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Javier E

FaceApp helped a middle-aged man become a popular younger woman. His fan base has never... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ker-faceapp-soya-azusagakuyuki

identity authenticity social media fake avatar Japan psychology

shared by Javier E on 12 May 21 - No Cached
  • Soya’s fame illustrated a simple truth: that social media is less a reflection of who we are, and more a performance of who we want to be.
  • It also seemed to herald a darker future where our fundamental senses of reality are under siege: The AI that allows anyone to fabricate a face can also be used to harass women with “deepfake” pornography, invent fraudulent LinkedIn personas and digitally impersonate political enemies.
  • As the photos began receiving hundreds of likes, Soya’s personality and style began to come through. She was relentlessly upbeat. She never sneered or bickered or trolled. She explored small towns, savored scenic vistas, celebrated roadside restaurants’ simple meals.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • She took pride in the basic things, like cleaning engine parts. And she only hinted at the truth: When one fan told her in October, “It’s great to be young,” Soya replied, “Youth does not mean a certain period of life, but how to hold your heart.”
  • She seemed, well, happy, and FaceApp had made her that way. Creating the lifelike impostor had taken only a few taps: He changed the “Gender” setting to “Female,” the “Age” setting to “Teen,” and the “Impression” setting — a mix of makeup filters — to a glamorous look the app calls “Hollywood.”
  • Users in the Internet’s early days rarely had any presumptions of authenticity, said Melanie C. Green, a University of Buffalo professor who studies technology and social trust. Most people assumed everyone else was playing a character clearly distinguished from their real life.
  • Nakajima grew his shimmering hair below his shoulders and raided his local convenience store for beauty supplies he thought would make the FaceApp images more convincing: blushes, eyeliners, concealers, shampoos.
  • “When I compare how I feel when I started to tweet as a woman and now, I do feel that I’m gradually gravitating toward this persona … this fantasy world that I created,” Nakajima said. “When I see photos of what I tweeted, I feel like, ‘Oh. That’s me.’ ”
  • The sensation Nakajima was feeling is so common that there’s a term for it: the Proteus effect, named for the shape-shifting Greek god. Stanford University researchers first coined it in 2007 to describe how people inhabiting the body of a digital avatar began to act the part
  • People made to appear taller in virtual-reality simulations acted more assertively, even after the experience ended. Prettier characters began to flirt.
  • What is it about online disguises? Why are they so good at bending people’s sense of self-perception?
  • they tap into this “very human impulse to play with identity and pretend to be someone you’re not.”
  • Soya pouted and scowled on rare occasions when Nakajima himself felt frustrated. But her baseline expression was an extra-wide smile, activated with a single tap.
  • “This identity play was considered one of the huge advantages of being online,” Green said. “You could switch your gender and try on all of these different personas. It was a playground for people to explore.”
  • But wasn’t this all just a big con? Nakajima had tricked people with a “cool girl” stereotype to boost his Twitter numbers. He hadn’t elevated the role of women in motorcycling; if anything, he’d supplanted them. And the character he’d created was paper thin: Soya had no internal complexity outside of what Nakajima had projected, just that eternally superimposed smile.
  • The Web’s big shift from text to visuals — the rise of photo-sharing apps, live streams and video calls — seemed at first to make that unspoken rule of real identities concrete. It seemed too difficult to fake one’s appearance when everyone’s face was on constant display.
  • Now, researchers argue, advances in image-editing artificial intelligence have done for the modern Internet what online pseudonyms did for the world’s first chat rooms. Facial filters have allowed anyone to mold themselves into the character they want to play.
  • researchers fear these augmented reality tools could end up distorting the beauty standards and expectations of actual reality.
  • Some political and tech theorists worry this new world of synthetic media threatens to detonate our concept of truth, eroding our shared experiences and infusing every online relationship with suspicion and self-doubt.
  • Deceptive political memes, conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine hoaxes and other scams have torn the fabric of our democracy, culture and public health.
  • But she also thinks about her kids, who assume “that everything online is fabricated,” and wonders whether the rules of online identity require a bit more nuance — and whether that generational shift is already underway.
  • “Bots pretending to be people, automated representations of humanity — that, they perceive as exploitative,” she said. “But if it’s just someone engaging in identity experimentation, they’re like: ‘Yeah, that’s what we’re all doing.'
  • To their generation, “authenticity is not about: ‘Does your profile picture match your real face?’ Authenticity is: ‘Is your voice your voice?’
  • “Their feeling is: ‘The ideas are mine. The voice is mine. The content is mine. I’m just looking for you to receive it without all the assumptions and baggage that comes with it.’ That’s the essence of a person’s identity. That’s who they really are.”
  • It wasn’t until the rise of giant social networks like Facebook — which used real identities to, among other things, supercharge targeted advertising — that this big game of pretend gained an air of duplicity. Spaces for playful performance shrank, and the biggest Internet watering holes began demanding proof of authenticity as a way to block out malicious intent.
  • Perhaps he should have accepted his irrelevance and faded into the digital sunset, sharing his life for few to see. But some of Soya’s followers have said they never felt deceived: It was Nakajima — his enthusiasm, his attitude about life — they’d been charmed by all along. “His personality,” as one Twitter follower said, “shined through.”
  • In Nakajima’s mind, he’d used the tools of a superficial medium to craft genuine connections. He had not felt real until he had become noticed for being fake.
  • Nakajima said he doesn’t know how long he’ll keep Soya alive. But he said he’s grateful for the way she helped him feel: carefree, adventurous, seen.
manhefnawi

