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

www.nytimes.com/...vindman-fox-news-.html media manipulation propaganda narrative conspiracy theory fox news psychology Bias
shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • In anticipation of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s recent public testimony in the House’s impeachment inquiry, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham and a guest concocted an insulting fantasy on her show: the idea that Colonel Vindman might be a Ukrainian spy.
  • as a former Fox News opinion talk-show guest host and contributor for 14 years, it didn’t shock me.
  • First, we must talk about narratives. In my time at Fox News, narratives were weapons of mass emotional manipulation, what the Nobel laureate Robert J. Shiller defines in “Narrative Economics” as “contagious stories” — as he put it in a paper of the same name, “a simple story or easily expressed explanation of events that many people want to bring up in conversation or on news or social media because it can be used to stimulate the concerns or emotions of others, and/or because it appears to advance self-interest.”
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  • we find information or misinformation “22 times more memorable in narrative form.”
  • It’s a contagion, and thanks to social media, or “participatory propaganda,” highly viral
  • The Fox News counternarrative model is as simple as it is cunning. The segment producer’s job is to get the answers to two questions: What is the most emotionally engaging story we have right now
  • The next question is, how do we construct a counternarrative that includes as many existing other believable meta-narratives as possible
  • The hunt for the killer narrative starts with the “Morning Memo” to the producers. It shares the interpretation from the vice president of news of the highest-trending articles on Foxnews.com and Drudge
  • The next move is to get a few Fox News contributor regulars — elected officials and paid pundits — not just to deliver the new counternarrative but also to wrap it inside an existing or new meta-narrative.
  • What do the ratings tell the producers are the most engaging meta-narratives for the over 80 million Fox News viewers on all digital platforms?
  • Conspiracy theories.
  • Why do people love conspiracy stories? It’s human behavior
  • The emotional payoff from being on the inside of a conspiracy is a self-esteem jolt that makes you feel smarter than your tribal foe and keeps your eyeballs glued to screens
  • Every successful Fox News segment producer has the conspiracy script down cold. These segments work best when the “proof” of a conspiracy against a tribal leader — in this case the Republican president — makes the viewer feel under attack as well
  • it helps when a proposed conservative thought leader mixes in the meta-narrative to the effect that “we are victimized again by the condescending Beltway elites.”
  • Believing in conspiracy theories is a psychological construct for people to take back some semblance of control in their lives. It inflates their sense of importance. It makes them feel they have access to “special knowledge” that the rest of the world is “too blind,” “too dumb” or “too corrupt” to understand.
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Neuroscience Is Making Significant Progress In Understanding Emotional Pain - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...n-understanding-emotional-pain emotions pain neuroscience research
shared by knudsenlu on 02 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • We are learning a lot right now about the neuroscience of emotions. Specifically, we are learning that there is a lot of overlap between the way we process physical pain and the way we process emotional pain.
  • Understanding emotional pain could be powerful in understanding a lot of the common emotional maladies that are regularly treated with psychotherapy or mood altering medications. Depression, anxiety, trauma, social pain, these are all debilitating disorders that are poorly understood and often poorly treated.
  • Humans are a unique species in two ways that account for our intense response to social rejection. We are born physically immature because of our enormous heads, and we require a lot of care early on. Because of our immaturity at birth, our species has selected for a deeply innate sense of bonding between individuals. The other unique feature of our species is that we require a lot of calories, probably also due to our oversized brains. Brains are calorie intensive organs and our brains are huge. So, humans burn about 400 more calories per day than other primates when you account for size [2]. Since we burn so much food, we as a species, have an innate drive to share food, which may have allowed us to get through bad hunting or gathering days in early human history. So, humans are naturally drawn to bond with others and to be conscious of aligning with a group of people where food sharing is possible.
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  • It makes sense then, that losing a friend, or being rejected by a group might register to a person as a very dangerous thing. Emotional pain might result if a person discovers that they weren’t invited to a dinner party with friends.
  • One thing we do know is that people who have a lot of friends have high pain thresholds
  • Look for cutting edge neuroscience coming out in the next few years that helps us understand how to raise the social pain threshold. We could, very soon, have some practical answers for people with debilitating social anxiety, depression, and loneliness.
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When Did Ancient Humans Start to Speak? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...603484 science psychology research brain science language
shared by anniina03 on 14 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The larynx, also called the voice box, is where the trouble begins: Its location is, or was, supposed to be the key to language.
