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Javier E

Opinion | Trump, Musk and Kanye Are Twitter Poisoned - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-musk-kanye-twitter.html

twitter poison corruption infantilization social media psychology conditioning

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • By Jaron LanierMr. Lanier is a computer scientist and an author of several books on technology’s impact on people.
  • I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot.
  • When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.
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  • I believe “Twitter poisoning” is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.
  • The same could be said about any number of other figures, including on the left. Examples are found in the excesses of cancel culture and joyless orthodoxies in fandom, in vain attention competitions and senseless online bullying.
  • The human brain did not evolve to handle modern chemicals or modern media technology and is vulnerable to addiction. That is true for me and for us all.
  • Behavioral changes occur as a side effect of something called operant conditioning, which is the underlying mechanism of social media addiction. This is the core mechanism analogous to the role alcohol plays in alcoholism.
  • In the case of digital platforms, the purpose is usually “engagement,” a concept that is hard to distinguish from addiction. People receive little positive and negative jolts of social feedback — getting followed or liked, or being ignored or even humiliated.
  • Before social media, that kind of tight feedback loop had rarely been present in human communications outside of laboratories or marriages. (This is part of why marriage can be hard, I suspect.)  
  • was around when Google and other companies that operate on the personalized advertising model were created, and I can say that at least in the early days, operant conditioning was not part of the plan.
  • What happened was that the algorithms that optimized the individualized advertising model found their way into it automatically, unintentionally rediscovering methods that had been tested on dogs and pigeons.
  • There is a childish insecurity, where before there was pride. Instead of being above it all, like traditional strongmen throughout history, the modern social media-poisoned alpha male whines and frets.
  • What do I think are the symptoms of Twitter poisoning?
  • o be clear, whiners are much better than Stalins. And yet there have been plenty of more mature and gracious leaders who are better than either
  • When we were children, we all had to negotiate our way through the jungle of human power relationships at the playground
  • When we feel those old humiliations, anxieties and sadisms again as adults — over and over, because the algorithm has settled on that pattern as a powerful way to engage us — habit formation restimulates old patterns that had been dormant. We become children again, not in a positive, imaginative sense, but in a pathetic way.
  • Twitter poisoning makes sufferers feel more oppressed than is reasonable in response to reasonable rules. The scope of fun is constricted to transgressions.
  • Unfortunately, scale changes everything. Taunts become dangerous hate when amplified. A Twitter-poisoned soul will often complain of a loss of fun when someone succeeds at moderating the spew of hate.
  • the afflicted lose all sense of proportion about their own powers. They can come to believe they have almost supernatural abilities
  • The degree of narcissism becomes almost absolute. Everything is about what someone else thinks of you.
  • These observations should inform our concerns about TikTok. The most devastating way China might use TikTok is not to misdirect our elections or to prefer pro-China posts, but to generally ramp up social media disease, so as to make Americans more divided, less able to talk to one another and less able to put up a coordinated, unified front.
  • uide society. Whether that idea appeals or not, when technology degrades the minds of those same engineers, then the result can only be dysfunction.
  • Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist who pioneered research in virtual reality and whose books include “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.” He is Microsoft’s “prime unifying scientist” but does not speak for the company.
Javier E

Everyone's Over Instagram - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672305

social media instagram

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • “Gen Z’s relationship with Instagram is much like millennials’ relationship with Facebook: Begrudgingly necessary,” Casey Lewis, a youth-culture consultant who writes the youth-culture newsletter After School, told me over email. “They don’t want to be on it, but they feel it’s weird if they’re not.”
  • a recent Piper Sandler survey found that, of 14,500 teens surveyed across 47 states, only 20 percent named Instagram their favorite social-media platform (TikTok came first, followed by Snapchat).
  • Simply being on Instagram is a very different thing from actively engaging with it. Participating means throwing pictures into a void, which is why it’s become kind of cringe. To do so earnestly suggests a blithe unawareness of your surroundings, like shouting into the phone in public.
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  • In other words, Instagram is giving us the ick: that feeling when a romantic partner or crush does something small but noticeable—like wearing a fedora—that immediately turns you off forever.
  • “People who aren’t influencers only use [Instagram] to watch other people make big announcements,” Lee Tilghman, a former full-time Instagram influencer, told me over the phone. “My close friends who aren’t influencers, they haven’t posted in, like, two years.”
  • although Instagram now has 2 billion monthly users, it faces an existential problem: What happens when the 18-to-29-year-olds who are most likely to use the app, at least in America, age out or go elsewhere? Last year, The New York Times reported that Instagram was privately worried about attracting and retaining the new young users that would sustain its long-term growth—not to mention whose growing shopping potential is catnip to advertisers.
  • Over the summer, these frustrations boiled over. An update that promised, among other things, algorithmically recommended video content that would fill the entire screen was a bridge too far. Users were fed up with watching the app contort itself into a TikTok copycat that prioritized video and recommended posts over photos from friends
  • . Internal documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal show that Instagram users spend 17.6 million hours a day watching Reels, Instagram’s TikTok knockoff, compared with the 197.8 million hours people spend watching TikTok every day. The documents also revealed that Reels engagement has declined by 13.6 percent in recent months, with most users generating “no engagement whatsoever.”
  • Instagram may not be on its deathbed, but its transformation from cool to cringe is a sea change in the social-media universe. The platform was perhaps the most significant among an old generation of popular apps that embodied the original purpose of social media: to connect online with friends and family. Its decline is about not just a loss of relevance, but a capitulation to a new era of “performance” media, in which we create online primarily to reach people we don’t know instead of the people we do
  • . Lavish brand deals, in which an influencer promotes a brand’s product to their audience for a fee, have been known to pay anywhere from $100 to $10,000 per post, depending on the size of the creator’s following and their engagement. Now Tilghman, who became an Instagram influencer in 2015 and at one point had close to 400,000 followers, says she’s seen her rate go down by 80 percent over the past five years. The market’s just oversaturated.
  • The author Jessica DeFino, who joined Instagram in 2018 on the advice of publishing agents, similarly began stepping back from the platform in 2020, feeling overwhelmed by the constant feedback of her following. She has now set up auto-replies to her Instagram DMs: If one of her 59,000 followers sends her a message, they’re met with an invitation to instead reach out to DeFino via email.
  • would she get back on Instagram as a regular user? Only if she “created a private, personal account — somewhere I could limit my interactions to just family and friends,” she says. “Like what Instagram was in the beginning, I guess.”
  • That is if, by then, Instagram’s algorithm-driven, recommendation-fueled, shopping-heavy interface would even let her. Ick.
Javier E

Book review - The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity | The Inquisitive Biolo... - 0 views

inquisitivebiologist.com/...hing-a-new-history-of-humanity

book review history big history anthropology archaeology inequality slavery research bias psychology

