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peterconnelly

Wikipedia acts as a check on Putin's false view of history - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Whether to call Hitler gravely immoral or evil is one of literally hundreds of discussions about this article, which is among the most viewed ever on the site — more than 125 million times over the last 15 years, twice as many as Jesus’s total and in the neighborhood of the number for the soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo.
  • Setting the record straight matters because historical misinformation walks hand in hand with current disinformation.
  • Putin has two claims he says are backed by the historical record: that there has never been a separate Ukrainian nation, and that people who claim there is a separate nation must have another motive, whether personal gain or an ideological cause like Nazism.
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  • She showed that accounts of so-called “aces” — fighters said to have heroically held off much more powerful enemies with a single tank or plane — were based on propaganda.
  • In making these repairs, Coffman faced resistance from a group of editors who were mainly military buffs and wanted to write about battlefield valor without too much scrutiny. She, however, kept coming back to facts and sources — how do we know what we think we know? — and an insistence that Wikipedia not be swept up in mythology.
  • In a speech last year, Putin strolled through 1,000 years of battles and alliances to justify his claim of the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
  • Just look at the rhetoric around Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, which Vladimir Putin has described as a battle to “de-Nazify” the leadership of Ukraine.
  • Since the Russian invasion, the English Wikipedia articles about the historical figures and topics Putin invoked have been racking up pop-star numbers.
  • When it comes to allegations about Nazi collaboration by prominent Ukrainian nationalists like Bandera, Wikipedia has pulled no punches. Even as Putin has emphasized these Nazi ties as a reason for his invasion, Wikipedia has resisted attempts to water down this history.
  • When Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was asked how Ukraine could be in need of de-Nazification if its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish, Lavrov replied: “I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood. [That Zelensky is Jewish] means absolutely nothing. Wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews.” It was an appalling answer that, according to the Israeli government, Putin apologized for.
  • In an unusual step, the English Wikipedia article brings up this particular falsehood to explicitly refute it.
  • The Wikipedia project comes with a stubborn confidence that facts can guide us through the darkness. In Wikipedia’s 20-year history, this belief has never been asked to do more.
criscimagnael

'I don't even remember what I read': People enter a 'dissociative state' when using soc... - 0 views

  • “I think people experience a lot of shame around social media use,” said lead author Amanda Baughan, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “One of the things I like about this framing of ‘dissociation’ rather than ‘addiction’ is that it changes the narrative. Instead of: ‘I should be able to have more self-control,’ it’s more like: ‘We all naturally dissociate in many ways throughout our day – whether it’s daydreaming or scrolling through Instagram, we stop paying attention to what’s happening around us.'”
  • “Having a stop built into a list meant that it was only going to be a few minutes of reading and then, if they wanted to really go crazy, they could read another list. But again, it’s only a few minutes. Having that bite-sized piece of content to consume was something that really resonated.”
  • Over the course of the month, 42% of participants (18 people) agreed or strongly agreed with that statement at least once. After the month, the researchers did in-depth interviews with 11 participants. Seven described experiencing dissociation while using Chirp.
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  • “But people only realize that they’ve dissociated in hindsight. So once you exit dissociation there’s sometimes this feeling of: How did I get here? It’s like when people on social media realize: ‘Oh my gosh, how did 30 minutes go by? I just meant to check one notification.'”
  • The problem with social media platforms, the researchers said, is not that people lack the self-control needed to not get sucked in, but instead that the platforms themselves are not designed to maximize what people value.
  • These platforms need to create an end-of-use experience, so that people can have it fit in their day with their time-management goals.”
criscimagnael

DOJ investigates Instagram's impact on young adults - 0 views

  • I probably check Instagram about 25 times a day," said Marika Marsh, a sophomore.She said while she's scrolling, she feels a bit of anxiety."Especially with girls today, because everyone looks so perfect all the time and it makes you feel insecure,"
  • "In reality, their days might be as boring as ours. I think it’s more of an image they're trying to portray for themselves,"
  • "Social media platforms identify young girls who click on information suggesting that they feel bad about how they look and they don't flood them with resources, helping them feel better."
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  • "A lot of the times I catch myself editing this to brighten my eyes, it will look nicer it's all about angles and perspective.
Javier E

Politics should be taught in primary schools, Alastair Campbell says | Alastair Campbel... - 0 views

  • the co-host of podcast The Rest is Politics expressed dismay that most students in the UK do not take politics classes unless they choose to study it at A-level.
  • Political education needs to start in primary schools, and then become part of the “everyday debate” in children’s entire school experience, he said. “Maybe you don’t call it politics,” he said, suggesting that it could be called “arguing”, “policy” or “big issues”.
  • “Some of the most enjoyable stuff I do is going into schools and trying to teach young kids what politics is,” he added. “When they sit down and they start thinking about stuff, it’s just so fascinating and innovative.”
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  • more state school students need to be taught “how to communicate, how to argue, how to fight their corner” from a young age.
Javier E

