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Javier E

Opinion | Elon Musk, Geoff Hinton, and the War Over A.I. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...i-safety-ethics-effective.html

ai threat faction technology research language

shared by Javier E on 28 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • Beneath almost all of the testimony, the manifestoes, the blog posts and the public declarations issued about A.I. are battles among deeply divided factions
  • Some are concerned about far-future risks that sound like science fiction.
  • Some are genuinely alarmed by the practical problems that chatbots and deepfake video generators are creating right now.
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  • Some are motivated by potential business revenue, others by national security concerns.
  • Sometimes, they trade letters, opinion essays or social threads outlining their positions and attacking others’ in public view. More often, they tout their viewpoints without acknowledging alternatives, leaving the impression that their enlightened perspective is the inevitable lens through which to view A.I.
  • you’ll realize this isn’t really a debate only about A.I. It’s also a contest about control and power, about how resources should be distributed and who should be held accountable.
  • It is critical that we begin to recognize the ideologies driving what we are being told. Resolving the fracas requires us to see through the specter of A.I. to stay true to the humanity of our values.
  • Because language itself is part of their battleground, the different A.I. camps tend not to use the same words to describe their positions
  • One faction describes the dangers posed by A.I. through the framework of safety, another through ethics or integrity, yet another through security and others through economics.
  • The Doomsayers
  • These are the A.I. safety people, and their ranks include the “Godfathers of A.I.,” Geoff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. For many years, these leading lights battled critics who doubted that a computer could ever mimic capabilities of the human mind
  • Many doomsayers say they are acting rationally, but their hype about hypothetical existential risks amounts to making a misguided bet with our future
  • Reasonable sounding on their face, these ideas can become dangerous if stretched to their logical extremes. A dogmatic long-termer would willingly sacrifice the well-being of people today to stave off a prophesied extinction event like A.I. enslavement.
  • The technology historian David C. Brock calls these fears “wishful worries” — that is, “problems that it would be nice to have, in contrast to the actual agonies of the present.”
  • OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom lead dominant A.I. companies, are pushing for A.I. regulations that they say will protect us from criminals and terrorists. Such regulations would be expensive to comply with and are likely to preserve the market position of leading A.I. companies while restricting competition from start-ups
  • the roboticist Rodney Brooks has pointed out that we will see the existential risks coming, the dangers will not be sudden and we will have time to change course.
  • While we shouldn’t dismiss the Hollywood nightmare scenarios out of hand, we must balance them with the potential benefits of A.I. and, most important, not allow them to strategically distract from more immediate concerns.
  • The Reformers
  • While the doomsayer faction focuses on the far-off future, its most prominent opponents are focused on the here and now. We agree with this group that there’s plenty already happening to cause concern: Racist policing and legal systems that disproportionately arrest and punish people of color. Sexist labor systems that rate feminine-coded résumés lower
  • Superpower nations automating military interventions as tools of imperialism and, someday, killer robots.
  • Propagators of these A.I. ethics concerns — like Meredith Broussard, Safiya Umoja Noble, Rumman Chowdhury and Cathy O’Neil — have been raising the alarm on inequities coded into A.I. for years. Although we don’t have a census, it’s noticeable that many leaders in this cohort are people of color, women and people who identify as L.G.B.T.Q.
  • Others frame efforts to reform A.I. in terms of integrity, calling for Big Tech to adhere to an oath to consider the benefit of the broader public alongside — or even above — their self-interest. They point to social media companies’ failure to control hate speech or how online misinformation can undermine democratic elections. Adding urgency for this group is that the very companies driving the A.I. revolution have, at times, been eliminating safeguards
  • reformers tend to push back hard against the doomsayers’ focus on the distant future. They want to wrestle the attention of regulators and advocates back toward present-day harms that are exacerbated by A.I. misinformation, surveillance and inequity.
  • Integrity experts call for the development of responsible A.I., for civic education to ensure A.I. literacy and for keeping humans front and center in A.I. systems.
  • Surely, we are a civilization big enough to tackle more than one problem at a time; even those worried that A.I. might kill us in the future should still demand that it not profile and exploit us in the present.
  • Other groups of prognosticators cast the rise of A.I. through the language of competitiveness and national security.
  • Some arguing from this perspective are acting on genuine national security concerns, and others have a simple motivation: money. These perspectives serve the interests of American tech tycoons as well as the government agencies and defense contractors they are intertwined with.
  • they appear deeply invested in the idea that there is no limit to what their creations will be able to accomplish.
  • U.S. megacompanies pleaded to exempt their general purpose A.I. from the tightest regulations, and whether and how to apply high-risk compliance expectations on noncorporate open-source models emerged as a key point of debate. All the while, some of the moguls investing in upstart companies are fighting the regulatory tide. The Inflection AI co-founder Reid Hoffman argued, “The answer to our challenges is not to slow down technology but to accelerate it.”
  • The warriors’ narrative seems to misrepresent that science and engineering are different from what they were during the mid-20th century. A.I. research is fundamentally international; no one country will win a monopoly.
  • As the science-fiction author Ted Chiang has said, fears about the existential risks of A.I. are really fears about the threat of uncontrolled capitalism
  • Regulatory solutions do not need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we need to double down on the rules that we know limit corporate power. We need to get more serious about establishing good and effective governance on all the issues we lost track of while we were becoming obsessed with A.I., China and the fights picked among robber barons.
  • By analogy to the health care sector, we need an A.I. public option to truly keep A.I. companies in check. A publicly directed A.I. development project would serve to counterbalance for-profit corporate A.I. and help ensure an even playing field for access to the 21st century’s key technology while offering a platform for the ethical development and use of A.I.
  • Also, we should embrace the humanity behind A.I. We can hold founders and corporations accountable by mandating greater A.I. transparency in the development stage, in addition to applying legal standards for actions associated with A.I. Remarkably, this is something that both the left and the right can agree on.
Javier E