  • Scientists have agreed for a while that the organ is lower down the throat in humans than it is in any other primate, or was in our ancestors. And for decades, they thought that low-down larynx was a sort of secret ingredient to speech because it enabled its bearers to produce a variety of distinctive vowels, like the ones that make beet, bat, and boot sound like different words. That would mean that speech—and, therefore, language—couldn’t have evolved until the arrival of anatomically modern Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago
  • In fact, they propose that the necessary equipment—specifically, the throat shape and motor control that produce distinguishable vowels—has been around as long as 27 million years, when humans and Old World monkeys (baboons, mandrills, and the like) last shared a common ancestor.
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  • Those speech abilities could include distinct vowels and consonants, syllables, or even syntax—all of which, according to LDT, should be impossible for any animal without a human vocal tract.
  • As John Locke, a linguistics professor at Lehman College, put it, “Motor control rots when you die.” Soft tissues like tongues and nerves and brains generally don’t fossilize; DNA sequencing is impossible past a few hundred thousand years; no one has yet found a diary or rap track recorded by a teenage Australopithecus.
  • One of the quantitative models the new study relies on, he says, doesn’t properly represent the shape of the larynx, tongue, and other parts we use to talk: “It would convert a mailing tube into a human vocal tract.” And according to Lieberman, laryngeal descent theory “never claimed language was not possible” prior to the critical changes in our ancestors’ throat anatomy. “They’re trying to set up a straw man,” he said.
  • Rather than 27 million years, Hickok proposes that the earliest bound on any sort of speech ability would be nearer to human ancestors’ split with the Pan genus, which includes chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives. That split happened about 5 million to 7 million years ago—certainly longer than 200,000 years, but a far cry from 27 million. Lieberman argues that the precursors of speech might have emerged about a little more than 3 million years ago, when artifacts like jewelry appear in the archaeological record. The idea is that both language and jewelry are intimately related to the evolution of symbolic thinking.
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This Strange Microbe May Mark One of Life's Great Leaps - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cells-eukaryotes-archaea.html science research
shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A bizarre tentacled microbe discovered on the floor of the Pacific Ocean may help explain the origins of complex life on this planet and solve one of the deepest mysteries in biology, scientists reported on Wednesday.Two billion years ago, simple cells gave rise to far more complex cells. Biologists have struggled for decades to learn how it happened.
  • The new species, called Prometheoarchaeum, turns out to be just such a transitional form, helping to explain the origins of all animals, plants, fungi — and, of course, humans. The research was reported in the journal Nature.
  • Species that share these complex cells are known as eukaryotes, and they all descend from a common ancestor that lived an estimated two billion years ago.Before then, the world was home only to bacteria and a group of small, simple organisms called archaea. Bacteria and archaea have no nuclei, lysosomes, mitochondria or skeletons
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  • In the late 1900s, researchers discovered that mitochondria were free-living bacteria at some point in the past. Somehow they were drawn inside another cell, providing new fuel for their host. In 2015, Thijs Ettema of Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues discovered fragments of DNA in sediments retrieved from the Arctic Ocean. The fragments contained genes from a species of archaea that seemed to be closely related to eukaryotes.Dr. Ettema and his colleagues named them Asgard archaea. (Asgard is the home of the Norse gods.) DNA from these mystery microbes turned up in a river in North Carolina, hot springs in New Zealand and other places around the world.
  • Masaru K. Nobu, a microbiologist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, and his colleagues managed to grow these organisms in a lab. The effort took more than a decade.The microbes, which are adapted to life in the cold seafloor, have a slow-motion existence. Prometheoarchaeum can take as long as 25 days to divide. By contrast, E. coli divides once every 20 minutes.
  • In the lab, the researchers mimicked the conditions in the seafloor by putting the sediment in a chamber without any oxygen. They pumped in methane and extracted deadly waste gases that might kill the resident microbes.The mud contained many kinds of microbes. But by 2015, the researchers had isolated an intriguing new species of archaea. And when Dr. Ettema and colleagues announced the discovery of Asgard archaea DNA, the Japanese researchers were shocked. Their new, living microbe belonged to that group.The researchers then undertook more painstaking research to understand the new species and link it to the evolution of eukaryotes.The researchers named the microbe Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum, in honor of Prometheus, the Greek god who gave humans fire — after fashioning them from clay.
