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Javier E

Why Baseball Is Obsessed With the Book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...inking-fast-and-slow-book.html

baseball cognitive bias cognitive psychology knowledge

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • In Teaford’s case, the scouting evaluation was predisposed to a mental shortcut called the representativeness heuristic, which was first defined by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In such cases, an assessment is heavily influenced by what is believed to be the standard or the ideal.
  • Kahneman, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, later wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” a book that has become essential among many of baseball’s front offices and coaching staffs.
  • “Pretty much wherever I go, I’m bothering people, ‘Have you read this?’” said Mejdal, now an assistant general manager with the Baltimore Orioles.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • There aren’t many explicit references to baseball in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” yet many executives swear by it
  • “From coaches to front office people, some get back to me and say this has changed their life. They never look at decisions the same way.
  • A few, though, swear by it. Andrew Friedman, the president of baseball operations for the Dodgers, recently cited the book as having “a real profound impact,” and said he reflects back on it when evaluating organizational processes. Keith Law, a former executive for the Toronto Blue Jays, wrote the book “Inside Game” — an examination of bias and decision-making in baseball — that was inspired by “Thinking, Fast and Slow.”
  • “As the decision tree in baseball has changed over time, this helps all of us better understand why it needed to change,” Mozeliak wrote in an email. He said that was especially true when “working in a business that many decisions are based on what we see, what we remember, and what is intuitive to our thinking.”
  • The central thesis of Kahneman’s book is the interplay between each mind’s System 1 and System 2, which he described as a “psychodrama with two characters.”
  • System 1 is a person’s instinctual response — one that can be enhanced by expertise but is automatic and rapid. It seeks coherence and will apply relevant memories to explain events.
  • System 2, meanwhile, is invoked for more complex, thoughtful reasoning — it is characterized by slower, more rational analysis but is prone to laziness and fatigue.
  • Kahneman wrote that when System 2 is overloaded, System 1 could make an impulse decision, often at the expense of self-control
  • No area of baseball is more susceptible to bias than scouting, in which organizations aggregate information from disparate sources:
  • “The independent opinion aspect is critical to avoid the groupthink and be aware of momentum,”
  • Matt Blood, the director of player development for the Orioles, first read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” as a Cardinals area scout nine years ago and said that he still consults it regularly. He collaborated with a Cardinals analyst to develop his own scouting algorithm as a tripwire to mitigate bias
  • Mejdal himself fell victim to the trap of the representativeness heuristic when he started with the Cardinals in 2005
Javier E

How Zeynep Tufekci Keeps Getting the Big Things Right - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ting-the-big-things-right.html