Reality, Representation, and the Search for Meaning: Argentine Artist Mirtha Dermisache... - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...a-dermisache-selected-writings

Language Reveal Conceal Reality

shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • “Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” Nietzsche asked in contemplating how we use language to both reveal and conceal reality.
  • In the 1970s, Dermisache invented an array of graphic languages, each with a distinct syntactic texture and a visual rhythm that inclines toward meaning, or the longing for meaning.
johnsonel7

Expect Trump to fight as if his life depends on it (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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

trump perception reality language

shared by johnsonel7 on 24 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Over the decades, Trump constructed and then inhabited a public persona that is powerful but unnatural. As a businessman and TV personality, Trump was, perhaps, the greatest illusionist of our time. He has repeated, ad nauseum, his unverified claims of wealth, sexual magnetism, and brilliance -- a "very stable genius" -- in an effort to produce the image of a great man.
  • But the theatrical dynamic of the Trump presidency was threatened every time real life collided with Trump's cartoon. His failures have often come at moments when he should be guided by a moral compass. But no one who is so devoted to a false persona could possess this kind of ethical reflex
  • Then, on Monday, Trump seemed to yet again try and regain his power by implying the Ukraine scandal couldn't be significant because it revolved around a "perfect" letter he wrote to Zelensky. It's the sort of distortion of the facts one would expect from a man whose comforting false reality is falling apart. As analysts have pointed out, Trump's contact with Zelensky involved not a letter, but a telephone call which was far from perfect. Indeed it was only "perfect" if one was looking for an example of a president abusing his office.
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  • The Russian connection echoes a long-running theme of the Trump presidency, which has cast doubt on his ability to lead the nation -- from Trump's criticism of the NATO alliance to his request for Russia to be admitted to the G7 economic summit countries, to his withdrawal of American troops from Syria. Indeed, last week Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi noted that "all roads lead" to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
  • When we hear the gears of the Trump machine grind and see the decorative pieces of chrome loosen and fall, we are witnessing the results of a confrontation between reality and fantasy. This observation doesn't diminish the power of Trump's marketing method. It does, however, suggest its limits.
Javier E

Reality is your brain's best guess - Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...ty-brain-predictive-processing

reality brain guess predictive processing misinformation self psychology

shared by Javier E on 16 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Andy Clark admits it’s strange that he took up “predictive processing,” an ambitious leading theory of how the brain works. A philosopher of mind at the University of Sussex, he has devoted his career to how thinking doesn’t occur just between the ears—that it flows through our bodies, tools, and environments. “The external world is functioning as part of our cognitive machinery
  • But 15 years ago, he realized that had to come back to the center of the system: the brain. And he found that predictive processing provided the essential links among the brain, body, and world.
  • There’s a traditional view that goes back at least to Descartes that perception was about the imprinting of the outside world onto the sense organs. In 20th-century artificial intelligence and neuroscience, vision was a feed-forward process in which you took in pixel-level information, refined it into a two and a half–dimensional sketch, and then refined that into a full world model.
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  • a new book, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, which is remarkable for how it connects the high-level concepts to everyday examples of how our brains make predictions, how that process can lead us astray, and what we can do about it.
  • being driven to stay within your own viability envelope is crucial to the kind of intelligence that we know about—the kind of intelligence that we are
  • If you ask what is a predictive brain for, the answer has to be: staying alive. Predictive brains are a way of staying within your viability envelope as an embodied biological organism: getting food when you need it, getting water when you need it.
  • in predictive processing, perception is structured around prediction. Perception is about the brain having a guess at what’s most likely to be out there and then using sensory information to refine the guess.
  • artificial curiosity. Predictive-processing systems automatically have that. They’re set up so that they predict the conditions of their own survival, and they’re always trying to get rid of prediction errors. But if they’ve solved all their practical problems and they’ve got nothing else to do, then they’ll just explore. Getting rid of any error is going to be a good thing for them. If you’re a creature like that, you’re going to be a really good learning system. You’re going to love to inhabit the environments that you can learn most from, where the problems are not too simple, not too hard, but just right.
  • It’s an effect that you also see in Marieke Jepma et al.’s work on pain. They showed that if you predict intense pain, the signal that you get will be interpreted as more painful than it would otherwise be, and vice versa. Then they asked why you don’t correct your misimpression. If it’s my expectation that is making it feel more painful, why don’t I get prediction errors that correct it?
  • The reason is that there are no errors. You’re expecting a certain level of pain, and your prediction helps bring that level about; there is nothing for you to correct. In fact, you’ve got confirmation of your own prediction. So it can be a vicious circle
  • Do you think this self-fulfilling loop in psychosis and pain perception helps to account for misinformation in our society’s and people’s susceptibility to certain narratives?Absolutely. We all have these vulnerabilities and self-fulfilling cycles. We look at the places that tend to support the models that we already have, because that’s often how we judge whether the information is good or not
  • Given that we know we’re vulnerable to self-fulfilling information loops, how can we make sure we don’t get locked into a belief?Unfortunately, it’s really difficult. The most potent intervention is to remind ourselves that we sample the world in ways that are guided by the models that we’ve currently got. The structures of science are there to push back against our natural tendency to cherry-pick.
Javier E