The Age of Social Media Is Ending - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672074

social media network culture relationship discourse

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.
  • A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.
  • “social media,” a name so familiar that it has ceased to bear meaning. But two decades ago, that term didn’t exist
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  • a “web 2.0” revolution in “user-generated content,” offering easy-to-use, easily adopted tools on websites and then mobile apps. They were built for creating and sharing “content,”
  • As the original name suggested, social networking involved connecting, not publishing. By connecting your personal network of trusted contacts (or “strong ties,” as sociologists call them) to others’ such networks (via “weak ties”), you could surface a larger network of trusted contacts
  • The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.
  • That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts.
  • Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.
  • A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.
  • The authors propose social media as a system in which users participate in “information exchange.” The network, which had previously been used to establish and maintain relationships, becomes reinterpreted as a channel through which to broadcast.
  • The toxicity of social media makes it easy to forget how truly magical this innovation felt when it was new. From 2004 to 2009, you could join Facebook and everyone you’d ever known—including people you’d definitely lost track of—was right there, ready to connect or reconnect. The posts and photos I saw characterized my friends’ changing lives, not the conspiracy theories that their unhinged friends had shared with them
  • Twitter, which launched in 2006, was probably the first true social-media site, even if nobody called it that at the time. Instead of focusing on connecting people, the site amounted to a giant, asynchronous chat room for the world. Twitter was for talking to everyone—which is perhaps one of the reasons journalists have flocked to it
  • on Twitter, anything anybody posted could be seen instantly by anyone else. And furthermore, unlike posts on blogs or images on Flickr or videos on YouTube, tweets were short and low-effort, making it easy to post many of them a week or even a day.
  • When we look back at this moment, social media had already arrived in spirit if not by name. RSS readers offered a feed of blog posts to catch up on, complete with unread counts. MySpace fused music and chatter; YouTube did it with video (“Broadcast Yourself”)
  • soon enough, all social networks became social media first and foremost. When groups, pages, and the News Feed launched, Facebook began encouraging users to share content published by others in order to increase engagement on the service, rather than to provide updates to friends. LinkedIn launched a program to publish content across the platform, too. Twitter, already principally a publishing platform, added a dedicated “retweet” feature, making it far easier to spread content virally across user networks.
  • From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality.
  • Other services arrived or evolved in this vein, among them Reddit, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, all far more popular than Twitter. Social networks, once latent routes for possible contact, became superhighways of constant content
  • Although you can connect the app to your contacts and follow specific users, on TikTok, you are more likely to simply plug into a continuous flow of video content that has oozed to the surface via algorithm.
  • In the social-networking era, the connections were essential, driving both content creation and consumption. But the social-media era seeks the thinnest, most soluble connections possible, just enough to allow the content to flow.
  • Facebook and all the rest enjoyed a massive rise in engagement and the associated data-driven advertising profits that the attention-driven content economy created. The same phenomenon also created the influencer economy, in which individual social-media users became valuable as channels for distributing marketing messages or product sponsorships by means of their posts’ real or imagined reach
  • “influencer” became an aspirational role, especially for young people for whom Instagram fame seemed more achievable than traditional celebrity—or perhaps employment of any kind.
  • social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks. Polarizing, offensive, or just plain fraudulent information was optimized for distribution. By the time the platforms realized and the public revolted, it was too late to turn off these feedback loops.
  • The ensuing disaster was multipar
  • Rounding up friends or business contacts into a pen in your online profile for possible future use was never a healthy way to understand social relationships.
  • when social networking evolved into social media, user expectations escalated. Driven by venture capitalists’ expectations and then Wall Street’s demands, the tech companies—Google and Facebook and all the rest—became addicted to massive scale
  • Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.
  • On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience: a writer who posted a take, a celebrity who announced a project, a pretty girl just trying to live her life, that anon who said something afflictive
  • When network connections become activated for any reason or no reason, then every connection seems worthy of traversing.
  • people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either.
  • This is also why journalists became so dependent on Twitter: It’s a constant stream of sources, events, and reactions—a reporting automat, not to mention an outbound vector for media tastemakers to make tastes.
  • That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.
  • If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse
  • Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.
  • Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation
  • The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain.
  • when I first wrote about downscale, the ambition seemed necessary but impossible. It still feels unlikely—but perhaps newly plausible.
  • To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often–and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well
  • We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.
Javier E

