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Javier E

Grand Old Planet - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...krugman-grand-old-planet.html

science bias partisan motivated reasoning knowledge evidence

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Mr. Rubio was asked how old the earth is. After declaring “I’m not a scientist, man,” the senator went into desperate evasive action, ending with the declaration that “it’s one of the great mysteries.”
  • Reading Mr. Rubio’s interview is like driving through a deeply eroded canyon; all at once, you can clearly see what lies below the superficial landscape. Like striated rock beds that speak of deep time, his inability to acknowledge scientific evidence speaks of the anti-rational mind-set that has taken over his political party.
  • that question didn’t come out of the blue. As speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio provided powerful aid to creationists trying to water down science education. In one interview, he compared the teaching of evolution to Communist indoctrination tactics — although he graciously added that “I’m not equating the evolution people with Fidel Castro.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe.
  • What accounts for this pattern of denial? Earlier this year, the science writer Chris Mooney published “The Republican Brain,” which was not, as you might think, a partisan screed. It was, instead, a survey of the now-extensive research linking political views to personality types. As Mr. Mooney showed, modern American conservatism is highly correlated with authoritarian inclinations — and authoritarians are strongly inclined to reject any evidence contradicting their prior beliefs
  • it’s not symmetric. Liberals, being human, often give in to wishful thinking — but not in the same systematic, all-encompassing way.
  • We are, after all, living in an era when science plays a crucial economic role. How are we going to search effectively for natural resources if schools trying to teach modern geology must give equal time to claims that the world is only 6.000 years old? How are we going to stay competitive in biotechnology if biology classes avoid any material that might offend creationists?
  • then there’s the matter of using evidence to shape economic policy. You may have read about the recent study from the Congressional Research Service finding no empirical support for the dogma that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to higher economic growth. How did Republicans respond? By suppressing the report. On economics, as in hard science, modern conservatives don’t want to hear anything challenging their preconceptions — and they don’t want anyone else to hear about it, either.
Javier E

Holly the Cat's Incredible Journey - NYTimes.com - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...one-cats-incredible-journey

sense perception animal

shared by Javier E on 21 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • “I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.
  • Strange, faraway locations would seem problematic, although he and Patrick Bateson, a behavioral biologist at Cambridge University, say that cats can sense smells across long distances. “Let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the north, so they move in a southerly direction,”
  • Professor Tabor cited longer-distance reports he considered credible: Murka, a tortoiseshell in Russia, traveling about 325 miles home to Moscow from her owner’s mother’s house in Voronezh in 1989; Ninja, who returned to Farmington, Utah, in 1997, a year after her family moved from there to Mill Creek, Wash.; and Howie, an indoor Persian cat in Australia who in 1978 ran away from relatives his vacationing family left him with and eventually traveled 1,000 miles to his family’s home.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The closest, said Roger Tabor, a British cat biologist, may have been a 1954 study in Germany which cats placed in a covered circular maze with exits every 15 degrees most often exited in the direction of their homes, but more reliably if their homes were less than five kilometers away.
  • “We haven’t the slightest idea how they do this,” Mr. Galaxy said. “Anybody who says they do is lying, and, if you find it, please God, tell me what it is.”
  • Nobody knows how it happened: an indoor housecat who got lost on a family excursion managing, after two months and about 200 miles, to return to her hometown.
Javier E

Auden on cultural overconsumption « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...quote-for-the-day-165

culture consumption reflection arts

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • “Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse
  • We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper,” – W.H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (1967).
Emily Horwitz

U.S. Stockpiles Smallpox Drug in Case of Bioterror Attack - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-case-of-bioterror-attack.html

smallpox bioterrorism fear

shared by Emily Horwitz on 14 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The United States government is buying enough of a new smallpox medicine to treat two million people in the event of a bioterrorism attack, and took delivery of the first shipment of it last week. But the purchase has set off a debate about the lucrative contract, with some experts saying the government is buying too much of the drug at too high a price.
  • Smallpox was eradicated by 1980, and the only known remaining virus is in government laboratories in the United States and Russia
  • Experts say the virus could also be re-engineered into existence in a sophisticated genetics lab.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • the government is paying more than $200 for each course of treatment.
  • But when stockpiling a smallpox drug was first proposed in 2001 after the Sept. 11 and anthrax attacks, it was expected to cost only $5 to $10 per course, said Dr. Donald A. Henderson, who led a government advisory panel on biodefense in the wake of those attacks. Dr. Henderson was a leader in the eradication of smallpox in the 1960s and is now at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
  • Smallpox has such a long incubation period that the vaccine can prevent disease even if it is given as late as three days after infection. Arestvyr may also prevent infection if given early enough, but that has not been proven.
  • the price being charged for a patented drug was a bargain compared with AIDS antiretrovirals that cost $20,000 a year and cancer drugs that cost more than $100,000 a year.
  • “There are 80 million courses of Tamiflu in the strategic national stockpile,” he said. “Smallpox is just as contagious and has 30 times the mortality. By measures like that, I’d say 2 million is on the low end.”
  • Emily Horwitz on 14 Mar 13
     