Is There a Crisis of Seriousness? - by Ted Gioia - 0 views

www.honest-broker.com/...-there-a-crisis-of-seriousness

seriousness fake action entertainment authenticity culture crisis US history

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 24 - No Cached
  • Back in 1996, critic Susan Sontag warned that seriousness was disappearing from society. She feared that the inherent laziness of consumerism was now permeating everything. Anything tough or demanding was bad for business
  • And everything had been turned into a business—even intangibles like education and human flourishing.
  • “The undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete,” she declared, “with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries.”
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  • In this frivolous new world, everything must be pleasing and inoffensive. Everything and everybody gets marketed like an exciting new product—even old, creepy politicians, or ancient film actors, or 80-year-old rock stars.
  • The public accepts this as a matter of course. They hardly expect anything to be real nowadays.
  • Let’s stay with 1996 for a moment—because it was a turning point. Before that time, Susan Sontag had been very receptive to popular culture—movies, commercial music, and campy pop art. But each of these was becoming unrecognizable in their turn-of-the-century guises.
  • Here’s a thumbnail sketch of the top grossing films of that year.
  • These films were all different—but they had one thing in common: overwhelming special effects. In the final years of the twentieth century, computer technology had reached a level where massive levels of destruction could be shown on screen with an immediacy never before possible. Technology was setting the agenda for creativity. Everything else—script, directing, acting, was subservient to the computer-generated imagery. But 1996 was just the beginning of cinema as a digital spectacle. With each passing year, the artificial digital component has increased, and the real human element decreased. The advent of AI will now accelerate this even further. We may soon reach the point where nothing on the screen is real.
  • Carlyle rightly mocks the citizens of France who, in those days, put so much trust in paper—whether the deceptive newspapers or the collapsing paper currency. Humans had once created a Stone Age and an Iron Age—but now settled for the Age of Paper.
  • By implication, we live today in a digital age—or the Age of Less-Than-Paper. It doesn’t help that that cutting edge technologies are focused so much on deception—fake images, fake video, fake audio, fake books by fake authors, fake songs by fake musicians, fake news, fake everything.
  • Fake is our leading candidate for word of the century. It captures almost everything relevant now in a single syllable.
  • So are you surprised that everything in culture has a feeling of unreality right now? It’s like cotton candy that shrinks to nothing as soon as you put it in your mouth, just leaving a brief sickly sweet taste.
  • Never before in history has authenticity been in such short supply. That’s so much the case, that the very word authenticity is mocked. (I will write about that more in the future.)
  • This is the flip side of our culture of artificiality. Anything that threatens the dominant fakeness with reality stirs up an intense backlash. The dreamer does not want to awaken from the dream.
  • Here’s the scariest part of the story: Most of this is by design. Our culture is now obsessed with deception and misdirection—and it’s not just on the movie screen anymore. You see it everywhere, from cosplay conventions to bands wearing masks to the misguided virtual reality mania.
  • A psychoanalyst would say that the hostility here is displaced—like people who kick the dog because they hate their boss.
  • In a cotton candy society, everything feels insubstantial:People go to war online—in toxic Twitter posts—but it’s a fake war with the angriest combatants typically hiding behind avatars.People seek love online, but even here the fakeness is toxic—hence many are catfished (a term that didn’t exist a few years ago) by scammers pretending to be a romantic interest. People not only work and play online, but even construct their selves online—which is where their identity increasingly resides.
  • These are all signs that we are living in a society running low on seriousness.
  • Ah, the word action. That’s fallen out of favor, too—another symptom worth noting. Here’s the Google analysis of its usage since the year 1900.
  • The decline in the word action accelerated during the same period that saw the rise (shown above) in the word fake. They are mirror images of the same cultural shift.
  • Participants at Normandy and Selma were taking action. But soup hurlers operate at a symbolic level, or (let’s be honest) a less-than-symbolic level—because these paintings have no connection in any way with the issues at stake.
  • The targeted paintings aren’t appropriate symbols of the evil they are supposed to represent. In fact, they embody the exact opposite.
  • It’s not mere coincidence that anger and violence are targeted at objects that are inescapablyrealtangibleuniqueauthentic (that word again!)produced by human hand
  • Can you build a culture on cotton candy? We will soon find out.
  • In an age of fakery, people who operate without seriousness will inevitably focus their hostility on precisely these cherished objects.
  • he cluelessness in Cupertino is understandable. The dominant companies in Silicon Valley are threatened by reality and seriousness—which are like Kryptonite to the digital agenda. So these mishaps are inevitable. Fakery is now a business model. Reality is its hated competitor.
  • here’s the most salient fact of all: People who have their act together are now taking things very seriously in there own lives. They aren't waiting for guidance from an app from the Apple Store or a post from an influencer.
  • let’s call them leaders—because that’s what they will be. And that’s such a better word than influencer.
  • Five years from now, the cultural landscape will look much different. I expect a lot will change in just the next 12 months.
  • COMING SOON: I will write about “How to Become a Serious Person.”
Grace Carey