  • This finding suggests that the proteins that eukaryotes used to build complex cells started out doing other things, and only later were assigned new jobs.Dr. Nobu and his colleagues are now trying to figure out what those original jobs were. It’s possible, he said, that Prometheoarchaeum creates its tentacles with genes later used by eukaryotes to build cellular skeletons.
  • Before the discovery of Prometheoarchaeum, some researchers suspected that the ancestors of eukaryotes lived as predators, swallowing up smaller microbes. They might have engulfed the first mitochondria this way.
  • Instead of hunting prey, Prometheoarchaeum seems to make its living by slurping up fragments of proteins floating by. Its partners feed on its waste. They, in turn, provide Prometheoarchaeum with vitamins and other essential compounds.
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The Life Changing Linguistics of... Nigerian Scam Emails | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

daily.jstor.org/istics-of-nigerian-scam-emails science research language Technology
shared by blythewallick on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • How do scammers use language to trick their victims?
  • Researchers often have pondered the psychology of how and why certain people fall for scams, especially ones that appear to be so obvious to others. Scammers target certain human traits, including vulnerabilities that can be easily exploited, such as naiveté, overconfidence in one’s intelligence or abilities, an overly optimistic expectation of immediate success in life, or a desire to feel good about helping others. As communication on the internet has gotten more sophisticated, so have the scams. Many still fall for it, as con artists continue to target businesses as well as individuals.
  • Nigerian 419 cons (the number refers to the fraud section of the Nigerian Criminal Code) are practically the oldest scams on the internet. They can actually be traced back to the 1920s, in the form of a confidence trick most gothically known as the Spanish Prisoner. The victims are asked to pay out more and more money to release the wealthy relative of your respectable foreign correspondents (who naturally doesn’t exist), cruelly imprisoned in Spain, in return for a large reward (that never comes).
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  • It’s well-known that most of the emails are composed by nonnative speakers of English, as is clear from the many grammatical and punctuation mistakes, broken syntax, missing words, and malapropisms (“the will to personify the façade to its practical conclusion” for “pursue the charade”). With so many mistakes, how can this language really fool anyone? Often, victims know the message comes from a nonnative speaker, or they may be nonnative English speakers themselves and may not always recognize grammatical errors.
  • The scammers make extraordinary efforts to use technical, military, financial or otherwise professional language in a clumsy caricature of what formal, educated English sounds like (“government officials . . . awarded themselves contracts that were grossly over-invoiced in various ministries and parastatals”) to keep up the pretence of being a barrister, a brigadier-general, or a bank official.
  • It’s a simple scam, but appears to be effective when it reaches credulous types who are willing to ignore the warning signs in search of a treasure hunting adventure that can make a life extraordinary for a while, before it all ends in grief.
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Seeking Dark Matter, They Detected Another Mystery - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-axions-neutrinos-tritium.html dark matter physics research science
shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • A team of scientists hunting dark matter has recorded suspicious pings coming from a vat of liquid xenon underneath a mountain in Italy
  • If the signal is real and persists, the scientists say, it may be evidence of a species of subatomic particles called axions — long theorized to play a crucial role in keeping nature symmetrical but never seen — streaming from the sun.
  • Instead of axions, the scientists may have detected a new, unexpected property of the slippery ghostly particles called neutrinos. Yet another equally likely explanation is that their detector has been contaminated by vanishingly tiny amounts of tritium, a rare radioactive form of hydrogen.
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  • “We want to be very clear that all we are reporting is observation of an excess (a fairly significant one) and not a discovery of any kind,”
  • “I’m trying to be calm here, but it’s hard not to be hyperbolic,” said Neal Weiner, a particle theorist at New York University. “If this is real, calling it a game changer would be an understatement.”
  • Dr. Aprile’s Xenon experiment is currently the largest and most sensitive in an alphabet soup of efforts aimed at detecting and identifying dark matter
  • The best guess is that this dark matter consists of clouds of exotic subatomic particles left over from the Big Bang and known generically as WIMPs, for weakly interacting massive particles, hundreds or thousands of times more massive than a hydrogen atom.
  • The story of axions begins in 1977, when Roberto Peccei, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who died on June 1, and Helen Quinn, emerita professor at Stanford, suggested a slight modification to the theory that governs strong nuclear forces, making sure that it is invariant to the direction of time, a feature that physicists consider a necessity for the universe.