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles.
  • , I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.
  • First, rather than one author’s pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber (a figurehead in the Occupy Wall Street movement and author of e.g. Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow (author of e.g. What Makes Civilization?). I expect a large part of their decade-long collaboration consisted of shooting holes in each other’s arguments
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  • Colonisation exposed us to new ideas that shocked and confused us. Graeber & Wengrow focus on the French coming into contact with Native Americans in Canada, and in particular on Wendat Confederacy philosopher–statesman Kandiaronk as an example of European traders, missionaries, and intellectuals debating with, and being criticized by indigenous people. Historians have downplayed how much these encounters shaped Enlightenment ideas.
  • this thought-provoking book is armed to the teeth with fascinating ideas and interpretations that go against mainstream thinking
  • ather than yet another history book telling you how humanity got here, they take their respective disciplines to task for dealing in myths.
  • Its legacy, shaped via several iterations, is the modern textbook narrative: hunter-gathering was replaced by pastoralism and then farming; the agricultural revolution resulted in larger populations producing material surpluses; these allowed for specialist occupations but also needed bureaucracies to share and administer them to everyone; and this top-down control led to today’s nation states. Ta-daa!
  • this simplistic tale of progress ignores and downplays that there was nothing linear or inevitable about where we have ended up.
  • ake agriculture. Rather than humans enthusiastically entering into what Harari in Sapiens called a Faustian bargain with crops, there were many pathways and responses
  • Experiments show that plant domestication could have been achieved in as little as 20–30 years, so the fact that cereal domestication here took some 3,000 years questions the notion of an agricultural “revolution”. Lastly, this book includes many examples of areas where agriculture was purposefully rejected. Designating such times and places as “pre-agricultural” is misleading, write the authors, they were anti-agricultural.
  • The idea that agriculture led to large states similarly needs revision
  • correlation is not causation, and some 15–20 additional centres of domestication have since been identified that followed different paths. Some cities have previously remained hidden in the sediments of ancient river deltas until revealed by modern remote-sensing technology.
  • “extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization”
  • And cities did not automatically imply social stratification. The Dawn of Everything fascinates with its numerous examples of large settlements without ruling classes, such as Ukrainian mega-sites, the Harappan civilization, or Mexican city-states.
  • These instead relied on collective decision-making through assemblies or councils, which questions some of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology about scale: that larger human groups require complex (i.e. hierarchical) systems to organize them.
  • e what is staring them in the face
  • humans have always been very capable of consciously experimenting with different social arrangements. And—this is rarely acknowledged—they did so on a seasonal basis, spending e.g. part of the year settled in large communal groups under a leader, and another part as small, independently roving bands.
  • Throughout, Graeber & Wengrow convincingly argue that the only thing we can say about our ancestors is that “there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration […] If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements […] maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?
  • Next to criticism, the authors put out some interesting ideas of their own, of which I want to quickly highlight two.
  • The first is that some of the observed variations in social arrangements resulted from schismogenesis. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined this term in the 1930s to describe how people define themselves against or in opposition to others, adopting behaviours and attitudes that are different.
  • The second idea is that states can be described in terms of three elementary forms of domination: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma, which express themselves as sovereignty, administration, and competitive politics.
  • Our current states combine these three, and thus we have state-endorsed violence in the form of law enforcement and armies, bureaucracy, and the popularity contests we call elections in some countries, and monarchs, oligarchs, or tyrants in other countries. But looking at history, there is no reason why this should be and the authors provide examples of societies that showed only one or two such forms of control
  • Asking which past society most resembles today’s is the wrong question to ask. It risks slipping into an exercise in retrofitting, “which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states”
  • I have left unmentioned several other topics: the overlooked role of women, the legacy of Rousseau’s and Hobbes’s ideas, the origins of inequality and the flawed assumptions hiding behind that question
  • There are so many historical details and delights hiding between these covers that I was thoroughly enthralle
  • If you have any interest in big history, archaeology, or anthropology, this book is indispensable. I am confident that the questions and critiques raised here will remain relevant for a long time to come.
  • I was particularly impressed by the in-depth critique by worbsintowords on his YouTube channel What is Politics? of (so far) five videos
Javier E

René Girard has many Silicon Valley disciples... - Berfrois - 1 views

www.berfrois.com/...-many-silicon-valley-disciples

Girard psychology mimesis desire

shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • A student of Girard’s while at Stanford in the late 1980s, Thiel would go on to report, in several interviews, and somewhat more sub-rosa in his 2014 book, From Zero to One, that Girard is his greatest intellectual inspiration. He is in the habit of recommending Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978) to others in the tech industry.
  • Michel Serres, another French theorist long resident at Stanford, and a strong advocate for Girard’s ideas, has described Girard as the “Darwin of the human sciences”, and has identified the mimetic theory as the relevant analog in the humanities of the Darwinian theory of natural selection.
  • For Girard, everything is imitation. Or rather, every human action that rises above “merely” biological appetite and that is experienced as desire for a given object, in fact is not a desire for that object itself, but a desire to have the object that somebody else already has
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  • The great problem of our shared social existence is not wanting things, it’s wanting things because they are someone else’s.
  • Desire for what the other person has brings about a situation in which individuals in a community grow more similar to one another over time in a process of competition-cum-emulation. Such dual-natured social encounters, more precisely, are typical of people who are socially more or less equal
  • In relation to a movie star who does not even know some average schlub exists, that schlub can experience only emulation (this is what Girard calls “external mediation”), but in relation to a fellow schlub down the street (a “neighbor” in the Girardian-Biblical sense), emulation is a much more intimate affair (“internal mediation”, Girard calls it)
  • This is the moment of what Girard calls “mimetic crisis”, which is resolved by the selection of a scapegoat, whose casting-out from the community has the salvific effect of unifying the opposed but undifferentiated doubles
  • In a community in which the mimetic mechanism has led to widespread non-differentiation, or in other words to a high degree of conformity, it can however happen that scapegoating approaches something like the horror scenario in Shirley Jackson’s 1948 tale, “The Lottery”
  • As a modest theory of the anthropology of punishment, these observations have some promise.
  • he is a practically-minded person’s idea of what a theorist is like. Girard himself appears to share in this idea: a theorist for him is someone who comes up with a simple, elegant account of how everything works, and spends a whole career driving that account home.
  • Girard is not your typical French intellectual. He is a would-be French civil-servant archivist gone rogue, via Bloomington, Baltimore, Buffalo, and finally at Stanford, where his individual brand of New World self-reinvention would be well-received by some in the Silicon Valley subculture of, let us say, hyper-Whitmanian intellectual invention and reinvention.
  • Most ritual, in fact, strikes me as characterized by imitation without internal mediation or scapegoating.
  • I do not see anything more powerfully explanatory of this phenomenon in the work of Girard than in, say, Roland Barthes’s analysis of haute-couture in his ingenious 1967 System of Fashion, or for that matter Thorstein Veblen on conspicuous consumption, or indeed any number of other authors who have noticed that indubitable truth of human existence: that we copy each other
  • whatever has money behind it will inevitably have intelligent-looking people at least pretending to take it seriously, and with the foundation of the Imitatio Project by the Thiel Foundation (executive director Jimmy Kaltreider, a principal at Thiel Capital), the study and promotion of Girardian mimetic theory is by now a solid edifice in the intellectual landscape of California.
  • with Girard what frustrates me even more is that he does not seem to detect the non-mimetic varieties of desire
  • Perhaps even more worrisome for Girard’s mimetic theory is that it appears to leave out all those instances in which imitation serves as a force for social cohesion and cannot plausibly be said to involve any process of “internal mediation” leading to a culmination in scapegoating
  • the idea that anything Girard has to say might be particularly well-suited to adaptation as a “business philosophy” is entirely without merit.
  • dancing may be given ritual meaning — a social significance encoded by human bodies doing the same thing simultaneously, and therefore in some sense becoming identical, but without any underlying desire at all to annihilate one another. It is this significance that the Australian poet Les Murray sees as constituting the essence of both poetry and religion: both are performed, as he puts it, “in loving repetition”.
  • There are different kinds of theorist, of course, and there is plenty of room for all of us. It is however somewhat a shame that the everything-explainers, the hammerers for whom all is nail, should be the ones so consistently to capture the popular imagination
  • Part of Girard’s appeal in the Silicon Valley setting lies not only in his totalizing urge, but also in his embrace of a certain interpretation of Catholicism that stresses the naturalness of hierarchy, all the way up to the archangels, rather than the radical egalitarianism of other tendencies within this faith
  • Girard explains that the positive reception in France of his On Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World had to do with the widespread misreading of it as a work of anti-Christian theory. “If they had known that there is no hostility in me towards the Church, they would have dismissed me. I appeared as the heretic, the revolted person that one has to be in order to reassure the media
  • Peter Thiel, for his part, certainly does not seem to feel oppressed by western phallocracy either — in fact he appears intent on coming out somewhere at the top of the phallocratic order, and in any case has explicitly stated that the aspirations of liberal democracy towards freedom and equality for all should rightly be seen as a thing of the past. In his demotic glosses on Girard, the venture capitalist also seems happy to promote the Girardian version of Catholicism as a clerical institution ideally suited to the newly emerging techno-feudalist order.
Javier E