role model intellectual independent critical thinking psychology bias

shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans in January that they didn’t need to wear masks, Dr. S. Vincent Rajkumar, a professor at the Mayo Clinic and the editor of the Blood Cancer Journal, couldn’t believe his ears.
  • “Here I am, the editor of a journal in a high profile institution, yet I didn’t have the guts to speak out that it just doesn’t make sense,” Dr. Rajkumar told me. “Everybody should be wearing masks.”
  • Ms. Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science with no obvious qualifications in epidemiology, came out against the C.D.C. recommendation in a March 1 tweetstorm before expanding on her criticism in a March 17 Op-Ed article for The New York Times.
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  • The C.D.C. changed its tune in April, advising all Americans above the age of 2 to wear masks to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Michael Basso, a senior health scientist at the agency who had been pushing internally to recommend masks, told me Ms. Tufekci’s public criticism of the agency was the “tipping point.”
  • Ms. Tufekci, a 40-something who speaks a mile a minute with a light Turkish accent, has none of the trappings of the celebrity academic or the professional pundit. But long before she became perhaps the only good amateur epidemiologist, she had quietly made a habit of being right on the big things.
  • In 2011, she went against the current to say the case for Twitter as a driver of broad social movements had been oversimplified. In 2012, she warned news media outlets that their coverage of school shootings could inspire more. In 2013, she argued that Facebook could fuel ethnic cleansing. In 2017, she warned that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm could be used as a tool of radicalization.
  • And when it came to the pandemic, she sounded the alarm early while also fighting to keep parks and beaches open.
  • “I’ve just been struck by how right she has been,” said Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School.
  • She told me she chalks up her habits of mind in part to a childhood she wouldn’t wish on anyone.
  • Mr. Goff was enthusing about the campaign’s ability to send different messages to individual voters based on the digital data it had gathered about them. Ms. Tufekci quickly objected to the practice, saying that microtargeting would more likely be used to sow division.
  • An international point of view she picked up while bouncing as a child between Turkey and Belgium and then working in the United States.
  • Knowledge that spans subject areas and academic disciplines, which she happened onto as a computer programmer who got into sociology.
  • A habit of complex, systems-based thinking, which led her to a tough critique in The Atlantic of America’s news media in the run-up to the pandemic
  • it began, she says, with growing up in an unhappy home in Istanbul. She said her alcoholic mother was liable to toss her into the street in the early hours of the morning. She found some solace in science fiction — Ursula K. Le Guin was a favorite — and in the optimistic, early internet.
  • Perhaps because of a kind of egalitarian nerd ideology that has served her well, she never sought to meet the rebels’ charismatic leader, known as Subcomandante Marcos.
  • “I have a thing that fame and charisma screws with your head,” she said. “I’ve made an enormous effort throughout my life to preserve my thinking.”
  • While many American thinkers were wide-eyed about the revolutionary potential of social media, she developed a more complex view, one she expressed when she found herself sitting to the left of Teddy Goff, the digital director for President Obama’s re-election campaign, at a South by Southwest panel in Austin in 2012
  • “A bunch of things came together, which I’m happy I survived,” she said, sitting outside a brick house she rents for $2,300 a month in Chapel Hill, N.C., where she is raising her 11-year-old son as a single parent. “But the way they came together was not super happy, when it was happening.”
  • “At a time when everybody was being stupidly optimistic about the potential of the internet, she didn’t buy the hype,” he told me. “She was very prescient in seeing that there would be a deeper rot to the role of data-driven politics in our world.”
  • Many tech journalists, entranced by the internet-fueled movements sweeping the globe, were slow to spot the ways they might fail, or how social media could be used against them. Ms. Tufekci, though, had “seen movement after movement falter because of a lack of organizational depth and experience, of tools or culture for collective decision making, and strategic, long-term action,” she wrote in her 2017 book, “Twitter and Tear Gas.”
  • One of the things that makes Ms. Tufekci stand out in this gloomy moment is her lack of irony or world-weariness. She is not a prophet of doom, having hung on to an early-internet optimism
  • Ms. Tufekci has taught epidemiology as a way to introduce her students to globalization and to make a point about human nature: Politicians and the news media often expect looting and crime when disaster strikes, as they did when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. But the reality on the ground has more to do with communal acts of generosity and kindness, she believes.
  • Her March column on masks was among the most influential The Times has published, although — or perhaps because —  it lacked the political edge that brings wide attention to an opinion piece.
  • “The real question is not whether Zuck is doing what I like or not,” she said. “The real question is why he’s getting to decide what hate speech is.”
  • She also suggested that we may get it wrong when we focus on individuals — on chief executives, on social media activists like her. The probable answer to a media environment that amplifies false reports and hate speech, she believes, is the return of functional governments, along with the birth of a new framework, however imperfect, that will hold the digital platforms responsible for what they host.
Javier E

New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have intensified coronavirus - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ity-coronavirus-misinformation

conservative media disinformation fake news research

shared by Javier E on 28 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • In recent weeks, three studies have focused on conservative media’s role in fostering confusion about the seriousness of the coronavirus. Taken together, they paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others.
  • The end result, according to one of the studies, is that infection and mortality rates are higher in places where one pundit who initially downplayed the severity of the pandemic — Fox News’ Sean Hannity — reaches the largest audiences.
  • “We are receiving an incredible number of studies and solid data showing that consuming far-right media and social media content was strongly associated with low concern about the virus at the onset of the pandemic,”
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  • Administering a nationally representative phone survey with 1,008 respondents, they found that people who got most of their information from mainstream print and broadcast outlets tended to have an accurate assessment of the severity of the pandemic and their risks of infection.
  • But those who relied on conservative sources, such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories or unfounded rumors, such as the belief that taking vitamin C could prevent infection, that the Chinese government had created the virus, and that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was exaggerating the pandemic’s threat “to damage the Trump presidency.”
  • “The effect that we measure could be driven by the long-term message of Fox News, which is that the mainstream media often report ‘fake news’ and have a political agenda,” Simonov said. “This could result in lowering trust in institutions and experts, including health experts in the case of the pandemic.”
  • Our results indicate that a one standard deviation increase in relative viewership of Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight is associated with approximately 32 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14 and approximately 23 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28,
  • “If the results hold, the research demonstrates the influence that broadcast media can have on behavior,”
Javier E