  • in its most recent analysis of that experiment, the team had looked for electrons, rather than the heavier xenon nuclei, recoiling from collisions. Among other things, that could be the signature of particles much lighter than the putative WIMPs striking the xenon.
  • Simulations and calculations suggested that random events should have produced about 232 such recoils over the course of a year.
  • But from February 2017 to February 2018, the detector recorded 285, an excess of 53 recoils.
  • Dr. Aprile and her colleagues have wired a succession of vats containing liquid xenon with photomultipliers and other sensors. The hope is that her team’s device — far underground to shield it from cosmic rays and other worldly forms of interference — would spot the rare collision between a WIMP and a xenon atom. The collision should result in a flash of light and a cloud of electrical charge.
  • this modification implied the existence of a new subatomic particle. Dr. Wilczek called it the axion, and the name stuck.
  • Axions have never been detected either directly or indirectly. And the theory does not predict their mass, which makes it hard to look for them. It only predicts that they would be weird and would barely interact with regular matter
  • although they are not WIMPS, they share some of those particles’ imagined weird abilities, such as being able to float through Earth and our bodies like smoke through a screen door.
  • In order to fulfill the requirements of cosmologists, however, such dark-matter axions would need to have a mass of less than a thousandth of an electron volt in the units of mass and energy preferred by physicists
  • (By comparison, the electrons that dance around in your smartphone weigh in at half a million electron volts each.) What they lack in heft they would more than make up for in numbers.
  • That would make individual cosmic dark-matter axions too slow and ethereal to be detected by the Xenon experiment.But axions could also be produced by nuclear reactions in the sun, and those “solar axions” would have enough energy to ping the Xenon detector right where it is most sensitive
  • The other exciting, though slightly less likely, possibility is that the Xenon collaboration’s excess signals come from the wispy particles known as neutrinos, which are real, and weird, and zipping through our bodies by the trillions every second.
  • Ordinarily, these neutrinos would not contribute much to the excess of events the detector read. But they would do so if they had an intrinsic magnetism that physicists call a magnetic moment. That would give them a higher probability of interacting with the xenon and tripping the detector
  • According to the standard lore, neutrinos, which are electrically neutral, do not carry magnetism. The discovery that they did would require rewriting the rules as they apply to neutrinos.
  • That, said Dr. Weiner, would be “a very very big deal,” because it would imply that there are new fundamental particles out there to look for — new physics.
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Opinion | You Are the Object of Facebook's Secret Extraction Operation - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-privacy.html surveillance capitalism facebook extraction secret data
shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Facebook is not just any corporation. It reached trillion-dollar status in a single decade by applying the logic of what I call surveillance capitalism — an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data
  • Facebook and other leading surveillance capitalist corporations now control information flows and communication infrastructures across the world.
  • These infrastructures are critical to the possibility of a democratic society, yet our democracies have allowed these companies to own, operate and mediate our information spaces unconstrained by public law.
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  • The result has been a hidden revolution in how information is produced, circulated and acted upon
  • The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit.
  • The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves a trail of social wreckage in its wake: the wholesale destruction of privacy, the intensification of social inequality, the poisoning of social discourse with defactualized information, the demolition of social norms and the weakening of democratic institutions.
  • These social harms are not random. They are tightly coupled effects of evolving economic operations. Each harm paves the way for the next and is dependent on what went before.
  • There is no way to escape the machine systems that surveil u
  • All roads to economic and social participation now lead through surveillance capitalism’s profit-maximizing institutional terrain, a condition that has intensified during nearly two years of global plague.
  • Will Facebook’s digital violence finally trigger our commitment to take back the “un-commons”?
  • Will we confront the fundamental but long ignored questions of an information civilization: How should we organize and govern the information and communication spaces of the digital century in ways that sustain and advance democratic values and principles?
  • Mark Zuckerberg’s start-up did not invent surveillance capitalism. Google did that. In 2000, when only 25 percent of the world’s information was stored digitally, Google was a tiny start-up with a great search product but little revenue.
  • By 2001, in the teeth of the dot-com bust, Google’s leaders found their breakthrough in a series of inventions that would transform advertising. Their team learned how to combine massive data flows of personal information with advanced computational analyses to predict where an ad should be placed for maximum “click through.”
  • Google’s scientists learned how to extract predictive metadata from this “data exhaust” and use it to analyze likely patterns of future behavior.
  • Prediction was the first imperative that determined the second imperative: extraction.