'The Godfather of AI' Quits Google and Warns of Danger Ahead - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bot-engineer-quits-hinton.html

danger AI pioneer industry warning technology research

shared by Javier E on 01 May 23 - No Cached
  • he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
  • Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.
  • “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,”
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  • Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education.
  • But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity.
  • “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Dr. Hinton said.
  • After the San Francisco start-up OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT in March, more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers signed an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of new systems because A.I technologies pose “profound risks to society and humanity.
  • Several days later, 19 current and former leaders of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society, released their own letter warning of the risks of A.I. That group included Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer at Microsoft, which has deployed OpenAI’s technology across a wide range of products, including its Bing search engine.
  • Dr. Hinton, often called “the Godfather of A.I.,” did not sign either of those letters and said he did not want to publicly criticize Google or other companies until he had quit his job
  • Dr. Hinton, a 75-year-old British expatriate, is a lifelong academic whose career was driven by his personal convictions about the development and use of A.I. In 1972, as a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Hinton embraced an idea called a neural network. A neural network is a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing data. At the time, few researchers believed in the idea. But it became his life’s work.
  • Dr. Hinton is deeply opposed to the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — what he calls “robot soldiers.”
  • In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his students in Toronto, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, built a neural network that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects, such as flowers, dogs and cars.
  • In 2018, Dr. Hinton and two other longtime collaborators received the Turing Award, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their work on neural networks.
  • Around the same time, Google, OpenAI and other companies began building neural networks that learned from huge amounts of digital text. Dr. Hinton thought it was a powerful way for machines to understand and generate language, but it was inferior to the way humans handled language.
  • Then, last year, as Google and OpenAI built systems using much larger amounts of data, his view changed. He still believed the systems were inferior to the human brain in some ways but he thought they were eclipsing human intelligence in others.
  • “Maybe what is going on in these systems,” he said, “is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain.”
  • As companies improve their A.I. systems, he believes, they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of A.I. technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”
  • Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.
  • His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”
  • He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”
  • Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their ow
  • And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.
  • “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
  • Many other experts, including many of his students and colleagues, say this threat is hypothetical. But Dr. Hinton believes that the race between Google and Microsoft and others will escalate into a global race that will not stop without some sort of global regulation.
  • But that may be impossible, he said. Unlike with nuclear weapons, he said, there is no way of knowing whether companies or countries are working on the technology in secret. The best hope is for the world’s leading scientists to collaborate on ways of controlling the technology. “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it,” he said.
  • Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”
  • He does not say that anymore.
Javier E

Opinion | The Book That Explains Our Cultural Stagnation - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...status-culture-book.html

art high culture boredom malaise rank status creativity meaning internet c

shared by Javier E on 30 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • The best explanation I’ve read for our current cultural malaise comes at the end of W. David Marx’s forthcoming “Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change,” a book that is not at all boring and that subtly altered how I see the world.
  • Marx posits cultural evolution as a sort of perpetual motion machine driven by people’s desire to ascend the social hierarchy. Artists innovate to gain status, and people unconsciously adjust their tastes to either signal their status tier or move up to a new one.
  • “Status struggles fuel cultural creativity in three important realms: competition between socioeconomic classes, the formation of subcultures and countercultures, and artists’ internecine battles.”
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  • avant-garde composer John Cage. When Cage presented his discordant orchestral piece “Atlas Eclipticalis” at Lincoln Center in 1964, many patrons walked out. Members of the orchestra hissed at Cage when he took his bow; a few even smashed his electronic equipment. But Cage’s work inspired other artists, leading “historians and museum curators to embrace him as a crucial figure in the development of postmodern art,” which in turn led audiences to pay respectful attention to his work
  • “There was a virtuous cycle for Cage: His originality, mystery and influence provided him artist status; this encouraged serious institutions to explore his work; the frequent engagement with his work imbued Cage with cachet among the public, who then received a status boost for taking his work seriously,” writes Marx.
  • The internet, Marx writes in his book’s closing section, changes this dynamic. With so much content out there, the chance that others will recognize the meaning of any obscure cultural signal declines
  • in the age of the internet, taste tells you less about a person. You don’t need to make your way into any social world to develop a familiarity with Cage — or, for that matter, with underground hip-hop, weird performance art, or rare sneakers.
  • people are, obviously, no less obsessed with their own status today than they were during times of fecund cultural production.
  • the markers of high social rank have become more philistine. When the value of cultural capital is debased, writes Marx, it makes “popularity and economic capital even more central in marking status.”
  • there’s “less incentive for individuals to both create and celebrate culture with high symbolic complexity.”
  • It makes more sense for a parvenu to fake a ride on a private jet than to fake an interest in contemporary art. We live in a time of rapid and disorientating shifts in gender, religion and technology. Aesthetically, thanks to the internet, it’s all quite dull.
Javier E

The Israel-Hamas War Shows Just How Broken Social Media Has Become - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675614

social media media disinformation news crisis information culture

shared by Javier E on 14 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • major social platforms have grown less and less relevant in the past year. In response, some users have left for smaller competitors such as Bluesky or Mastodon. Some have simply left. The internet has never felt more dense, yet there seem to be fewer reliable avenues to find a signal in all the noise. One-stop information destinations such as Facebook or Twitter are a thing of the past. The global town square—once the aspirational destination that social-media platforms would offer to all of us—lies in ruins, its architecture choked by the vines and tangled vegetation of a wild informational jungle
  • Musk has turned X into a deepfake version of Twitter—a facsimile of the once-useful social network, altered just enough so as to be disorienting, even terrifying.
  • At the same time, Facebook’s user base began to erode, and the company’s transparency reports revealed that the most popular content circulating on the platform was little more than viral garbage—a vast wasteland of CBD promotional content and foreign tabloid clickbait.
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  • What’s left, across all platforms, is fragmented. News and punditry are everywhere online, but audiences are siloed; podcasts are more popular than ever, and millions of younger people online have turned to influencers and creators on Instagram and especially TikTok as trusted sources of news.
  • Social media, especially Twitter, has sometimes been an incredible news-gathering tool; it has also been terrible and inefficient, a game of do your own research that involves batting away bullshit and parsing half truths, hyperbole, outright lies, and invaluable context from experts on the fly. Social media’s greatest strength is thus its original sin: These sites are excellent at making you feel connected and informed, frequently at the expense of actually being informed.
  • At the center of these pleas for a Twitter alternative is a feeling that a fundamental promise has been broken. In exchange for our time, our data, and even our well-being, we uploaded our most important conversations onto platforms designed for viral advertising—all under the implicit understanding that social media could provide an unparalleled window to the world.
  • What comes next is impossible to anticipate, but it’s worth considering the possibility that the centrality of social media as we’ve known it for the past 15 years has come to an end—that this particular window to the world is being slammed shut.
Javier E

Among the Disrupted - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...among-the-disrupted.html

humanism tech technocracy universalism posthumanism culture history crisis technology knowledge science

