazine lost their dominance long ago. Web home pages are following suit. Increasingly, the articles, videos, photographs and graphics that media organizations publish are stand-alone fragments that readers happen upon one at a time, often on social media.
  • “In digital, every story becomes unbundled from each other, so if you’re not thinking of each story as living on its own, it’s tying yourself back to an analog era,”
  • summertyler on 02 Jun 15
     
    Should we trust social media with the news?
Javier E

They're Watching You at Work - Don Peck - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...354681

data analytics work Big Data university potential aptitude

shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Predictive statistical analysis, harnessed to big data, appears poised to alter the way millions of people are hired and assessed.
  • By one estimate, more than 98 percent of the world’s information is now stored digitally, and the volume of that data has quadrupled since 2007.
  • The application of predictive analytics to people’s careers—an emerging field sometimes called “people analytics”—is enormously challenging, not to mention ethically fraught
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  • By the end of World War II, however, American corporations were facing severe talent shortages. Their senior executives were growing old, and a dearth of hiring from the Depression through the war had resulted in a shortfall of able, well-trained managers. Finding people who had the potential to rise quickly through the ranks became an overriding preoccupation of American businesses. They began to devise a formal hiring-and-management system based in part on new studies of human behavior, and in part on military techniques developed during both world wars, when huge mobilization efforts and mass casualties created the need to get the right people into the right roles as efficiently as possible. By the 1950s, it was not unusual for companies to spend days with young applicants for professional jobs, conducting a battery of tests, all with an eye toward corner-office potential.
  • But companies abandoned their hard-edged practices for another important reason: many of their methods of evaluation turned out not to be very scientific.
  • this regime, so widespread in corporate America at mid-century, had almost disappeared by 1990. “I think an HR person from the late 1970s would be stunned to see how casually companies hire now,”
  • Many factors explain the change, he said, and then he ticked off a number of them: Increased job-switching has made it less important and less economical for companies to test so thoroughly. A heightened focus on short-term financial results has led to deep cuts in corporate functions that bear fruit only in the long term. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which exposed companies to legal liability for discriminatory hiring practices, has made HR departments wary of any broadly applied and clearly scored test that might later be shown to be systematically biased.
  • about a quarter of the country’s corporations were using similar tests to evaluate managers and junior executives, usually to assess whether they were ready for bigger roles.
  • He has encouraged the company’s HR executives to think about applying the games to the recruitment and evaluation of all professional workers.
  • Knack makes app-based video games, among them Dungeon Scrawl, a quest game requiring the player to navigate a maze and solve puzzles, and Wasabi Waiter, which involves delivering the right sushi to the right customer at an increasingly crowded happy hour. These games aren’t just for play: they’ve been designed by a team of neuroscientists, psychologists, and data scientists to suss out human potential. Play one of them for just 20 minutes, says Guy Halfteck, Knack’s founder, and you’ll generate several megabytes of data, exponentially more than what’s collected by the SAT or a personality test. How long you hesitate before taking every action, the sequence of actions you take, how you solve problems—all of these factors and many more are logged as you play, and then are used to analyze your creativity, your persistence, your capacity to learn quickly from mistakes, your ability to prioritize, and even your social intelligence and personality. The end result, Halfteck says, is a high-resolution portrait of your psyche and intellect, and an assessment of your potential as a leader or an innovator.
  • When the results came back, Haringa recalled, his heart began to beat a little faster. Without ever seeing the ideas, without meeting or interviewing the people who’d proposed them, without knowing their title or background or academic pedigree, Knack’s algorithm had identified the people whose ideas had panned out. The top 10 percent of the idea generators as predicted by Knack were in fact those who’d gone furthest in the process.
  • What Knack is doing, Haringa told me, “is almost like a paradigm shift.” It offers a way for his GameChanger unit to avoid wasting time on the 80 people out of 100—nearly all of whom look smart, well-trained, and plausible on paper—whose ideas just aren’t likely to work out.
  • Aptitude, skills, personal history, psychological stability, discretion, loyalty—companies at the time felt they had a need (and the right) to look into them all. That ambit is expanding once again, and this is undeniably unsettling. Should the ideas of scientists be dismissed because of the way they play a game? Should job candidates be ranked by what their Web habits say about them? Should the “data signature” of natural leaders play a role in promotion? These are all live questions today, and they prompt heavy concerns: that we will cede one of the most subtle and human of skills, the evaluation of the gifts and promise of other people, to machines; that the models will get it wrong; that some people will never get a shot in the new workforce.
  • scoring distance from work could violate equal-employment-opportunity standards. Marital status? Motherhood? Church membership? “Stuff like that,” Meyerle said, “we just don’t touch”—at least not in the U.S., where the legal environment is strict. Meyerle told me that Evolv has looked into these sorts of factors in its work for clients abroad, and that some of them produce “startling results.”
  • consider the alternative. A mountain of scholarly literature has shown that the intuitive way we now judge professional potential is rife with snap judgments and hidden biases, rooted in our upbringing or in deep neurological connections that doubtless served us well on the savanna but would seem to have less bearing on the world of work.
  • We may like to think that society has become more enlightened since those days, and in many ways it has, but our biases are mostly unconscious, and they can run surprisingly deep. Consider race. For a 2004 study called “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?,” the economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand put white-sounding names (Emily Walsh, Greg Baker) or black-sounding names (Lakisha Washington, Jamal Jones) on similar fictitious résumés, which they then sent out to a variety of companies in Boston and Chicago. To get the same number of callbacks, they learned, they needed to either send out half again as many résumés with black names as those with white names, or add eight extra years of relevant work experience to the résumés with black names.
  • a sociologist at Northwestern, spent parts of the three years from 2006 to 2008 interviewing professionals from elite investment banks, consultancies, and law firms about how they recruited, interviewed, and evaluated candidates, and concluded that among the most important factors driving their hiring recommendations were—wait for it—shared leisure interests.
  • Lacking “reliable predictors of future performance,” Rivera writes, “assessors purposefully used their own experiences as models of merit.” Former college athletes “typically prized participation in varsity sports above all other types of involvement.” People who’d majored in engineering gave engineers a leg up, believing they were better prepared.
  • the prevailing system of hiring and management in this country involves a level of dysfunction that should be inconceivable in an economy as sophisticated as ours. Recent survey data collected by the Corporate Executive Board, for example, indicate that nearly a quarter of all new hires leave their company within a year of their start date, and that hiring managers wish they’d never extended an offer to one out of every five members on their team
  • In the late 1990s, as these assessments shifted from paper to digital formats and proliferated, data scientists started doing massive tests of what makes for a successful customer-support technician or salesperson. This has unquestionably improved the quality of the workers at many firms.
  • In 2010, however, Xerox switched to an online evaluation that incorporates personality testing, cognitive-skill assessment, and multiple-choice questions about how the applicant would handle specific scenarios that he or she might encounter on the job. An algorithm behind the evaluation analyzes the responses, along with factual information gleaned from the candidate’s application, and spits out a color-coded rating: red (poor candidate), yellow (middling), or green (hire away). Those candidates who score best, I learned, tend to exhibit a creative but not overly inquisitive personality, and participate in at least one but not more than four social networks, among many other factors. (Previous experience, one of the few criteria that Xerox had explicitly screened for in the past, turns out to have no bearing on either productivity or retention
  • When Xerox started using the score in its hiring decisions, the quality of its hires immediately improved. The rate of attrition fell by 20 percent in the initial pilot period, and over time, the number of promotions rose. Xerox still interviews all candidates in person before deciding to hire them, Morse told me, but, she added, “We’re getting to the point where some of our hiring managers don’t even want to interview anymore”
  • Gone are the days, Ostberg told me, when, say, a small survey of college students would be used to predict the statistical validity of an evaluation tool. “We’ve got a data set of 347,000 actual employees who have gone through these different types of assessments or tools,” he told me, “and now we have performance-outcome data, and we can split those and slice and dice by industry and location.”
  • Evolv’s tests allow companies to capture data about everybody who applies for work, and everybody who gets hired—a complete data set from which sample bias, long a major vexation for industrial-organization psychologists, simply disappears. The sheer number of observations that this approach makes possible allows Evolv to say with precision which attributes matter more to the success of retail-sales workers (decisiveness, spatial orientation, persuasiveness) or customer-service personnel at call centers (rapport-building)
  • There are some data that Evolv simply won’t use, out of a concern that the information might lead to systematic bias against whole classes of people
  • the idea that hiring was a science fell out of favor. But now it’s coming back, thanks to new technologies and methods of analysis that are cheaper, faster, and much-wider-ranging than what we had before
  • what most excites him are the possibilities that arise from monitoring the entire life cycle of a worker at any given company.
  • Now the two companies are working together to marry pre-hire assessments to an increasing array of post-hire data: about not only performance and duration of service but also who trained the employees; who has managed them; whether they were promoted to a supervisory role, and how quickly; how they performed in that role; and why they eventually left.
  • What begins with an online screening test for entry-level workers ends with the transformation of nearly every aspect of hiring, performance assessment, and management.
  • I turned to Sandy Pentland, the director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory at MIT. In recent years, Pentland has pioneered the use of specialized electronic “badges” that transmit data about employees’ interactions as they go about their days. The badges capture all sorts of information about formal and informal conversations: their length; the tone of voice and gestures of the people involved; how much those people talk, listen, and interrupt; the degree to which they demonstrate empathy and extroversion; and more. Each badge generates about 100 data points a minute.
  • he tried the badges out on about 2,500 people, in 21 different organizations, and learned a number of interesting lessons. About a third of team performance, he discovered, can usually be predicted merely by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members. (Too many is as much of a problem as too few.) Using data gathered by the badges, he was able to predict which teams would win a business-plan contest, and which workers would (rightly) say they’d had a “productive” or “creative” day. Not only that, but he claimed that his researchers had discovered the “data signature” of natural leaders, whom he called “charismatic connectors” and all of whom, he reported, circulate actively, give their time democratically to others, engage in brief but energetic conversations, and listen at least as much as they talk.
  • His group is developing apps to allow team members to view their own metrics more or less in real time, so that they can see, relative to the benchmarks of highly successful employees, whether they’re getting out of their offices enough, or listening enough, or spending enough time with people outside their own team.
  • Torrents of data are routinely collected by American companies and now sit on corporate servers, or in the cloud, awaiting analysis. Bloomberg reportedly logs every keystroke of every employee, along with their comings and goings in the office. The Las Vegas casino Harrah’s tracks the smiles of the card dealers and waitstaff on the floor (its analytics team has quantified the impact of smiling on customer satisfaction). E‑mail, of course, presents an especially rich vein to be mined for insights about our productivity, our treatment of co-workers, our willingness to collaborate or lend a hand, our patterns of written language, and what those patterns reveal about our intelligence, social skills, and behavior.
  • people analytics will ultimately have a vastly larger impact on the economy than the algorithms that now trade on Wall Street or figure out which ads to show us. He reminded me that we’ve witnessed this kind of transformation before in the history of management science. Near the turn of the 20th century, both Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford famously paced the factory floor with stopwatches, to improve worker efficiency.
  • “The quantities of data that those earlier generations were working with,” he said, “were infinitesimal compared to what’s available now. There’s been a real sea change in the past five years, where the quantities have just grown so large—petabytes, exabytes, zetta—that you start to be able to do things you never could before.”
  • People analytics will unquestionably provide many workers with more options and more power. Gild, for example, helps companies find undervalued software programmers, working indirectly to raise those people’s pay. Other companies are doing similar work. One called Entelo, for instance, specializes in using algorithms to identify potentially unhappy programmers who might be receptive to a phone cal
  • He sees it not only as a boon to a business’s productivity and overall health but also as an important new tool that individual employees can use for self-improvement: a sort of radically expanded The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, custom-written for each of us, or at least each type of job, in the workforce.
  • the most exotic development in people analytics today is the creation of algorithms to assess the potential of all workers, across all companies, all the time.
  • The way Gild arrives at these scores is not simple. The company’s algorithms begin by scouring the Web for any and all open-source code, and for the coders who wrote it. They evaluate the code for its simplicity, elegance, documentation, and several other factors, including the frequency with which it’s been adopted by other programmers. For code that was written for paid projects, they look at completion times and other measures of productivity. Then they look at questions and answers on social forums such as Stack Overflow, a popular destination for programmers seeking advice on challenging projects. They consider how popular a given coder’s advice is, and how widely that advice ranges.
  • The algorithms go further still. They assess the way coders use language on social networks from LinkedIn to Twitter; the company has determined that certain phrases and words used in association with one another can distinguish expert programmers from less skilled ones. Gild knows these phrases and words are associated with good coding because it can correlate them with its evaluation of open-source code, and with the language and online behavior of programmers in good positions at prestigious companies.
  • having made those correlations, Gild can then score programmers who haven’t written open-source code at all, by analyzing the host of clues embedded in their online histories. They’re not all obvious, or easy to explain. Vivienne Ming, Gild’s chief scientist, told me that one solid predictor of strong coding is an affinity for a particular Japanese manga site.
  • Gild’s CEO, Sheeroy Desai, told me he believes his company’s approach can be applied to any occupation characterized by large, active online communities, where people post and cite individual work, ask and answer professional questions, and get feedback on projects. Graphic design is one field that the company is now looking at, and many scientific, technical, and engineering roles might also fit the bill. Regardless of their occupation, most people leave “data exhaust” in their wake, a kind of digital aura that can reveal a lot about a potential hire.
  • professionally relevant personality traits can be judged effectively merely by scanning Facebook feeds and photos. LinkedIn, of course, captures an enormous amount of professional data and network information, across just about every profession. A controversial start-up called Klout has made its mission the measurement and public scoring of people’s online social influence.
  • Mullainathan expressed amazement at how little most creative and professional workers (himself included) know about what makes them effective or ineffective in the office. Most of us can’t even say with any certainty how long we’ve spent gathering information for a given project, or our pattern of information-gathering, never mind know which parts of the pattern should be reinforced, and which jettisoned. As Mullainathan put it, we don’t know our own “production function.”
  • Over time, better job-matching technologies are likely to begin serving people directly, helping them see more clearly which jobs might suit them and which companies could use their skills. In the future, Gild plans to let programmers see their own profiles and take skills challenges to try to improve their scores. It intends to show them its estimates of their market value, too, and to recommend coursework that might allow them to raise their scores even more. Not least, it plans to make accessible the scores of typical hires at specific companies, so that software engineers can better see the profile they’d need to land a particular job
  • Knack, for its part, is making some of its video games available to anyone with a smartphone, so people can get a better sense of their strengths, and of the fields in which their strengths would be most valued. (Palo Alto High School recently adopted the games to help students assess careers.) Ultimately, the company hopes to act as matchmaker between a large network of people who play its games (or have ever played its games) and a widening roster of corporate clients, each with its own specific profile for any given type of job.
  • When I began my reporting for this story, I was worried that people analytics, if it worked at all, would only widen the divergent arcs of our professional lives, further gilding the path of the meritocratic elite from cradle to grave, and shutting out some workers more definitively. But I now believe the opposite is likely to happen, and that we’re headed toward a labor market that’s fairer to people at every stage of their careers
  • For decades, as we’ve assessed people’s potential in the professional workforce, the most important piece of data—the one that launches careers or keeps them grounded—has been educational background: typically, whether and where people went to college, and how they did there. Over the past couple of generations, colleges and universities have become the gatekeepers to a prosperous life. A degree has become a signal of intelligence and conscientiousness, one that grows stronger the more selective the school and the higher a student’s GPA, that is easily understood by employers, and that, until the advent of people analytics, was probably unrivaled in its predictive powers.
  • the limitations of that signal—the way it degrades with age, its overall imprecision, its many inherent biases, its extraordinary cost—are obvious. “Academic environments are artificial environments,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, told The New York Times in June. “People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment,” which is often quite different from the workplace.
  • because one’s college history is such a crucial signal in our labor market, perfectly able people who simply couldn’t sit still in a classroom at the age of 16, or who didn’t have their act together at 18, or who chose not to go to graduate school at 22, routinely get left behind for good. That such early factors so profoundly affect career arcs and hiring decisions made two or three decades later is, on its face, absurd.
  • I spoke with managers at a lot of companies who are using advanced analytics to reevaluate and reshape their hiring, and nearly all of them told me that their research is leading them toward pools of candidates who didn’t attend college—for tech jobs, for high-end sales positions, for some managerial roles. In some limited cases, this is because their analytics revealed no benefit whatsoever to hiring people with college degrees; in other cases, and more often, it’s because they revealed signals that function far better than college history,
  • Google, too, is hiring a growing number of nongraduates. Many of the people I talked with reported that when it comes to high-paying and fast-track jobs, they’re reducing their preference for Ivy Leaguers and graduates of other highly selective schools.
  • This process is just beginning. Online courses are proliferating, and so are online markets that involve crowd-sourcing. Both arenas offer new opportunities for workers to build skills and showcase competence. Neither produces the kind of instantly recognizable signals of potential that a degree from a selective college, or a first job at a prestigious firm, might. That’s a problem for traditional hiring managers, because sifting through lots of small signals is so difficult and time-consuming.
  • all of these new developments raise philosophical questions. As professional performance becomes easier to measure and see, will we become slaves to our own status and potential, ever-focused on the metrics that tell us how and whether we are measuring up? Will too much knowledge about our limitations hinder achievement and stifle our dreams? All I can offer in response to these questions, ironically, is my own gut sense, which leads me to feel cautiously optimistic.
  • Google’s understanding of the promise of analytics is probably better than anybody else’s, and the company has been changing its hiring and management practices as a result of its ongoing analyses. (Brainteasers are no longer used in interviews, because they do not correlate with job success; GPA is not considered for anyone more than two years out of school, for the same reason—the list goes on.) But for all of Google’s technological enthusiasm, these same practices are still deeply human. A real, live person looks at every résumé the company receives. Hiring decisions are made by committee and are based in no small part on opinions formed during structured interviews.
Javier E