How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist - BBC Future - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...ransformed-a-white-supremacist

psychology research brain science connections empathy

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • February 2020, Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural science at the University of Chicago, was running an experiment on whether the drug MDMA increased the pleasantness of social touch in healthy volunteers
  • The latest participant in the double-blind trial, a man named Brendan, had filled out a standard questionnaire at the end. Strangely, at the very bottom of the form, Brendan had written in bold letters: "This experience has helped me sort out a debilitating personal issue. Google my name. I now know what I need to do."
  • They googled Brendan's name, and up popped a disturbing revelation: until just a couple of months before, Brendan had been the leader of the US Midwest faction of Identity Evropa, a notorious white nationalist group rebranded in 2019 as the American Identity Movement. Two months earlier, activists at Chicago Antifascist Action had exposed Brendan's identity, and he had lost his job.
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  • "Go ask him what he means by 'I now know what I need to do,'" she instructed Bremmer. "If it's a matter of him picking up an automatic rifle or something, we have to intervene."
  • As he clarified to Bremmer, love is what he had just realised he had to do. "Love is the most important thing," he told the baffled research assistant. "Nothing matters without
  • When de Wit recounted this story to me nearly two years after the fact, she still could hardly believe it. "Isn't that amazing?" she said. "It's what everyone says about this damn drug, that it makes people feel love. To think that a drug could change somebody's beliefs and thoughts without any expectations – it's mind-boggling."
  • Over the past few years, I've been investigating the scientific research and medical potential of MDMA for a book called "I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World". I learnt how this once-vilified drug is now remerging as a therapeutic agent – a role it previously played in the 1970s and 1980s, prior to its criminalisation
  • He attended the notorious "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville and quickly rose up the ranks of his organisation, first becoming the coordinator for Illinois and then the entire Midwest. He travelled to Europe and around the US to meet other white nationalist groups, with the ultimate goal of taking the movement mainstream
  • some researchers have begun to wonder if it could be an effective tool for pushing people who are already somehow primed to reconsider their ideology toward a new way of seeing things
  • While MDMA cannot fix societal-level drivers of prejudice and disconnection, on an individual basis it can make a difference. In certain cases, the drug may even be able to help people see through the fog of discrimination and fear that divides so many of us.
  • in December 2021 I paid Brendan a visit
  • What I didn't expect was how ordinary the 31-year-old who answered the door would appear to be: blue plaid button-up shirt, neatly cropped hair, and a friendly smile.
  • Brendan grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb in an Irish Catholic family. He leaned liberal in high school but got sucked into white nationalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he joined a fraternity mostly composed of conservative Republican men, began reading antisemitic conspiracy books, and fell down a rabbit hole of racist, sexist content online. Brendan was further emboldened by the populist rhetoric of Donald Trump during his presidential campaign. "His speech talking about Mexicans being rapists, the fixation on the border wall and deporting everyone, the Muslim ban – I didn't really get white nationalism until Trump started running for president," Brendan said.
  • If this comes to pass, MDMA – and other psychedelics-assisted therapy – could transform the field of mental health through widespread clinical use in the US and beyond, for addressing trauma and possibly other conditions as well, including substance use disorders, depression and eating disorders.
  • A group of anti-fascist activists published identifying information about him and more than 100 other people in Identity Evropa. He was immediately fired from his job and ostracised by his siblings and friends outside white nationalism.
  • When Brendan saw a Facebook ad in early 2020 for some sort of drug trial at the University of Chicago, he decided to apply just to have something to do and to earn a little money
  • At the time, Brendan was "still in the denial stage" following his identity becoming public, he said. He was racked with regret – not over his bigoted views, which he still held, but over the missteps that had landed him in this predicament.
  • About 30 minutes after taking the pill, he started to feel peculiar. "Wait a second – why am I doing this? Why am I thinking this way?" he began to wonder. "Why did I ever think it was okay to jeopardise relationships with just about everyone in my life?"
  • Just then, Bremmer came to collect Brendan to start the experiment. Brendan slid into an MRI, and Bremmer started tickling his forearm with a brush and asked him to rate how pleasant it felt. "I noticed it was making me happier – the experience of the touch," Brendan recalled. "I started progressively rating it higher and higher." As he relished in the pleasurable feeling, a single, powerful word popped into his mind: connection.
  • It suddenly seemed so obvious: connections with other people were all that mattered. "This is stuff you can't really put into words, but it was so profound," Brendan said. "I conceived of my relationships with other people not as distinct boundaries with distinct entities, but more as we-are-all-on
  • I realised I'd been fixated on stuff that doesn't really matter, and is just so messed up, and that I'd been totally missing the point. I hadn't been soaking up the joy that life has to offer."