Rebecca F Kuang rejects idea authors should not write about other races | Publishing | ... - 0 views

  • The author of Babel and The Poppy War, Rebecca F Kuang, has said she finds the idea that authors should only write about characters of their own race “deeply frustrating and pretty illogical”.
  • the author, who was born in China but moved to the US when she was four, said that there is a “really weird kind of identity politics going on in American publishing”. She is “sympathetic” to an extent, as it is coming from “decades of frustration of seeing the same racist, uncritical, under-researched, shallow stereotypes”
  • The problem is, Kuang thinks, is that this has now “spiralled into this really strict and reductive understanding of race”. As a result, a movement that began as a call for more authentic stories about marginalised communities “gets flipped around and weaponised against the marginalised writers to pigeonhole them into telling only certain kinds of stories”.
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  • Kuang was critical of those who believe that “the only people getting book deals right now are BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of colour] writers”, including Joyce Carol Oates, who tweeted last year that editors do not want to look at debuts by white male writers. Oates “really just needs to get off Twitter”, Kuang joked, but also said “if you just walk into a bookstore you know that’s not true.”
  • “We also know from industry reports year after year that the number of BIPOC authors being published hasn’t really budged since the 70s”, she added. “In fact, you can historically trace the years in which the number of Black authors being published in the US spiked to the years in which Toni Morrison was an acquiring editor, which is very depressing.
Javier E

Ian Hacking, Eminent Philosopher of Science and Much Else, Dies at 87 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In an academic career that included more than two decades as a professor in the philosophy department of the University of Toronto, following appointments at Cambridge and Stanford, Professor Hacking’s intellectual scope seemed to know no bounds. Because of his ability to span multiple academic fields, he was often described as a bridge builder.
  • “Ian Hacking was a one-person interdisciplinary department all by himself,” Cheryl Misak, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, said in a phone interview. “Anthropologists, sociologists, historians and psychologists, as well as those working on probability theory and physics, took him to have important insights for their disciplines.”
  • Professor Hacking wrote several landmark works on the philosophy and history of probability, including “The Taming of Chance” (1990), which was named one of the best 100 nonfiction books of the 20th century by the Modern Library.
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  • “I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the effects on the people in turn change the classifications,” he wrote in “Making Up People
  • His work in the philosophy of science was groundbreaking: He departed from the preoccupation with questions that had long concerned philosophers. Arguing that science was just as much about intervention as it was about representation, be helped bring experimentation to center stage.
  • Regarding one such question — whether unseen phenomena like quarks and electrons were real or merely the theoretical constructs of physicists — he argued for reality in the case of phenomena that figured in experiments, citing as an example an experiment at Stanford that involved spraying electrons and positrons into a ball of niobium to detect electric charges. “So far as I am concerned,” he wrote, “if you can spray them, they’re real.”
  • His book “The Emergence of Probability” (1975), which is said to have inspired hundreds of books by other scholars, examined how concepts of statistical probability have evolved over time, shaping the way we understand not just arcane fields like quantum physics but also everyday life.
  • “I was trying to understand what happened a few hundred years ago that made it possible for our world to be dominated by probabilities,” he said in a 2012 interview with the journal Public Culture. “We now live in a universe of chance, and everything we do — health, sports, sex, molecules, the climate — takes place within a discourse of probabilities.”
  • Whatever the subject, whatever the audience, one idea that pervades all his work is that “science is a human enterprise,” Ragnar Fjelland and Roger Strand of the University of Bergen in Norway wrote when Professor Hacking won the Holberg Prize. “It is always created in a historical situation, and to understand why present science is as it is, it is not sufficient to know that it is ‘true,’ or confirmed. We have to know the historical context of its emergence.”
  • Hacking often argued that as the human sciences have evolved, they have created categories of people, and that people have subsequently defined themselves as falling into those categories. Thus does human reality become socially constructed.
  • In 2000, he became the first Anglophone to win a permanent position at the Collège de France, where he held the chair in the philosophy and history of scientific concepts until he retired in 2006.
  • “I call this the ‘looping effect,’” he added. “Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before.”
  • In “Why Race Still Matters,” a 2005 article in the journal Daedalus, he explored how anthropologists developed racial categories by extrapolating from superficial physical characteristics, with lasting effects — including racial oppression. “Classification and judgment are seldom separable,” he wrote. “Racial classification is evaluation.”
  • Similarly, he once wrote, in the field of mental health the word “normal” “uses a power as old as Aristotle to bridge the fact/value distinction, whispering in your ear that what is normal is also right.”
  • In his influential writings about autism, Professor Hacking charted the evolution of the diagnosis and its profound effects on those diagnosed, which in turn broadened the definition to include a greater number of people.
  • Encouraging children with autism to think of themselves that way “can separate the child from ‘normalcy’ in a way that is not appropriate,” he told Public Culture. “By all means encourage the oddities. By no means criticize the oddities.”
  • His emphasis on historical context also illuminated what he called transient mental illnesses, which appear to be so confined 0cto their time 0c 0cthat they can vanish when times change.
  • “hysterical fugue” was a short-lived epidemic of compulsive wandering that emerged in Europe in the 1880s, largely among middle-class men who had become transfixed by stories of exotic locales and the lure of trave
  • His intellectual tendencies were unmistakable from an early age. “When he was 3 or 4 years old, he would sit and read the dictionary,” Jane Hacking said. “His parents were completely baffled.”
  • He wondered aloud, the interviewer noted, if the whole universe was governed by nonlocality — if “everything in the universe is aware of everything else.”“That’s what you should be writing about,” he said. “Not me. I’m a dilettante. My governing word is ‘curiosity.’”
Javier E