Dating Study: At What Age Are Men, Women Most Desirable? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...567083

dating matchmaking Psychology social media

shared by Javier E on 11 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • “Three-quarters, or more, of people are dating aspirationally,” she says. And according to a new study, users of online-dating sites spend most of their time trying to contact people “out of their league.”In fact, most online-dating users tend to message people exactly 25 percent more desirable than they are.
  • “There’s so much folk wisdom about dating and courtship, and very little scientific evidence,” she told me recently. “My research comes out of realizing that with these large-scale data sets, we can shed light on a lot of these old dating aphorisms
  • Bruch and her colleagues analyzed thousands of messages exchanged on a “popular, free online-dating service” between more than 186,000 straight men and women. They looked only at four metro areas—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle—and only at messages from January 2014.
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  • imagine that you are a very desirable user. Your specific desirability rank would have been generated by two figures: whether other desirable people contacted you, and whether other desirable people responded when you contacted them. If you contacted a much less desirable person, their desirability score would rise; if they contacted you and you replied, then your score would fall.
  • The team had to analyze both first messages and first replies, because, well, men usually make the first move. “A defining feature of heterosexual online dating is that, in the vast majority of cases, it is men who establish the first contact—more than 80 percent of first messages are from men in our data set,” the study says. But “women reply very selectively to the messages they receive from men—their average reply rate is less than 20 percent—so women’s replies … can give us significant insight about who they are interested in.”
  • It found that—insofar as dating “leagues” are not different tiers of hotness, but a single ascending hierarchy of desirability—then they do seem to exist in the data. But people do not seem universally locked into them—and they can occasionally find success escaping from theirs.
  • “I mean, everybody knows—and as a sociologist, it’s been shown—that older women have a harder time in the dating market. But I hadn’t expected to see their desirability drop off from the time they’re 18 to the time they’re 65,”
  • Across the four cities and the thousands of users, consistent patterns around age, race, and education level emerge. White men and Asian women are consistently more desired than other users, while black women rank anomalously lower.
  • “what we are seeing is overwhelmingly the effect of white preferences,” she cautioned. “This site is predominantly white, 70 percent white. If this was a site that was 20 percent white, we may see a totally different desirability hierarchy.”
  • And Bruch emphasized that the hierarchy did not just depend on race, age, and education level: Because it is derived from user behavior, it “captures whatever traits people are responding to when they pursue partners. This will include traits like wittiness, genetic factors, or whatever else drives people to message,” she said.
  • Here are seven other not entirely happy takeaways from Bruch’s study:- In the study, men’s desirability peaks at age 50. But women’s desirability starts high at age 18 and falls throughout their lifespan.
  • The key, Bruch said, is that “persistence pays off.”“Reply rates [to the average message] are between zero percent and 10 percent,” she told me. Her advice: People should note those extremely low reply rates and send out more greetings.
  • I was also surprised to see how flat men’s desirability was over the age distribution,” she said. “For men, it peaks around age 40 or 50. Especially in New York.”
  • “New York is a special case for men,” Bruch told me. “It’s the market with the highest fraction of women. But it’s also about it being an incredibly dense market.”
  • “Seattle presents the most unfavorable dating climate for men, with as many as two men for every woman in some segments,” the study says
  • Across all four cities, men and women generally tended to send longer messages to people who were more desirable than them. Women, especially, deployed this strategy.
  • But the only place it paid off—and the only people for whom it worked with statistically significant success—were men in Seattle. The longest messages in the study were sent by Seattle men, the study says,“and only Seattle men experience a payoff to writing longer messages.”
  • A more educated man is almost always more desirable, on average: Men with postgraduate degrees outperform men with bachelor’s degrees; men with bachelor’s degrees beat high-school graduates.
  • “But for women, an undergraduate degree is most desirable,” the study says. “Postgraduate education is associated with decreased desirability among women.
  • men tended to use less positive language when messaging more desirable women. They may have stumbled upon this strategy through trial and error because “in all four cities, men experience slightly lower reply rates when they write more positively worded messages.”
  • “The most common behavior for both men and women is to contact members of the opposite sex who on average have roughly the same ranking as themselves,
  • “The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1504 messages during the period of observation,” the study says. This is “equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month.”
Javier E