    After reading this article, I thought about how much fear and the perceived threat of terrorism can be used quite effectively as manipulative tools. The article seemed to suggest that, because the US is so afraid/wary of a bioterrorism attack involving smallpox, we were willing to pay an excessive amount of money for emergency-use vaccines.
Emily Horwitz

Upside of Distraction - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...upside-of-distraction

distractions human sciences writing

shared by Emily Horwitz on 05 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Writing a book consists largely of avoiding distractions. If you can forget your real circumstances and submerge yourself in your subject for hours every day, characters become more human, sentences become clearer and prettier. But utter devotion to the principle that distraction is Satan and writing is paramount can be just as poisonous as an excess of diversion.
  • Monomania is what it sounds like: a pathologically intense focus on one thing.
  • It’s the opposite of the problem you have, in other words, if you are a normal, contemporary, non-agrarian 30-something.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • There was nothing to do besides read, write, reflect on God and drink. It was a circumstance favorable to writing fiction. But it was also conducive to depravity, the old Calvinist definition thereof: a warping of the spirit.
  • When I socialized, it was often with poets, who confirmed by their very existence that I had landed in a better, vanished time. Even their physical ailments were of the 19th century. One day, in the depths of winter, I came upon one of them picking his way across the snow and ice on crutches, pausing to drag on his cigarette.
  • The disaster unfolded slowly. The professors and students were diplomatic, but a pall of boredom fell over the seminar table when my work was under discussion. I could see everyone struggling to care. And then, trying feverishly to write something that would engage people, I got worse. First my writing became overthought, and then it went rank with the odor of desperation. It got to the point that every chapter, short story, every essay was trash.
  • It took me a long time to realize that the utter domination of my consciousness by the desire to write well was itself the problem.
  • When good writing was my only goal, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth. For this reason, I wasn’t able to read my own writing well. I couldn’t tell whether something I had just written was good or bad, because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane.
  • I purged myself of monomania — slowly, and somewhat unwittingly. I fell in love, an overpowering diversion, and began to spend more time at my girlfriend’s place, where she had Wi-Fi, a flat-screen TV and a DVD player.
  • One morning, after I diversified my mania, my writing no longer stank of decay.
  • I’m glad I went to 19th-century Russia. But I wish I had been more careful, more humble, and kept one foot in modernity. The thing about 19th-century Russia is that if you race in, heedless of all but conquest and glory, you get stuck.
  • Emily Horwitz on 05 Feb 13
     
    An interesting article about the need for distractions - if we focus too much on one thing at a time, we lose the capacity to tell whether it is good or not.
Javier E

The searchers | ROUGH TYPE - 0 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=2459

internet search engines search google

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • When we talk about “searching” these days, we’re almost always talking about using Google to find something online.
  • That’s quite a twist for a word that has long carried existential connotations, that has been bound up in our sense of what it means to be conscious and alive. We don’t just search for car keys or missing socks. We search for truth and meaning, for love, for transcendence, for peace, for ourselves. To be human is to be a searcher.
  • in its original conception, the Google search engine did transport us into a messy and confusing world—the world of the web—with the intent of helping us make some sense of it. It pushed us outward, away from ourselves. It was a means of exploration
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  • In its highest form, a search has no well-defined object. It’s open-ended, an act of exploration that takes us out into the world, beyond the self, in order to know the world, and the self, more fully
  • Google’s goal is no longer to read the web. It’s to read us. 
  • In its new design, Google’s search engine doesn’t push us outward; it turns us inward. It gives us information that fits the behavior and needs and biases we have displayed in the past, as meticulously interpreted by Google’s algorithms. Because it reinforces the existing state of the self rather than challenging it, it subverts the act of searching. We find out little about anything, least of all ourselves, through self-absorption.
Javier E