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • even as technologism, which is not the same as technology, asserts itself over more and more precincts of human life, so too does scientism, which is not the same as science.
  • The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions, and that nonscientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings if they are to qualify as knowledge, is increasingly popular inside and outside the university,
  • So, too, does the view that the strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods
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  • The contrary insistence that the glories of art and thought are not evolutionary adaptations, or that the mind is not the brain, or that love is not just biology’s bait for sex, now amounts to a kind of heresy.
  • Greif’s book is a prehistory of our predicament, of our own “crisis of man.” (The “man” is archaic, the “crisis” is not.) It recognizes that the intellectual history of modernity may be written in part as the epic tale of a series of rebellions against humanism
  • We are not becoming transhumanists, obviously. We are too singular for the Singularity. But are we becoming posthumanists?
  • In American culture right now, as I say, the worldview that is ascendant may be described as posthumanism.
  • The posthumanism of the 1970s and 1980s was more insular, an academic affair of “theory,” an insurgency of professors; our posthumanism is a way of life, a social fate.
  • In “The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973,” the gifted essayist Mark Greif, who reveals himself to be also a skillful historian of ideas, charts the history of the 20th-century reckonings with the definition of “man.
  • Here is his conclusion: “Anytime your inquiries lead you to say, ‘At this moment we must ask and decide who we fundamentally are, our solution and salvation must lie in a new picture of ourselves and humanity, this is our profound responsibility and a new opportunity’ — just stop.” Greif seems not to realize that his own book is a lasting monument to precisely such inquiry, and to its grandeur
  • “Answer, rather, the practical matters,” he counsels, in accordance with the current pragmatist orthodoxy. “Find the immediate actions necessary to achieve an aim.” But before an aim is achieved, should it not be justified? And the activity of justification may require a “picture of ourselves.” Don’t just stop. Think harder. Get it right.
  • — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian character, so that individuals can know more than how things work, and develop their powers of discernment and judgment, their competence in matters of truth and goodness and beauty, to equip themselves adequately for the choices and the crucibles of private and public life.
  • Who has not felt superior to humanism? It is the cheapest target of all: Humanism is sentimental, flabby, bourgeois, hypocritical, complacent, middlebrow, liberal, sanctimonious, constricting and often an alibi for power
  • what is humanism? For a start, humanism is not the antithesis of religion, as Pope Francis is exquisitely demonstrating
  • The worldview takes many forms: a philosophical claim about the centrality of humankind to the universe, and about the irreducibility of the human difference to any aspect of our animality
  • Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.
  • And posthumanism? It elects to understand the world in terms of impersonal forces and structures, and to deny the importance, and even the legitimacy, of human agency.
  • There have been humane posthumanists and there have been inhumane humanists. But the inhumanity of humanists may be refuted on the basis of their own worldview
  • the condemnation of cruelty toward “man the machine,” to borrow the old but enduring notion of an 18th-century French materialist, requires the importation of another framework of judgment. The same is true about universalism, which every critic of humanism has arraigned for its failure to live up to the promise of a perfect inclusiveness
  • there has never been a universalism that did not exclude. Yet the same is plainly the case about every particularism, which is nothing but a doctrine of exclusion; and the correction of particularism, the extension of its concept and its care, cannot be accomplished in its own name. It requires an idea from outside, an idea external to itself, a universalistic idea, a humanistic idea.
  • Asking universalism to keep faith with its own principles is a perennial activity of moral life. Asking particularism to keep faith with its own principles is asking for trouble.
  • there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life
  • a methodological claim about the most illuminating way to explain history and human affairs, and about the essential inability of the natural sciences to offer a satisfactory explanation; a moral claim about the priority, and the universal nature, of certain values, not least tolerance and compassion
  • “Our very mastery seems to escape our mastery,” Michel Serres has anxiously remarked. “How can we dominate our domination; how can we master our own mastery?”
  • universal accessibility is not the end of the story, it is the beginning. The humanistic methods that were practiced before digitalization will be even more urgent after digitalization, because we will need help in navigating the unprecedented welter
  • Searches for keywords will not provide contexts for keywords. Patterns that are revealed by searches will not identify their own causes and reasons
  • The new order will not relieve us of the old burdens, and the old pleasures, of erudition and interpretation.
  • Is all this — is humanism — sentimental? But sentimentality is not always a counterfeit emotion. Sometimes sentiment is warranted by reality.
  • The persistence of humanism through the centuries, in the face of formidable intellectual and social obstacles, has been owed to the truth of its representations of our complexly beating hearts, and to the guidance that it has offered, in its variegated and conflicting versions, for a soulful and sensitive existence
  • a complacent humanist is a humanist who has not read his books closely, since they teach disquiet and difficulty. In a society rife with theories and practices that flatten and shrink and chill the human subject, the humanist is the dissenter.
Javier E

AI is about to completely change how you use computers | Bill Gates - 0 views

www.gatesnotes.com/AI-agents

ai gates applications opportunities technology

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Health care
  • Entertainment and shopping
  • Today, AI’s main role in healthcare is to help with administrative tasks. Abridge, Nuance DAX, and Nabla Copilot, for example, can capture audio during an appointment and then write up notes for the doctor to review.
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  • agents will open up many more learning opportunities.
  • Already, AI can help you pick out a new TV and recommend movies, books, shows, and podcasts. Likewise, a company I’ve invested in, recently launched Pix, which lets you ask questions (“Which Robert Redford movies would I like and where can I watch them?”) and then makes recommendations based on what you’ve liked in the past
  • Productivity
  • copilots can do a lot—such as turn a written document into a slide deck, answer questions about a spreadsheet using natural language, and summarize email threads while representing each person’s point of view.
  • before the sophisticated agents I’m describing become a reality, we need to confront a number of questions about the technology and how we’ll use it.
  • Helping patients and healthcare workers will be especially beneficial for people in poor countries, where many never get to see a doctor at all.
  • To create a new app or service, you won’t need to know how to write code or do graphic design. You’ll just tell your agent what you want. It will be able to write the code, design the look and feel of the app, create a logo, and publish the app to an online store
  • Agents will do even more. Having one will be like having a person dedicated to helping you with various tasks and doing them independently if you want. If you have an idea for a business, an agent will help you write up a business plan, create a presentation for it, and even generate images of what your product might look like
  • For decades, I’ve been excited about all the ways that software would make teachers’ jobs easier and help students learn. It won’t replace teachers, but it will supplement their work—personalizing the work for students and liberating teachers from paperwork and other tasks so they can spend more time on the most important parts of the job.
  • Mental health care is another example of a service that agents will make available to virtually everyone. Today, weekly therapy sessions seem like a luxury. But there is a lot of unmet need, and many people who could benefit from therapy don’t have access to it.
  • I don’t think any single company will dominate the agents business--there will be many different AI engines available.
  • The real shift will come when agents can help patients do basic triage, get advice about how to deal with health problems, and decide whether they need to seek treatment.
  • They’ll replace word processors, spreadsheets, and other productivity apps.
  • Education
  • For example, few families can pay for a tutor who works one-on-one with a student to supplement their classroom work. If agents can capture what makes a tutor effective, they’ll unlock this supplemental instruction for everyone who wants it. If a tutoring agent knows that a kid likes Minecraft and Taylor Swift, it will use Minecraft to teach them about calculating the volume and area of shapes, and Taylor’s lyrics to teach them about storytelling and rhyme schemes. The experience will be far richer—with graphics and sound, for example—and more personalized than today’s text-based tutors.
  • your agent will be able to help you in the same way that personal assistants support executives today. If your friend just had surgery, your agent will offer to send flowers and be able to order them for you. If you tell it you’d like to catch up with your old college roommate, it will work with their agent to find a time to get together, and just before you arrive, it will remind you that their oldest child just started college at the local university.
  • To see the dramatic change that agents will bring, let’s compare them to the AI tools available today. Most of these are bots. They’re limited to one app and generally only step in when you write a particular word or ask for help. Because they don’t remember how you use them from one time to the next, they don’t get better or learn any of your preferences.
  • The current state of the art is Khanmigo, a text-based bot created by Khan Academy. It can tutor students in math, science, and the humanities—for example, it can explain the quadratic formula and create math problems to practice on. It can also help teachers do things like write lesson plans.
  • Businesses that are separate today—search advertising, social networking with advertising, shopping, productivity software—will become one business.
  • other issues won’t be decided by companies and governments. For example, agents could affect how we interact with friends and family. Today, you can show someone that you care about them by remembering details about their life—say, their birthday. But when they know your agent likely reminded you about it and took care of sending flowers, will it be as meaningful for them?
  • In the computing industry, we talk about platforms—the technologies that apps and services are built on. Android, iOS, and Windows are all platforms. Agents will be the next platform.
  • A shock wave in the tech industry
  • Agents won’t simply make recommendations; they’ll help you act on them. If you want to buy a camera, you’ll have your agent read all the reviews for you, summarize them, make a recommendation, and place an order for it once you’ve made a decision.
  • Agents will affect how we use software as well as how it’s written. They’ll replace search sites because they’ll be better at finding information and summarizing it for you
  • they’ll be dramatically better. You’ll be able to have nuanced conversations with them. They will be much more personalized, and they won’t be limited to relatively simple tasks like writing a letter.
  • Companies will be able to make agents available for their employees to consult directly and be part of every meeting so they can answer questions.
  • AI agents that are well trained in mental health will make therapy much more affordable and easier to get. Wysa and Youper are two of the early chatbots here. But agents will go much deeper. If you choose to share enough information with a mental health agent, it will understand your life history and your relationships. It’ll be available when you need it, and it will never get impatient. It could even, with your permission, monitor your physical responses to therapy through your smart watch—like if your heart starts to race when you’re talking about a problem with your boss—and suggest when you should see a human therapist.
  • If the number of companies that have started working on AI just this year is any indication, there will be an exceptional amount of competition, which will make agents very inexpensive.
  • Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. They accomplish tasks across applications. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior. Based on this information, they offer to provide what they think you need, although you will always make the final decisions.
  • Agents are not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers. They’re also going to upend the software industry, bringing about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons.
  • The most exciting impact of AI agents is the way they will democratize services that today are too expensive for most people
  • The ramifications for the software business and for society will be profound.
  • In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology.
  • You’ll also be able to get news and entertainment that’s been tailored to your interests. CurioAI, which creates a custom podcast on any subject you ask about, is a glimpse of what’s coming.
  • An agent will be able to help you with all your activities if you want it to. With permission to follow your online interactions and real-world locations, it will develop a powerful understanding of the people, places, and activities you engage in. It will get your personal and work relationships, hobbies, preferences, and schedule. You’ll choose how and when it steps in to help with something or ask you to make a decision.
  • even the best sites have an incomplete understanding of your work, personal life, interests, and relationships and a limited ability to use this information to do things for you. That’s the kind of thing that is only possible today with another human being, like a close friend or personal assistant.
  • In the distant future, agents may even force humans to face profound questions about purpose. Imagine that agents become so good that everyone can have a high quality of life without working nearly as much. In a future like that, what would people do with their time? Would anyone still want to get an education when an agent has all the answers? Can you have a safe and thriving society when most people have a lot of free time on their hands?
  • They’ll have an especially big influence in four areas: health care, education, productivity, and entertainment and shopping.
karenmcgregor