Opinion | Richard Powers on What We Can Learn From Trees - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-podcast-richard-powers.html

trees buddhism immanence nature stewardship science knowledge

shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Theo and Robin have a nightly ritual where they say a prayer that Alyssa, the deceased wife and mother, taught them: May all sentient beings be free from needless suffering. That prayer itself comes from the four immeasurables in the Buddhist tradition.
  • When we enter into or recover this sense of kinship that was absolutely fundamental to so many indigenous cultures everywhere around the world at many, many different points in history, that there is no radical break between us and our kin, that even consciousness is shared, to some degree and to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, then death stops seeming like the enemy and it starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining.
  • Look, I’m 64 years old. I can remember sitting in psychology class as an undergraduate and having my professor declare that no, of course animals don’t have emotions because they don’t have an internal life. They don’t have conscious awareness. And so what looks to you like your dog being extremely happy or being extremely guilty, which dogs do so beautifully, is just your projection, your anthropomorphizing of those other creatures. And this prohibition against anthropomorphism created an artificial gulf between even those animals that are ridiculously near of kin to us, genetically.
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  • I don’t know if that sounds too complicated. But the point is, it’s not just giving up domination. It’s giving up this sense of separateness in favor of a sense of kinship. And those people who do often wonder how they failed to see how much continuity there is in the more-than-human world with the human world.
  • to go from terror into being and into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social and economic and cultural things. If the experiment is sacred, how can we possibly justify our food systems, for instance?
  • when I first went to the Smokies and hiked up into the old growth in the Southern Appalachians, it was like somebody threw a switch. There was some odd filter that had just been removed, and the world sounded different and smelled different.
  • richard powersYeah. In human exceptionalism, we may be completely aware of evolutionary continuity. We may understand that we have a literal kinship with the rest of creation, that all life on Earth employs the same genetic code, that there is a very small core of core genes and core proteins that is shared across all the kingdoms and phyla of life. But conceptually, we still have this demented idea that somehow consciousness creates a sanctity and a separation that almost nullifies the continuous elements of evolution and biology that we’ve come to understand.
  • if we want to begin this process of rehabilitation and transformation of consciousness that we are going to need in order to become part of the living Earth, it is going to be other kinds of minds that give us that clarity and strength and diversity and alternative way of thinking that could free us from this stranglehold of thought that looks only to the maximizing return on investment in very leverageable ways.
  • richard powersIt amazed me to get to the end of the first draft of “Bewilderment” and to realize how much Buddhism was in the book, from the simplest things.
  • I think there is nothing more science inflected than being out in the living world and the more-than-human world and trying to understand what’s happening.
  • And of course, we can combine this with what we were talking about earlier with death. If we see all of evolution as somehow leading up to us, all of human, cultural evolution leading up to neoliberalism and here we are just busily trying to accumulate and make meaning for ourselves, death becomes the enemy.
  • And you’re making the point in different ways throughout the book that it is the minds we think of as unusual, that we would diagnose as having some kind of problem or dysfunction that are, in some cases, are the only ones responding to the moment in the most common sense way it deserves. It is almost everybody else’s brain that has been broken.
  • it isn’t surprising. If you think of the characteristics of this dominant culture that we’ve been talking about — the fixation on control, the fixation on mastery, the fixation on management and accumulation and the resistance of decay — it isn’t surprising that that culture is also threatened by difference and divergence. It seeks out old, stable hierarchies — clear hierarchies — of control, and anything that’s not quite exploitable or leverageable in the way that the normal is terrifying and threatening.
  • And the more I looked for it, the more it pervaded the book.
  • ezra kleinI’ve heard you say that it has changed the way you measure a good day. Can you tell me about that?richard powersThat’s true.I suppose when I was still enthralled to commodity-mediated individualist market-driven human exceptionalism — we need a single word for this
  • And since moving to the Smokies and since publishing “The Overstory,” my days have been entirely inverted. I wake up, I go to the window, and I look outside. Or I step out onto the deck — if I haven’t been sleeping on the deck, which I try to do as much as I can in the course of the year — and see what’s in the air, gauge the temperature and the humidity and the wind and see what season it is and ask myself, you know, what’s happening out there now at 1,700 feet or 4,000 feet or 5,000 feet.
  • let me talk specifically about the work of a scientist who has herself just recently published a book. It’s Dr. Suzanne Simard, and the book is “Finding the Mother Tree.” Simard has been instrumental in a revolution in our way of thinking about what’s happening underground at the root level in a forest.
  • it was a moving moment for me, as an easterner, to stand up there and to say, this is what an eastern forest looks like. This is what a healthy, fully-functioning forest looks like. And I’m 56 years old, and I’d never seen it.
  • the other topics of that culture tend to circle back around these sorts of trends, human fascinations, ways of magnifying our throw weight and our ability and removing the last constraints to our desires and, in particular, to eliminate the single greatest enemy of meaning in the culture of the technological sublime that is, itself, such a strong instance of the culture of human separatism and commodity-mediated individualist capitalism— that is to say, the removal of death.
  • Why is it that we have known about the crisis of species extinction for at least half a century and longer? And I mean the lay public, not just scientists. But why has this been general knowledge for a long time without public will demanding some kind of action or change
  • And when you make kinship beyond yourself, your sense of meaning gravitates outwards into that reciprocal relationship, into that interdependence. And you know, it’s a little bit like scales falling off your eyes. When you do turn that corner, all of the sources of anxiety that are so present and so deeply internalized become much more identifiable. And my own sense of hope and fear gets a much larger frame of reference to operate in.
  • I think, for most of my life, until I did kind of wake up to forests and to trees, I shared — without really understanding this as a kind of concession or a kind of subscription — I did share this cultural consensus that meaning is a private thing that we do for ourselves and by ourselves and that our kind of general sense of the discoveries of the 19th and 20th century have left us feeling a bit unsponsored and adrift beyond the accident of human existence.
  • The largest single influence on any human being’s mode of thought is other human beings. So if you are surrounded by lots of terrified but wishful-thinking people who want to believe that somehow the cavalry is going to come at the last minute and that we don’t really have to look inwards and change our belief in where meaning comes from, that we will somehow be able to get over the finish line with all our stuff and that we’ll avert this disaster, as we have other kinds of disasters in the past.
  • I think what was happening to me at that time, as I was turning outward and starting to take the non-human world seriously, is my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me but all of these other ways of being that I could make kinship with.
  • And I think I was right along with that sense that somehow we are a thing apart. We can make purpose and make meaning completely arbitrarily. It consists mostly of trying to be more in yourself, of accumulating in one form or another.
  • I can’t really be out for more than two or three miles before my head just fills with associations and ideas and scenes and character sketches. And I usually have to rush back home to keep it all in my head long enough to get it down on paper.
  • for my journey, the way to characterize this transition is from being fascinated with technologies of mastery and control and what they’re doing to us as human beings, how they’re changing what the capacities and affordances of humanity are and how we narrate ourselves, to being fascinated with technologies and sciences of interdependence and cooperation, of those sciences that increase our sense of kinship and being one of many, many neighbors.
  • And that’s an almost impossible persuasion to rouse yourself from if you don’t have allies. And I think the one hopeful thing about the present is the number of people trying to challenge that consensual understanding and break away into a new way of looking at human standing is growing.
  • And when you do subscribe to a culture like that and you are confronted with the reality of your own mortality, as I was when I was living in Stanford, that sense of stockpiling personal meaning starts to feel a little bit pointless.
  • And I just head out. I head out based on what the day has to offer. And to have that come first has really changed not only how I write, but what I’ve been writing. And I think it really shows in “Bewilderment.” It’s a totally different kind of book from my previous 12.
  • the marvelous thing about the work, which continues to get more sophisticated and continues to turn up newer and newer astonishments, is that there was odd kind of reciprocal interdependence and cooperation across the species barrier, that Douglas firs and birches were actually involved in these sharing back and forth of essential nutrients. And that’s a whole new way of looking at forest.
  • she began to see that the forests were actually wired up in very complex and identifiable ways and that there was an enormous system of resource sharing going on underground, that trees were sharing not only sugars and the hydrocarbons necessary for survival, but also secondary metabolites. And these were being passed back and forth, both symbiotically between the trees and the fungi, but also across the network to other trees so that there were actually trees in wired up, fungally-connected forests where large, dominant, healthy trees were subsidizing, as it were, trees that were injured or not in favorable positions or damaged in some way or just failing to thrive.
  • so when I was still pretty much a card-carrying member of that culture, I had this sense that to become a better person and to get ahead and to really make more of myself, I had to be as productive as possible. And that meant waking up every morning and getting 1,000 words that I was proud of. And it’s interesting that I would even settle on a quantitative target. That’s very typical for that kind of mindset that I’m talking about — 1,000 words and then you’re free, and then you can do what you want with the day.
  • there will be a threshold, as there have been for these other great social transformations that we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades where somehow it goes from an outsider position to absolutely mainstream and common sense.
  • I am persuaded by those scholars who have showed the degree to which the concept of nature is itself an artificial construction that’s born of cultures of human separatism. I believe that everything that life does is part of the living enterprise, and that includes the construction of cities. And there is no question at all the warning that you just gave about nostalgia creating a false binary between the built world and the true natural world is itself a form of cultural isolation.
  • Religion is a technology to discipline, to discipline certain parts of the human impulse. A lot of the book revolves around the decoded neurofeedback machine, which is a very real literalization of a technology, of changing the way we think
  • one of the things I think that we have to take seriously is that we have created technologies to supercharge some parts of our natural impulse, the capitalism I think should be understood as a technology to supercharge the growth impulse, and it creates some wonders out of that and some horrors out of that.
  • richard powersSure. I base my machine on existing technology. Decoded neurofeedback is a kind of nascent field of exploration. You can read about it; it’s been publishing results for a decade. I first came across it in 2013. It involves using fMRI to record the brain activity of a human being who is learning a process, interacting with an object or engaged in a certain emotional state. That neural activity is recorded and stored as a data structure. A second subsequent human being is then also scanned in real time and fed kinds of feedback based on their own internal neural activity as determined by a kind of software analysis of their fMRI data structures.
  • And they are queued little by little to approximate, to learn how to approximate, the recorded states of the original subject. When I first read about this, I did get a little bit of a revelation. I did feel my skin pucker and think, if pushed far enough, this would be something like a telepathy conduit. It would be a first big step in answering that age-old question of what does it feel like to be something other than we are
  • in the book I simply take that basic concept and extend it, juke it up a little bit, blur the line between what the reader might think is possible right now and what they might wonder about, and maybe even introduce possibilities for this empathetic transference
  • ezra kleinOne thing I loved about the role this played in the book is that it’s highlighting its inverse. So a reader might look at this and say, wow, wouldn’t that be cool if we had a machine that could in real time change how we think and change our neural pathways and change our mental state in a particular direction? But of course, all of society is that machine,
  • Robin and Theo are in an airport. And you’ve got TVs everywhere playing the news which is to say playing a constant loop of outrage, and disaster, and calamity. And Robbie, who’s going through these neural feedback sessions during this period, turns to his dad and says, “Dad, you know how the training’s rewiring my brain? This is what is rewiring everybody else.”
  • ezra kleinI think Marshall McLuhan knew it all. I really do. Not exactly what it would look like, but his view and Postman’s view that we are creating a digital global nervous system is a way they put it, it was exactly right. A nervous system, it was such the exact right metaphor.
  • the great insight of McLuhan, to me, what now gets called the medium is the message is this idea that the way media acts upon us is not in the content it delivers. The point of Twitter is not the link that you click or even the tweet that you read; it is that the nature and structure of the Twitter system itself begins to act on your system, and you become more like it.If you watch a lot of TV, you become more like TV. If you watch a lot of Twitter, you become more like Twitter, Facebook more like Facebook. Your identities become more important to you — that the content is distraction from the medium, and the medium changes you
  • it is happening to all of us in ways that at least we are not engaging in intentionally, not at that level of how do we want to be transformed.
  • richard powersI believe that the digital neural system is now so comprehensive that the idea that you could escape it somewhere, certainly not in the Smokies, even more remotely, I think, becomes more and more laughable. Yeah, and to build on this idea of the medium being the message, not the way in which we become more like the forms and affordances of the medium is that we begin to expect that those affordances, the method in which those media are used, the physiological dependencies and castes of behavior and thought that are required to operate them and interact with them are actual — that they’re real somehow, and that we just take them into human nature and say no, this is what we’ve always wanted and we’ve simply been able to become more like our true selves.
  • Well, the warpage in our sense of time, the warpage in our sense of place, are profound. The ways in which digital feedback and the affordances of social media and all the rest have changed our expectations with regard to what we need to concentrate on, what we need to learn for ourselves, are changing profoundly.
  • If you look far enough back, you can find Socrates expressing great anxiety and suspicion about the ways in which writing is going to transform the human brain and human expectation. He was worried that somehow it was going to ruin our memories. Well, it did up to a point — nothing like the way the digital technologies have ruined our memories.
  • my tradition is Jewish, the Sabbath is a technology, is a technology to create a different relationship between the human being, and time, and growth, and productive society than you would have without the Sabbath which is framed in terms of godliness but is also a way of creating separation from the other impulses of the weak.
  • Governments are a technology, monogamy is a technology, a religiously driven technology, but now one that is culturally driven. And these things do good and they do bad. I’m not making an argument for any one of them in particular. But the idea that we would need to invent something wholly new to come up with a way to change the way human beings act is ridiculous
  • My view of the story of this era is that capitalism was one of many forces, and it has become, in many societies, functionally the only one that it was in relationship with religion, it was in relationship with more rooted communities.
  • it has become not just an economic system but a belief system, and it’s a little bit untrammeled. I’m not an anti-capitalist person, but I believe it needs countervailing forces. And my basic view is that it doesn’t have them anymore.
  • the book does introduce this kind of fable, this kind of thought experiment about the way the affordances that a new and slightly stronger technology of empathy might deflect. First of all, the story of a little boy and then the story of his father who’s scrambling to be a responsible single parent. And then, beyond that, the community of people who hear about this boy and become fascinated with him as a narrative, which again ripples outward through these digital technologies in ways that can’t be controlled or whose consequences can be foreseen.
  • I’ve talked about it before is something I’ve said is that I think a push against, functionally, materialism and want is an important weight in our society that we need. And when people say it is the way we’ll deal with climate change in the three to five year time frame, I become much more skeptical because to the point of things like the technology you have in the book with neural feedback, I do think one of the questions you have to ask is, socially and culturally, how do you move people’s minds so you can then move their politics?
  • You’re going to need something, it seems to me, outside of politics, that changes humans’ sense of themselves more fundamentally. And that takes a minute at the scale of billions.
  • richard powersWell, you are correct. And I don’t think it’s giving away any great reveal in the book to say that a reader who gets far enough into the story probably has this moment of recursive awareness where they, he or she comes to understand that what Robin is doing in this gradual training on the cast of mind of some other person is precisely what they’re doing in the act of reading the novel “Bewilderment” — by living this act of active empathy for these two characters, they are undergoing their own kind of neurofeedback.
  • The more we understand about the complexities of living systems, of organisms and the evolution of organisms, the more capable it is to feel a kind of spiritual awe. And that certainly makes it easier to have reverence for the experiment beyond me and beyond my species. I don’t think those are incommensurable or incompatible ways of knowing the world. In fact, I think to invoke one last time that Buddhist precept of interbeing, I think there is a kind of interbeing between the desire, the true selfless desire to understand the world out there through presence, care, measurement, attention, reproduction of experiment and the desire to have a spiritual affinity and shared fate with the world out there. They’re really the same project.
  • richard powersWell, sure. If we turn back to the new forestry again and researchers like Suzanne Simard who were showing the literal interconnectivity across species boundaries and the cooperation of resource sharing between different species in a forest, that is rigorous science, rigorous reproducible science. And it does participate in that central principle of practice, or collection of practices, which always requires the renunciation of personal wish and ego and prior belief in favor of empirical reproduction.
  • I’ve begun to see people beginning to build out of the humbling sciences a worldview that seems quite spiritual. And as you’re somebody who seems to me to have done that and it has changed your life, would you reflect on that a bit?
  • So much of the book is about the possibility of life beyond Earth. Tell me a bit about the role that’s playing. Why did you make the possibility of alien life in the way it might look and feel and evolve and act so central in a book about protecting and cherishing life here?
  • richard powersI’m glad that we’re slipping this in at the end because yes this framing of the book around this question of are we alone or does the universe want life it’s really important. Theo, Robin’s father, is an astrobiologist.
  • Imagine that everything happens just right so that every square inch of this place is colonized by new forms of experiments, new kinds of life. And the father trying to entertain his son with the story of this remarkable place in the sun just stopping him and saying, Dad, come on, that’s asking too much. Get real, that’s science fiction. That’s the vision that I had when I finished the book, an absolutely limitless sense of just how lucky we’ve had it here.
  • one thing I kept thinking about that didn’t make it into the final book but exists as a kind of parallel story in my own head is the father and son on some very distant planet in some very distant star, many light years from here, playing that same game. And the father saying, OK, now imagine a world that’s just the right size, and it has plate tectonics, and it has water, and it has a nearby moon to stabilize its rotation, and it has incredible security and safety from asteroids because of other large planets in the solar system.
  • they make this journey across the universe through all kinds of incubators, all kinds of petri dishes for life and the possibilities of life. And rather than answer the question — so where is everybody? — it keeps deferring the question, it keeps making that question more subtle and stranger
  • For the purposes of the book, Robin, who desperately believes in the sanctity of life beyond himself, begs his father for these nighttime, bedtime stories, and Theo gives him easy travel to other planets. Father and son going to a new planet based on the kinds of planets that Theo’s science is turning up and asking this question, what would life look like if it was able to get started here?
Javier E