Opinion | Have Some Sympathy - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Schools and parenting guides instruct children in how to cultivate empathy, as do workplace culture and wellness programs. You could fill entire bookshelves with guides to finding, embracing and sharing empathy. Few books or lesson plans extol sympathy’s virtues.
  • “Sympathy focuses on offering support from a distance,” a therapist explains on LinkedIn, whereas empathy “goes beyond sympathy by actively immersing oneself in another person’s emotions and attempting to comprehend their point of view.”
  • In use since the 16th century, when the Greek “syn-” (“with”) combined with pathos (experience, misfortune, emotion, condition) to mean “having common feelings,” sympathy preceded empathy by a good four centuries
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  • Empathy (the “em” means “into”) barged in from the German in the 20th century and gained popularity through its usage in fields like philosophy, aesthetics and psychology. According to my benighted 1989 edition of Webster’s Unabridged, empathy was the more self-centered emotion, “the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts or attitudes of another.”
  • in more updated lexicons, it’s as if the two words had reversed. Sympathy now implies a hierarchy whereas empathy is the more egalitarian sentiment.
  • Sympathy, the session’s leader explained to school staff members, was seeing someone in a hole and saying, “Too bad you’re in a hole,” whereas empathy meant getting in the hole, too.
  • “Empathy is a choice and it’s a vulnerable choice because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling,”
  • Still, it’s hard to square the new emphasis on empathy — you must feel what others feel — with another element of the current discourse. According to what’s known as “standpoint theory,” your view necessarily depends on your own experience: You can’t possibly know what others feel.
  • In short, no matter how much an empath you may be, unless you have actually been in someone’s place, with all its experiences and limitations, you cannot understand where that person is coming from. The object of your empathy may find it presumptuous of you to think that you “get it.”
  • Bloom asks us to imagine what empathy demands should a friend’s child drown. “A highly empathetic response would be to feel what your friend feels, to experience, as much as you can, the terrible sorrow and pain,” he writes. “In contrast, compassion involves concern and love for your friend, and the desire and motivation to help, but it need not involve mirroring your friend’s anguish.”
  • Bloom argues for a more rational, modulated, compassionate response. Something that sounds a little more like our old friend sympathy.
Javier E

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

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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”)
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • “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.
  • 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
  • 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

All the (open) world's a stage: how the video game Fallout became a backdrop for live S... - 0 views