News at Tipitaka Network - 0 views

www.tipitaka.net/...news.php

dogmatism falsification religion ignorance bias faith dual-causation logic Quantum-Physics measurement Reality Heisenberg uncertainty 5-senses perception

shared by Grace Carey on 27 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Grace Carey on 27 Jan 13
     
    Finding some interesting and very much TOK articles while I'm working on my religious investigation about the science behind Buddhist beliefs. I found this one particularly intriguing as it discusses why the theory of reincarnation is scientifically sound and why scientists are often narrow-minded and overly trusted. "I was once told by a Buddhist G.P. that, on his first day at a medical school in Sydney, the famous Professor, head of the Medical School, began his welcoming address by stating "Half of what we are going to teach you in the next few years is wrong. Our problem is that we do not know which half it is!" Those were the words of a real scientist." "Logic is only as reliable as the assumptions on which it is based." "Objective experience is that which is free from all bias. In Buddhism, the three types of bias are desire, ill-will and skeptical doubt. Desire makes one see only what one wants to see, it bends the truth to fit one's preferences." "Reality, according to pure science, does not consist of well ordered matter with precise massed, energies and positions in space, all just waiting to be measured. Reality is the broadest of smudges of all possibilities, only some being more probable than others." "At a recent seminar on Science and Religion, at which I was a speaker, a Catholic in the audience bravely announced that whenever she looks through a telescope at the stars, she feels uncomfortable because her religion is threatened. I commented that whenever a scientist looks the other way round through a telescope, to observe the one who is watching, then they feel uncomfortable because their science is threatened by what is doing the seeing! "
aliciathompson1

Science needs the freedom to constantly change its m... - 0 views

aeon.co/...-to-constantly-change-its-mind

science

shared by aliciathompson1 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • science is one of humanity’s most noble and successful endeavours, and our best way to learn how the world works.
  • Today science faces a crisis of legitimacy which is entirely centred on rampant public distrust and disavowal.
  • The capacity for self-correction is the source of science’s immense strength, but the public is unnerved by the fact that scientific wisdom isn’t immutable.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Many scientific findings run counter to common sense and challenge our deepest assumptions about reality
  • Nor are paradigm shifts confined to the distant scientific past.
  • But that’s the thing. Holding still is exactly what science won’t do.
  • aliciathompson1 on 06 Mar 16
     
    Many scientific findings run counter to common sense and challenge our deepest assumptions about reality
kortanekev

Allegory of the Cave - 1 views

faculty.washington.edu/...cave.htm

shared by kortanekev on 12 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Such prisoners would mistake appearance for reality. They would think the things they see on the wall (the shadows) were real; they would know nothing of the real causes of the shadows
  • kortanekev on 12 Sep 16
     
    Human perception vs. reality as shown in Plato's allegory of the cave.  (the ability to make knowledge claims of the "shadows," but what's casting them?)  - Evie (9/12/16)
Javier E

What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right' | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump

post-truth disinformation fascism rationality far right social media manipulation press alt-right psychology