Opinion | What Moral Philosophy Tells Us About Our Reactions to Trump's Illness - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-shadenfreude-ethics.html

moral philosophy trump

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • While I agree that the gloating over Mr. Trump’s illness is morally concerning, I also find it fair to ask whether certain less celebratory but still positive reactions to his disease are entirely blameworthy and without moral merit.
  • Ambivalent reactions to President Trump’s medical condition become more understandable when we appreciate that valid moral principles are often in tension with one another and can pull us in different directions
  • Condemning the pleasure that his misfortune has produced is certainly correct from one moral perspective, but there are also valid moral reasons to regard his illness as a potentially positive thing.
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  • Judging the moral meaning of Mr. Trump’s bout with Covid-19 — and our reactions to it — is no easy task.
  • while it is true that life is sacred, and we must honor the dignity of all persons, including Mr. Trump, society also has a legitimate moral interest in seeing wrongdoers face consequences for their actions.
  • The sense that justice requires punishment for wrongs runs deep and is not the same as a mere thirst for revenge or a desire to get even.
  • On the contrary, punishment plays an important role in any healthy moral ecosystem. When the moral order has been ruptured, punishment for wrongs helps to repair tears to the social fabric and to reinforce the validity of the moral expectations that were violated.
  • The moral complexity becomes greater still when we consider that from a purely consequentialist point of view, there are reasons to view Mr. Trump’s potential incapacity as the best moral outcome.
  • Imagining Mr. Trump’s illness as a metaphorical punishment for his misdeeds helps to satisfy at the level of fantasy a legitimate need to see justice done
  • consequentialism is the philosophical position that affirms that what is morally right is whatever makes the world best in the future
  • a consequentialist argument can be made that his speedy recovery from Covid-19 would not be the best moral outcome.
  • The consequentialist argument, while repugnant from the perspective of human dignity, tells us that a world in which Mr. Trump is unable to commit harm would be morally better than a world in which he continues to harm freely.
  • This philosophical approach to weighing moral outcomes conflicts with the principle of individual human dignity and offers no easy guideline for reconciling these powerful yet opposing ways of thinking about what is best.
  • the punishment that Mr. Trump’s bout of Covid-19 represents is merely symbolic, a stand-in for the real punishment he deserves, which is necessarily social in character. Mr. Trump deserves to be punished at the ballot box and to be held accountable for any possible criminal wrongdoing in a court of law.
Javier E

Data on inbred nobles support a leader-driven theory of history | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...eader-driven-theory-of-history

history leadership genetics research

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • a recent working paper by Nico Voigtländer and Sebastian Ottinger of the University of California at Los Angeles argues that leaders’ impact can indeed be isolated—thanks to the genomes of kings like Charles.
  • In theory, each round of inbreeding should have made monarchs slightly stupider—and thus worse at their jobs. This yields a natural experiment. Assuming that countries’ propensity for incest did not vary based on their political fortunes, the periods in which they had highly inbred (and probably dim-witted) leaders occurred at random intervals.
  • The authors analysed 331 European monarchs between 990 and 1800. They first calculated how inbred each ruler was, and then assessed countries’ success during their reigns using two measures: historians’ subjective scores, and the change in land area controlled by each monarch. The authors only compared each ruler against their own country’s historical averages.
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  • The change in their land areas tended to be about 24 percentage points greater under their least inbred rulers than under their most inbred ones.
  • Sure enough, Spain’s tailspin under Charles was predictable. Countries tended to endure their darkest periods under their most inbred monarchs, and enjoy golden ages during the reigns of their most genetically diverse leaders.
  • the study’s finding—rulers who preside over setbacks tend to be relatively unintelligent—has timeless implications.
  • Javier E on 01 Jan 22
     
    The authors analysed 331 European monarchs between 990 and 1800. They first calculated how inbred each ruler was, and then assessed countries' success during their reigns using two measures: historians' subjective scores, and the change in land area controlled by each monarch. The authors only compared each ruler against their own country's historical averages.
Javier E

Pandemic-Era Politics Are Ruining Public Education - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...622824

learning teaching trends school history ideology books reading research social social media technology psychology