  • The Wasteland Theatre Company is not your average band of thespians. Dotted all across the world, they meet behind their keyboards to perform inside Fallout 76, a video game set in a post-nuclear apocalyptic America. The Fallout series is one of gaming’s most popular, famous for encouraging players to role-play survivors within the oddly beautiful ruins of alternate-history Earth
  • “Imagine a wandering theatre troupe in the 17th century going from town to town doing little performances,” says the company’s director, Northern_Harvest, who goes by his gamertag or just ‘North’, and works in communications in real life. “It’s not a new idea; we’re just doing it within the brand new medium of a video game.”
  • The company was formed almost by chance, when North befriended a group of players in the wasteland. As they adventured together, they noticed that the Fallout games are peppered with references to Shakespeare’s works.
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  • “The Fallout universe lends itself really well to Shakespeare. It’s very desolate, very grotesque, very tragic, really,” says North. In this world, Shakespeare existed before the bombs fell, so it seemed logical that North and his friends could role-play a company keeping culture alive in the ruins of civilisation – like the troupe of actors in Emily St John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic dystopia, Station Eleven.
  • It takes months to pull a show together. First, North picks the play and adapts it. Hundreds of pages of script are shared with the crew, so set design and rehearsals can commence. “It’s just like a real theatre company, where you start with an idea and a few folks sitting together and figuring out what our season is going to look like,”
  • There are no ticketed seats, and the company makes no money. The majority of audiences stumble across the performances accidentally in the wasteland, and sit to watch the show for free – or tune in on Twitch, where the company broadcasts every performance live
  • n 2022 Fallout 76 claimed to have over 13.5 million players, some of whom North believes “may never have seen a Shakespeare play. Ninety-nine per cent of those who find us sit down and quietly watch the show … It’s really quite moving, performing for people who might not go to the theatre in their own communities or haven’t thought about Shakespeare since high school. We are tickled silly knowing that we are potentially reaching new, untapped audiences and (re)introducing Shakespeare to so many. I hope Shakespeare academics who study comparative drama will take note of our use of this new medium to reach new audiences
  • “I think we’re a perfect example of how video games inspire creativity, and celebrate theatre and culture and the arts. I hope that other gamers out there know that there’s so much potential for you to be able to express what you’re passionate about in video games.”
Javier E

Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: ​​“I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.
  • The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up
  • “You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.”
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  • In the modern tech world, the value of a humanistic education shows up in evidence of its absence. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto exchange FTX who recently lost his $16 billion fortune in a few days, is a famously proud illiterate. “I would never read a book,” he once told an interviewer. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”
  • Elon Musk and Twitter are another excellent case in point. It’s painful and extraordinary to watch the ham-fisted way a brilliant engineering mind like Musk deals with even relatively simple literary concepts such as parody and satire. He obviously has never thought about them before.
  • The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg has read a great deal about Caesar Augustus, but I wish he’d read about the regulation of the pamphlet press in 17th-century Europe. It might have spared America the annihilation of social trust.
  • These failures don’t derive from mean-spiritedness or even greed, but from a willful obliviousness. The engineers do not recognize that humanistic questions—like, say, hermeneutics or the historical contingency of freedom of speech or the genealogy of morality—are real questions with real consequences
  • Everybody is entitled to their opinion about politics and culture, it’s true, but an opinion is different from a grounded understanding. The most direct path to catastrophe is to treat complex problems as if they’re obvious to everyone. You can lose billions of dollars pretty quickly that way.
  • As the technologists have ignored humanistic questions to their peril, the humanists have greeted the technological revolutions of the past 50 years by committing soft suicide.
  • As of 2017, the number of English majors had nearly halved since the 1990s. History enrollments have declined by 45 percent since 2007 alone
  • the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades, despite technology altering the entire world around them. They are still exploding meta-narratives like it’s 1979, an exercise in self-defeat.
  • Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine.
  • the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations.
  • The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major?
  • Despite the clear value of a humanistic education, its decline continues. Over the past 10 years, STEM has triumphed, and the humanities have collapsed. The number of students enrolled in computer science is now nearly the same as the number of students enrolled in all of the humanities combined.
  • now there’s GPT-3. Natural-language processing presents the academic humanities with a whole series of unprecedented problems
  • Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated?
  • despite the drastic divide of the moment, natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example.
  • The humanists will need to understand natural-language processing because it’s the future of language
  • that space for collaboration can exist, both sides will have to take the most difficult leaps for highly educated people: Understand that they need the other side, and admit their basic ignorance.
  • But that’s always been the beginning of wisdom, no matter what technological era we happen to inhabit.
Javier E