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Gamergate
  • The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate – even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect
  • ure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasn’t why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.
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  • Is this all sounding rather familiar now? Does it remind you of something?
  • it quickly became clear that the GamerGate movement was a mess – an undefined mission to Make Video Games Great Again via undecided means.
  • fter all, the culture war that began in games now has a senior representative in The White House. As a founder member and former executive chair of Brietbart News, Steve Bannon had a hand in creating media monster Milo Yiannopoulos, who built his fame and Twitter following by supporting and cheerleading Gamergate. This hashtag was the canary in the coalmine, and we ignored it.
  • Gamergate was an online movement that effectively began because a man wanted to punish his ex girlfriend. Its most notable achievement was harassing a large number of progressive figures - mostly women – to the point where they felt unsafe or considered leaving the industry
  • The similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the “alt-right”, are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence
  • no one in the movement was willing to be associated with the abuse being carried out in its name. Prominent supporters on Twitter, in subreddits and on forums like 8Chan, developed a range of pernicious rhetorical devices and defences to distance themselves from threats to women and minorities in the industry: the targets were lying or exaggerating, they were too precious; a language of dismissal and belittlement was formed against them. Safe spaces, snowflakes, unicorns, cry bullies. Even when abuse was proven, the usual response was that people on their side were being abused too. These techniques, forged in Gamergate, have become the standard toolset of far-right voices online
  • In 2016, new wave conservative media outlets like Breitbart have gained trust with their audience by painting traditional news sources as snooty and aloof. In 2014, video game YouTube stars, seeking to appear in touch with online gaming communities, unscrupulously proclaimed that traditional old-media sources were corrupt. Everything we’re seeing now, had its precedent two years ago.
  • With 2014’s Gamergate, Breitbart seized the opportunity to harness the pre-existing ignorance and anger among disaffected young white dudes. With Trump’s movement in 2016, the outlet was effectively running his campaign: Steve Bannon took leave of his role at the company in August 2016 when he was hired as chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign
  • young men converted via 2014’s Gamergate, are being more widely courted now. By leveraging distrust and resentment towards women, minorities and progressives, many of Gamergate’s most prominent voices – characters like Mike Cernovich, Adam Baldwin, and Milo Yiannopoulos – drew power and influence from its chaos
  • These figures gave Gamergate a new sense of direction – generalising the rhetoric: this was now a wider war between “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) and everyday, normal, decent people. Games were simply the tip of the iceberg – progressive values, went the argument, were destroying everything
  • The same voices moved into other geek communities, especially comics, where Marvel and DC were criticised for progressive storylines and decisions. They moved into science fiction with the controversy over the Hugo awards. They moved into cinema with the revolting kickback against the all-female Ghostbusters reboot.
  • Using 4chan (and then the more sympathetic offshoot 8Chan) to plan their subversions and attacks made Gamergate a terribly sloppy operation, leaving a trail of evidence that made it quite clear the whole thing was purposefully, plainly nasty. But the video game industry didn’t have the spine to react, and allowed the movement to coagulate – forming a mass of spiteful disappointment that Breitbart was only more than happy to coddle
  • Historically, that seems to be Breitbart’s trick - strongly represent a single issue in order to earn trust, and then gradually indoctrinate to suit wider purposes. With Gamergate, they purposefully went fishing for anti-feminists. 2016’s batch of fresh converts – the white extremists – came from enticing conspiracy theories about the global neoliberal elite secretly controlling the world.
  • The greatest strength of Gamergate, though, was that it actually appeared to represent many left-leaning ideals: stamping out corruption in the press, pushing for better ethical practices, battling for openness.
  • There are similarities here with many who support Trump because of his promises to put an end to broken neo-liberalism, to “drain the swamp” of establishment corruption. Many left-leaning supporters of Gamergate sought to intellectualise their alignment with the hashtag, adopting familiar and acceptable labels of dissent – identifying as libertarian, egalitarian, humanist.
  • At best they unknowingly facilitated abuse, defending their own freedom of expression while those who actually needed support were threatened and attacked.
  • Genuine discussions over criticism, identity and censorship were paralysed and waylaid by Twitter voices obsessed with rhetorical fallacies and pedantic debating practices. While the core of these movements make people’s lives hell, the outer shell – knowingly or otherwise – protect abusers by insisting that the real problem is that you don’t want to talk, or won’t provide the ever-shifting evidence they politely require.
  • In 2017, the tactics used to discredit progressive game critics and developers will be used to discredit Trump and Bannon’s critics. There will be gaslighting, there will be attempts to make victims look as though they are losing their grip on reality, to the point that they gradually even start to believe it. The “post-truth” reality is not simply an accident – it is a concerted assault on the rational psyche.
  • The strangest aspect of Gamergate is that it consistently didn’t make any sense: people chose to align with it, and yet refused responsibility. It was constantly demanded that we debate the issues, but explanations and facts were treated with scorn. Attempts to find common ground saw the specifics of the demands being shifted: we want you to listen to us; we want you to change your ways; we want you to close your publication down. This movement that ostensibly wanted to protect free speech from cry bully SJWs simultaneously did what it could to endanger sites it disagreed with, encouraging advertisers to abandon support for media outlets that published stories critical of the hashtag. The petulance of that movement is disturbingly echoed in Trump’s own Twitter feed.
  • Looking back, Gamergate really only made sense in one way: as an exemplar of what Umberto Eco called “eternal fascism”, a form of extremism he believed could flourish at any point in, in any place – a fascism that would extol traditional values, rally against diversity and cultural critics, believe in the value of action above thought and encourage a distrust of intellectuals or experts – a fascism built on frustration and machismo. The requirement of this formless fascism would – above all else – be to remain in an endless state of conflict, a fight against a foe who must always be portrayed as impossibly strong and laughably weak
  • 2016 has presented us with a world in which our reality is being wilfully manipulated. Fake news, divisive algorithms, misleading social media campaigns.
  • The majority of people who voted for Trump will never take responsibility for his racist, totalitarian policies, but they’ll provide useful cover and legitimacy for those who demand the very worst from the President Elect. Trump himself may have disavowed the “alt-right”, but his rhetoric has led to them feeling legitimised. As with Gamergate, the press risks being manipulated into a position where it has to tread a respectful middle ground that doesn’t really exist.
  • Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements. The situation was horrifying enough two years ago, it is many times more dangerous now.
anonymous

