Opinion | Jeff Zucker Was Right to Resign. But I Can't Judge Him. - The New York Times - 0 views
-
As animals, we are not physically well designed to sit at a desk for a minimum of 40 hours a week staring at screens. That so many of our waking hours are devoted to work in the first place is a very modern development that can easily erode our mental health and sense of self. We are a higher species capable of observing restraint, but we are also ambulatory clusters of needs and desires, with which evolution has both protected and sabotaged us.
-
Professional life, especially in a culture as work-obsessed as America’s, forces us into a lot of unnatural postures
-
it’s no surprise, when work occupies so much of our attention, that people sometimes find deep human connections there, even when they don’t intend to, and even when it’s inappropriate.
- ...2 more annotations...
Opinion | Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT - The New York Times - 0 views
-
we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.
-
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought
-
if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I
- ...22 more annotations...
GPT-4 has arrived. It will blow ChatGPT out of the water. - The Washington Post - 0 views
-
GPT-4, in contrast, is a state-of-the-art system capable of creating not just words but describing images in response to a person’s simple written commands.
-
When shown a photo of a boxing glove hanging over a wooden seesaw with a ball on one side, for instance, a person can ask what will happen if the glove drops, and GPT-4 will respond that it would hit the seesaw and cause the ball to fly up.
-
an AI program, known as a large language model, that early testers had claimed was remarkably advanced in its ability to reason and learn new things
- ...22 more annotations...
The Neoracists - by John McWhorter - Persuasion - 0 views
-
Third Wave Antiracism exploits modern Americans’ fear of being thought racist, using this to promulgate an obsessive, self-involved, totalitarian and unnecessary kind of cultural reprogramming.
-
The problem is that on matters of societal procedure and priorities, the adherents of this religion—true to the very nature of religion—cannot be reasoned with. They are, in this, medievals with lattes.
-
first, what this is not.
- ...14 more annotations...
Elon Musk is wrong to call for a pause on the AI race | The Spectator - 0 views
-
the idea of autonomous computers, ‘thinking’ for themselves, and eventually usurping humans, is the stuff of nonsense and lurid science fiction.
-
It is only the fevered imagination of the current crop of tech titans that allows them to believe that the world is on the cusp of a form of artificial intelligence that could prove a match for the genius and human intuition of someone like Einstein, threatening the future of the entire human race.
-
Moratoriums on scientific and technological research are never a good idea; others who do not have the same ethical or moral qualms will soon race to fill the gap.
- ...1 more annotation...
Human memory may be unreliable after just a few seconds, scientists find | Neuroscience... - 0 views
-
“Even at the shortest term, our memory might not be fully reliable,” said Dr Marte Otten, the first author of the research from the University of Amsterdam. “Particularly when we have strong expectations about how the world should be, when our memory starts fading a little bit – even after one and a half seconds, two seconds, three seconds – then we start filling in based on our expectations.”
-
Otten noted that details of speech were rapidly replaced by a general meaning of the sentence.“The bigger effects when it comes to social expectations might be intonation, [for example] ‘oh, she said that in a really angry and upset voice,’ right? Whereas maybe the intonation wasn’t that, but it’s just coloured quickly in your memory based on your assumptions about how women are,” she said.
Francis Fukuyama: Still the End of History - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
Over the past year, though, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of these strong states.
-
The weaknesses are of two sorts. First, the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader at the top all but guarantees low-quality decision making, and over time will produce truly catastrophic consequences
-
Second, the absence of public discussion and debate in “strong” states, and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow, and can erode at a moment’s notice.
- ...4 more annotations...
The Six Forces That Fuel Friendship - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
I’ve done my best to pull out the recurring themes I’ve observed from these 100 conversations.
-
I have come to believe that there are six forces that help form friendships and maintain them through the years: accumulation, attention, intention, ritual, imagination, and grace.
-
The simplest and most obvious force that forms and sustains friendships is time spent together. One study estimates that it takes spending 40 to 60 hours together within the first six weeks of meeting to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, and about 80 to 100 hours to become more than that.