  • Lucrative predictions required flows of human data at unimaginable scale. Users did not suspect that their data was secretly hunted and captured from every corner of the internet and, later, from apps, smartphones, devices, cameras and sensors
  • User ignorance was understood as crucial to success. Each new product was a means to more “engagement,” a euphemism used to conceal illicit extraction operations.
  • When asked “What is Google?” the co-founder Larry Page laid it out in 2001,
  • “Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate enormous amounts of data,” Mr. Page said. “Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.”
  • Instead of selling search to users, Google survived by turning its search engine into a sophisticated surveillance medium for seizing human data
  • Company executives worked to keep these economic operations secret, hidden from users, lawmakers, and competitors. Mr. Page opposed anything that might “stir the privacy pot and endanger our ability to gather data,” Mr. Edwards wrote.
  • As recently as 2017, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, acknowledged the role of Google’s algorithmic ranking operations in spreading corrupt information. “There is a line that we can’t really get across,” he said. “It is very difficult for us to understand truth.” A company with a mission to organize and make accessible all the world’s information using the most sophisticated machine systems cannot discern corrupt information.
  • This is the economic context in which disinformation wins
  • In March 2008, Mr. Zuckerberg hired Google’s head of global online advertising, Sheryl Sandberg, as his second in command. Ms. Sandberg had joined Google in 2001 and was a key player in the surveillance capitalism revolution. She led the build-out of Google’s advertising engine, AdWords, and its AdSense program, which together accounted for most of the company’s $16.6 billion in revenue in 2007.
  • A Google multimillionaire by the time she met Mr. Zuckerberg, Ms. Sandberg had a canny appreciation of Facebook’s immense opportunities for extraction of rich predictive data. “We have better information than anyone else. We know gender, age, location, and it’s real data as opposed to the stuff other people infer,” Ms. Sandberg explained
  • The company had “better data” and “real data” because it had a front-row seat to what Mr. Page had called “your whole life.”
  • Facebook paved the way for surveillance economics with new privacy policies in late 2009. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that new “Everyone” settings eliminated options to restrict the visibility of personal data, instead treating it as publicly available information.
  • Mr. Zuckerberg “just went for it” because there were no laws to stop him from joining Google in the wholesale destruction of privacy. If lawmakers wanted to sanction him as a ruthless profit-maximizer willing to use his social network against society, then 2009 to 2010 would have been a good opportunity.
  • Facebook was the first follower, but not the last. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are private surveillance empires, each with distinct business models.
  • In 2021 these five U.S. tech giants represent five of the six largest publicly traded companies by market capitalization in the world.
  • As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, surveillance capitalism is the dominant economic institution of our time. In the absence of countervailing law, this system successfully mediates nearly every aspect of human engagement with digital information
  • Today all apps and software, no matter how benign they appear, are designed to maximize data collection.
  • Historically, great concentrations of corporate power were associated with economic harms. But when human data are the raw material and predictions of human behavior are the product, then the harms are social rather than economic
  • The difficulty is that these novel harms are typically understood as separate, even unrelated, problems, which makes them impossible to solve. Instead, each new stage of harm creates the conditions for the next stage.
  • Fifty years ago the conservative economist Milton Friedman exhorted American executives, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” Even this radical doctrine did not reckon with the possibility of no rules.
  • With privacy out of the way, ill-gotten human data are concentrated within private corporations, where they are claimed as corporate assets to be deployed at will.
  • The sheer size of this knowledge gap is conveyed in a leaked 2018 Facebook document, which described its artificial intelligence hub, ingesting trillions of behavioral data points every day and producing six million behavioral predictions each second.
  • Next, these human data are weaponized as targeting algorithms, engineered to maximize extraction and aimed back at their unsuspecting human sources to increase engagement
  • Targeting mechanisms change real life, sometimes with grave consequences. For example, the Facebook Files depict Mr. Zuckerberg using his algorithms to reinforce or disrupt the behavior of billions of people. Anger is rewarded or ignored. News stories become more trustworthy or unhinged. Publishers prosper or wither. Political discourse turns uglier or more moderate. People live or die.
  • Occasionally the fog clears to reveal the ultimate harm: the growing power of tech giants willing to use their control over critical information infrastructure to compete with democratically elected lawmakers for societal dominance.
  • when it comes to the triumph of surveillance capitalism’s revolution, it is the lawmakers of every liberal democracy, especially in the United States, who bear the greatest burden of responsibility. They allowed private capital to rule our information spaces during two decades of spectacular growth, with no laws to stop it.