Mastering Network Security: Your Trusted Network Security Assignment Helper - 2 views

In the rapidly advancing world of technology, mastering network security is pivotal for academic success. Students navigating the complexities of this dynamic field often seek the expertise of a re...

#networksecurityassignmenthelper #assignmenthelpservicesonline #students #college #universityassessment

started by karenmcgregor on 04 Dec 23 no follow-up yet
Javier E

The Perks of Taking the High Road - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...629495

response climate discussion generosity listening respect gift sharing boomerang disagreement research psychology language

shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • hat is the point of arguing with someone who disagrees with you? Presumably, you would like them to change their mind. But that’s easier said than done
  • Research shows that changing minds, especially changing beliefs that are tied strongly to people’s identity, is extremely difficult
  • this personal attachment to beliefs encourages “competitive personal contests rather than collaborative searches for the truth.”
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  • The way that people tend to argue today, particularly online, makes things worse.
  • You wouldn’t blame anyone involved for feeling as if they’re under fire, and no one is likely to change their mind when they’re being attacked.
  • odds are that neither camp is having any effect on the other; on the contrary, the attacks make opponents dig in deeper.
  • If you want a chance at changing minds, you need a new strategy: Stop using your values as a weapon, and start offering them as a gift.
  • hilosophers and social scientists have long pondered the question of why people hold different beliefs and values
  • One of the most compelling explanations comes from Moral Foundations Theory, which has been popularized by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU. This theory proposes that humans share a common set of “intuitive ethics,” on top of which we build different narratives and institutions—and therefore beliefs—that vary by culture, community, and even person.
  • Extensive survey-based research has revealed that almost everyone shares at least two common values: Harming others without cause is bad, and fairness is good. Other moral values are less widely shared
  • political conservatives tend to value loyalty to a group, respect for authority, and purity—typically in a bodily sense, in terms of sexuality—more than liberals do.
  • Sometimes conflict arises because one group holds a moral foundation that the other simply doesn’t feel strongly about
  • even when two groups agree on a moral foundation, they can radically disagree on how it should be expressed
  • When people fail to live up to your moral values (or your expression of them), it is easy to conclude that they are immoral people.
  • Further, if you are deeply attached to your values, this difference can feel like a threat to your identity, leading you to lash out, which won’t convince anyone who disagrees with you.
  • research shows that if you insult someone in a disagreement, the odds are that they will harden their position against yours, a phenomenon called the boomerang effect.
  • so it is with our values. If we want any chance at persuasion, we must offer them happily. A weapon is an ugly thing, designed to frighten and coerce
  • effective missionaries present their beliefs as a gift. And sharing a gift is a joyful act, even if not everyone wants it.
  • he solution to this problem requires a change in the way we see and present our own values
  • A gift is something we believe to be good for the recipient, who, we hope, may accept it voluntarily, and do so with gratitude. That requires that we present it with love, not insults and hatred.
  • 1. Don’t “other” others.
  • Go out of your way to welcome those who disagree with you as valued voices, worthy of respect and attention. There is no “them,” only “us.”
  • 2. Don’t take rejection personally.
  • just as you are not your car or your house, you are not your beliefs. Unless someone says, “I hate you because of your views,” a repudiation is personal only if you make it so
  • 3. Listen more.
  • when it comes to changing someone’s mind, listening is more powerful than talking. They conducted experiments that compared polarizing arguments with a nonjudgmental exchange of views accompanied by deep listening. The former had no effect on viewpoints, whereas the latter reliably lowered exclusionary opinions.
  • when possible, listening and asking sensitive questions almost always has a more beneficial effect than talking.
  • howing others that you can be generous with them regardless of their values can help weaken their belief attachment, and thus make them more likely to consider your point of view
  • for your values to truly be a gift, you must weaken your own belief attachment first
  • we should all promise to ourselves, “I will cultivate openness, non-discrimination, and non-attachment to views in order to transform violence, fanaticism, and dogmatism in myself and in the world.”
  • if I truly have the good of the world at heart, then I must not fall prey to the conceit of perfect knowledge, and must be willing to entertain new and better ways to serve my ultimate goal: creating a happier world
  • generosity and openness have a bigger chance of making the world better in the long run.
Javier E

The New York Times' trans coverage is under fire. The paper needs to listen | Arwa Mahd... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-trans-coverage-open-letters

trans debate nyt objectivity bias

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.
  • “In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”
  • This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.
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  • “It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism,” Kahn wrote in the memo. “In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort … We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”
  • Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communication, put out a statement stating that the organization pursues “independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care”. While that was all very diplomatic, the executive editor, Joe Kahn, and opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, sent around a rather more pointed newsroom memo condemning the letters on Thursday.
  • The second letter was signed by more than 100 LGBTQ+ and civil rights groups, including Glaad and the Human Rights Campaign. It expressed support for the contributor letter and accused the Times of platforming “fringe theories” and “dangerous inaccuracies”. It noted that while the Times has produced responsible coverage of trans people, “those articles are not getting front-page placement or sent to app users via push notification like the irresponsible pieces are”. And it observed that rightwing politicians have been using the Times’s coverage of trans issues to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care.
  • Here’s the thing: there is no clear-cut line between advocacy and journalism. All media organizations have a perspective about the world and filter their output (which will, of course, strive to be fairly reported) through that perspective. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. Like it or not, the Times is involved in advocacy. It just needs to step back for a moment and think about who it’s advocating for.
Javier E