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't: Nate Silver: 978... - 0 views

www.amazon.com/...159420411X

prediction forecasting analysis

shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters.
  • Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the “prediction paradox”: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.
  • the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.
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  • Baseball, weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, economics, and polling: In all of these areas, Silver finds predictions gone bad thanks to biases, vested interests, and overconfidence. But he also shows where sophisticated forecasters have gotten it right (and occasionally been ignored to boot)
  • This is the best general-readership book on applied statistics that I've read. Short review: if you're interested in science, economics, or prediction: read it. It's full of interesting cases, builds intuition, and is a readable example of Bayesian thinking.
  • The core concept is this: prediction is a vital part of science, of business, of politics, of pretty much everything we do. But we're not very good at it, and fall prey to cognitive biases and other systemic problems such as information overload that make things worse. However, we are simultaneously learning more about how such things occur and that knowledge can be used to make predictions better -- and to improve our models in science, politics, business, medicine, and so many other areas.
oliviaodon

Will the Republican Party Survive the 2016 Election? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...419118

politics republican

shared by oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • many observers worried that Americans had lost interest in politics. In his famous book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, the social scientist Robert Putnam bemoaned the collapse in American political participation during the second half of the 20th century. Putnam suggested that this trend would continue as the World War II generation gave way to disengaged Gen Xers.
  • oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16
     
    This article definitely serves as an interesting read. 
proudsa

Hitler Is a Rock Star in South Asia | VICE | United States - 0 views

www.vice.com/...r-is-a-rock-star-in-south-asia

shared by proudsa on 07 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Hitler Is a Rock Star in South Asia
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 07 Jan 16
       
      TOK - perspective
  • In Asia, though, Mein Kampf is treated like an old classic. It's long been a popular read for businessmen in India, sold alongside titles like Rich Dad Poor Dad, Who Moved My Cheese?, and the various motivational books by Donald Trump.
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 07 Jan 16
       
      The idea that people half-way across the globe associate Hitler with Trump in their ways of thinking should say something to the American public
  • "we [in Nepal] need a leader like Hitler."
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 07 Jan 16
       
      did they get a different version of history than we did?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • When Nepal hasn't been under the blanket of armed insurgencies, it's been in the grip of corrupt political leaders. People in Nepal seem to be looking for a leader that can carry them out of developmental paralysis, no matter the cost.
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 07 Jan 16
       
      Similar to post-WWII Germany
mcginnisca

Why Do We Teach Girls That It's Cute to Be Scared? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hat-its-cute-to-be-scared.html

psychology gender bias education brain science

shared by mcginnisca on 22 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Why Do We Teach Girls That It’s Cute to Be Scared?
  • Apparently, fear is expected of women.
  • parents cautioned their daughters about the dangers of the fire pole significantly more than they did their sons and were much more likely to assist them
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • But both moms and dads directed their sons to face their fears, with instruction on how to complete the task on their own.
  • Misadventures meant that I should try again. With each triumph over fear and physical adversity, I gained confidence.
  • She said that her own mother had been very fearful, gasping at anything remotely rough-and-tumble. “I had been so discouraged from having adventures, and I wanted you to have a more exciting childhood,”
  • arents are “four times more likely to tell girls than boys to be more careful”
  • “Girls may be less likely than boys to try challenging physical activities, which are important for developing new skills.” This study points to an uncomfortable truth: We think our daughters are more fragile, both physically and emotionally, than our sons. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • Nobody is saying that injuries are good, or that girls should be reckless. But risk taking is important
  • It follows that by cautioning girls away from these experiences, we are not protecting them. We are failing to prepare them for life.
  • When a girl learns that the chance of skinning her knee is an acceptable reason not to attempt the fire pole, she learns to avoid activities outside her comfort zone.
  • Fear becomes a go-to feminine trait, something girls are expected to feel and express at will.
  • By the time a girl reaches her tweens no one bats an eye when she screams at the sight of an insect.
  • When girls become women, this fear manifests as deference and timid decision making
  • We must chuck the insidious language of fear (Be careful! That’s too scary!) and instead use the same terms we offer boys, of bravery and resilience. We need to embolden girls to master skills that at first appear difficult, even dangerous. And it’s not cute when a 10-year-old girl screeches, “I’m too scared.”
  • I was often scared. Of course I was. So were the men.
sissij