  • Brendan hired a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant to advise him, enrolled in therapy, began meditating, and started working his way through a list of educational books. S still regularly communicates with Brendan and, for his part, thinks that Brendan is serious in his efforts to change
  • "I think he is trying to better himself and work on himself, and I do think that experience with MDMA had an impact on him. It's been a touchstone for growth, and over time, I think, the reflection on that experience has had a greater impact on him than necessarily the experience itself."
  • Brendan is still struggling, though, to make the connections with others that he craves. When I visited him, he'd just spent Thanksgiving alone
  • He also has not completely abandoned his bigoted ideology, and is not sure that will ever be possible. "There are moments when I have racist or antisemitic thoughts, definitely," he said. "But now I can recognise that those kinds of thought patterns are harming me more than anyone else."
  • it's not without precedent. In the 1980s, for example, an acquaintance of early MDMA-assisted therapy practitioner Requa Greer administered the drug to a pilot who had grown up in a racist home and had inherited those views. The pilot had always accepted his bigoted way of thinking as being a normal, accurate reflection of the way things were. MDMA, however, "gave him a clear vision that unexamined racism was both wrong and mean," Greer says
  • Encouraging stories of seemingly spontaneous change appear to be exceptions to the norm, however, and from a neurological point of view, this makes sense
  • Research shows that oxytocin – one of the key hormones that MDMA triggers neurons to release – drives a "tend and defend" response across the animal kingdom. The same oxytocin that causes a mother bear to nurture her newborn, for example, also fuels her rage when she perceives a threat to her cub. In people, oxytocin likewise strengthens caregiving tendencies toward liked members of a person's in-group and strangers perceived to belong to the same group, but it increases hostility toward individuals from disliked groups
  • In a 2010 study published in Science, for example, men who inhaled oxytocin were three times more likely to donate money to members of their team in an economic game, as well as more likely to harshly punish competing players for not donating enough. (Read more: "The surprising downsides of empathy.")
  • According to research published this week in Nature by Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist Gül Dölen, MDMA and other psychedelics – including psilocybin, LSD, ketamine and ibogaine – work therapeutically by reopening a critical period in the brain. Critical periods are finite windows of impressionability that typically occur in childhood, when our brains are more malleable and primed to learn new things
  • Dölen and her colleagues' findings likewise indicate that, without the proper set and setting, MDMA and other psychedelics probably do not reopen critical periods, which means they will not have a spontaneous, revelatory effect for ridding someone of bigoted beliefs.
  • In the West, plenty of members of right-wing authoritarian political movements, including neo-Nazi groups, also have track records of taking MDMA and other psychedelics
  • This suggests, researchers write, that psychedelics are nonspecific, "politically pluripotent" amplifiers of whatever is going on in somebody's head, with no particular directional leaning "on the axes of conservatism-liberalism or authoritarianism-egalitarianism."
  • That said, a growing body of scientific evidence indicates that the human capacity for compassion, kindness, empathy, gratitude, altruism, fairness, trust, and cooperation are core features of our natures
  • As Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal wrote, "Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire that can rid us of the curse of xenophobia."
  • Ginsberg also envisions using the drug in workshops aimed at eliminating racism, or as a means of bringing people together from opposite sides of shared cultural histories to help heal intergenerational trauma. "I think all psychedelics have a role to play, but I think MDMA has a particularly key role because you're both expanded and present, heart-open and really able to listen in a new way," Ginsberg says. "That's something really powerful."
  • "If you give MDMA to hard-core haters on each side of an issue, I don't think it'll do a lot of good,"
  • if you start with open-minded people on both sides, then I think it can work. You can improve communications and build empathy between groups, and help people be more capable of analysing the world from a more balanced perspective rather than from fear-based, anxiety-based distrust."
  • In 2021, Ginsberg and Doblin were coauthors on a study investigating the possibility of using ayahuasca – a plant-based psychedelic – in group contexts to bridge divides between Palestinians and Israelis, with positive findings
  • "I kind of have a fantasy that maybe as we get more reacquainted with psychedelics, there could be group-based experiences that build community resiliency and are intentionally oriented toward breaking down barriers between people, having people see things from other perspectives and detribalising our society,
  • "But that's not going to happen on its own. It would have to be intentional, and – if it happens – it would probably take multiple generations."
  • Based on his experience with extremism, Brendan agreed with expert takes that no drug, on its own, will spontaneously change the minds of white supremacists or end political conflict in the US
  • he does think that, with the right framing and mindset, MDMA could be useful for people who are already at least somewhat open to reconsidering their ideologies, just as it was for him. "It helped me see things in a different way that no amount of therapy or antiracist literature ever would have done," he said. "I really think it was a breakthrough experience."
Javier E