For Chat-Based AI, We Are All Once Again Tech Companies' Guinea Pigs - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-are-tech-guinea-pigs-647d827b

ai chatbot generative experiment evaluation justification debate

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The companies touting new chat-based artificial-intelligence systems are running a massive experiment—and we are the test subjects.
  • In this experiment, Microsoft, MSFT -2.18% OpenAI and others are rolling out on the internet an alien intelligence that no one really understands, which has been granted the ability to influence our assessment of what’s true in the world. 
  • Companies have been cautious in the past about unleashing this technology on the world. In 2019, OpenAI decided not to release an earlier version of the underlying model that powers both ChatGPT and the new Bing because the company’s leaders deemed it too dangerous to do so, they said at the time.
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  • Microsoft leaders felt “enormous urgency” for it to be the company to bring this technology to market, because others around the world are working on similar tech but might not have the resources or inclination to build it as responsibly, says Sarah Bird, a leader on Microsoft’s responsible AI team.
  • One common starting point for such models is what is essentially a download or “scrape” of most of the internet. In the past, these language models were used to try to understand text, but the new generation of them, part of the revolution in “generative” AI, uses those same models to create texts by trying to guess, one word at a time, the most likely word to come next in any given sequence.
  • Wide-scale testing gives Microsoft and OpenAI a big competitive edge by enabling them to gather huge amounts of data about how people actually use such chatbots. Both the prompts users input into their systems, and the results their AIs spit out, can then be fed back into a complicated system—which includes human content moderators paid by the companies—to improve it.
  • , being first to market with a chat-based AI gives these companies a huge initial lead over companies that have been slower to release their own chat-based AIs, such as Google.
  • rarely has an experiment like Microsoft and OpenAI’s been rolled out so quickly, and at such a broad scale.
  • Among those who build and study these kinds of AIs, Mr. Altman’s case for experimenting on the global public has inspired responses ranging from raised eyebrows to condemnation.
  • The fact that we’re all guinea pigs in this experiment doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be conducted, says Nathan Lambert, a research scientist at the AI startup Huggingface.
  • “I would kind of be happier with Microsoft doing this experiment than a startup, because Microsoft will at least address these issues when the press cycle gets really bad,” says Dr. Lambert. “I think there are going to be a lot of harms from this kind of AI, and it’s better people know they are coming,” he adds.
  • Others, particularly those who study and advocate for the concept of “ethical AI” or “responsible AI,” argue that the global experiment Microsoft and OpenAI are conducting is downright dangerous
  • Celeste Kidd, a professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley, studies how people acquire knowledge
  • Her research has shown that people learning about new things have a narrow window in which they form a lasting opinion. Seeing misinformation during this critical initial period of exposure to a new concept—such as the kind of misinformation that chat-based AIs can confidently dispense—can do lasting harm, she says.
  • Dr. Kidd likens OpenAI’s experimentation with AI to exposing the public to possibly dangerous chemicals. “Imagine you put something carcinogenic in the drinking water and you were like, ‘We’ll see if it’s carcinogenic.’ After, you can’t take it back—people have cancer now,”
  • Part of the challenge with AI chatbots is that they can sometimes simply make things up. Numerous examples of this tendency have been documented by users of both ChatGPT and OpenA
  • These models also tend to be riddled with biases that may not be immediately apparent to users. For example, they can express opinions gleaned from the internet as if they were verified facts
  • When millions are exposed to these biases across billions of interactions, this AI has the potential to refashion humanity’s views, at a global scale, says Dr. Kidd.
  • OpenAI has talked publicly about the problems with these systems, and how it is trying to address them. In a recent blog post, the company said that in the future, users might be able to select AIs whose “values” align with their own.
  • “We believe that AI should be a useful tool for individual people, and thus customizable by each user up to limits defined by society,” the post said.
  • Eliminating made-up information and bias from chat-based search engines is impossible given the current state of the technology, says Mark Riedl, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology who studies artificial intelligence
  • He believes the release of these technologies to the public by Microsoft and OpenAI is premature. “We are putting out products that are still being actively researched at this moment,” he adds. 
  • in other areas of human endeavor—from new drugs and new modes of transportation to advertising and broadcast media—we have standards for what can and cannot be unleashed on the public. No such standards exist for AI, says Dr. Riedl.
  • To modify these AIs so that they produce outputs that humans find both useful and not-offensive, engineers often use a process called “reinforcement learning through human feedback.
  • that’s a fancy way of saying that humans provide input to the raw AI algorithm, often by simply saying which of its potential responses to a query are better—and also which are not acceptable at all.
  • Microsoft’s and OpenAI’s globe-spanning experiments on millions of people are yielding a fire hose of data for both companies. User-entered prompts and the AI-generated results are fed back through a network of paid human AI trainers to further fine-tune the models,
  • Huggingface’s Dr. Lambert says that any company, including his own, that doesn’t have this river of real-world usage data helping it improve its AI is at a huge disadvantage
  • In chatbots, in some autonomous-driving systems, in the unaccountable AIs that decide what we see on social media, and now, in the latest applications of AI, again and again we are the guinea pigs on which tech companies are testing new technology.
  • It may be the case that there is no other way to roll out this latest iteration of AI—which is already showing promise in some areas—at scale. But we should always be asking, at times like these: At what price?
Javier E

Opinion | Even the Best Smart Watch Might Be Bad for Your Brain - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...smartwatch-health-body.html

wearable devices tracking fitness health metrics psychology brain science social media technology

shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • one major downside to all this quantification: It can interfere with our ability to know our own bodies. Once you outsource your well-being to a device and convert it into a number, it stops being yours.
  • With my smart watch, sometimes I would wake up in the morning and check my app to see how I slept — instead of just taking a moment to notice that I was still tired
  • It’s an extension of our hustle-oriented culture, said the executive coach and performance expert Brad Stulberg, author of “The Practice of Groundedness.” “Our culture promotes the limiting belief that measurable achievement is the predominant arbiter of success, and these devices play right into that,
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  • The more I used my watch to monitor my stress, the higher my stress levels rose.
  • “It’s like you’re trying to win at this game instead of living your life. Instead of learning what your body feels like, you have a number.”
  • Add a social or competitive component, as in the fitness app Strava or the community features on Peloton, and the feelings of control and empowerment that fitness can foster can morph quickly into the opposite.
  • If it feels like an addiction, that’s because it can work similarly to smartphone and other digital addictions. Dependency is what these devices are designed to foster.
  • in fact, we very much can become compulsively fixated on these wearable devices — in a way that is akin to addiction.”
  • These devices don’t just record your behavior — they influence it and keep you coming back. You become dependent on external validation.
  • you can’t quantify your way to good health. The reality is much harder.
  • I know I got fitter. But I started to feel that my health wasn’t grounded in my own body anymore, or even in my mind.
  • Exercise wasn’t helping me rebound from pressure anymore; it was adding to it.
  • Of course these watches can be useful: for health data, reminding you to move more or maybe even that emergency call if you wind up falling in the woods. Many of us make better choices when we know we’re being watched.
Javier E

GPT-4 has arrived. It will blow ChatGPT out of the water. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...it-will-blow-chatgpt-out-water