It's True: False News Spreads Faster and Wider. And Humans Are to Blame. - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...witter-fake-news-research.html

polarization business model social media fake news misinformation psychology research technology

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • What if the scourge of false news on the internet is not the result of Russian operatives or partisan zealots or computer-controlled bots? What if the main problem is us?
  • People are the principal culprits
  • people, the study’s authors also say, prefer false news.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • As a result, false news travels faster, farther and deeper through the social network than true news.
  • those patterns applied to every subject they studied, not only politics and urban legends, but also business, science and technology.
  • The stories were classified as true or false, using information from six independent fact-checking organizations including Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org
  • with or without the bots, the results were essentially the same.
  • “It’s not really the robots that are to blame.”
  • “News” and “stories” were defined broadly — as claims of fact — regardless of the source. And the study explicitly avoided the term “fake news,” which, the authors write, has become “irredeemably polarized in our current political and media climate.”
  • False claims were 70 percent more likely than the truth to be shared on Twitter. True stories were rarely retweeted by more than 1,000 people, but the top 1 percent of false stories were routinely shared by 1,000 to 100,000 people. And it took true stories about six times as long as false ones to reach 1,500 people.
  • the researchers enlisted students to annotate as true or false more than 13,000 other stories that circulated on Twitter.
  • “The comprehensiveness is important here, spanning the entire history of Twitter,” said Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University. “And this study shines a spotlight on the open question of the success of false information online.”
  • The M.I.T. researchers pointed to factors that contribute to the appeal of false news. Applying standard text-analysis tools, they found that false claims were significantly more novel than true ones — maybe not a surprise, since falsehoods are made up.
  • The goal, said Soroush Vosoughi, a postdoctoral researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab and the lead author, was to find clues about what is “in the nature of humans that makes them like to share false news.”
  • The study analyzed the sentiment expressed by users in replies to claims posted on Twitter. As a measurement tool, the researchers used a system created by Canada’s National Research Council that associates English words with eight emotions
  • False claims elicited replies expressing greater surprise and disgust. True news inspired more anticipation, sadness and joy, depending on the nature of the stories.
  • The M.I.T. researchers said that understanding how false news spreads is a first step toward curbing it. They concluded that human behavior plays a large role in explaining the phenomenon, and mention possible interventions, like better labeling, to alter behavior.
  • For all the concern about false news, there is little certainty about its influence on people’s beliefs and actions. A recent study of the browsing histories of thousands of American adults in the months before the 2016 election found that false news accounted for only a small portion of the total news people consumed.
  • In fall 2016, Mr. Roy, an associate professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab, became a founder and the chairman of Cortico, a nonprofit that is developing tools to measure public conversations online to gauge attributes like shared attention, variety of opinion and receptivity. The idea is that improving the ability to measure such attributes would lead to better decision-making that would counteract misinformation.
  • Mr. Roy acknowledged the challenge in trying to not only alter individual behavior but also in enlisting the support of big internet platforms like Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter, and media companies
  • “Polarization,” he said, “has turned out to be a great business model.”
sissij