Why The CHIPS and Science Act Is a Climate Bill - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Over the next five years, the CHIPS Act will direct an estimated $67 billion, or roughly a quarter of its total funding, toward accelerating the growth of zero-carbon industries and conducting climate-relevant research, according to an analysis from RMI, a nonpartisan energy think tank based in Colorado.
  • That means that the CHIPS Act is one of the largest climate bills ever passed by Congress. It exceeds the total amount of money that the government spent on renewable-energy tax credits from 2005 to 2019
  • And it’s more than half the size of the climate spending in President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. That’s all the more remarkable because the CHIPS Act was passed by large bipartisan majorities, with 41 Republicans and nearly all Democrats supporting it in the House and the Senate.
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  • When viewed with the Inflation Reduction Act, which the House is poised to pass later this week, and last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law, a major shift in congressional climate spending comes into focus. According to the RMI analysis, these three laws are set to more than triple the federal government’s average annual spending on climate and clean energy this decade, compared with the 2010s.
  • Within a few years, when the funding has fully ramped up, the government will spend roughly $80 billion a year on accelerating the development and deployment of zero-carbon energy and preparing for the impacts of climate change. That exceeds the GDP of about 120 of the 192 countries that have signed the Paris Agreement on Climate Change
  • By the end of the decade, the federal government will have spent more than $521 billion
  • the bill’s programs focus on the bleeding edge of the decarbonization problem, investing money in technology that should lower emissions in the 2030s and beyond.
  • The International Energy Association has estimated that almost half of global emissions reductions by 2050 will come from technologies that exist only as prototypes or demonstration projects today.
  • To get those technologies ready in time, we need to deploy those new ideas as fast as we can, then rapidly get them to commercial scale, Carey said. “What used to take two decades now needs to take six to 10 years.” That’s what the CHIPS Act is supposed to do
  • The law, for instance, establishes a new $20 billion Directorate for Technology, which will specialize in pushing new technologies from the prototype stage into the mass market. It is meant to prevent what happened with the solar industry—where America invented a new technology, only to lose out on commercializing it—from happening again
  • Congress has explicitly tasked the new office with studying “natural and anthropogenic disaster prevention or mitigation” as well as “advanced energy and industrial efficiency technologies,” including next-generation nuclear reactors.
  • The bill also directs about $12 billion in new research, development, and demonstration funding to the Department of Energy, according to RMI’s estimate. That includes doubling the budget for ARPA-E, the department’s advanced-energy-projects skunk works.
  • it allocates billions to upgrade facilities at the government’s in-house defense and energy research institutes, including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and Berkeley Lab, which conducts environmental-science research.
  • RMI’s estimate of the climate spending in the CHIPS bill should be understood as just that: an estimate. The bill text rarely specifies how much of its new funding should go to climate issues.
  • When you add CHIPS, the IRA, and the infrastructure law together, Washington appears to be unifying behind a new industrial policy, focused not only on semiconductors and defense technology but clean energy
  • The three bills combine to form a “a coordinated, strategic policy for accelerating the transition to the technologies that are going to define the 21st century,”
  • scholars and experts have speculated about whether industrial policy—the intentional use of law to nurture and grow certain industries—might make a comeback to help fight climate change. Industrial policy was central to some of the Green New Deal’s original pitch, and it has helped China develop a commanding lead in the global solar industry.
  • “Industrial policy,” he said, “is back.”
Javier E

Roger Scruton and the Fascists Who Love Him - 0 views

  • Scruton was a true intellectual, that his writing extended far beyond political commentary into various fields of philosophy and the arts, and that his reputation was that of a gentleman
  • reading Scruton’s critique of liberalism from the safety of, say, 1995, with communism vanquished, liberalism ascendant, and Europe beginning to heal from an 80-year-old wound is one thing.
  • Reading Scruton’s critique of liberalism today, with right-wing illiberalism on the march both at home and abroad, is quite another.
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  • Scruton’s argument in many of his essays and books amounted to a deep critique of liberalism as mistaken about human beings, about society, about politics. That critique was especially valuable when it could be read as a friendly corrective to liberalism’s errors, excesses, and contradictions
  • today, with liberalism under threat, it comes across more like an indictment of liberalism—an indictment that has apparently been taken up as a foundational text by fascists.
  • Pappin extols Hungary as “a traditional Christian society,” going on to say “as an anti-liberal, I think that’s good.” Pappin then defends altering the Constitution to tilt power toward the right and strip protections from groups he feels have undermined American traditional values.
  • at some point, you have to start asking hard questions. In art, we divorce the work from both its creator and its legacy. You judge the work for the work and do not hold it responsible if the artist, or its fans, turn out to be bad people.
  • I’m not certain that this is how it is—or should be—in the world of ideas.
  • In Scruton’s place and time, it did seem like liberalism was ascendant and that its overreach and failings needed conservative correction.
  • In our day, though, liberalism needs correction less than it needs protection—including protection from the would-be authoritarians sipping espresso in the Scruton café.
Javier E