  • All of it begins with extraction. An economic order founded on the secret massive-scale extraction of human data assumes the destruction of privacy as a nonnegotiable condition of its business operations.
  • We can’t fix all our problems at once, but we won’t fix any of them, ever, unless we reclaim the sanctity of information integrity and trustworthy communications
  • The abdication of our information and communication spaces to surveillance capitalism has become the meta-crisis of every republic, because it obstructs solutions to all other crises.
  • Neither Google, nor Facebook, nor any other corporate actor in this new economic order set out to destroy society, any more than the fossil fuel industry set out to destroy the earth.
  • like global warming, the tech giants and their fellow travelers have been willing to treat their destructive effects on people and society as collateral damage — the unfortunate but unavoidable byproduct of perfectly legal economic operations that have produced some of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the history of capitalism.
  • Where does that leave us?
  • Democracy is the only countervailing institutional order with the legitimate authority and power to change our course. If the ideal of human self-governance is to survive the digital century, then all solutions point to one solution: a democratic counterrevolution.
  • instead of the usual laundry lists of remedies, lawmakers need to proceed with a clear grasp of the adversary: a single hierarchy of economic causes and their social harms.
  • We can’t rid ourselves of later-stage social harms unless we outlaw their foundational economic causes
  • This means we move beyond the current focus on downstream issues such as content moderation and policing illegal content. Such “remedies” only treat the symptoms without challenging the illegitimacy of the human data extraction that funds private control over society’s information spaces
  • Similarly, structural solutions like “breaking up” the tech giants may be valuable in some cases, but they will not affect the underlying economic operations of surveillance capitalism.
  • Instead, discussions about regulating big tech should focus on the bedrock of surveillance economics: the secret extraction of human data from realms of life once called “private.
  • No secret extraction means no illegitimate concentrations of knowledge about people. No concentrations of knowledge means no targeting algorithms. No targeting means that corporations can no longer control and curate information flows and social speech or shape human behavior to favor their interests
  • the sober truth is that we need lawmakers ready to engage in a once-a-century exploration of far more basic questions:
  • How should we structure and govern information, connection and communication in a democratic digital century?
  • What new charters of rights, legislative frameworks and institutions are required to ensure that data collection and use serve the genuine needs of individuals and society?
  • What measures will protect citizens from unaccountable power over information, whether it is wielded by private companies or governments?
  • The corporation that is Facebook may change its name or its leaders, but it will not voluntarily change its economics.
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6 Podcasts About the Dark Side of the Internet - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dark-web-podcasts.html new york times podcasts
shared by peterconnelly on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Online life is no longer optional for most people. The pandemic only accelerated a shift already underway, turning the internet into our school, office and social lifeline.
  • the internet’s tightening grip on every aspect of life isn’t without costs
  • These six shows tap into some of those dangers, exploring cybercrime, cryptocurrency and the many flavors of horror that lurk on the dark web.
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  • Recent episodes have focused on mainstream tech stories — the crypto crash, the Netflix bubble bursting — but others go down truly weird rabbit holes, like the mysterious world of Katie Couric CBD scams on Facebook.
  • Begun during the early days of quarantine in March 2020, this affable show feels like eavesdropping on a conversation between two internet-savvy friends
  • “One Click” explores the stories of other young DNP victims, whose deaths were all caused by a combination of predatory marketing, toxic diet culture and unregulated online pharmacies. It’s upsetting but vital listening.
  • Delving into the deepest recesses of the dark web, “Hunting Warhead” follows a monthslong investigation by Einar Stangvik, the hacker, and Hakon Hoydal, the journalist, that ultimately led to the downfall of a local politician.
  • In a bizarre twist, the hack turned out to be motivated by the impending release of a movie named “The Interview,” (starring Seth Rogen and James Franco), which depicted a fictional plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un of North Korea.
  • This wry, richly reported podcast from the BBC World Service chronicles every twist and turn of the saga and its implications far beyond Hollywood.
  • Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, told stories inspired specifically by the quixotic virtual communities Reddit creates and the everyday mysteries it spotlights. (One classic episode focuses on a Reddit thread about a man who stumbled on a huge, inexplicable pile of plates in rural Pennsylvania.)