How Murphy's Law Works - HowStuffWorks - 0 views

people.howstuffworks.com/murphys-law.htm

murphy's law psychology brain science bias

shared by sissij on 18 Nov 16 - Cached
  • You're sitting in eight lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. You're more than ready to get home, but you notice, to your great dismay, that all of the other lanes seem to be moving. You change lanes. But once you do, the cars in your new lane come to a dead halt. At a standstill, you notice every lane on the highway (including the one you just left) is moving -- except yours.
  • whatever can go wrong will go wrong.
  • After all, we expect that things should work out in our favor. But when things go badly, we look for reasons.
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  • It seems to poke fun at us for being such hotheads, and it uses the rules of probability -- the mathematical likeliness that something will occur -- to support itself.
  • sissij on 18 Nov 16
     
    I found this law very interesting because it is related to our topic of our lack of ability to deal with probabilities. We always tends to notice the bad things and rare things that happen to us and we named it coincidence. However, by math, coincidence is not only limited to things that rarely happen; it should also include things that has a high probability to happen. In the reading we did on Lesson Five, it mentions that we tend to think the cluster is not random, so we only find patterns between rarely happened things. For example, the death of two America presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. But what about the presidents who make through their presidency alive? Is it be a coincidence that they all live through their presidency? --Sissi (11/18/2016)
sissij

Your Dog Remembers More Than You Think - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dogs-memory.html

brain science language research

shared by sissij on 24 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • In people it is called episodic memory, and it involves a sense of self. In animals, it’s called episodic-like memory, because it’s difficult to try to plumb something as elusive as self without the aid of language.
  • Dr. Fugazza and colleagues reported online in Current Biology that this showed that the dogs remembered an event they hadn’t been concentrating on, the trainer’s action. She said one aspect strengthened that conclusion: The dogs tended to lie down immediately when they got back to the mat, suggesting that their heads were in “lie down” mode, not “do it” mode.
  • He said human episodic memory is lost in Alzheimer’s disease and he and others study animal memory in hopes of learning how to combat that loss. The work on dogs offers a new technique that could be very useful, he said.
  • sissij on 24 Nov 16
     
    I found this experiment very interesting because it shows some aspect of how animals memory works. The result can be used to see how memory work without language. I think language and memory have an intertwined relationship because sometimes I can feel that the information stored in my brain is in language rather than abstract form such as knowledge. For example, my memory of chemistry knowledge is stored in English, so when I am reading a chemistry related book in Chinese, I would usually get lost because there aren't any vocals on Chemistry in Chinese in my memory. It would be a very interesting question to consider that how our memory will construct if we don't have a language. There is a kind of mental disease called "aphasia", meaning the loss of ability to understand language. How do they remember things when they lose the ability to assign meanings and communicate? --Sissi (11/24/2016)
sissij

What Not to Say to a Cancer Patient - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...o-say-to-a-cancer-patient.html

new york times Language psychology knowledge

shared by sissij on 01 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • “Really” I was fine, I told her. But what if I hadn’t been? Would I have wanted to launch into a description of bad medical news at what was supposed to be a fun event? Would I have wanted even to be reminded of a bout with cancer?
  • False optimism devalued what was going on in my body. People were insensitive not from a lack of compassion but from not knowing what is really helpful.
  • What he and those he’s counseled have found to be most helpful were not words but actions
  • sissij on 01 Dec 16
     
    This reading helps me to see how we can do a better job at comforting the patients from the perspective of a patient. Many times, we are so eccentric and think we are doing something good. However, our language might be misunderstand because there is no fixed meaning or definition to any word or language. People from different background, in different mood, or from different standpoint may see the same sentence differently. What we think is appropriate is not necessarily appropriate from everybody else since language cannot fully, clear, or precisely express what we really mean. --Sissi (11/30/2016) 
sissij