When a Shitposter Runs a Social Media Platform - The Bulwark - 0 views

www.thebulwark.com/r-runs-a-social-media-platform

social media musk radicalization

shared by Javier E on 17 May 23 - No Cached
  • This is an unfortunate and pernicious pattern. Musk often refers to himself as moderate or independent, but he routinely treats far-right fringe figures as people worth taking seriously—and, more troublingly, as reliable sources of information.
  • By doing so, he boosts their messages: A message retweeted by or receiving a reply from Musk will potentially be seen by millions of people.
  • Also, people who pay for Musk’s Twitter Blue badges get a lift in the algorithm when they tweet or reply; because of the way Twitter Blue became a culture war front, its subscribers tend to skew to the righ
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  • The important thing to remember amid all this, and the thing that has changed the game when it comes to the free speech/content moderation conversation, is that Elon Musk himself loves conspiracy theorie
  • The media isn’t just unduly critical—a perennial sore spot for Musk—but “all news is to some degree propaganda,” meaning he won’t label actual state-affiliated propaganda outlets on his platform to distinguish their stories from those of the New York Times.
  • In his mind, they’re engaged in the same activity, so he strikes the faux-populist note that the people can decide for themselves what is true, regardless of objectively very different track records from different sources.
  • Musk’s “just asking questions” maneuver is a classic Trump tactic that enables him to advertise conspiracy theories while maintaining a sort of deniability.
  • At what point should we infer that he’s taking the concerns of someone like Loomer seriously not despite but because of her unhinged beliefs?
  • Musk’s skepticism seems largely to extend to criticism of the far-right, while his credulity for right-wing sources is boundless.
  • Brandolini’s Law holds that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
  • Refuting bullshit requires some technological literacy, perhaps some policy knowledge, but most of all it requires time and a willingness to challenge your own prior beliefs, two things that are in precious short supply online.
  • This is part of the argument for content moderation that limits the dispersal of bullshit: People simply don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to seek out the boring truth when stimulated by some online outrage.
  • Here we can return to the example of Loomer’s tweet. People did fact-check her, but it hardly matters: Following Musk’s reply, she ended up receiving over 5 million views, an exponentially larger online readership than is normal for her. In the attention economy, this counts as a major win. “Thank you so much for posting about this, @elonmusk!” she gushed in response to his reply. “I truly appreciate it.”
  • the problem isn’t limited to elevating Loomer. Musk had his own stock of misinformation to add to the pile. After interacting with her account, Musk followed up last Tuesday by tweeting out last week a 2021 Federalist article claiming that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had “bought” the 2020 election, an allegation previously raised by Trump and others, and which Musk had also brought up during his recent interview with Tucker Carlson.
  • If Zuckerberg wanted to use his vast fortune to tip the election, it would have been vastly more efficient to create a super PAC with targeted get-out-the-vote operations and advertising. Notwithstanding legitimate criticisms one can make about Facebook’s effect on democracy, and whatever Zuckerberg’s motivations, you have to squint hard to see this as something other than a positive act addressing a real problem.
  • It’s worth mentioning that the refutations I’ve just sketched of the conspiratorial claims made by Loomer and Musk come out to around 1,200 words. The tweets they wrote, read by millions, consisted of fewer than a hundred words in total. That’s Brandolini’s Law in action—an illustration of why Musk’s cynical free-speech-over-all approach amounts to a policy in favor of disinformation and against democracy.
  • Moderation is a subject where Zuckerberg’s actions provide a valuable point of contrast with Musk. Through Facebook’s independent oversight board, which has the power to overturn the company’s own moderation decisions, Zuckerberg has at least made an effort to have credible outside actors inform how Facebook deals with moderation issues
  • Meanwhile, we are still waiting on the content moderation council that Elon Musk promised last October:
  • The problem is about to get bigger than unhinged conspiracy theorists occasionally receiving a profile-elevating reply from Musk. Twitter is the venue that Tucker Carlson, whom advertisers fled and Fox News fired after it agreed to pay $787 million to settle a lawsuit over its election lies, has chosen to make his comeback. Carlson and Musk are natural allies: They share an obsessive anti-wokeness, a conspiratorial mindset, and an unaccountable sense of grievance peculiar to rich, famous, and powerful men who have taken it upon themselves to rail against the “elites,” however idiosyncratically construed
  • f the rumors are true that Trump is planning to return to Twitter after an exclusivity agreement with Truth Social expires in June, Musk’s social platform might be on the verge of becoming a gigantic rec room for the populist right.
  • These days, Twitter increasingly feels like a neighborhood where the amiable guy-next-door is gone and you suspect his replacement has a meth lab in the basement.
  • even if Twitter’s increasingly broken information environment doesn’t sway the results, it is profoundly damaging to our democracy that so many people have lost faith in our electoral system. The sort of claims that Musk is toying with in his feed these days do not help. It is one thing for the owner of a major source of information to be indifferent to the content that gets posted to that platform. It is vastly worse for an owner to actively fan the flames of disinformation and doubt.
Javier E

Male Stock Analysts With 'Dominant' Faces Get More Information-and Have Better Forecast... - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...tion-better-forecasts-6783f77c

stock analysts face dominance trust trustworthy attractiveness accuracy psychology

shared by Javier E on 09 May 23 - No Cached
  • “People form impressions after extremely brief exposure to faces—within a hundred milliseconds,” says Alexander Todorov, a behavioral-science professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “They take actions based on those impressions,”
  • . Under most circumstances, such quick impressions aren’t accurate and shouldn’t be trusted, he says.
  • Prof. Teoh and her fellow researchers analyzed the facial traits of nearly 800 U.S. sell-side stock financial analysts working between January 1990 and December 2017 who also had a LinkedIn profile photo as of 2018. They pulled their sample of analysts from Thomson Reuters and the firms they covered from the merged Center for Research in Security Prices and Compustat, a database of financial, statistical and market information
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  • The researchers used facial-recognition software to map out specific points on a person’s face, then applied machine-learning algorithms to the facial points to obtain empirical measures for three key face impressions—trustworthiness, dominance and attractiveness.  
  • They examined the association of these impressions with the accuracy of analysts’ quarterly forecasts, drawn from the Institutional Brokers Estimate System
  • Analyst accuracy was determined by comparing each analyst’s prediction error—the difference between their prediction and the actual earnings—with that of all analysts for that same company and quarter.
  • For an average stock valued at $100, Prof. Teoh says, analysts ranked as looking most trustworthy were 25 cents more accurate in earnings-per-share forecasts than the analysts who were ranked as looking least trustworthy
  • Similarly, most-dominant-looking analysts were 52 cents more accurate in their EPS forecast than least-dominant-looking analysts.
  • The relation between a dominant face and accuracy, meanwhile, was significant before and after the regulation was enacted, the analysts say. This suggests that dominant-looking male analysts are always able to obtain information,
  • While forecasts of female analysts regardless of facial characteristics were on average more accurate than those of their male counterparts, the forecasts of women who were seen as more-dominant-looking were significantly less accurate than their male counterparts.  
  • Says Prof. Todorov: “Women who look dominant are more likely to be viewed negatively because it goes against the cultural stereotype.
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.
  • he solution to this problem requires a change in the way we see and present our own values
  • effective missionaries present their beliefs as a gift. And sharing a gift is a joyful act, even if not everyone wants it.
  • 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
  • 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