  • Cybercrime has snowballed so rapidly that the world has been caught off guard; last year’s ransomware attack on a major U.S. pipeline highlighted just how vulnerable many of our institutions are, not to mention our individual data.
  • The hosts, Dave Bittner and Joe Carrigan, are cybersecurity experts who emphasize solutions as they unfurl tales of social engineering, phishing scams and online con artists of every stripe.
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Chris Licht Broke Journalism Rules-and CNN - 0 views

plus.thebulwark.com/...s-licht-out-whats-next-for-cnn journalism rules fairness objectivity impartiality media
shared by Javier E on 10 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • Who could not have noticed the media’s mistakes made over the last eight years, starting with showing Trump’s rallies live and free of real-time fact checking? Who could have missed that moment in early 2016 when Leslie Moonves, then CEO of CBS, said all of these things about a GOP primary race he likened to a circus with bomb-throwing? “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” And “I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” And “Donald’s place in this election is a good thing.” And “The money’s rolling in and this is fun.”
  • Democratic strategist Kurt Bardella, a former Republican congressional staffer who in the age of Trump left the GOP for the Democratic party, argued last summer in a Los Angeles Times column that CNN should be accurately informing citizens so they can make “meaningful choices” instead of trying to appease enemies of democracy. “The greatest disservice you can do is to place the liars on the same playing field as those who are committed to the truth,” he wrote.
  • We are on the verge of a crucial time, when federal prosecutors could make history by indicting Trump, and juries could make history by convicting him. Would CNN bring in Trump acolytes and FBI haters to whine about witch hunts and hoaxes and unfairness, even as the charges and witnesses and evidence are out there for the world to see
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  • If Trump wins the GOP nomination despite all, will CNN treat him and his fanboys as normal politicians and voters, putting January 6th and everything else in the memory hole, in pursuit of a supposed evenhandedness that in fact distorts reality? All while the nation teeters on the brink of another Trump presidency?
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The Constitution of Knowledge - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...than-rauch-the-constitution-of constitution knowledge persuasion psychology
shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • But ideas in the marketplace do not talk directly to each other, and for the most part neither do individuals.
  • It is a good metaphor as far as it goes, yet woefully incomplete. It conjures up an image of ideas being traded by individuals in a kind of flea market, or of disembodied ideas clashing and competing in some ethereal realm of their own
  • When Americans think about how we find truth amid a world full of discordant viewpoints, we usually turn to a metaphor, that of the marketplace of ideas
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  • Rather, our conversations are mediated through institutions like journals and newspapers and social-media platforms. They rely on a dense network of norms and rules, like truthfulness and fact-checking. They depend on the expertise of professionals, like peer reviewers and editors. The entire system rests on a foundation of values: a shared understanding that there are right and wrong ways to make knowledge.
  • Those values and rules and institutions do for knowledge what the U.S. Constitution does for politics: They create a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways.
  • I call them, collectively, the Constitution of Knowledge. If we want to defend that system from its many persistent attackers, we need to understand it—and its very special notion of reality.
  • What reality really is
  • The question “What is reality?” may seem either too metaphysical to answer meaningfully or too obvious to need answering
  • The whole problem is that humans have no direct access to an objective world independent of our minds and senses, and subjective certainty is no guarantee of truth. Faced with those problems and others, philosophers and practitioners think of reality as a set of propositions (or claims, or statements) that have been validated in some way, and that have thereby been shown to be at least conditionally true—true, that is, unless debunked
  • Some propositions reflect reality as we perceive it in everyday life (“The sky is blue”). Others, like the equations on a quantum physicist’s blackboard, are incomprehensible to intuition. Many fall somewhere in between.
  • a phrase I used a few sentences ago, “validated in some way,” hides a cheat. In epistemology, the whole question is, validated in what way? If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: Anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community.
  • That is a very bold, very broad, very tough claim, and it goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge: creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions.
  • But, like the U.S. Constitution’s claim to exclusivity in governing (“unconstitutional” means “illegal,” period), the Constitution of Knowledge’s claim to exclusivity is its sine qua non.
  • Rules for reality
  • The specific proposition does not matter. What does matter is that the only way to validate it is to submit it to the reality-based community. Otherwise, you could win dominance for your proposition by, say, brute force, threatening and jailing and torturing and killing those who see things differently—a standard method down through history
  • Say you believe something (X) to be true, and you believe that its acceptance as true by others is important or at least warranted
  • Or you and your like-minded friends could go off and talk only to each other, in which case you would have founded a cult—which is lawful but socially divisive and epistemically worthless.