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head.
  • Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are
  • Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.
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  • It isn’t clear how the American public-school system will survive the COVID years. Teachers, whose relative pay and status have been in decline for decades, are fleeing the field. In 2021, buckling under the stresses of the pandemic, nearly 1 million people quit jobs in public education, a 40 percent increase over the previous year.
  • These kids, and the investments that come with them, may never return—the beginning of a cycle of attrition that could continue long after the pandemic ends and leave public schools even more underfunded and dilapidated than before. “It’s an open question whether the public-school system will recover,” Steiner said. “That is a real concern for democratic education.”
  • The high-profile failings of public schools during the pandemic have become a political problem for Democrats, because of their association with unions, prolonged closures, and the pedagogy of social justice, which can become a form of indoctrination.
  • The party that stands for strong government services in the name of egalitarian principles supported the closing of schools far longer than either the science or the welfare of children justified, and it has been woefully slow to acknowledge how much this damaged the life chances of some of America’s most disadvantaged students.
  • Public education is too important to be left to politicians and ideologues. Public schools still serve about 90 percent of children across red and blue America.
  • Since the common-school movement in the early 19th century, the public school has had an exalted purpose in this country. It’s our core civic institution—not just because, ideally, it brings children of all backgrounds together in a classroom, but because it prepares them for the demands and privileges of democratic citizenship. Or at least, it needs to.
  • What is school for? This is the kind of foundational question that arises when a crisis shakes the public’s faith in an essential institution. “The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens,”
  • “Horace Mann went to his grave having never once uttered the phrase college- and career-ready. We’ve become more accustomed to thinking about the private ends of education. We’ve completely lost the habit of thinking about education as citizen-making.”
  • School can’t just be an economic sorting system. One reason we have a stake in the education of other people’s children is that they will grow up to be citizens.
  • Public education is meant not to mirror the unexamined values of a particular family or community, but to expose children to ways that other people, some of them long dead, think.
  • If the answer were simply to push more and more kids into college, the United States would be entering its democratic prime
  • So the question isn’t just how much education, but what kind. Is it quaint, or utopian, to talk about teaching our children to be capable of governing themselves?
  • The COVID era, with Donald Trump out of office but still in power and with battles over mask mandates and critical race theory convulsing Twitter and school-board meetings, shows how badly Americans are able to think about our collective problems—let alone read, listen, empathize, debate, reconsider, and persuade in the search for solutions.
  • democratic citizenship can, at least in part, be learned.
  • he orthodoxies currently fighting for our children’s souls turn the teaching of U.S. history into a static and morally simple quest for some American essence. They proceed from celebration or indictment toward a final judgment—innocent or guilty—and bury either oppression or progress in a subordinate clause. The most depressing thing about this gloomy pedagogy of ideologies in service to fragile psyches is how much knowledge it takes away from students who already have so little
  • The history warriors build their metaphysics of national good or evil on a foundation of ignorance. In a 2019 survey, only 40 percent of Americans were able to pass the test that all applicants for U.S. citizenship must take, which asks questions like “Who did the United States fight in World War II?” and “We elect a President for how many years?” The only state in which a majority passed was Vermont.
  • A central goal for history, social-studies, and civics instruction should be to give students something more solid than spoon-fed maxims—to help them engage with the past on its own terms, not use it as a weapon in the latest front of the culture wars.
  • W. E. B. Du Bois wrote: “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
  • The truth requires a grounding in historical facts, but facts are quickly forgotten without meaning and context
  • The goal isn’t just to teach students the origins of the Civil War, but to give them the ability to read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up their claims with evidence from original documents.
  • This kind of instruction, which requires teachers to distinguish between exposure and indoctrination, isn’t easy; it asks them to be more sophisticated professionals than their shabby conditions and pay (median salary: $62,000, less than accountants and transit police) suggest we are willing to support.
  • To do that, we’ll need to help kids restore at least part of their crushed attention spans.
  • staring at a screen for hours is a heavy depressant, especially for teenagers.
  • we’ll look back on the amount of time we let our children spend online with the same horror that we now feel about earlier generations of adults who hooked their kids on smoking.
  • “It’s not a choice between tech or no tech,” Bill Tally, a researcher with the Education Development Center, told me. “The question is what tech infrastructure best enables the things we care about,” such as deep engagement with instructional materials, teachers, and other students.
  • The pandemic should have forced us to reassess what really matters in public school; instead, it’s a crisis that we’ve just about wasted.
  • Like learning to read as historians, learning to sift through the tidal flood of memes for useful, reliable information can emancipate children who have been heedlessly hooked on screens by the adults in their lives
  • Finally, let’s give children a chance to read books—good books. It’s a strange feature of all the recent pedagogical innovations that they’ve resulted in the gradual disappearance of literature from many classrooms.
  • The best way to interest young people in literature is to have them read good literature, and not just books that focus with grim piety on the contemporary social and psychological problems of teenagers.
  • We sell them insultingly short in thinking that they won’t read unless the subject is themselves. Mirrors are ultimately isolating; young readers also need windows, even if the view is unfamiliar, even if it’s disturbing
  • connection through language to universal human experience and thought is the reward of great literature, a source of empathy and wisdom.
  • The culture wars, with their atmosphere of resentment, fear, and petty faultfinding, are hostile to the writing and reading of literature.
  • Releasing them to do “research” in the vast ocean of the internet without maps and compasses, as often happens, guarantees that they will drown before they arrive anywhere.
  • The classroom has become a half-abandoned battlefield, where grown-ups who claim to be protecting students from the virus, from books, from ideologies and counter-ideologies end up using children to protect themselves and their own entrenched camps.
  • American democracy can’t afford another generation of adults who don’t know how to talk and listen and think. We owe our COVID-scarred children the means to free themselves from the failures of the past and the present.
  • Students are leaving as well. Since 2020, nearly 1.5 million children have been removed from public schools to attend private or charter schools or be homeschooled.
  • “COVID has encouraged poor parents to question the quality of public education. We are seeing diminished numbers of children in our public schools, particularly our urban public schools.” In New York, more than 80,000 children have disappeared from city schools; in Los Angeles, more than 26,000; in Chicago, more than 24,000.
Javier E