Free will debate: What does free will mean and how did it evolve? - 0 views

www.slate.com/..._how_did_it_evolve.single.html

free will human sciences natural scions

shared by anonymous on 03 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Many scientists cannot imagine how the idea of free will could be reconciled with the laws of physics and chemistry. Brain researchers say that the brain is just a bunch of nerve cells that fire as a direct result of chemical and electrical events, with no room for free will
  • Scientists take delight in (and advance their careers by) claiming to have disproved conventional wisdom, and so bashing free will is appealing. But their statements against free will can be misleading
  • Free will means freedom from causation.” Other scientists who argue against free will say that it means that a soul or other supernatural entity causes behavior, and not surprisingly they consider such explanations unscientific.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • There is a genuine psychological reality behind the idea of free will. The debate is merely about whether this reality deserves to be called free will.
  • Our actions cannot break the laws of physics, but they can be influenced by things beyond gravity, friction, and electromagnetic charges. No number of facts about a carbon atom can explain life, let alone the meaning of your life. These causes operate at different levels of organization.
  • Free will cannot violate the laws of physics or even neuroscience, but it invokes causes that go beyond them
  • Self-control furnishes the possibility of acting from rational principles rather than acting on impulse.
  • If you think of freedom as being able to do whatever you want, with no rules, you might be surprised to hear that free will is for following rules. Doing whatever you want is fully within the capability of any animal in the forest. Free will is for a far more advanced way of acting
  • That, in a nutshell, is the inner deciding process that humans have evolved. That is the reality behind the idea of free will: these processes of rational choice and self-control
  • Self-control counts as a kind of freedom because it begins with not acting on every impulse. The simple brain acts whenever something triggers a response: A hungry creature sees food and eats it
  • Our ancestors evolved the ability to act in the ways necessary for culture to succeed. Free will likely will be found right there—it’s what enables humans to control their actions in precisely the ways required to build and operate complex social systems.
  • Understanding free will in this way allows us to reconcile the popular understanding of free will as making choices with our scientific understanding of the world.
Javier E

Our Cold Civil War Intensifies, Ctd « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...ld-civil-war-intensifies-ctd-3

polarization compromise gop democrat epistemic closure in-group exclusion politics

shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Taken alone, it would appear both sides share equal blame for the present political paralysis as each shifts to their ideological poles.
  • while both sides may be guilty of running to their respective corners, one is clearly more liable for putting the kibosh on negotiation deal-making.
  • one gets more liberal, the more he or she wants elected officials who compromise.
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  • only the Republicans are carrying out a primary purification to fit their no-compromise dispositions.
  • polarization per se is not the current critical crisis – it’s a refusal to compromise, to reach out from one’s ideological end of the spectrum to meet in the middle (where most of us already are), and demanding that one’s representatives refuse to negotiate to get things done and better the country.
  • A consistently liberal position is fine if you’re prepared to meet the other side halfway – and vice-versa of course. In fact, sometimes a strong position can help facilitate a real deal.
  • it’s the GOP that is the outlier, and long has been.
  • Liberals and conservatives are coming to rely on different worldviews motivated by different interpretations of what “reality” is. The Republican party has clearly decided that the only path open to them is to further embrace the resentment exhibited in rural, displaced white voters – people whose concerns have been unconscionably ignored but who have directed their anger at an entirely inappropriate target. They see Obama as the enemy but they vote for the people who are their real enemies.
  • If you think about it point by point, it becomes even less sensible. The debt? That was a result of Bush’s unfunded wars, irresponsible tax cuts and his corporatist Medicare expansion (which was itself just a subsidy for drug companies). The recession? A logical endpoint of a decades-long abandonment of responsible financial regulation. Immigration? There have been no significant changes to our immigration law since 1986, when Saint Reagan pushed through a bill that provided legal status to many who were undocumented – and the right conveniently proceeded to forget that. Ditto with gun control, since Reagan supported the Brady Bill publicly, and that clearly must be erased from the record.
  • The left, by contrast, did not throw Democrats out of office for supporting the Bush tax cuts. It did not throw Democrats out of office for opposing cap-and-trade legislation, immigration reform, or for stonewalling Obamacare until the very last minute when Scott Brown’s surprise election made inaction untenable. The left complained about these realities but never pretended that the reality was any different than what it was; we had the best we could get and that while Obama has let us down on specific issues, he has been a wholly underappreciated president – and history will very likely vindicate him
Emilio Ergueta