What Michelle Obama Wore and Why It Mattered - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-obama-first-lady-fashion.html

new york times social media psychology

shared by sissij on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • it had just been revealed that the campaign clothes budget for Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, was $150,000
  • And thus was an eight-year obsession born. Not to mention a new approach to the story of dress and power.
  • it set in motion a strategic rethink about the use of clothes that not only helped define her tenure as first lady, but also started a conversation that went far beyond the label or look that she wore and that is only now, maybe, reaching its end.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • If you know everyone is going to see what you wear and judge it, then what you wear becomes fraught with meaning.
  • She realized very early on that everything she did had ramifications
  • Just because something appears trivial does not mean it is any less powerful as a means of persuasion and outreach. In some ways its very triviality — the fact that everyone could talk about it, dissect it, imitate it — makes fashion the most potentially viral item in the subliminal political toolbox.
  • as she said to Vogue in her third cover story, the most of any first lady, one of the factors in choosing a garment always has to be, “Is it cute?”
  • she saw it as a way to frame her own independence and points of difference, add to her portfolio and amplify her husband’s agenda.
  • Mrs. Obama seemed to work with them all.
  • We all tend to gravitate toward certain designers in part because of sheer laziness: We know what suits us, what we like, and so we go there first. To have been so, well, evenhanded in her choices could have happened only with careful calculation.
  • Especially because Mrs. Obama not only wore their clothes, she also took their business seriously, framing fashion as a credible, covetable job choice during her education initiatives.
  • If you think that was an accident, there’s a bridge I can sell you — just as the fact she wore Jason Wu to her husband’s farewell address in Chicago, a designer she also wore at both inaugural balls, was no coincidence. It was closure.
  • But above all, her wardrobe was representative of the country her husband wanted to lead.
  • It may be because the point of what Mrs. Obama wore was never simply that it was good to mix up your wardrobe among a group of designers, but rather that clothes were most resonant when they were an expression of commitment to an idea, or an ideal, that had resonance.
  • sissij on 16 Jan 17
     
    This article takes a close look to Mrs. Obama's wardrobe, which I found to be very interesting. Even clothes can represent what a person is think about. There is a quote in this article that I really like: "Just because something appears trial does not mean it is any less powerful as a means of persuasion and outreach." Especial that it is the era of internet and you can find literally every detail online. People always like to assign meanings to things they see, though sometimes others don't mean it. Also, people are very easily influenced by social medias. For example, when I finish reading this article, the clothes Mrs. Obama chose suddenly become meaningful. Twenty-first century is an era of information. Even the smallest thing such as clothing can be a delivery of information
oliviaodon

EFFECTIVE USE OF LANGUAGE - 0 views

faculty.washington.edu/...el.htm

language

shared by oliviaodon on 05 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • To communicate effectively, it is not enough to have well organized ideas expressed in complete and coherent sentences and paragraphs. One must also think about the style, tone and clarity of his/her writing, and adapt these elements to the reading audience. Again, analyzing one's audience and purpose is the key to writing effectiveness. In order to choose the most effective language, the writer must consider the objective of the document, the context in which it is being written, and who will be reading it.
  • Effective language is: (1) concrete and specific, not vague and abstract; (2) concise, not verbose; (3) familiar, not obscure; (4) precise and clear, not inaccurate or ambiguous; (5) constructive, not destructive; and (6) appropriately formal.
  • oliviaodon on 05 Dec 16
     
    This article is informative and extremely helpful if you are preparing for an  essay or presentation!
Javier E

Covering politics in a "post-truth" America | Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...litics-in-a-post-truth-america

post-truth politics journalism media fake news crisis culture news trump

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
  • Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.
  • I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • (An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)
  • Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year
  • the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
  • Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.
  • none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.
  • This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.
  • To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.
  • Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.
  • Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.
  • This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.
  • I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.
  • In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”
  • Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.
  • I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.
  • And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.
  • Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.
  • These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.
  • , we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.
  • politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth
  • Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.
  • As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.
  • And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.
  • When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.
  • when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!
  • By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.
  • in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.
  • So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.
  • 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.
Emily Freilich

The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think - James Somers - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309529