AI chatbot evolution assessment

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • GPT-4, in contrast, is a state-of-the-art system capable of creating not just words but describing images in response to a person’s simple written commands.
  • When shown a photo of a boxing glove hanging over a wooden seesaw with a ball on one side, for instance, a person can ask what will happen if the glove drops, and GPT-4 will respond that it would hit the seesaw and cause the ball to fly up.
  • an AI program, known as a large language model, that early testers had claimed was remarkably advanced in its ability to reason and learn new things
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  • hose promises have also fueled anxiety over how people will be able to compete for jobs outsourced to eerily refined machines or trust the accuracy of what they see online.
  • Officials with the San Francisco lab said GPT-4’s “multimodal” training across text and images would allow it to escape the chat box and more fully emulate a world of color and imagery, surpassing ChatGPT in its “advanced reasoning capabilities.”
  • A person could upload an image and GPT-4 could caption it for them, describing the objects and scene.
  • AI language models often confidently offer wrong answers because they are designed to spit out cogent phrases, not actual facts. And because they have been trained on internet text and imagery, they have also learned to emulate human biases of race, gender, religion and class.
  • GPT-4 still makes many of the errors of previous versions, including “hallucinating” nonsense, perpetuating social biases and offering bad advice. It also lacks knowledge of events that happened after about September 2021, when its training data was finalized, and “does not learn from its experience,” limiting people’s ability to teach it new things.
  • Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI in the hope its technology will become a secret weapon for its workplace software, search engine and other online ambitions. It has marketed the technology as a super-efficient companion that can handle mindless work and free people for creative pursuits, helping one software developer to do the work of an entire team or allowing a mom-and-pop shop to design a professional advertising campaign without outside help.
  • it could lead to business models and creative ventures no one can predict.
  • sparked criticism that the companies are rushing to exploit an untested, unregulated and unpredictable technology that could deceive people, undermine artists’ work and lead to real-world harm.
  • the company held back the feature to better understand potential risks. As one example, she said, the model might be able to look at an image of a big group of people and offer up known information about them, including their identities — a possible facial recognition use case that could be used for mass surveillance.
  • OpenAI researchers wrote, “As GPT-4 and AI systems like it are adopted more widely,” they “will have even greater potential to reinforce entire ideologies, worldviews, truths and untruths, and to cement them or lock them in.”
  • “We can agree as a society broadly on some harms that a model should not contribute to,” such as building a nuclear bomb or generating child sexual abuse material, she said. “But many harms are nuanced and primarily affect marginalized groups,” she added, and those harmful biases, especially across other languages, “cannot be a secondary consideration in performance.”
  • OpenAI said its new model would be able to handle more than 25,000 words of text, a leap forward that could facilitate longer conversations and allow for the searching and analysis of long documents.
  • OpenAI developers said GPT-4 was more likely to provide factual responses and less likely to refuse harmless requests
  • Duolingo, the language learning app, has already used GPT-4 to introduce new features, such as an AI conversation partner and a tool that tells users why an answer was incorrect.
  • The company did not share evaluations around bias that have become increasingly common after pressure from AI ethicists.
  • GPT-4 will have competition in the growing field of multisensory AI. DeepMind, an AI firm owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, last year released a “generalist” model named Gato that can describe images and play video games. And Google this month released a multimodal system, PaLM-E, that folded AI vision and language expertise into a one-armed robot on wheels: If someone told it to go fetch some chips, for instance, it could comprehend the request, wheel over to a drawer and choose the right bag.
  • The systems, though — as critics and the AI researchers are quick to point out — are merely repeating patterns and associations found in their training data without a clear understanding of what it’s saying or when it’s wrong.
  • GPT-4, the fourth “generative pre-trained transformer” since OpenAI’s first release in 2018, relies on a breakthrough neural-network technique in 2017 known as the transformer that rapidly advanced how AI systems can analyze patterns in human speech and imagery.
  • The systems are “pre-trained” by analyzing trillions of words and images taken from across the internet: news articles, restaurant reviews and message-board arguments; memes, family photos and works of art.
  • Giant supercomputer clusters of graphics processing chips are mapped out their statistical patterns — learning which words tended to follow each other in phrases, for instance — so that the AI can mimic those patterns, automatically crafting long passages of text or detailed images, one word or pixel at a time.
  • In 2019, the company refused to publicly release GPT-2, saying it was so good they were concerned about the “malicious applications” of its use, from automated spam avalanches to mass impersonation and disinformation campaigns.
  • Altman has also marketed OpenAI’s vision with the aura of science fiction come to life. In a blog post last month, he said the company was planning for ways to ensure that “all of humanity” benefits from “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI — an industry term for the still-fantastical idea of an AI superintelligence that is generally as smart as, or smarter than, the humans themselves.
Javier E

Opinion | Do You Live in a 'Tight' State or a 'Loose' One? Turns Out It Matters Quite a... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-blue-tight-loose-state.html

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.
  • In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a Ph.D. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”
  • titled “Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.
  • ...64 more annotations...
  • Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”
  • The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina
  • states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.
  • Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters).
  • “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World” in 2018, in which she described the results of a 2016 pre-election survey she and two colleagues had commissioned
  • The results were telling: People who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism.
  • The 2016 election, Gelfand continued, “turned largely on primal cultural reflexes — ones that had been conditioned not only by cultural forces, but by a candidate who was able to exploit them.”
  • Gelfand said:Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.
  • In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.
  • The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued,is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France,
  • cultures that don’t have a lot of threat can afford to be more permissive and loose.”
  • The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive
  • My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.
  • Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side.
  • Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.
  • If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?
  • Along the same lines, if liberals and conservatives hold differing moral visions, not just about what makes a good government but about what makes a good life, what turned the relationship between left and right from competitive to mutually destructive?
  • As a set, Niemi wrote, conservative binding values encompassthe values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals
  • She cited research thatfound 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals
  • Conservatives and liberals, Niemi continued,see different things as threats — the nature of the threat and how it happens to stir one’s moral values (and their associated emotions) is a better clue to why liberals and conservatives react differently.
  • Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior as morally relevant and wrong.
  • Underlying these differences are competing sets of liberal and conservative moral priorities, with liberals placing more stress than conservatives on caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values
  • conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”
  • Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right.
  • For example, binding values are associated with Machiavellianism (e.g., status-seeking and lying, getting ahead by any means, 2013); victim derogation, blame, and beliefs that victims were causal contributors for a variety of harmful acts (2016, 2020); and a tendency to excuse transgressions of ingroup members with attributions to the situation rather than the person (2023).
  • Niemi cited a paper she and Liane Young, a professor of psychology at Boston College, published in 2016, “When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims,” which tested responses of men and women to descriptions of crimes including sexual assaults and robberies.
  • We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity)
  • Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated, increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators.
  • A central explanation typically offered for the current situation in American politics is that partisanship and political ideology have developed into strong social identities where the mass public is increasingly sorted — along social, partisan, and ideological lines.
  • What happened to people ecologically affected social-political developments, including the content of the rules people made and how they enforced them
  • Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the U.S. historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.
  • Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:
  • I would guess that the reason conservatives are more likely to blame the victim has less to do with binding values and more to do with the just-world bias (the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, therefore if a bad thing happened to you, you must be a bad person).
  • Belief in a just world, Hartshorne argued, is crucial for those seeking to protect the status quo:It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world
  • Conversely, if you generally believe the world is not just, and you view yourself as a moral person, then you are likely to feel like you have an obligation to change things.
  • I asked Lene Aaroe, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, why the contemporary American political system is as polarized as it is now, given that the liberal-conservative schism is longstanding. What has happened to produce such intense hostility between left and right?
  • There is variation across countries in hostility between left and right. The United States is a particularly polarized case which calls for a contextual explanatio
  • I then asked Aaroe why surveys find that conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”
  • Numerous factors potentially influence the evolution of liberalism and conservatism and other social-cultural differences, including geography, topography, catastrophic events, and subsistence styles
  • Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, elaborated in an email on the link between conservatism and happiness:
  • t’s a combination of factors. Conservatives are likelier to be married, patriotic, and religious, all of which make people happier
  • They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals also place politics closer to their identity and striving for meaning and purpose, which is a recipe for frustration.
  • Some features of the woke faction of liberalism may make people unhappier: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, wokeism is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in reverse, urging upon people maladaptive mental habits such as catastrophizing, feeling like a victim of forces beyond one’s control, prioritizing emotions of hurt and anger over rational analysis, and dividing the world into allies and villains.
  • Why, I asked Pinker, would liberals and conservatives react differently — often very differently — to messages that highlight threat?
  • It may be liberals (or at least the social-justice wing) who are more sensitive to threats, such as white supremacy, climate change, and patriarchy; who may be likelier to moralize, seeing racism and transphobia in messages that others perceive as neutral; and being likelier to surrender to emotions like “harm” and “hurt.”
  • While liberals and conservatives, guided by different sets of moral values, may make agreement on specific policies difficult, that does not necessarily preclude consensus.
  • there are ways to persuade conservatives to support liberal initiatives and to persuade liberals to back conservative proposals:
  • While liberals tend to be more concerned with protecting vulnerable groups from harm and more concerned with equality and social justice than conservatives, conservatives tend to be more concerned with moral issues like group loyalty, respect for authority, purity and religious sanctity than liberals are. Because of these different moral commitments, we find that liberals and conservatives can be persuaded by quite different moral arguments
  • For example, we find that conservatives are more persuaded by a same-sex marriage appeal articulated in terms of group loyalty and patriotism, rather than equality and social justice.
  • Liberals who read the fairness argument were substantially more supportive of military spending than those who read the loyalty and authority argument.
  • We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation’s official language.”
  • In one test of persuadability on the right, Feinberg and Willer assigned some conservatives to read an editorial supporting universal health care as a matter of “fairness (health coverage is a basic human right)” or to read an editorial supporting health care as a matter of “purity (uninsured people means more unclean, infected, and diseased Americans).”
  • Conservatives who read the purity argument were much more supportive of health care than those who read the fairness case.
  • “political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective
  • In “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Willer, Yuan Chang Leong of the University of Chicago, Janice Chen of Johns Hopkins and Jamil Zaki of Stanford address the question of how partisan biases are encoded in the brain:
  • society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos.
  • The four authors argue that their “findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.” These results, they continue, “shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.”
  • The authors used neural imaging to follow changes in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (known as DMPFC) as conservatives and liberals watched videos presenting strong positions, left and right, on immigration.
  • or each video,” they write,participants with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of conservative-leaning participants became more likely to support the conservative positio
  • Conversely, those with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of liberal-leaning participants became more likely to support the liberal position. These results suggest that divergent interpretations of the same information are associated with increased attitude polarizatio
  • Together, our findings describe a neural basis for partisan biases in processing political information and their effects on attitude change.
  • Describing their neuroimaging method, the authors point out that theysearched for evidence of “neural polarization” activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content.
  • The question is whether the political polarization that we are witnessing now proves to be a core, encoded aspect of the human mind, difficult to overcome — as Leong, Chen, Zaki and Willer sugges
  • — or whether, with our increased knowledge of the neural basis of partisan and other biases, we will find more effective ways to manage these most dangerous of human predispositions.
Javier E