Opinion | Barack Obama's smart way to change the disinformation debate - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...y-change-disinformation-debate

obama analysis misinformation tech solutions social media

shared by Javier E on 02 May 22 - No Cached
  • The former president spoke at Stanford University on April 21 to lay out his vision for fighting disinformation on the Internet. His focus on the subject is fitting; the dusk of his administration marked a turning point from techno-optimism to pessimism after election interference revealed how easily malicious actors could exploit the free flow of information.
  • His diagnosis is on target. The Internet has given us access to more people, more opportunities and more knowledge
  • This has helped activists drum up attention for overlooked causes. It has also enabled the nation’s adversaries to play on our preexisting prejudices and divisions to sow discord
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  • Mr. Obama starts where most lawmakers are stuck: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives platforms immunity from legal liability for most third-party posts. He suggested a “higher standard of care” for ads than for so-called organic content that everyday users post. This would strike a sensible balance between eviscerating Section 230, making sites accountable for everything they host, and doing nothing.
  • On top of that, “an instant, 24/7 global information stream,” from which audiences can pick and choose material that confirms their biases, has deepened the social divides that bad actors seek to exploit.
  • Mr. Obama identified another problem with the Section 230 talk: homing in on what material platforms do and don’t take down risks missing how the “very design” of these sites privileges polarizing, inflammatory posts.
  • With this, Mr. Obama adds something vital to the mainstream debate over social media regulation, shifting attention away from a debate about whack-a-mole content removal and toward the sites’ underlying structures. His specific suggestions, while fuzzy, also have promise — from slowing down viral material to imposing transparency obligations that would subject social media companies’ algorithms to scrutiny from researchers and regulators.
  • Mr. Obama calls this “democratic oversight.” But the material companies reveal could be highly technical. Ideally, it would get translated into layman’s terms so that everyday people, too, can understand how decisions so significant in their daily lives and the life of the country are made.
Javier E

'The Fourth Turning' Enters Pop Culture - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ourth-turning-pop-culture.html