artificial intelligence science technology progression

shared by Emily Freilich on 08 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind.
  • “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done
  • Their operating premise is simple: the mind is a very unusual piece of software, and the best way to understand how a piece of software works is to write it yourself.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • “It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.”
  • Computers are flexible enough to model the strange evolved convolutions of our thought, and yet responsive only to precise instructions. So if the endeavor succeeds, it will be a double victory: we will finally come to know the exact mechanics of our selves—and we’ll have made intelligent machines.
  • Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn’t understand language, because she “had something deeply wrong with her brain” (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter.
  • How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves?
  • Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.”
  • In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself.
  • But then AI changed, and Hofstadter didn’t change with it, and for that he all but disappeared.
  • By the early 1980s, the pressure was great enough that AI, which had begun as an endeavor to answer yes to Alan Turing’s famous question, “Can machines think?,” started to mature—or mutate, depending on your point of view—into a subfield of software engineering, driven by applications.
  • Take Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that bested the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue won by brute force.
  • Hofstadter wanted to ask: Why conquer a task if there’s no insight to be had from the victory? “Okay,” he says, “Deep Blue plays very good chess—so what? Does that tell you something about how we play chess? No. Does it tell you about how Kasparov envisions, understands a chessboard?”
  • AI started working when it ditched humans as a model, because it ditched them. That’s the thrust of the analogy: Airplanes don’t flap their wings; why should computers think?
  • It’s a compelling point. But it loses some bite when you consider what we want: a Google that knows, in the way a human would know, what you really mean when you search for something
  • Cognition is recognition,” he likes to say. He describes “seeing as” as the essential cognitive act: you see some lines a
  • How do you make a search engine that understands if you don’t know how you understand?
  • s “an A,” you see a hunk of wood as “a table,” you see a meeting as “an emperor-has-no-clothes situation” and a friend’s pouting as “sour grapes”
  • That’s what it means to understand. But how does understanding work?
  • analogy is “the fuel and fire of thinking,” the bread and butter of our daily mental lives.
  • there’s an analogy, a mental leap so stunningly complex that it’s a computational miracle: somehow your brain is able to strip any remark of the irrelevant surface details and extract its gist, its “skeletal essence,” and retrieve, from your own repertoire of ideas and experiences, the story or remark that best relates.
  • in Hofstadter’s telling, the story goes like this: when everybody else in AI started building products, he and his team, as his friend, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, wrote, “patiently, systematically, brilliantly,” way out of the light of day, chipped away at the real problem. “Very few people are interested in how human intelligence works,”
  • For more than 30 years, Hofstadter has worked as a professor at Indiana University at Bloomington
  • The quick unconscious chaos of a mind can be slowed down on the computer, or rewound, paused, even edited
  • project out of IBM called Candide. The idea behind Candide, a machine-translation system, was to start by admitting that the rules-based approach requires too deep an understanding of how language is produced; how semantics, syntax, and morphology work; and how words commingle in sentences and combine into paragraphs—to say nothing of understanding the ideas for which those words are merely conduits.
  • , Hofstadter directs the Fluid Analogies Research Group, affectionately known as FARG.
  • Parts of a program can be selectively isolated to see how it functions without them; parameters can be changed to see how performance improves or degrades. When the computer surprises you—whether by being especially creative or especially dim-witted—you can see exactly why.
  • When you read Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, which describes in detail this architecture and the logic and mechanics of the programs that use it, you wonder whether maybe Hofstadter got famous for the wrong book.
  • ut very few people, even admirers of GEB, know about the book or the programs it describes. And maybe that’s because FARG’s programs are almost ostentatiously impractical. Because they operate in tiny, seemingly childish “microdomains.” Because there is no task they perform better than a human.
  • “The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.”
  • “Nobody is a very reliable guide concerning activities in their mind that are, by definition, subconscious,” he once wrote. “This is what makes vast collections of errors so important. In an isolated error, the mechanisms involved yield only slight traces of themselves; however, in a large collection, vast numbers of such slight traces exist, collectively adding up to strong evidence for (and against) particular mechanisms.
  • So IBM threw that approach out the window. What the developers did instead was brilliant, but so straightforward,
  • The technique is called “machine learning.” The goal is to make a device that takes an English sentence as input and spits out a French sentence
  • What you do is feed the machine English sentences whose French translations you already know. (Candide, for example, used 2.2 million pairs of sentences, mostly from the bilingual proceedings of Canadian parliamentary debates.)
  • By repeating this process with millions of pairs of sentences, you will gradually calibrate your machine, to the point where you’ll be able to enter a sentence whose translation you don’t know and get a reasonable resul
  • Google Translate team can be made up of people who don’t speak most of the languages their application translates. “It’s a bang-for-your-buck argument,” Estelle says. “You probably want to hire more engineers instead” of native speakers.
  • But the need to serve 1 billion customers has a way of forcing the company to trade understanding for expediency. You don’t have to push Google Translate very far to see the compromises its developers have made for coverage, and speed, and ease of engineering. Although Google Translate captures, in its way, the products of human intelligence, it isn’t intelligent itself.
  • “Did we sit down when we built Watson and try to model human cognition?” Dave Ferrucci, who led the Watson team at IBM, pauses for emphasis. “Absolutely not. We just tried to create a machine that could win at Jeopardy.”
  • For Ferrucci, the definition of intelligence is simple: it’s what a program can do. Deep Blue was intelligent because it could beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Watson was intelligent because it could beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy.
  • “There’s a limited number of things you can do as an individual, and I think when you dedicate your life to something, you’ve got to ask yourself the question: To what end? And I think at some point I asked myself that question, and what it came out to was, I’m fascinated by how the human mind works, it would be fantastic to understand cognition, I love to read books on it, I love to get a grip on it”—he called Hofstadter’s work inspiring—“but where am I going to go with it? Really what I want to do is build computer systems that do something.
  • Peter Norvig, one of Google’s directors of research, echoes Ferrucci almost exactly. “I thought he was tackling a really hard problem,” he told me about Hofstadter’s work. “And I guess I wanted to do an easier problem.”
  • Of course, the folly of being above the fray is that you’re also not a part of it
  • As our machines get faster and ingest more data, we allow ourselves to be dumber. Instead of wrestling with our hardest problems in earnest, we can just plug in billions of examples of them.
  • Hofstadter hasn’t been to an artificial-intelligence conference in 30 years. “There’s no communication between me and these people,” he says of his AI peers. “None. Zero. I don’t want to talk to colleagues that I find very, very intransigent and hard to convince of anything
  • Everything from plate tectonics to evolution—all those ideas, someone had to fight for them, because people didn’t agree with those ideas.
  • Academia is not an environment where you just sit in your bath and have ideas and expect everyone to run around getting excited. It’s possible that in 50 years’ time we’ll say, ‘We really should have listened more to Doug Hofstadter.’ But it’s incumbent on every scientist to at least think about what is needed to get people to understand the ideas.”
sissij