Thinking Straight About Curved Space | Issue 108 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

philosophynow.org/...ng_Straight_About_Curved_Space

Space time curve philosophy science physics

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • In earlier columns, I have defended time from the assaults of physics. With a few exceptions, physicists have not been kind to time. Relativity theory stripped it of its tenses, dismissing the difference between past, present, and future as illusory. Worse, the theory seemed to deny time an independent existence.
  • My own view, however, is that both space and time are traduced in physics. They should form a victim support group, which is why this column is devoted to a defence of space.
  • Places – habitats – are stripped down to decimal places. Much is lost in consequence. The space of the physicist has neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’, no centre or periphery, no inside or outside, except in terms of relationships between points defined mathematically with respect to a frame of reference built out of axes whose (0,0,0) point of origin is arbitrarily chosen. The inhabitants of the physicists’ space are fields and objects that have only primary qualities – size, distance, number of instances. They are void of secondary qualities – warmth, brightness, colour, texture – never mind meaning, value, and use – even though all these qualities are inseparable from the space in which we experience, enact, and suffer our lives.
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  • So long as we don’t think that the physicists’ space is more fundamental than, or is the ultimate reality of, lived space, then no harm is done.
  • in contemporary physics, space is curved, or non-Euclidean. In non-Euclidean space, the sum of the angles of a triangle may be greater than 180°; more importantly, the shortest distance between two points may not be a straight line, but a curved one.
  • When we first hear talk of ‘curved space’ we rebel. The least we should ask of something said to be curved is that it should have edges, surfaces, and parts that look or feel curved, which space itself does not. Analogies are offered to make the idea less counter-intuitive
  • Physicists will smile at taking the analogy too literally. But if it is not taken literally, it lacks explanatory force. And taken literally, it is seriously misleading. The curvature of an object such as the earth is extrinsic – evident in its surface
  • From Pythagoras onwards we have been prone to the illusion that our ways of geometrising space capture space itself – perhaps even believing that the mathematical logic of pure quantities is somehow ‘out there’. However, the immense power of mathematical physics – which requires abstracting from phenomenal reality and the reduction of experienced and experienceable reality to mere parameters to which numerical values are assigned – does not justify uncritically accepting concepts such as ‘curved space’ that attempt to re-insert phenomenal appearances into its abstractions. On the contrary, we should acknowledge that ‘unreasonably effective’ mathematics (to borrow Eugene Wigner’s phrase) can take us to places to which nothing non-mathematical corresponds. For instance, consider the assumption, central to modern cosmology, that space itself is expanding.
Javier E

Specs that see right through you - tech - 05 July 2011 - New Scientist - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...hat-see-right-through-you.html

emotion tracking identification interpretation technology involuntary augmented reality