Book Review: 'Life Is Hard,' by Kieran Setiya - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “Life Is Hard” pushes back against many platitudes of contemporary American self-improvement culture. Setiya is no friend to positive thinking — at best, it requires self-deception, and at worst, such glass-half-full optimism can be cruel to those whose pain we refuse to recognize.
  • Another theory Setiya challenges is the idea that happiness should be life’s primary pursuit. Instead, he argues that we should try to live well within our limits, even if this sometimes means acknowledging difficult truths.
  • If you really consider “happiness” in its everyday sense — a feeling of contentment and pleasure — its desirability is complicated; we can certainly be made to feel good by ignoring injustice, wars, climate change or the hardships of aging. But we cannot live meaningfully that way.
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  • what does living well mean in practice? To Setiya, it lies in embracing one of the many possible “good-enough lives” instead of aching for a perfect one
  • Setiya’s approach blends empathy with common sense. True, a person who is blind or lacks full movement may not be able to enjoy certain pleasures — at least, in the typical way. And suffering injury can be traumatic. But none of us can fit everything worth doing into one lifetime. Our possibilities and our choices are always limited, and we can live fully within those limits.
  • he invites the reader to join him as he looks at life’s challenges — loneliness, injustice, grief — and in turning them over to examine every angle. Sometimes these twists make it difficult to grasp his ultimate point; in his discussion of the potential extinction of human beings, for instance, Setiya argues movingly that it is hard to find meaning in our actions without the promise of future societies who will enjoy the result
  • The golden thread running through “Life Is Hard” is Setiya’s belief in the value of well-directed attention. Pain, as much as we wish to avoid it, forces us to remember that we are indelibly connected to our bodies.
  • Listening carefully, whether to good friends or to strangers on a bus, can help us feel less lonely. “Close reading” other people, trying as hard as possible to see them in their full humanity, is a small step toward a more just world. By cultivating our sensitivity to ourselves and to others, we escape another destructive modern myth: that we are separate from other people, and that we can live well without caring for them.
  • Mindfulness is also Setiya’s answer to the threat of personal failure. If we can teach ourselves to notice all the splendid, varied incidents of our lives, he claims, we are much less likely to brand ourselves with a single label, winner or loser.
  • He encourages readers to abandon simple narratives about success over the course of a lifetime. I suspect this is why Setiya so often finds his conclusions in poetry, not in philosophy: The experience of suffering leads to messy, counterintuitive truths.
  • “Life Is Hard” is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway.
Javier E

Opinion | Here's Hoping Elon Musk Destroys Twitter - The New York Times - 0 views

  • I’ve sometimes described being on Twitter as like staying too late at a bad party full of people who hate you. I now think this was too generous to Twitter. I mean, even the worst parties end.
  • Twitter is more like an existentialist parable of a party, with disembodied souls trying and failing to be properly seen, forever. It’s not surprising that the platform’s most prolific users often refer to it as “this hellsite.”
  • Among other things, he’s promised to reinstate Donald Trump, whose account was suspended after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Other far-right figures may not be far behind, along with Russian propagandists, Covid deniers and the like. Given Twitter’s outsize influence on media and politics, this will probably make American public life even more fractious and deranged.
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  • The best thing it could do for society would be to implode.
  • Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” Most of the time, it’s repetitive and uninteresting, but occasionally, at random intervals, some compelling nugget will appear. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.
  • “I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.
  • Twitter is not, obviously, the only social media platform with addictive qualities. But with its constant promise of breaking news, it feeds the hunger of people who work in journalism and politics, giving it a disproportionate, and largely negative, impact on those fields, and hence on our national life.
  • Twitter is much better at stoking tribalism than promoting progress.
  • According to a 2021 study, content expressing “out-group animosity” — negative feelings toward disfavored groups — is a major driver of social-media engagement
  • That builds on earlier research showing that on Twitter, false information, especially about politics, spreads “significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth.”
  • The company’s internal research has shown that Twitter’s algorithm amplifies right-wing accounts and news sources over left-wing ones.
  • This dynamic will probably intensify quite a bit if Musk takes over. Musk has said that Twitter has “a strong left bias,” and that he wants to undo permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly call for violence. That suggests figures like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene will be welcomed back.
  • But as one of the people who texted Musk pointed out, returning banned right-wingers to Twitter will be a “delicate game.” After all, the reason Twitter introduced stricter moderation in the first place was that its toxicity was bad for business
  • For A-list entertainers, The Washington Post reports, Twitter “is viewed as a high-risk, low-reward platform.” Plenty of non-celebrities feel the same way; I can’t count the number of interesting people who were once active on the site but aren’t anymore.
  • An influx of Trumpists is not going to improve the vibe. Twitter can’t be saved. Maybe, if we’re lucky, it can be destroyed.
Javier E