Kids and Social Media: a Mental Health Crisis or Moral Panic? - 0 views

samf.substack.com/...d-social-media-a-mental-health

mental health social social media adolescents research psychology

shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • given the range of evidence and the fact that the biggest increases relate to a specific group (teenage girls) and a specific set of issues clustered around anxiety and body image I would assign a high probability to it being a real issue. Especially as it fits the anecdotal conservations I have with headteachers and parents.
  • Is social media the cause?
  • One of the most commonly identified culprits is social media. Until recently I’ve been sceptical for two reasons. First I’m allergic to moral panics.
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  • Secondly as Stuart Ritchie points out in this excellent article, to date the evidence assembled by proponents of the social media theory like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, has shown correlations not causal relationships. Yes, it seems that young people who use social media a lot have worse mental health, but that could easily be because young people with worse mental health choose to use social media more!  
  • recently I’ve shifted to thinking it probably is a major cause for three reasons:
  • 1.       I can’t think of anything else that fits. Other suggested causes just don’t work.
  • Social media does fit, the big increase in take up maps well on to the mental health data and it happened everywhere in rich countries at the same time. The most affected group, teenage girls, are also the ones who report that social media makes them more anxious and body conscious in focus groups
  • It is of course true that correlation doesn’t prove anything but if there’s only one strongly related correlation it’s pretty likely there’s a relationship.
  • 2.       There is no doubt that young people are spending a huge amount of time online now. And that, therefore, must have replaced other activities that involve being out with friends in real life. Three quarters of 12 year olds now have a social media profile and 95% of teenagers use social media regularly. Over half who say they’ve been bullied, say it was on social media.
  •   We finally have the first evidence of a direct causal relationship via a very clever US study using the staged rollout of Facebook across US college campuses to assess the impact on mental health. Not only does it show that mental illness increased after the introduction of Facebook but it also shows that it was particularly pronounced amongst those who were more likely to view themselves unfavourably alongside their peers due to being e.g. overweight or having lower socio-economic status. It is just one study but it nudges me even further towards thinking this a major cause of the problem.
  • I have blocked my (12 year old) twins from all social media apps and will hold out as long as possible. The evidence isn’t yet rock solid but it’s solid enough to make me want to protect them as best I can.
Javier E

The Chatbots Are Here, and the Internet Industry Is in a Tizzy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...disrupt-internet-industry.html