Google and Facebook Take Aim at Fake News Sites - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...from-using-its-ad-service.html

new york times social media bias knowledge

shared by sissij on 07 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Over the last week, two of the world’s biggest internet companies have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election’s outcome.
  • Hours later, Facebook, the social network, updated the language in its Facebook Audience Network policy, which already says it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites.
  • Google did not escape the glare, with critics saying the company gave too much prominence to false news stories.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Facebook has long spoken of how it helped influence and stoke democratic movements in places like the Middle East, and it tells its advertisers that it can help sway its users with ads.
  • It remains to be seen how effective Google’s new policy on fake news will be in practice. The policy will rely on a combination of automated and human reviews to help determine what is fake. Although satire sites like The Onion are not the target of the policy, it is not clear whether some of them, which often run fake news stories written for humorous effect, will be inadvertently affected by Google’s change.
  • sissij on 07 Mar 17
     
    Company start to pay attention to the fake news on the social media. It reminded me of the government involvement in economics. Although internet should be a place free of speech, there are mounting amount of fake news and alternative facts now that the company need to regulate and make rules to restrict it. I think as long as there is human society, we need rule. In free markets, we also need government regulation to remain a balance. --Sissi (3/6/2017)
runlai_jiang

You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ces-2018-reader-questions.html

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • You Asked About CES 2018. We Answered. By BRIAN X. CHEN At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who is attending the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. 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  • At the International Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, thousands of tech companies showcased some of the hottest new innovations: artificial intelligence, self-driving car tech, the smart home, voice-controlled accessories, fifth-generation cellular connectivity and more.
  • Curious about the new products and how they will affect your personal technology? Readers asked Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology writer who attended the trade show, their questions about wireless, TV and the Internet of Things. (In addition,
adonahue011

Opinion | Take a Social Media Break Until You've Voted - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-election-misinformation.html

opinion new york times social media research technology education bias

shared by adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      This is an interesting idea to me because people are so set in their views, how staying on social media leading up to the election will affect their vote is a bit confusing.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      I think the idea of believing what you see on social media could be a logical fallacy. The idea of following the mases on a specific idea, or an authority figure
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      I think the idea of believing what you see on social media could be a logical fallacy. The idea of following the mases on a specific idea, or an authority figure
  • Americans who rely the most on social media to get their news are also far less likely to have accurate or complete knowledge of political events
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • 60 percent of people who primarily get their news from social media had minimal knowledge of current political events, according to the study, compared with 23 percent who primarily get their news directly from news websites or apps
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Very interesting statistic. I think social media allows for too much individual opinion when it comes to news. Our brains are very deceptive so I find it easy to believe things I personally read on social media.
  • 18- to 29-year-olds, 48 percent get most of their political news from social media sites
  • are breeding a generation of the misinformed — a situation that has only grown more dire at a time when the president spreads falsehoods about public health and the election.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      I don't agree with this at all. I think the younger generation is seeing the older generation use social media as a news outlet many times. This is the logical fallacy I previously mentioned.
  • while false information flows unimpeded through Facebook groups, user posts and advertisements.
  • The company says it will limit political advertising in the week before Election Day — but with huge numbers of mail-in ballots already being sent in around the country, that will amount to too little, too late.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      The writer of this article is very bias on this topic, at least facebook is trying to help.
  • “I don’t think there is any question at this point voters will be more informed by seeking out news brands they trust rather than spending their time on social media where it’s less than clear,”
  • Twitter sometimes forces users to first click through a warning that a tweet violates its rules on election integrity,
  • The problem with such posts is that they are widely spread, echoed and believed — and that happens far more quickly than moderators can react with a warning label.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      This is an important point which is why when we look at media we need to try and analyze it, and not allow ourselves to believe everything we read.
  • Mr. Trump that falsely claimed the seasonal flu is responsible for more deaths than coronavirus
  • here are many positives to social media, of course — particularly as millions of Americans struggle to stay connected during the coronavirus pandemic.
  • available more reliably elsewhere, from your local board of elections website and from good government groups
  • People believe them.
  • Social media is a cesspool
  • however, aren’t taking the threat of spreading misinformation seriously enough ahead of the election.
  • Stay off social media at least until you’ve voted.
blythewallick

Facial Recognition Moves Into a New Front: Schools - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...acial-recognition-schools.html

research Technology education science

shared by blythewallick on 06 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • im Shultz tried everything he could think of to stop facial recognition technology from entering the public schools in Lockport, a small city 20 miles east of Niagara Falls. He posted about the issue in a Facebook group called Lockportians. He wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times. He filed a petition with the superintendent of the district, where his daughter is in high school.But a few weeks ago, he lost. The Lockport City School District turned on the technology to monitor who’s on the property at its eight schools, becoming the first known public school district in New York to adopt facial recognition, and one of the first in the nation.
  • Proponents call it a crucial crime-fighting tool, to help prevent mass shootings and stop sexual predators. Robert LiPuma, the Lockport City School District’s director of technology, said he believed that if the technology had been in place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the deadly 2018 attack there may never have happened.
  • “You had an expelled student that would have been put into the system, because they were not supposed to be on school grounds,” Mr. LiPuma said. “They snuck in through an open door. The minute they snuck in, the system would have identified that person.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “Subjecting 5-year-olds to this technology will not make anyone safer, and we can’t allow invasive surveillance to become the norm in our public spaces,” said Stefanie Coyle, deputy director of the Education Policy Center for the New York Civil Liberties Union.
  • When the system is on, Mr. LiPuma said, the software looks at the faces captured by the hundreds of cameras and calculates whether those faces match a “persons of interest” list made by school administrators.
  • Jayde McDonald, a political science major at Buffalo State College, grew up as one of the few black students in Lockport public schools. She said she thought it was too risky for the school to install a facial recognition system that could automatically call the police.
  • “I’m not sure where they are in the school or even think I’ve seen them,” said Brooke Cox, 14, a freshman at Lockport High School. “I don’t fully know why we have the cameras. I haven’t been told what their purpose is.”
  • “If suspended students are put on the watch list, they are going to be scrutinized more heavily,” he said, which could lead to a higher likelihood that they could enter into the criminal justice system.
  • Days after the district announced that the technology had been turned on, some students said they had been told very little about how it worked.
  • “We all want to keep our children safe in school,” she said. “But there are more effective, proven ways to do so that are less costly.”
Javier E

95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump's Tongue - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...from-donald-trumps-tongue.html

language trump rhetoric demagogues speech

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months.
  • The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns
  • The most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • He has a particular habit of saying “you” and “we” as he inveighs against a dangerous “them” or unnamed other — usually outsiders like illegal immigrants (“they’re pouring in”), Syrian migrants (“young, strong men”) and Mexicans, but also leaders of both political parties.
  • Mr. Trump appears unrivaled in his ability to forge bonds with a sizable segment of Americans over anxieties about a changing nation, economic insecurities, ferocious enemies and emboldened minorities (like the first black president, whose heritage and intelligence he has all but encouraged supporters to malign).
  • “ ‘We vs. them’ creates a threatening dynamic, where ‘they’ are evil or crazy or ignorant and ‘we’ need a candidate who sees the threat and can alleviate it,”
  • “He appeals to the masses and makes them feel powerful again: ‘We’ need to build a wall on the Mexican border — not ‘I,’ but ‘we.’ ”
  • And as much as he likes the word “attack,” the Times analysis shows, he often uses it to portray himself as the victim of cable news channels and newspapers that, he says, do not show the size of his crowds.
  • The specter of violence looms over much of his speech, which is infused with words like kill, destroy and fight.
  • “Such statements and accusations make him seem like a guy who can and will cut through all the b.s. and do what in your heart you know is right — and necessary,
  • And Mr. Trump uses rhetoric to erode people’s trust in facts, numbers, nuance, government and the news media, according to specialists in political rhetoric.
  • “Nobody knows,” he likes to declare, where illegal immigrants are coming from or the rate of increase of health care premiums under the Affordable Care Act, even though government agencies collect and publish this information.
  • He insists that Mr. Obama wants to accept 250,000 Syrian migrants, even though no such plan exists, and repeats discredited rumors that thousands of Muslims were cheering in New Jersey during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
  • In another pattern, Mr. Trump tends to attack a person rather than an idea or a situation, like calling political opponents “stupid” (at least 30 times), “horrible” (14 times), “weak” (13 times) and other names, and criticizing foreign leaders, journalists and so-called anchor babies
  • This pattern of elevating emotional appeals over rational ones is a rhetorical style that historians, psychologists and political scientists placed in the tradition of political figures like Goldwater, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Huey Long and Pat Buchanan,
  • “His entire campaign is run like a demagogue’s — his language of division, his cult of personality, his manner of categorizing and maligning people with a broad brush,”
  • “If you’re an illegal immigrant, you’re a loser. If you’re captured in war, like John McCain, you’re a loser. If you have a disability, you’re a loser. It’s rhetoric like Wallace’s — it’s not a kind or generous rhetoric.”
  • “And then there are the winners, most especially himself, with his repeated references to his wealth and success and intelligence,”
  • Historically, demagogues have flourished when they tapped into the grievances of citizens and then identified and maligned outside foes, as McCarthy did with attacking Communists, Wallace with pro-integration northerners and Mr. Buchanan with cultural liberals
  • Mr. Trump, by contrast, is an energetic and charismatic speaker who can be entertaining and ingratiating with his audiences. There is a looseness to his language that sounds almost like water-cooler talk or neighborly banter, regardless of what it is about.
  • he presents himself as someone who is always right in his opinions — even prophetic, a visionary
  • It is the sort of trust-me-and-only-me rhetoric that, according to historians, demagogues have used to insist that they have unique qualities that can lead the country through turmoil
Javier E