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • a number of "social X-ray specs" that are set to transform how we interact with each other. By sensing emotions that we would otherwise miss, these technologies can thwart disastrous social gaffes and help us understand each other better.
  • In conversation, we pantomime certain emotions that act as social lubricants. We unconsciously nod to signal that we are following the other person's train of thought, for example, or squint a bit to indicate that we are losing track. Many of these signals can be misinterpreted - sometimes because different cultures have their own specific signals.
  • n 2005, she enlisted Simon Baron-Cohen, also at Cambridge, to help her identify a set of more relevant emotional facial states. They settled on six: thinking, agreeing, concentrating, interested - and, of course, the confused and disagreeing expressions
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  • More often, we fail to spot them altogether. D
  • To create this lexicon, they hired actors to mime the expressions, then asked volunteers to describe their meaning, taking the majority response as the accurate one.
  • The camera tracks 24 "feature points" on your conversation partner's face, and software developed by Picard analyses their myriad micro-expressions, how often they appear and for how long. It then compares that data with its bank of known expressions (see diagram).
  • Eventually, she thinks the system could be incorporated into a pair of augmented-reality glasses, which would overlay computer graphics onto the scene in front of the wearer.
  • the average person only managed to interpret, correctly, 54 per cent of Baron-Cohen's expressions on real, non-acted faces. This suggested to them that most people - not just those with autism - could use some help sensing the mood of people they are talking to.
  • set up a company called Affectiva, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, which is selling their expression recognition software. Their customers include companies that, for example, want to measure how people feel about their adverts or movie.
  • it's hard to fool the machine for long
  • In addition to facial expressions, we radiate a panoply of involuntary "honest signals", a term identified by MIT Media Lab researcher Alex Pentland in the early 2000s to describe the social signals that we use to augment our language. They include body language such as gesture mirroring, and cues such as variations in the tone and pitch of the voice. We do respond to these cues, but often not consciously. If we were more aware of them in others and ourselves, then we would have a fuller picture of the social reality around us, and be able to react more deliberately.
  • develop a small electronic badge that hangs around the neck. Its audio sensors record how aggressive the wearer is being, the pitch, volume and clip of their voice, and other factors. They called it the "jerk-o-meter".
  • it helped people realise when they were being either obnoxious or unduly self-effacing.
  • y the end of the experiment, all the dots had gravitated towards more or less the same size and colour. Simply being able to see their role in a group made people behave differently, and caused the group dynamics to become more even. The entire group's emotional intelligence had increased (
  • Some of our body's responses during a conversation are not designed for broadcast to another person - but it's possible to monitor those too. Your temperature and skin conductance can also reveal secrets about your emotional state, and Picard can tap them with a glove-like device called the Q Sensor. In response to stresses, good or bad, our skin becomes clammy, increasing its conductance, and the Q Sensor picks this up.
  • Physiological responses can now even be tracked remotely, in principle without your consent. Last year, Picard and one of her graduate students showed that it was possible to measure heart rate without any surface contact with the body. They used software linked to an ordinary webcam to read information about heart rate, blood pressure and skin temperature based on, among other things, colour changes in the subject's face
  • In Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo, police officers can decide whether someone is a criminal just by looking at them. Their glasses scan the features of a face, and match them against a database of criminal mugshots. A red light blinks if there's a match.
  • Thad Starner at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta wears a small device he has built that looks like a monocle. It can retrieve video, audio or text snippets of past conversations with people he has spoken with, and even provide real-time links between past chats and topics he is currently discussing.
  • The US military has built a radar-imaging device that can see through walls to capture 3D images of people and objects beyond.
carolinewren

Schrödinger's cat gets a reality check - 0 views

theconversation.com/cat-gets-a-reality-check-37278

science

shared by carolinewren on 27 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • At the root of quantum physics there is something of a reality crisis. Multiple interpretations of the theory exist, and they paint very different pictures of the world
  • wave function describes the quantum state of a physical system.
  • the quantum state in general only gives probabilistic predictions.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • describe bizarre situations, like physical systems existing simultaneously in multiple states, such as different positions or velocities. It gives very precise probabilities for the possible outcomes of laboratory experiments, but it defies an intuitive interpretation.
  • But the theorems show that this explanation simply cannot work.
jongardner04

Looks Can Deceive: Why Perception and Reality Don't Always Match Up - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...looks-can-deceive

perception reality

shared by jongardner04 on 15 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • ALL OF US, even postmodern philosophers, are naive realists at heart. We assume that the external world maps perfectly onto our internal view of it—an expectation that is reinforced by daily experience.
  • That there should be a match between perception and reality is not surprising, because evolution ruthlessly eliminates the unfit.
  • As psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered over the past several decades, our consciousness provides a stable interface to a dizzyingly rich sensory world. Underneath this interface lurk two visio
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • systems that work in parallel.
  • jongardner04 on 15 Jan 15
     
    Discusses sense perception and how it shapes our society.
silveiragu

College Scorecard Sandbags Equity in Higher Education | Patricia McGuire - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...orecard-sandbag_b_8129780.html

research higher_education bias

shared by silveiragu on 23 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • the "haves" in higher education have quite a lot; the "have nots" struggle mightily. And this economic chasm is seriously influenced by gender, race and social class -- issues on which the College Scorecard is silent, but which affect just about every factoid presented
  • The reality is that even smart wonks educated at some of the best of the "haves" can be blind to social reality; their monument to algorithmic gymnastics in the College Scorecard obscures some of the most important and painful facts about college life and American society today.
  • The administration presents the collegiate earnings data as if it were value-neutral, not only with no reference to the mission of institutions that may have different values from those the administration apparently exalts, but even more devastatingly, with no reference to the pernicious effects of gender and race discrimination on career opportunities and earnings.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • I am not a wonk, but I did prepare this chart based on data in the College Scorecard and the federal data system IPEDS
  • The value-neutral approach to the collegiate earnings data ignores the facts of life about women and families.
  • 74% of all undergraduates have at least one "non-traditional" characteristic, and more than 55% have two or more non-traditional characteristics such as having children, being a caregiver, delaying college enrollment, attending part-time, working full-time.
  • But the College Scorecard completely ignores the increasingly non-traditional nature of the nation's undergraduate student body today, and instead, presents data as if most college students are privileged children whiling away four years in some grove of academic luxury
  • The Obama administration claims that the new College Scorecard will provide more "transparent" data to students and families trying to decide which college to attend. Unfortunately, by presenting some data in value-neutral or misleading ways, and ignoring other truly important questions in the college choice process
  • the administration presents a data mashup with limited utility for consumers but large potential for misrepresentation of social realities.
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