chatbot AI industry effects business internet companies technology

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • He cleared his calendar and asked employees to figure out how the technology, which instantly provides comprehensive answers to complex questions, could benefit Box, a cloud computing company that sells services that help businesses manage their online data.
  • Mr. Levie’s reaction to ChatGPT was typical of the anxiety — and excitement — over Silicon Valley’s new new thing. Chatbots have ignited a scramble to determine whether their technology could upend the economics of the internet, turn today’s powerhouses into has-beens or create the industry’s next giants.
  • Cloud computing companies are rushing to deliver chatbot tools, even as they worry that the technology will gut other parts of their businesses. E-commerce outfits are dreaming of new ways to sell things. Social media platforms are being flooded with posts written by bots. And publishing companies are fretting that even more dollars will be squeezed out of digital advertising.
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  • The volatility of chatbots has made it impossible to predict their impact. In one second, the systems impress by fielding a complex request for a five-day itinerary, making Google’s search engine look archaic. A moment later, they disturb by taking conversations in dark directions and launching verbal assaults.
  • The result is an industry gripped with the question: What do we do now?
  • The A.I. systems could disrupt $100 billion in cloud spending, $500 billion in digital advertising and $5.4 trillion in e-commerce sales,
  • As Microsoft figures out a chatbot business model, it is forging ahead with plans to sell the technology to others. It charges $10 a month for a cloud service, built in conjunction with the OpenAI lab, that provides developers with coding suggestions, among other things.
  • Smaller companies like Box need help building chatbot tools, so they are turning to the giants that process, store and manage information across the web. Those companies — Google, Microsoft and Amazon — are in a race to provide businesses with the software and substantial computing power behind their A.I. chatbots.
  • “The cloud computing providers have gone all in on A.I. over the last few months,
  • “They are realizing that in a few years, most of the spending will be on A.I., so it is important for them to make big bets.”
  • Yusuf Mehdi, the head of Bing, said the company was wrestling with how the new version would make money. Advertising will be a major driver, he said, but the company expects fewer ads than traditional search allows.
  • Google, perhaps more than any other company, has reason to both love and hate the chatbots. It has declared a “code red” because their abilities could be a blow to its $162 billion business showing ads on searches.
  • “The discourse on A.I. is rather narrow and focused on text and the chat experience,” Mr. Taylor said. “Our vision for search is about understanding information and all its forms: language, images, video, navigating the real world.”
  • Sridhar Ramaswamy, who led Google’s advertising division from 2013 to 2018, said Microsoft and Google recognized that their current search business might not survive. “The wall of ads and sea of blue links is a thing of the past,” said Mr. Ramaswamy, who now runs Neeva, a subscription-based search engine.
  • As that underlying tech, known as generative A.I., becomes more widely available, it could fuel new ideas in e-commerce. Late last year, Manish Chandra, the chief executive of Poshmark, a popular online secondhand store, found himself daydreaming during a long flight from India about chatbots building profiles of people’s tastes, then recommending and buying clothes or electronics. He imagined grocers instantly fulfilling orders for a recipe.
  • “It becomes your mini-Amazon,” said Mr. Chandra, who has made integrating generative A.I. into Poshmark one of the company’s top priorities over the next three years. “That layer is going to be very powerful and disruptive and start almost a new layer of retail.”
  • In early December, users of Stack Overflow, a popular social network for computer programmers, began posting substandard coding advice written by ChatGPT. Moderators quickly banned A.I.-generated text
  • t people could post this questionable content far faster than they could write posts on their own, said Dennis Soemers, a moderator for the site. “Content generated by ChatGPT looks trustworthy and professional, but often isn’t,”
  • When websites thrived during the pandemic as traffic from Google surged, Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, a tech news site, warned publishers that the search giant would one day turn off the spigot. He had seen Facebook stop linking out to websites and foresaw Google following suit in a bid to boost its own business.
  • He predicted that visitors from Google would drop from a third of websites’ traffic to nothing. He called that day “Google zero.”
  • Because chatbots replace website search links with footnotes to answers, he said, many publishers are now asking if his prophecy is coming true.
  • , strategists and engineers at the digital advertising company CafeMedia have met twice a week to contemplate a future where A.I. chatbots replace search engines and squeeze web traffic.
  • The group recently discussed what websites should do if chatbots lift information but send fewer visitors. One possible solution would be to encourage CafeMedia’s network of 4,200 websites to insert code that limited A.I. companies from taking content, a practice currently allowed because it contributes to search rankings.
  • Courts are expected to be the ultimate arbiter of content ownership. Last month, Getty Images sued Stability AI, the start-up behind the art generator tool Stable Diffusion, accusing it of unlawfully copying millions of images. The Wall Street Journal has said using its articles to train an A.I. system requires a license.
  • In the meantime, A.I. companies continue collecting information across the web under the “fair use” doctrine, which permits limited use of material without permission.
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.
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  • 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

Functional medicine: Is it the future of healthcare or just another wellness trend? - I... - 0 views