Opinion | How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of 'Race' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...genetics-race.html

genetics race science research human origins

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis.
  • eginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven “races” — West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians — and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of “differences between individuals.”
  • In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Instead, it was argued, race is a “social construct,” a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • t is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view.
  • this consensus has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy. The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored.
  • With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.
  • I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”
  • Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades
  • Care.
  • The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations
  • You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work
  • I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science.
  • I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.
  • This is why it is important, even urgent, that we develop a candid and scientifically up-to-date way of discussing any such difference
  • While most people will agree that finding a genetic explanation for an elevated rate of disease is important, they often draw the line there. Finding genetic influences on a propensity for disease is one thing, they argue, but looking for such influences on behavior and cognition is another
  • Is performance on an intelligence test or the number of years of school a person attends shaped by the way a person is brought up? Of course. But does it measure something having to do with some aspect of behavior or cognition? Almost certainly.
  • Recent genetic studies have demonstrated differences across populations not just in the genetic determinants of simple traits such as skin color, but also in more complex traits like bodily dimensions and susceptibility to diseases.
  • in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century.
  • consider what kinds of voices are filling the void that our silence is creating
  • Nicholas Wade, a longtime science journalist for The New York Times, rightly notes in his 2014 book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” that modern research is challenging our thinking about the nature of human population differences. But he goes on to make the unfounded and irresponsible claim that this research is suggesting that genetic factors explain traditional stereotypes.
  • 139 geneticists (including myself) pointed out in a letter to The New York Times about Mr. Wade’s book, there is no genetic evidence to back up any of the racist stereotypes he promotes.
  • Another high-profile example is James Watson, the scientist who in 1953 co-discovered the structure of DNA, and who was forced to retire as head of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in 2007 after he stated in an interview — without any scientific evidence — that research has suggested that genetic factors contribute to lower intelligence in Africans than in Europeans.
  • What makes Dr. Watson’s and Mr. Wade’s statements so insidious is that they start with the accurate observation that many academics are implausibly denying the possibility of average genetic differences among human populations, and then end with a claim — backed by no evidence — that they know what those differences are and that they correspond to racist stereotypes
  • They use the reluctance of the academic community to openly discuss these fraught issues to provide rhetorical cover for hateful ideas and old racist canards.
  • This is why knowledgeable scientists must speak out. If we abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing differences among populations, we risk losing the trust of the public and we actively contribute to the distrust of expertise that is now so prevalent.
  • If scientists can be confident of anything, it is that whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong.
  • For example, my laboratory discovered in 2016, based on our sequencing of ancient human genomes, that “whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today.
  • For me, a natural response to the challenge is to learn from the example of the biological differences that exist between males and females
  • The differences between the sexes are far more profound than those that exist among human populations, reflecting more than 100 million years of evolution and adaptation. Males and females differ by huge tracts of genetic material
  • How do we accommodate the biological differences between men and women? I think the answer is obvious: We should both recognize that genetic differences between males and females exist and we should accord each sex the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences
  • fulfilling these aspirations in practice is a challenge. Yet conceptually it is straightforward.
  • Compared with the enormous differences that exist among individuals, differences among populations are on average many times smaller, so it should be only a modest challenge to accommodate a reality in which the average genetic contributions to human traits differ.
katherineharron

Unemployment benefits: Claims from Asian Americans have spiked 6,900% in New York. Here... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 04 May 20 - No Cached
  • Across New York, businesses like Lam's have shut down during the coronavirus pandemic and Asian American workers have filed for unemployment benefits at extraordinary rates. In the state, about 147,000 self-identified Asian workers have filed initial unemployment claims in the last four weeks alone, up from just 2,100 during the same period last year.
  • That's a 6,900% increase — by far the largest percentage increase experienced by any one racial or ethnic group.
  • Not surprisingly, claims are skyrocketing for every group in the state, reflecting the sharp economic downturn that nationwide has left 30 million Americans filing first-time unemployment claims since mid-March.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Asian workers make up about 9% of New York state's population and work force, but now account for 12.5% of initial claims over the last four weeks. A year ago, they made up just 3.7% of claims during the same time period.
  • White workers, for example, make up 65% of New York's labor force, but only 51% of recent claims.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Fox News Slimed a Purple Heart Recipient - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vindman-fox-news-.html

media manipulation propaganda narrative conspiracy theory fox news psychology Bias

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • In anticipation of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s recent public testimony in the House’s impeachment inquiry, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham and a guest concocted an insulting fantasy on her show: the idea that Colonel Vindman might be a Ukrainian spy.
  • as a former Fox News opinion talk-show guest host and contributor for 14 years, it didn’t shock me.
  • First, we must talk about narratives. In my time at Fox News, narratives were weapons of mass emotional manipulation, what the Nobel laureate Robert J. Shiller defines in “Narrative Economics” as “contagious stories” — as he put it in a paper of the same name, “a simple story or easily expressed explanation of events that many people want to bring up in conversation or on news or social media because it can be used to stimulate the concerns or emotions of others, and/or because it appears to advance self-interest.”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • we find information or misinformation “22 times more memorable in narrative form.”
  • It’s a contagion, and thanks to social media, or “participatory propaganda,” highly viral
  • The Fox News counternarrative model is as simple as it is cunning. The segment producer’s job is to get the answers to two questions: What is the most emotionally engaging story we have right now
  • The next question is, how do we construct a counternarrative that includes as many existing other believable meta-narratives as possible
  • The hunt for the killer narrative starts with the “Morning Memo” to the producers. It shares the interpretation from the vice president of news of the highest-trending articles on Foxnews.com and Drudge
  • The next move is to get a few Fox News contributor regulars — elected officials and paid pundits — not just to deliver the new counternarrative but also to wrap it inside an existing or new meta-narrative.
  • What do the ratings tell the producers are the most engaging meta-narratives for the over 80 million Fox News viewers on all digital platforms?
  • Conspiracy theories.
  • Why do people love conspiracy stories? It’s human behavior
  • The emotional payoff from being on the inside of a conspiracy is a self-esteem jolt that makes you feel smarter than your tribal foe and keeps your eyeballs glued to screens
  • Every successful Fox News segment producer has the conspiracy script down cold. These segments work best when the “proof” of a conspiracy against a tribal leader — in this case the Republican president — makes the viewer feel under attack as well
  • it helps when a proposed conservative thought leader mixes in the meta-narrative to the effect that “we are victimized again by the condescending Beltway elites.”
  • Believing in conspiracy theories is a psychological construct for people to take back some semblance of control in their lives. It inflates their sense of importance. It makes them feel they have access to “special knowledge” that the rest of the world is “too blind,” “too dumb” or “too corrupt” to understand.
Javier E

Facebook's Troubling One-Way Mirror - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-troubling-one-way-mirror.html

facebook psychology social media

shared by Javier E on 23 May 16 - No Cached
  • If you bothered to read the fine print when you created your Facebook account, you would have noticed just how much of yourself you were giving over to Mark Zuckerberg and his $340 billion social network.
  • In exchange for an admittedly magical level of connectivity, you were giving them your life as content — the right to run ads around video from your daughter’s basketball game; pictures from your off-the-chain birthday party, or an emotional note about your return to health after serious illness. You also gave them the right to use your information to help advertisers market to you
  • at the heart of the relationship is a level of trust and a waiving of privacy that Facebook requires from its users as it pursues its mission to “make the world more open and connected.”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • how open is Facebook willing to be in return?
  • not very.
  • that should concern anyone of any political persuasion as Facebook continues to gain influence over the national — and international — conversation
  • Increasingly, those users are spending time on Facebook not only to share personal nuggets with friends, but, for more than 40 percent of American adults, according to Pew Research Center, to stay on top of news
  • It now has an inordinate power to control a good part of the national discussion should it choose to do so, a role it shares with Sili
  • There was the initial statement that Facebook could find “no evidence” supporting the allegations; Facebook said it did not “insert stories artificially” into the Trending list, and that it had “rigorous guidelines” to ensure neutrality. But when journalists like my colleague Farhad Manjoo asked for more details about editorial guidelines, the company declined to discuss them.
  • Only after The Guardian newspaper obtained an old copy of the Trending Topics guidelines did Facebook provide more information, and an up-to-date copy of them. (They showed that humans work with algorithms to shape the lists and introduce headlines on their own under some circumstances, contradicting Facebook’s initial statement, Recode noted.) It was openness by way of a bullet to the foot.
  • a more important issue emerged during the meeting that had been lying beneath the surface, and has been for a while now: the power of the algorithms that determine what goes into individual Facebook pages.
  • “What they have is a disproportionate amount of power, and that’s the real story,” Mr. Carlson told me. “It’s just concentrated in a way you’ve never seen before in media.”
  • What most people don’t realize is that not everything they like or share necessarily gets a prominent place in their friends’ newsfeeds: The Facebook algorithm sends it to those it determines will find it most engaging.
  • For outlets like The Daily Caller, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post or The New York Times — for whom Facebook’s audience is vital to growth — any algorithmic change can affect how many people see their journalism.
  • This gives Facebook enormous influence over how newsrooms, almost universally eager for Facebook exposure, make decisions and money. Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, called this a “profound and alarming” development in a column in The New Statesman last week.
  • , Facebook declines to talk in great detail about its algorithms, noting that it does not want to make it easy to game its system. That system, don’t forget, is devised to keep people on Facebook by giving them what they want
Javier E

Fixation on Fake News Overshadows Waning Trust in Real Reporting - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-trust-in-real-reporting.html

fake news facebook culture crisis informed citizenry reporting social media

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • It misunderstands a new media world in which every story, and source, is at risk of being discredited, not by argument but by sheer force.
  • During the months I spent talking to partisan Facebook page operators for a magazine article this year, it became clear that while the ecosystem contained easily identifiable and intentional fabrication, it contained much, much more of something else.
  • I recall a conversation with a fact checker about how to describe a story, posted on a pro-Trump website and promoted on a pro-Trump Facebook page — and, incidentally, copied from another pro-Trump site by overseas contractors. It tried to cast suspicion on Khizr Khan, the father of a slain American soldier, who had spoken out against Donald J. Trump.
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  • The overarching claims of the story were disingenuous and horrifying; the facts it included had been removed from all useful context and placed in a new, sinister one; its insinuating mention of “Muslim martyrs,” in proximity to mentions of Mr. Khan’s son, and its misleading and strategic mention of Shariah law, amounted to a repulsive smear. It was a story that appealed to bigoted ideas and that would clearly appeal to those who held them.
  • This was a story the likes of which was an enormous force in this election, clearly designed to function well within Facebook’s economy of sharing. And it probably would not run afoul of the narrow definition of “fake news.”
  • Stories like that one get to the heart of the rhetorical and strategic risk of holding up “fake news” as a broad media offensive position, especially after an election cycle characterized by the euphoric inversion of rhetoric by some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, and by the candidate himself
  • This tactic was used on the language of social justice, which was appropriated by opponents and redeployed nihilistically, in an open effort to sap its power while simultaneously taking advantage of what power it retained
  • Anti-racists were cast as the real racists. Progressives were cast as secretly regressive on their own terms
  • This was not a new tactic, but it was newly effective. It didn’t matter that its targets knew that it was a bad-faith maneuver, a clear bid for power rather than an attempt to engage or reason. The referees called foul, but nobody could hear them over the roar of the crowds. Or maybe they could, but realized that nobody could make them listen.
  • This wide formulation of “fake news” will be applied back to the traditional news media, which does not yet understand how threatened its ability is to declare things true, even when they are.
  • the worst identified defenders make their money outside Facebook anyway.
  • Another narrow response from Facebook could be to assert editorial control over external forces
  • Facebook is a place where people construct and project identities to friends, family and peers. It is a marketplace in which news is valuable mainly to the extent that it serves those identities. It is a system built on ranking and vetting and votin
  • Fake news operations are closely aligned with the experienced incentives of the Facebook economy
  • the outrage is at risk of being misdirected, and will be followed by the realization that the colloquial “fake news” — the newslike media, amateur and professional, for which truth is defined first in personal and political terms, and which must only meet the bar of not being obviously, inarguably, demonstrably false — will continue growing apace, gaining authority by sheer force
  • Media companies have spent years looking to Facebook, waiting for the company to present a solution to their mounting business concerns
  • Those who expect the operator of the dominant media ecosystem of our time, in response to getting caught promoting lies, to suddenly return authority to the companies it has superseded are in for a similar surprise.
kushnerha