Scientists Can No Longer Ignore Ancient Flooding Tales - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • It wasn’t long after Henry David Inglis arrived on the island of Jersey, just northwest of France, that he heard the old story. Locals eagerly told the 19th-century Scottish travel writer how, in a bygone age, their island had been much more substantial, and that folks used to walk to the French coast. The only hurdle to their journey was a river—one easily crossed using a short bridge.
  • there had been a flood. A big one. Between roughly 15,000 and 6,000 years ago, massive flooding caused by melting glaciers raised sea levels around Europe. That flooding is what eventually turned Jersey into an island.
  • Rather than being a ridiculous claim not worthy of examination, perhaps the old story was true—a whisper from ancestors who really did walk through now-vanished lands
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  • That’s exactly what the geographer Patrick Nunn and the historian Margaret Cook at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia have proposed in a recent paper.
  • In their work, the pair describe colorful legends from northern Europe and Australia that depict rising waters, peninsulas becoming islands, and receding coastlines during that period of deglaciation thousands of years ago. Some of these stories, the researchers say, capture historical sea-level rise that actually happened—often several thousand years ago. For scholars of oral history, that makes them geomyths.
  • “The first time I read an Aboriginal story from Australia that seemed to recall the rise of sea levels after the last ice age, I thought, No, I don’t think this is correct,” Nunn says. “But then I read another story that recalled the same thing.
  • For Jo Brendryen, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Bergen in Norway who has studied the effects of deglaciation in Europe following the end of the last ice age, the idea that traditional oral histories preserve real accounts of sea-level rise is perfectly plausible.
  • During the last ice age, he says, the sudden melting of ice sheets induced catastrophic events known as meltwater pulses, which caused sudden and extreme sea-level rise. Along some coastlines in Europe, the ocean may have risen as much as 10 meters in just 200 years. At such a pace, it would have been noticeable to people across just a few human generations.
  • “These are stories based in trauma, based in catastrophe.”
  • That, he suggests, is why it may have made sense for successive generations to pass on tales of geological upheaval. Ancient societies may have sought to broadcast their warning: Beware, these things can happen!
  • the old stories still have things to teach us. As Nunn says, “The fact that our ancestors have survived those periods gives us hope that we can survive this.”
Javier E

J. D. Vance and the Collapse of Dignity - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Americans once expected politicians to carry themselves with a seriousness that indicated their ability and willingness to tackle problems, whether poverty or war, that were too difficult for the rest of us. We elected such people not because we wanted them to be like us but because we hoped that they were better than us: smarter, tougher, and capable of being leaders and role models.
  • ven some of the most flawed people we elevated to high office at least pretended to be better people, and thus were capable of inspiring us to be a better nation.
  • Today, we no longer expect or even want our politicians to be better than we are.
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  • The new American right, however, has blown past the relatively innocuous populism of the past 40 years and added a fetid cynicism about almost everything related to public life.
  • Not only are the MAGA Republicans seemingly repelled by the idea of voting for someone better than they are; they support candidates who are often manifestly worse people than the average citizen, so that they may slather their fears about their own shortcomings and prejudices under a sludgy and undifferentiated hatred about almost everyone in public office.
  • These populists not only look past the sins of their candidates but also defend and even celebrate them
  • The same Republicans who claim to venerate the Founders and the Constitution have intentionally turned our politics into a scuzzy burlesque.
  • consider how many people cheer on unhinged cranks such as Marjorie Taylor Greene or allow themselves to be courted by smarmy opportunists such as Vance and Ted Cruz.
  • This new populism, centered in the modern Republican Party, has no recognizable policy content beyond the thrill of cruelty and a juvenile boorishness meant largely to enrage others.
  • The GOP’s goals now boil down to power for its elected royalty and cheap coliseum pleasures for its rank and file.
  • Republicans, therefore, are forced to lower their—and our—standards for admission to public office, because the destruction of dignity is the only way they can find the candidates who will do what decent men and women will not, including abasing themselves to Donald Trump.
  • Let us leave aside the cult around Trump, which has now reached such levels of weirdness that the specter of Jim Jones is probably pacing about the netherworld in awe.
  • I’m an adult. I get it. Our elected officials aren’t saints, and only rarely are they heroes. But must they now be a cavalcade of clowns and charlatans, joyously parading their embrace of vice and their rejection of virtue? The Republican Party seems to think so.
Javier E