Opinion | Lower fertility rates are the new cultural norm - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...estigating-low-fertility-rates

fertility rate us research psychology social media tech norm

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • The percentage who say that having children is very important to them has dropped from 43 percent to 30 percent since 2019. This fits with data showing that, since 2007, the total fertility rate in the United States has fallen from 2.1 lifetime births per woman, the “replacement rate” necessary to sustain population levels, to just 1.64 in 2020.
  • The U.S. economy is losing an edge that robust population dynamics gave it relative to low-birth-rate peer nations in Japan and Western Europe; this country, too, faces chronic labor-supply constraints as well as an even less favorable “dependency ratio” between workers and retirees than it already expected.
  • the timing and the magnitude of such a demographic sea-change cry out for explanation. What happened in 2007?
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • New financial constraints on family formation are a potential cause, as implied by another striking finding in the Journal poll — 78 percent of adults lack confidence this generation of children will enjoy a better life than they do.
  • Yet a recent analysis for the Aspen Economic Strategy Group by Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine, economics professors at the University of Maryland and Wellesley College, respectively, determined that “beyond the temporary effects of the Great Recession, no recent economic or policy change is responsible for a meaningful share of the decline in the US fertility rate since 2007.”
  • Their study took account of such factors as the high cost of child care, student debt service and housing as well as Medicaid coverage and the wider availability of long-acting reversible contraception. Yet they had “no success finding evidence” that any of these were decisive.
  • Kearney and Levine speculated instead that the answers lie in the cultural zeitgeist — “shifting priorities across cohorts of young adults,”
  • A possibility worth considering, they suggested, is that young adults who experienced “intensive parenting” as children now balk at the heavy investment of time and resources needed to raise their own kids that way: It would clash with their career and leisure goals.
  • another event that year: Apple released the first iPhone, a revolutionary cultural moment if there ever was one. The ensuing smartphone-enabled social media boom — Facebook had opened membership to anyone older than 13 in 2006 — forever changed how human beings relate with one another.
  • We are just beginning to understand this development’s effect on mental health, education, religious observance, community cohesion — everything. Why wouldn’t it also affect people’s willingness to have children?
  • one indirect way new media affect childbearing rates is through “time competition effects” — essentially, hours spent watching the tube cannot be spent forming romantic partnerships.
  • a 2021 review of survey data on young adults and adolescents in the United States and other countries, the years between 2009 and 2018 saw a marked decline in reported sexual activity.
  • the authors hypothesized that people are distracted from the search for partners by “increasing use of computer games and social media.
  • during the late 20th century, Brazil’s fertility rates fell after women who watched soap operas depicting smaller families sought to emulate them by having fewer children themselves.
  • This may be an area where incentives do not influence behavior, at least not enough. Whether the cultural shift to lower birthrates occurs on an accelerated basis, as in the United States after 2007, or gradually, as it did in Japan, it appears permanent — “sticky,” as policy wonks say.
Javier E

It's Not Just the Discord Leak. Group Chats Are the Internet's New Chaos Machine. - The... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673738

social media chaos internet group in-group dynamics

shared by Javier E on 15 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Digital bulletin-board systems—proto–group chats, you could say—date back to the 1970s, and SMS-style group chats popped up in WhatsApp and iMessage in 2011.
  • As New York magazine put it in 2019, group chats became “an outright replacement for the defining mode of social organization of the past decade: the platform-centric, feed-based social network.”
  • unlike the Facebook feed or Twitter, where posts can be linked to wherever, group chats are a closed system—a safe and (ideally) private space. What happens in the group chat ought to stay there.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • In every group chat, no matter the size, participants fall into informal roles. There is usually a leader—a person whose posting frequency drives the group or sets the agenda. Often, there are lurkers who rarely chime in
  • Larger group chats are not immune to the more toxic dynamics of social media, where competition for attention and herd behavior cause infighting, splintering, and back-channeling.
  • It’s enough to make one think, as the writer Max Read argued, that “venture-capitalist group chats are a threat to the global economy.” Now you might also say they are a threat to national security.
  • thanks to the private nature of the group chats, this information largely stayed out of the public eye. As Bloomberg reported, “By the time most people figured out that a bank run was a possibility … it was already well underway.”
  • The investor panic that led to the swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March was effectively caused by runaway group-chat dynamics. “It wasn’t phone calls; it wasn’t social media,” a start-up founder told Bloomberg in March. “It was private chat rooms and message groups.
  • Unlike traditional social media or even forums and message boards, group chats are nearly impossible to monitor.
  • as our digital social lives start to splinter off from feeds and large audiences and into siloed areas, a different kind of unpredictability and chaos awaits. Where social networks create a context collapse—a process by which information meant for one group moves into unfamiliar networks and is interpreted by outsiders—group chats seem to be context amplifiers
  • group chats provide strong relationship dynamics, and create in-jokes and lore. For decades, researchers have warned of the polarizing effects of echo chambers across social networks; group chats realize this dynamic fully.
  • Weird things happen in echo chambers. Constant reinforcement of beliefs or ideas might lead to group polarization or radicalization. It may trigger irrational herd behavior such as, say, attempting to purchase a copy of the Constitution through a decentralized autonomous organization
  • Obsession with in-group dynamics might cause people to lose touch with the reality outside the walls of a particular community; the private-seeming nature of a closed group might also lull participants into a false sense of security, as it did with Teixiera.
  • the age of the group chat appears to be at least as unpredictable, swapping a very public form of volatility for a more siloed, incalculable version
karenmcgregor

Is ComputerNetworkAssignmentHelp.com a Legitimate Source for Network Security Assignmen... - 0 views

In the dynamic landscape of academic support services, finding a trustworthy platform for network security assignment writing help is crucial. Today, we'll delve into the legitimacy of https://www....

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