Which Type of Exercise Is Best for the Brain? - The New York Times - 1 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...exercise-is-best-for-the-brain

new york times exercise running brain science research

shared by kushnerha on 19 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Some forms of exercise may be much more effective than others at bulking up the brain, according to a remarkable new study in rats. For the first time, scientists compared head-to-head the neurological impacts of different types of exercise: running, weight training and high-intensity interval training. The surprising results suggest that going hard may not be the best option for long-term brain health.
  • exercise changes the structure and function of the brain. Studies in animals and people have shown that physical activity generally increases brain volume and can reduce the number and size of age-related holes in the brain’s white and gray matter.
  • Exercise also, and perhaps most resonantly, augments adult neurogenesis, which is the creation of new brain cells in an already mature brain. In studies with animals, exercise, in the form of running wheels or treadmills, has been found to double or even triple the number of new neurons that appear afterward in the animals’ hippocampus, a key area of the brain for learning and memory, compared to the brains of animals that remain sedentary. Scientists believe that exercise has similar impacts on the human hippocampus.
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  • These past studies of exercise and neurogenesis understandably have focused on distance running. Lab rodents know how to run. But whether other forms of exercise likewise prompt increases in neurogenesis has been unknown and is an issue of increasing interest
  • new study, which was published this month in the Journal of Physiology, researchers at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland and other institutions gathered a large group of adult male rats. The researchers injected the rats with a substance that marks new brain cells and then set groups of them to an array of different workouts, with one group remaining sedentary to serve as controls.
  • They found very different levels of neurogenesis, depending on how each animal had exercised. Those rats that had jogged on wheels showed robust levels of neurogenesis. Their hippocampal tissue teemed with new neurons, far more than in the brains of the sedentary animals. The greater the distance that a runner had covered during the experiment, the more new cells its brain now contained. There were far fewer new neurons in the brains of the animals that had completed high-intensity interval training. They showed somewhat higher amounts than in the sedentary animals but far less than in the distance runners. And the weight-training rats, although they were much stronger at the end of the experiment than they had been at the start, showed no discernible augmentation of neurogenesis. Their hippocampal tissue looked just like that of the animals that had not exercised at all.
  • “sustained aerobic exercise might be most beneficial for brain health also in humans.”
  • Just why distance running was so much more potent at promoting neurogenesis than the other workouts is not clear, although Dr. Nokia and her colleagues speculate that distance running stimulates the release of a particular substance in the brain known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor that is known to regulate neurogenesis. The more miles an animal runs, the more B.D.N.F. it produces. Weight training, on the other hand, while extremely beneficial for muscular health, has previously been shown to have little effect on the body’s levels of B.D.N.F.
  • As for high-intensity interval training, its potential brain benefits may be undercut by its very intensity, Dr. Nokia said. It is, by intent, much more physiologically draining and stressful than moderate running, and “stress tends to decrease adult hippocampal neurogenesis,” she said.
  • These results do not mean, however, that only running and similar moderate endurance workouts strengthen the brain, Dr. Nokia said. Those activities do seem to prompt the most neurogenesis in the hippocampus. But weight training and high-intensity intervals probably lead to different types of changes elsewhere in the brain. They might, for instance, encourage the creation of additional blood vessels or new connections between brain cells or between different parts of the brain.
Javier E

Stop Googling. Let's Talk. - The New York Times - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...stop-googling-lets-talk.html

tech social context conversation solitude self-knowledge empathy psychology

shared by Javier E on 28 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • In a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last social gathering they attended. But they weren’t happy about it; 82 percent of adults felt that the way they used their phones in social settings hurt the conversation.
  • I’ve been studying the psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years. For the past five, I’ve had a special focus: What has happened to face-to-face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather text than talk?
  • Young people spoke to me enthusiastically about the good things that flow from a life lived by the rule of three, which you can follow not only during meals but all the time. First of all, there is the magic of the always available elsewhere. You can put your attention wherever you want it to be. You can always be heard. You never have to be bored.
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  • But the students also described a sense of loss.
  • A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. One college junior tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together that’s the problem.”
  • One teacher observed that the students “sit in the dining hall and look at their phones. When they share things together, what they are sharing is what is on their phones.” Is this the new conversation? If so, it is not doing the work of the old conversation. The old conversation taught empathy. These students seem to understand each other less.
  • In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.
  • We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.
  • the trend line is clear. It’s not only that we turn away from talking face to face to chat online. It’s that we don’t allow these conversations to happen in the first place because we keep our phones in the landscape.
  • It’s a powerful insight. Studies of conversation both in the laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they won’t mind being interrupted. They don’t feel as invested in each other. Even a silent phone disconnects us.
  • Yalda T. Uhls was the lead author on a 2014 study of children at a device-free outdoor camp. After five days without phones or tablets, these campers were able to read facial emotions and correctly identify the emotions of actors in videotaped scenes significantly better than a control group. What fostered these new empathic responses? They talked to one another. In conversation, things go best if you pay close attention and learn how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. This is easier to do without your phone in hand. Conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do.
  • At a nightly cabin chat, a group of 14-year-old boys spoke about a recent three-day wilderness hike. Not that many years ago, the most exciting aspect of that hike might have been the idea of roughing it or the beauty of unspoiled nature. These days, what made the biggest impression was being phoneless. One boy called it “time where you have nothing to do but think quietly and talk to your friends.” The campers also spoke about their new taste for life away from the online feed. Their embrace of the virtue of disconnection suggests a crucial connection: The capacity for empathic conversation goes hand in hand with the capacity for solitude.
  • In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other people for who they are. If we are not content to be alone, we turn others into the people we need them to be. If we don’t know how to be alone, we’ll only know how to be lonely.
  • we have put this virtuous circle in peril. We turn time alone into a problem that needs to be solved with technology.
  • People sometimes say to me that they can see how one might be disturbed when people turn to their phones when they are together. But surely there is no harm when people turn to their phones when they are by themselves? If anything, it’s our new form of being together.
  • But this way of dividing things up misses the essential connection between solitude and conversation. In solitude we learn to concentrate and imagine, to listen to ourselves. We need these skills to be fully present in conversation.
  • One start toward reclaiming conversation is to reclaim solitude. Some of the most crucial conversations you will ever have will be with yourself. Slow down sufficiently to make this possible. And make a practice of doing one thing at a time. Think of unitasking as the next big thing. In every domain of life, it will increase performance and decrease stress.
  • Multitasking comes with its own high, but when we chase after this feeling, we pursue an illusion. Conversation is a human way to practice unitasking.
  • Our phones are not accessories, but psychologically potent devices that change not just what we do but who we are. A second path toward conversation involves recognizing the degree to which we are vulnerable to all that connection offers. We have to commit ourselves to designing our products and our lives to take that vulnerability into account.
  • We can choose not to carry our phones all the time. We can park our phones in a room and go to them every hour or two while we work on other things or talk to other people. We can carve out spaces at home or work that are device-free, sacred spaces for the paired virtues of conversation and solitude.
  • Families can find these spaces in the day to day — no devices at dinner, in the kitchen and in the car.
  • Engineers are ready with more ideas: What if our phones were not designed to keep us attached, but to do a task and then release us? What if the communications industry began to measure the success of devices not by how much time consumers spend on them but by whether it is time well spent?
  • The young woman who is so clear about the seven minutes that it takes to see where a conversation is going admits that she often doesn’t have the patience to wait for anything near that kind of time before going to her phone. In this she is characteristic of what the psychologists Howard Gardner and Katie Davis called the “app generation,” which grew up with phones in hand and apps at the ready. It tends toward impatience, expecting the world to respond like an app, quickly and efficiently. The app way of thinking starts with the idea that actions in the world will work like algorithms: Certain actions will lead to predictable results.
  • This attitude can show up in friendship as a lack of empathy. Friendships become things to manage; you have a lot of them, and you come to them with tools
  • here is a first step: To reclaim conversation for yourself, your friendships and society, push back against viewing the world as one giant app. It works the other way, too: Conversation is the antidote to the algorithmic way of looking at life because it teaches you about fluidity, contingency and personality.
  • We have time to make corrections and remember who we are — creatures of history, of deep psychology, of complex relationships, of conversations, artless, risky and face to face.
Javier E

How Does Science Really Work? | The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...how-does-science-really-work