www.independent.ie/...r-wellness-trend-37437566.html

functional medicine healthcare future wellness health science research

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Functional Medicine is the alternative medicine Bill Clinton credits with giving him his life back after his 2004 quadruple heart by-pass surgery. Its ideology is embraced by Oprah and regularly features on Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop.
  • Developed in 1990 by Dr Jeffrey Bland, who in 1991 set up the Institute of Functional Medicine with his wife Susan, today the field is spearheaded by US best-selling author Dr Mark Hyman, adviser to the Clintons and co-director of the controversial Cleveland Clinic for Functional Medicine.
  • "Functional Medicine is not about a test or a supplement or a particular protocol," he adds. "It's really a new paradigm of disease and how it arises and how to restore health. Within it there are many approaches that are effective, it's not exclusive, it doesn't exclude traditional medications, it includes all modalities depending on what's right for that patient."
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  • Functional Medicine isn't a protected title and a medical qualification isn't a prerequisite to practice. The result is an unregulated and disparate field, with medical doctors, nutritionists, naturopaths and homeopaths among the many practitioners.
  • Some other chronic illnesses the field claims to treat include heart disease, type 2 diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, depression, anxiety and arthritis
  • ll kinds of different reasons, some might have gluten issues, gut issues, others might have a deficiency causing neurological issues, MS is a symptom."
  • "There are components of Functional Medicine that absolutely lack an evidence base and there are practitioners of what they call Functional Medicine, they charge people for intravenous nutritional injections, they exaggerate claims, and that is professionally inappropriate, unethical and it lacks evidence.
  • On Dr Mark Hyman's view of MS he says, "there are a lot of terms put together there, all of which individually make a lot of sense, but put together in that way they do not.
  • "What does FM actually mean? It means nothing. It's a gift-gallop of words thrown together. It's criticised by advocates of evidence-based medicine because it's giving a veneer of scientific legitimacy to ideas that are considered pseudoscientific. For example, it'll take alternative medicine modalities like homeopathy and then call them 'bio-infusions' or something similar, rebranding it as something that works.
  • "It's a redundant name, real medicine is functional."
  • Next month the third annual Lifestyle and Functional Medical conference will take place in Salthill, Galway on November 3. Last year's event was attended by more than 500 people and featured a keynote address by honorary consultant cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, author of bestselling The Pioppi Diet (which was named one of the top five worst celebrity diets to avoid in 2018 by the British Dietetic Foundation).
  • Dr David Robert Grimes is physicist and visiting fellow of Oxford and QUB. His research into cancer focuses on modelling tumour metabolism and radiation interactions. For Dr Grimes, the lack of definition, or "double-speak" as he puts it, in FM is troubling.
  • As well as the cost of appointments, FM practitioners commonly charge extra for tests. An omega finger prick test is around €100. A vitamin D test can cost upwards of €60, full thyroid panel more than €150 and a gut function test €400. Prices vary between practitioners.
  • "If I, as a GP, engaged in some of these behaviours I would be struck off." Specifically? "If I was recommending treatments that lacked an evidence base, or if I was promoting diagnostic tests which are expensive and lack an evidence base.
  • GPs engage every year in ongoing continuous professional development, I spend my evenings and my weekends outside of working hours attending educational events, small-group learning, large-group learning, engaging in research. This is an accusation that was levelled at the profession 30 years ago and then it was correct, but the profession has caught up…
  • "Obviously promoting wellness and healthy diet is very welcome but going beyond that and stating that certain aspects of 'functional medicine' can lead to reduced inflammation or prevent cancer, we have to be very careful about those claims.
  • Often the outcome of such tests are seemingly 'benign' prescriptions of vitamins or cleanses. However, dietitian Orla Walsh stresses that even these can have potentially harmful effects, especially on "vulnerable" patients, if not prescribed judiciously.
  • FM has five basic principles. 1. We are all genetically and biochemically unique so it treats the individual, not the disease. 2. It's science-based. 3. The body is intelligent and has the capacity for self-regulation. 4. The body has the ability to heal and prevent nearly all the diseases of ageing. 5. Health is not just the absence of disease, but a state of immense vitality.
  • She began her Functional Medicine career while training as a medical doctor and now travels the world working with high-profile clients. Dr McHale charges €425 for an initial consultation and €175 for follow-up appointments. Straightforward lab tests are €250 to €750, for complex cases testing fees can be up to €2,000.
  • "The term [Functional Medicine] tends to be bandied around quite a bit. Other things people say, such as 'functional nutritionist', can be misleading as a term. Many people are Functional Medicine practitioners but don't have any real medical background at all... I think regulation is always probably the best way forward."
  • "There's an awful lot to it in terms of biochemistry and physiology," she says. "You do need to have a very solid and well ingrained bio-chemistry background. A solely clinical background doesn't equip you with the knowledge to read a test.
  • "Evidence-base is the cornerstone of medicine and that has to be maintained. It becomes problematic in this area because you are looking at personalised medicine and that can be very difficult to evidence-base."
  • GP Christine Ritter travelled from England to attend the Galway conference last year with a view to integrating Functional Medicine into her practice.
  • "It was very motivating," she says. "Where it wasn't perhaps as strong was to find the evidence. The Functional Medicine people would say, 'we've done this study and this trial and we've used this supplement that was successful', but they can't show massive research data which might make it difficult to bring it into the mainstream.
  • "I also know the rigorous standard of trials we have in medicine they're not usually that great either, it's often driven by who's behind the trial and who's paying for it.
  • "Every approach that empowers patient to work on their destiny [is beneficial], but you'd have to be mindful that you're not missing any serious conditions."
  • Dr Hyman is working to grow the evidence-base for Functional Medicine worldwide. "The future is looking very bright," he says. "At the Cleveland Centre we're establishing a research base, building educational platforms, fellowships, residency programmes, rotations. We're advancing the field that's spreading across the world. We're seeing in China the development of a programme of Functional Medicine, South Africa, the UK, in London the Cleveland Clinic will hopefully have a Functional Medicine centre."
  • For Dr Mark Murphy regulation is a moot point as it can only apply once the field meets the standards of evidence-based medicine.
  • "Despite well intentioned calls for regulation, complementary and alternative medical therapies cannot be regulated," he says. "Only therapies that possess an evidence-base can enter our standard regulatory processes, including the Irish Medical Council, the Health Products Regulatory Authority and Irish advertising standards. In situations where complementary and alternative therapies develop an evidence base, they are no longer 'complementary and alternative', but in effect they become part of mainstream 'Medicine'.
  • l What are the principles?
  • "There's a huge variation between therapists, some are brilliant and some are okay, and some are ludicrous snake oil salesmen."
  • He is so concerned that patients' health and wealth are being put at risk by alternative therapies that earlier this year he joined Fine Gael TD Kate O'Connell and the Irish Cancer Society in introducing draft legislation earlier this year making it illegal to sell unproven treatments to cancer patients. Violators face jail and heavy fines.
  • Dr Grimes says criticism of variations in the standards of traditional medical research can be fair, however due to the weight of research it is ultimately self-correcting. He adds, "The reality is that good trials are transparent, independent and pre-registered.
  • "My involvement in shaping the Bill came from seeing first-hand the exploitation of patients and their families. Most patients undergoing treatment will take some alternative modalities in conjunction but a significant portion are talked out of their conventional medicine and seduced by false promises
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