- ...23 more annotations...
How to Navigate a 'Quarterlife' Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Satya Doyle Byock, a 39-year-old therapist, noticed a shift in tone over the past few years in the young people who streamed into her office: frenetic, frazzled clients in their late teens, 20s and 30s. They were unnerved and unmoored, constantly feeling like something was wrong with them.
-
“Crippling anxiety, depression, anguish, and disorientation are effectively the norm,”
-
her new book, “Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood.” The book uses anecdotes from Ms. Byock’s practice to outline obstacles faced by today’s young adults — roughly between the ages of 16 and 36 — and how to deal with them.
- ...40 more annotations...
Functional medicine: Is it the future of healthcare or just another wellness trend? - I... - 0 views
-
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."
- ...31 more annotations...
Who is Andrew Tate, the misogynist hero to millions of young men? | The Economist - 0 views
-
what sets Mr Tate apart from other alt-right social-media personalities and previous anti-feminist online movements is the extent to which his views have found a ready audience among teenage boys.
-
In 2021 Mr Tate established Hustlers University, an online platform where young men could take courses in business and investing for $49.99 a month. It also gave students financial rewards for promoting Mr Tate’s misogynist ideas via a now-suspended affiliate marketing programme. Thanks to a continuing stream of fan-generated content, his views have proliferated on social media even though most platforms have banned his accounts.
-
Part of the reason why Mr Tate has found success specifically on TikTok is that its algorithm is uniquely predictive, appearing not only to rely on the content users watch and recommend, but making assumptions about their potential interests
- ...1 more annotation...
Jonathan Haidt on the 'National Crisis' of Gen Z - WSJ - 0 views
-
he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”
-
He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood
-
Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.
- ...26 more annotations...
A Leading Memory Researcher Explains How to Make Precious Moments Last - The New York T... - 0 views
-
Our memories form the bedrock of who we are. Those recollections, in turn, are built on one very simple assumption: This happened. But things are not quite so simple
-
“We update our memories through the act of remembering,” says Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, and the author of the illuminating new book “Why We Remember.” “So it creates all these weird biases and infiltrates our decision making. It affects our sense of who we are.
-
Rather than being photo-accurate repositories of past experience, Ranganath argues, our memories function more like active interpreters, working to help us navigate the present and future. The implication is that who we are, and the memories we draw on to determine that, are far less fixed than you might think. “Our identities,” Ranganath says, “are built on shifting sand.”
- ...24 more annotations...
Opinion | The Question of Transgender Care - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Doctors and researchers have proposed various theories to try to explain these trends. One is that greater social acceptance of trans people has enabled people to seek these therapies. Another is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity. A third is that the rise of teen mental health issues may be contributing to gender dysphoria.
-
Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities.
-
Transition through medical interventions was embraced by providers in the United States and Europe after a pair of small Dutch studies showed that such treatment improved patients’ well-being
- ...11 more annotations...
Elon Musk May Kill Us Even If Donald Trump Doesn't - 0 views
-
In his extraordinary 2021 book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at Brookings, writes that modern societies have developed an implicit “epistemic” compact–an agreement about how we determine truth–that rests on a broad public acceptance of science and reason, and a respect and forbearance towards institutions charged with advancing knowledge.
-
Today, Rauch writes, those institutions have given way to digital “platforms” that traffic in “information” rather than knowledge and disseminate that information not according to its accuracy but its popularity. And what is popular is sensation, shock, outrage. The old elite consensus has given way to an algorithm. Donald Trump, an entrepreneur of outrage, capitalized on the new technology to lead what Rauch calls “an epistemic secession.”
-
Rauch foresees the arrival of “Internet 3.0,” in which the big companies accept that content regulation is in their interest and erect suitable “guardrails.” In conversation with me, Rauch said that social media companies now recognize that their algorithm are “toxic,” and spoke hopefully of alternative models like Mastodon, which eschews algorithms and allows users to curate their own feeds
- ...10 more annotations...
« First
‹ Previous
1021 - 1036 of 1036
Showing 20▼ items per page