science scientific method history research knowledge culture progress discovery

shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • I wanted to be a scientist. So why did I find the actual work of science so boring? In college science courses, I had occasional bursts of mind-expanding insight. For the most part, though, I was tortured by drudgery.
  • I’d found that science was two-faced: simultaneously thrilling and tedious, all-encompassing and narrow. And yet this was clearly an asset, not a flaw. Something about that combination had changed the world completely.
  • “Science is an alien thought form,” he writes; that’s why so many civilizations rose and fell before it was invented. In his view, we downplay its weirdness, perhaps because its success is so fundamental to our continued existence.
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  • In school, one learns about “the scientific method”—usually a straightforward set of steps, along the lines of “ask a question, propose a hypothesis, perform an experiment, analyze the results.”
  • That method works in the classroom, where students are basically told what questions to pursue. But real scientists must come up with their own questions, finding new routes through a much vaster landscape.
  • Since science began, there has been disagreement about how those routes are charted. Two twentieth-century philosophers of science, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, are widely held to have offered the best accounts of this process.
  • For Popper, Strevens writes, “scientific inquiry is essentially a process of disproof, and scientists are the disprovers, the debunkers, the destroyers.” Kuhn’s scientists, by contrast, are faddish true believers who promulgate received wisdom until they are forced to attempt a “paradigm shift”—a painful rethinking of their basic assumptions.
  • Working scientists tend to prefer Popper to Kuhn. But Strevens thinks that both theorists failed to capture what makes science historically distinctive and singularly effective.
  • Sometimes they seek to falsify theories, sometimes to prove them; sometimes they’re informed by preëxisting or contextual views, and at other times they try to rule narrowly, based on t
  • Why do scientists agree to this scheme? Why do some of the world’s most intelligent people sign on for a lifetime of pipetting?
  • Strevens thinks that they do it because they have no choice. They are constrained by a central regulation that governs science, which he calls the “iron rule of explanation.” The rule is simple: it tells scientists that, “if they are to participate in the scientific enterprise, they must uncover or generate new evidence to argue with”; from there, they must “conduct all disputes with reference to empirical evidence alone.”
  • , it is “the key to science’s success,” because it “channels hope, anger, envy, ambition, resentment—all the fires fuming in the human heart—to one end: the production of empirical evidence.”
  • Strevens arrives at the idea of the iron rule in a Popperian way: by disproving the other theories about how scientific knowledge is created.
  • The problem isn’t that Popper and Kuhn are completely wrong. It’s that scientists, as a group, don’t pursue any single intellectual strategy consistently.
  • Exploring a number of case studies—including the controversies over continental drift, spontaneous generation, and the theory of relativity—Strevens shows scientists exerting themselves intellectually in a variety of ways, as smart, ambitious people usually do.
  • “Science is boring,” Strevens writes. “Readers of popular science see the 1 percent: the intriguing phenomena, the provocative theories, the dramatic experimental refutations or verifications.” But, he says,behind these achievements . . . are long hours, days, months of tedious laboratory labor. The single greatest obstacle to successful science is the difficulty of persuading brilliant minds to give up the intellectual pleasures of continual speculation and debate, theorizing and arguing, and to turn instead to a life consisting almost entirely of the production of experimental data.
  • Ultimately, in fact, it was good that the geologists had a “splendid variety” of somewhat arbitrary opinions: progress in science requires partisans, because only they have “the motivation to perform years or even decades of necessary experimental work.” It’s just that these partisans must channel their energies into empirical observation. The iron rule, Strevens writes, “has a valuable by-product, and that by-product is data.”
  • Science is often described as “self-correcting”: it’s said that bad data and wrong conclusions are rooted out by other scientists, who present contrary findings. But Strevens thinks that the iron rule is often more important than overt correction.
  • Eddington was never really refuted. Other astronomers, driven by the iron rule, were already planning their own studies, and “the great preponderance of the resulting measurements fit Einsteinian physics better than Newtonian physics.” It’s partly by generating data on such a vast scale, Strevens argues, that the iron rule can power science’s knowledge machine: “Opinions converge not because bad data is corrected but because it is swamped.”
  • Why did the iron rule emerge when it did? Strevens takes us back to the Thirty Years’ War, which concluded with the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648. The war weakened religious loyalties and strengthened national ones.
  • Two regimes arose: in the spiritual realm, the will of God held sway, while in the civic one the decrees of the state were paramount. As Isaac Newton wrote, “The laws of God & the laws of man are to be kept distinct.” These new, “nonoverlapping spheres of obligation,” Strevens argues, were what made it possible to imagine the iron rule. The rule simply proposed the creation of a third sphere: in addition to God and state, there would now be science.
  • Strevens imagines how, to someone in Descartes’s time, the iron rule would have seemed “unreasonably closed-minded.” Since ancient Greece, it had been obvious that the best thinking was cross-disciplinary, capable of knitting together “poetry, music, drama, philosophy, democracy, mathematics,” and other elevating human disciplines.
  • We’re still accustomed to the idea that a truly flourishing intellect is a well-rounded one. And, by this standard, Strevens says, the iron rule looks like “an irrational way to inquire into the underlying structure of things”; it seems to demand the upsetting “suppression of human nature.”
  • Descartes, in short, would have had good reasons for resisting a law that narrowed the grounds of disputation, or that encouraged what Strevens describes as “doing rather than thinking.”
  • In fact, the iron rule offered scientists a more supple vision of progress. Before its arrival, intellectual life was conducted in grand gestures.
  • Descartes’s book was meant to be a complete overhaul of what had preceded it; its fate, had science not arisen, would have been replacement by some equally expansive system. The iron rule broke that pattern.
  • by authorizing what Strevens calls “shallow explanation,” the iron rule offered an empirical bridge across a conceptual chasm. Work could continue, and understanding could be acquired on the other side. In this way, shallowness was actually more powerful than depth.
  • it also changed what counted as progress. In the past, a theory about the world was deemed valid when it was complete—when God, light, muscles, plants, and the planets cohered. The iron rule allowed scientists to step away from the quest for completeness.
  • The consequences of this shift would become apparent only with time
  • In 1713, Isaac Newton appended a postscript to the second edition of his “Principia,” the treatise in which he first laid out the three laws of motion and the theory of universal gravitation. “I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses,” he wrote. “It is enough that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws that we have set forth.”
  • What mattered, to Newton and his contemporaries, was his theory’s empirical, predictive power—that it was “sufficient to explain all the motions of the heavenly bodies and of our sea.”
  • Descartes would have found this attitude ridiculous. He had been playing a deep game—trying to explain, at a fundamental level, how the universe fit together. Newton, by those lights, had failed to explain anything: he himself admitted that he had no sense of how gravity did its work
  • Strevens sees its earliest expression in Francis Bacon’s “The New Organon,” a foundational text of the Scientific Revolution, published in 1620. Bacon argued that thinkers must set aside their “idols,” relying, instead, only on evidence they could verify. This dictum gave scientists a new way of responding to one another’s work: gathering data.
  • Quantum theory—which tells us that subatomic particles can be “entangled” across vast distances, and in multiple places at the same time—makes intuitive sense to pretty much nobody.
  • Without the iron rule, Strevens writes, physicists confronted with such a theory would have found themselves at an impasse. They would have argued endlessly about quantum metaphysics.
  • ollowing the iron rule, they can make progress empirically even though they are uncertain conceptually. Individual researchers still passionately disagree about what quantum theory means. But that hasn’t stopped them from using it for practical purposes—computer chips, MRI machines, G.P.S. networks, and other technologies rely on quantum physics.
  • One group of theorists, the rationalists, has argued that science is a new way of thinking, and that the scientist is a new kind of thinker—dispassionate to an uncommon degree.
  • As evidence against this view, another group, the subjectivists, points out that scientists are as hopelessly biased as the rest of us. To this group, the aloofness of science is a smoke screen behind which the inevitable emotions and ideologies hide.
  • At least in science, Strevens tells us, “the appearance of objectivity” has turned out to be “as important as the real thing.”
  • The subjectivists are right, he admits, inasmuch as scientists are regular people with a “need to win” and a “determination to come out on top.”
  • But they are wrong to think that subjectivity compromises the scientific enterprise. On the contrary, once subjectivity is channelled by the iron rule, it becomes a vital component of the knowledge machine. It’s this redirected subjectivity—to come out on top, you must follow the iron rule!—that solves science’s “problem of motivation,” giving scientists no choice but “to pursue a single experiment relentlessly, to the last measurable digit, when that digit might be quite meaningless.”
  • If it really was a speech code that instigated “the extraordinary attention to process and detail that makes science the supreme discriminator and destroyer of false ideas,” then the peculiar rigidity of scientific writing—Strevens describes it as “sterilized”—isn’t a symptom of the scientific mind-set but its cause.
  • The iron rule—“a kind of speech code”—simply created a new way of communicating, and it’s this new way of communicating that created science.
  • Other theorists have explained science by charting a sweeping revolution in the human mind; inevitably, they’ve become mired in a long-running debate about how objective scientists really are
  • In “The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science” (Liveright), Michael Strevens, a philosopher at New York University, aims to identify that special something. Strevens is a philosopher of science
  • Compared with the theories proposed by Popper and Kuhn, Strevens’s rule can feel obvious and underpowered. That’s because it isn’t intellectual but procedural. “The iron rule is focused not on what scientists think,” he writes, “but on what arguments they can make in their official communications.”
  • Like everybody else, scientists view questions through the lenses of taste, personality, affiliation, and experience
  • geologists had a professional obligation to take sides. Europeans, Strevens reports, tended to back Wegener, who was German, while scholars in the United States often preferred Simpson, who was American. Outsiders to the field were often more receptive to the concept of continental drift than established scientists, who considered its incompleteness a fatal flaw.
  • Strevens’s point isn’t that these scientists were doing anything wrong. If they had biases and perspectives, he writes, “that’s how human thinking works.”
  • Eddington’s observations were expected to either confirm or falsify Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which predicted that the sun’s gravity would bend the path of light, subtly shifting the stellar pattern. For reasons having to do with weather and equipment, the evidence collected by Eddington—and by his colleague Frank Dyson, who had taken similar photographs in Sobral, Brazil—was inconclusive; some of their images were blurry, and so failed to resolve the matter definitively.
  • it was only natural for intelligent people who were free of the rule’s strictures to attempt a kind of holistic, systematic inquiry that was, in many ways, more demanding. It never occurred to them to ask if they might illuminate more collectively by thinking about less individually.
  • In the single-sphered, pre-scientific world, thinkers tended to inquire into everything at once. Often, they arrived at conclusions about nature that were fascinating, visionary, and wrong.
  • How Does Science Really Work?Science is objective. Scientists are not. Can an “iron rule” explain how they’ve changed the world anyway?By Joshua RothmanSeptember 28, 2020
runlai_jiang

In Some Countries, Facebook's Fiddling Has Magnified Fake News - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...acebook-news-feed-changes.html

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • In Some Countries, Facebook’s Fiddling Has Magnified Fake News
  • SAN FRANCISCO — One morning in October, the editors of Página Siete, Bolivia’s third-largest news site, noticed that traffic to their outlet coming from Facebook was plummeting.The publication had recently been hit by cyberattacks, and editors feared it was being targeted by hackers loyal to the government of President Evo Morales.
  • But it wasn’t the government’s fault. It was Facebook’s. The Silicon Valley company was testing a new version of its hugely popular News Feed, peeling off professional news sites from what people normally see and relegating them to a new section of Facebook called Explore.
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  • Facebook said these News Feed modifications were not identical to those introduced last fall in six countries through its Explore program, but both alterations favor posts from friends and family over professional news sites. And what happened in those countries illustrates the unintended consequences of such a change in an online service that now has a global reach of more than two billion people every month.
  • The fabricated story circulated so widely that the local police issued a statement saying it wasn’t true. But when the police went to issue the warning on Facebook, they found that the message — unlike the fake news story they meant to combat — could no longer appear on News Feed because it came from an official account.Facebook explained its goals for the Explore program in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Serbia in a blog post in October. “The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content,” wrote Adam Mosseri, head of Facebook’s News Feed. “There is no current plan to roll this out beyond these test countries.”
  • The loss of visitors from Facebook was readily apparent in October, and Mr. Huallpa could communicate with Facebook only through a customer service form letter. He received an automatic reply in return.
  • ech giant may play in her country.“It’s a private company — they have the right to do as they please, of course,” she said. “But the first question we asked is ‘Why Bolivia?’ And we don’t even have the possibility of asking why. Why us?”
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