A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Use this hiatus to do something you would never have done if this emergency hadn’t hit. When the lockdown lifts, move to another state or country. Take some job that never would have made sense if you were worrying about building a career—bartender, handyman, AmeriCorps volunteer.
  • If you use the next two years as a random hiatus, you may not wind up richer, but you’ll wind up more interesting.
  • The biggest way most colleges fail is this: They don’t plant the intellectual and moral seeds students are going to need later, when they get hit by the vicissitudes of life.
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  • If you didn’t study Jane Austen while you were here, you probably lack the capacity to think clearly about making a marriage decision. If you didn’t read George Eliot, then you missed a master class on how to judge people’s character. If you didn’t read Nietzsche, you are probably unprepared to handle the complexities of atheism—and if you didn’t read Augustine and Kierkegaard, you’re probably unprepared to handle the complexities of faith.
  • The list goes on. If you didn’t read de Tocqueville, you probably don’t understand your own country. If you didn’t study Gibbon, you probably lack the vocabulary to describe the rise and fall of cultures and nations.
  • The wisdom of the ages is your inheritance; it can make your life easier. These resources often fail to get shared because universities are too careerist, or because faculty members are more interested in their academic specialties or politics than in teaching undergraduates, or because of a host of other reasons
  • What are you putting into your mind? Our culture spends a lot less time worrying about this, and when it does, it goes about it all wrong.
  • my worry is that, especially now that you’re out of college, you won’t put enough really excellent stuff into your brain.
  • I worry that it’s possible to grow up now not even aware that those upper registers of human feeling and thought exist.
  • The theory of maximum taste says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit—the best that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming.
  • After college, most of us resolve to keep doing this kind of thing, but we’re busy and our brains are tired at the end of the day. Months and years go by. We get caught up in stuff, settle for consuming Twitter and, frankly, journalism. Our maximum taste shrinks.
  • I’m worried about the future of your maximum taste. People in my and earlier generations, at least those lucky enough to get a college education, got some exposure to the classics, which lit a fire that gets rekindled every time we sit down to read something really excellent.
  • the “theory of maximum taste.” This theory is based on the idea that exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness. If you spend a lot of time with genius, your mind will end up bigger and broader than if you spend your time only with run-of-the-mill stuff.
  • the whole culture is eroding the skill the UCLA scholar Maryanne Wolf calls “deep literacy,” the ability to deeply engage in a dialectical way with a text or piece of philosophy, literature, or art.
  • “To the extent that you cannot perceive the world in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape.”
  • I can’t say that to you, because it sounds fussy and elitist and OK Boomer. And if you were in front of me, you’d roll your eyes.
  •  
    Or as the neurologist Richard Cytowic put it to Adam Garfinkle, "To the extent that you cannot perceive the world in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape."*
Javier E

Influencers Don't Have to Be Human to Be Believable - WSJ - 0 views

  • Why would consumers look even somewhat favorably upon virtual influencers that make comments about real products?
  • . Virtual and human social-media influencers can be equally effective for certain types of posts, the research suggests.
  • The thinking is that virtual influencers can be fun and entertaining and make a brand seem innovative and tech savvy,
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  •  virtual influencers can also be cost-effective and provide more flexibility than a human alternative. 
  • “When it comes to an endorsement by a virtual influencer, the followers start questioning the expertness of the influencer on the field of the endorsed product/service,” he says. “Pretending that the influencer has actual experience with the product backfires.”
  • In one part of the study, about 300 participants were shown a social-media post purported to be from an influencer about either ice cream or sunglasses. Then, roughly half were told the influencer was human and half were told she was virtual. Regardless of the product, participants perceived the virtual influencer to be less credible than its “human” counterpart. Participants who were told the influencer was virtual also had a less-positive attitude toward the brand behind the product.
  • When the influencers “can’t really use the brand they are promoting,” it’s hard to see them as trustworthy experts, say Ozdemir.
  • Two groups saw a post with an emotional endorsement where the influencer uses words like love and adore. The other two groups saw a more staid post, focusing on specific software features. In each scenario one group was told the influencer was human and one group was told the influencer was virtual.
  • For the emotional endorsement, participants found the human influencer to be more credible. Participants who were told the influencer was human also had a more positive view of the brand than those who were told the influencer was virtual.
  • For the more factual endorsement, however, there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups when it came to influencer credibility or brand perception.
  • “When it comes to delivering a more factual endorsement, highlighting features that could be found by doing an internet search, participants really didn’t seem to care if the influencer was human or not,”
Javier E

Opinion | Cloning Scientist Hwang Woo-suk Gets a Second Chance. Should He? - The New Yo... - 0 views

  • The Hwang Woo-suk saga is illustrative of the serious deficiencies in the self-regulation of science. His fraud was uncovered because of brave Korean television reporters. Even those efforts might not have been enough, had Dr. Hwang’s team not been so sloppy in its fraud. The team’s papers included fabricated data and pairs of images that on close comparison clearly indicated duplicity.
  • Yet as a cautionary tale about the price of fraud, it is, unfortunately, a mixed bag. He lost his academic standing, and he was convicted of bioethical violations and embezzlement, but he never ended up serving jail time
  • Although his efforts at cloning human embryos, ended in failure and fraud, they provided him the opportunities and resources he needed to take on projects, such as dog cloning, that were beyond the reach of other labs. The fame he earned in academia proved an asset in a business world where there’s no such thing as bad press.
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  • it is comforting to think that scientific truth inevitably emerges and scientific frauds will be caught and punished.
  • Dr. Hwang’s scandal suggests something different. Researchers don’t always have the resources or motivation to replicate others’ experiments
  • Even if they try to replicate and fail, it is the institution where the scientist works that has the right and responsibility to investigate possible fraud. Research institutes and universities, facing the prospect of an embarrassing scandal, might not do so.
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