  • Or you could engage in a social-media campaign to shame and intimidate those who disagree with you—a very common method these days, but one that stifles debate and throttles knowledge (and harms a lot of people).
  • What the reality-based community does is something else again. Its distinctive qualities derive from two core rules: 
  • what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: You must assume your own and everyone else’s fallibility and you must hunt for your own and others’ errors, even if you are confident you are right. Otherwise, you are not reality-based.
  • The fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it.
  • The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement
  • Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based.
  • Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to.
  • Both rules have very profound social implications. “No final say” insists that to be knowledge, a statement must be checked; and it also says that knowledge is always provisional, standing only as long as it withstands checking.
  • “No personal authority” adds a crucial second step by defining what properly counts as checking. The point, as the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce emphasized more than a century ago, is not that I look or you look but that we look; and then we compare, contest, and justify our views. Critically, then, the empirical rule is a social principle that forces us into the same conversation—a requirement that all of us, however different our viewpoints, agree to discuss what is in principle only one reality.
  • By extension, the empirical rule also dictates what does not count as checking: claims to authority by dint of a personally or tribally privileged perspective.
  • In principle, persons and groups are interchangeable. If I claim access to divine revelation, or if I claim the support of miracles that only believers can witness, or if I claim that my class or race or historically dominant status or historically oppressed status allows me to know and say things that others cannot, then I am breaking the empirical rule by exempting my views from contestability by others.
  • Though seemingly simple, the two rules define a style of social learning that prohibits a lot of the rhetorical moves we see every day.
  • Claiming that a conversation is too dangerous or blasphemous or oppressive or traumatizing to tolerate will almost always break the fallibilist rule.
  • Claims which begin “as a Jew,” or “as a queer,” or for that matter “as minister of information” or “as Pope” or “as head of the Supreme Soviet,” can be valid if they provide useful information about context or credentials; but if they claim to settle an argument by appealing to personal or tribal authority, rather than earned authority, they violate the empirical rule. 
  • “No personal authority” says nothing against trying to understand where people are coming from. If we are debating same-sex marriage, I may mention my experience as a gay person, and my experience may (I hope) be relevant.
  • But statements about personal standing and interest inform the conversation; they do not control it, dominate it, or end it. The rule acknowledges, and to an extent accepts, that people’s social positions and histories matter; but it asks its adherents not to burrow into their social identities, and not to play them as rhetorical trump cards, but to bring them to the larger project of knowledge-building and thereby transcend them.
  • the fallibilist and empirical rules are the common basis of science, journalism, law, and all the other branches of today’s reality-based community. For that reason, both rules also attract hostility, defiance, interference, and open warfare from those who would rather manipulate truth than advance it.
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A Hair-Raising Hypothesis About Rodent Hair - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mice-hair-infrared.html rodent sense perception science
shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • It’s tough out there for a mouse
  • Mice compensate with sharp senses of sight, hearing and smell. But they may have another set of tools we’ve overlooked. A paper published last week in Royal Society Open Science details striking similarities between the internal structures of certain small mammal and marsupial hairs and those of man-made optical instruments.
  • Over the years, he has developed an appreciation for “how comfortable animals are in complete darkness,” he said. That led him to wonder about the extent of their sensory powers.
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  • Observations of predator behavior further piqued his interest. While filming and playing back his videos, he noted how cats stack their bodies behind their faces when they’re hunting. He interprets this, he said, as cats “trying to hide their heat” with their cold noses. He has also observed barn owls twisting as they swoop down, perhaps to shield their warmer parts — legs and wingpits — with cooler ones.
  • Maybe, he thought, “predators have to conceal their infrared to be able to catch a mouse.”
  • Eventually, these and other musings led Dr. Baker to place mouse hairs under a microscope. As it came into view, he felt a strong sense of familiarity. The guard hair in particular — the bristliest type of mouse hair — contained evenly-spaced bands of pigment that, to Dr. Baker, closely resembled structures that allow optical sensors to tune into specific wavelengths of light.
  • Thermal cameras, for instance, focus specifically on 10-micron radiation: the slice of the spectrum that most closely corresponds with heat released by living things. By measuring the stripes, Dr. Baker found they were tuned to 10 microns as well — apparently homed in on life’s most common heat signature. “That was my Eureka moment,” he said.
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