The Right Way to Fall - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-right-way-to-fall.html

new york times psychology science

shared by sissij on 27 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • According to paratroopers, stunt professionals, physical therapists and martial arts instructors, there is indeed a “right way” to fall — and it can save you a lot of grief if you know how to do it.
  • The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality estimates that falls cause more than a third of injury-related emergency room visits, around 7.9 million a year.
  • Moreover, falling straight forward or backward raises the risk of damaging your spine and vital organs.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • You similarly don’t want to come crashing down on your knee so you break your kneecap or do that maneuver where you kind of pedal with your feet to catch yourself, which can lead to broken bones in your foot and ankle.
  • Paratroopers’ goal is to fall sideways in the direction the wind is carrying them — in no way resisting the momentum of the fall. When the balls of their feet barely reach the ground, they immediately distribute the impact in rapid sequence up through the calf to the thigh and buttocks.
  • Accept that you’re falling and go with it, round your body, and don’t stiffen and distribute the energy so you take the fall in the widest area possible,
  • Young children are arguably the best fallers because they have yet to develop fear or embarrassment, so they just tumble and roll without tensing up and trying to catch themselves.
  • sissij on 27 Jan 17
     
    There are techniques and science even in how you choose to fall. After reading this article, I sort of take the advice metaphorically. In the article, it said: "Accept that you're falling and go with it, round your body, and don't stiffen and distribute the energy so you take the fall in the widest area possible." I think it also applies to times when we meet some obstacles and fall in our life. We sometimes just have to accept the grieve and go with it. Although there are many novels depicting heroes going against their fall, as individuals in the reality, I think the better way to deal with our down point is to go with it and let it fade away. Always have your pain and grief at a high concentration will only lead to a broken heart. --Sissi (1/26/2017)
sissij

To Make the World Better, Think Small - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-world-better-think-small.html

new york times brain science psychology

shared by sissij on 01 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • There is a solution, however, to psychic numbing: Think small. In the fund-raising business, there’s an old axiom that “one is greater than one million.” This isn’t bad math; it is a reminder that when it comes to people in need, one million is a statistic, while one is a human story.
  • As we head into 2017, do you want a solution better than “Screw ’em”? Maybe your problem is that you are thinking too big. This year, start with one, not one million. It might just be a happy new year after all.
  • sissij on 01 Jan 17
     
    I have once read about a story of a marathon runner. He overcome all the tiresome and pain by setting small goal throughout the long course. He would observe the course beforehand and memorize some significant symbols on the course. By having those small goals, it can release some mental pressure and make the course more approachable. I think this an example of deceiving our brain for good. --Sissi (12/31/2016)
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