turning point history crisis culture book trend framework historiography cycles

shared by Javier E on 08 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • According to “fourth turning” proponents, American history goes through recurring cycles. Each one, which lasts about 80 to 100 years, consists of four generation-long seasons, or “turnings.” The winter season is a time of upheaval and reconstruction — a fourth turning.
  • The theory first appeared in “The Fourth Turning,” a work of pop political science that has had a cult following more or less since it was published in 1997. In the last few years of political turmoil, the book and its ideas have bubbled into the mainstream.
  • According to “The Fourth Turning,” previous crisis periods include the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II. America entered its latest fourth turning in the mid-2000s. It will culminate in a crisis sometime in the 2020s — i.e., now.
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  • One of the book’s authors, Neil Howe, 71, has become a frequent podcast guest. A follow-up, “The Fourth Turning Is Here,” comes out this month.
  • The play’s author, Will Arbery, 33, said he heard about “The Fourth Turning” while researching Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing firebrand and former adviser to President Donald J. Trump, who is a longtime fan of the book and directed a 2010 documentary based on its ideas.
  • He described it as “this almost fun theory about history,” but added: “And yet there’s something deeply menacing about it.”
  • Mr. Arbery, who said he does not subscribe to the theory, sees parallels between the fourth turning and other nonscientific beliefs. “I modeled the way that Teresa talks about the fourth turning on the way that young liberals talk about astrology,” he said.
  • The book’s outlook on the near future has made it appealing to macro traders and crypto enthusiasts, and it is frequently cited on the podcasts “Macro Voices,” “Wealthion” and “On the Margin.”
  • In the new book, he describes what a coming civil war or geopolitical conflict might look like — though he shies away from casting himself as a modern-day Nostradamus.
  • “The Fourth Turning” captured a mood of decline in recent American life. “I remember feeling safe in the ’90s, and then as soon as 9/11 hit, the world went topsy-turvy,” he said. “Every time my cohort got to the point where we were optimistic, another crisis happened. When I read the book, I was like, ‘That makes sense.’”
  • “The Fourth Turning” was conceived during a period of relative calm. In the late 1980s, Mr. Howe, a Washington, D.C., policy analyst, teamed with William Strauss, a founder of the political satire troupe the Capitol Steps.
  • Their first book, “Generations,” told a story of American history through generational profiles going back to the 1600s. The book was said to have influenced Bill Clinton to choose a fellow baby boomer, Al Gore, as his running mate
  • when the 2008 financial crisis hit at almost exactly the point when the start of the fourth turning was predicted, it seemed to many that the authors might have been onto something. Recent events — the pandemic, the storming of the Capitol — have seemingly provided more evidence for the book’s fans.
  • Historically, a fourth turning crisis has always translated into a civil war, a war of great nations, or both, according to the book. Either is possible over the next decade, Mr. Howe said. But he is a doomsayer with an optimistic streak: Each fourth turning, in his telling, kicks off a renaissance in civic life.
  • “I’ve read ‘The Fourth Turning,’ and indeed found it useful from a macroeconomic investing perspective,” Lyn Alden, 35, an investment analyst, wrote in an email. “History doesn’t repeat, but it kind of gives us a loose framework to work with.”
  • “This big tidal shift is arriving,” Mr. Howe said. “But if you’re asking me which wave is going to knock down the lighthouse, I can’t do that. I can just tell you that this is the time period. It gives you a good idea of what to watch for.”
Javier E

The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003 - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674797

media presentation critique effects technology

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • if all of those bad presentations really led to broad societal ills, the proof is hard to find.
  • Some scientists have tried to take a formal measure of the alleged PowerPoint Effect, asking whether the software really influences our ability to process information. Sebastian Kernbach, a professor of creativity and design at the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, has co-authored multiple reviews synthesizing this literature. On the whole, he told me, the research suggests that Tufte was partly right, partly wrong. PowerPoint doesn’t seem to make us stupid—there is no evidence of lower information retention or generalized cognitive decline, for example, among those who use it—but it does impose a set of assumptions about how information ought to be conveyed: loosely, in bullet points, and delivered by presenters to an audience of passive listeners. These assumptions have even reshaped the physical environment for the slide-deck age, Kernbach said: Seminar tables, once configured in a circle, have been bent, post-PowerPoint, into a U-shape to accommodate presenters.
  • When I spoke with Kernbach, he was preparing for a talk on different methods of visual thinking to a group of employees at a large governmental organization. He said he planned to use a flip chart, draw on blank slides like a white board, and perhaps even have audience members do some drawing of their own. But he was also gearing up to use regular old PowerPoint slides. Doing so, he told me, would “signal preparation and professionalism” for his audience. The organization was NASA.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The fact that the American space agency still uses PowerPoint should not be surprising. Despite the backlash it inspired in the press, and the bile that it raised in billionaires, and the red alert it caused within the military, the corporate-presentation juggernaut rolls on. The program has more monthly users than ever before, according to Shawn Villaron, Microsoft’s vice president of product for PowerPoint—well into the hundreds of millions. If anything, its use cases have proliferated. During lockdown, people threw PowerPoint parties on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint presentations for their parents when they want to get a puppy or quit soccer or attend a Niall Horan meet and greet. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil rules the world.
  • it’s tempting to entertain counterfactuals and wonder how things might have played out if Tufte and the rest of us had worried about social media back in 2003 instead of presentation software. Perhaps a timely pamphlet on The Cognitive Style of Friendster or a Wired headline asserting that “LinkedIn Is Evil” would have changed the course of history. If the social-media backlash of the past few years had been present from the start, maybe Facebook would never have grown into the behemoth it is now, and the country would never have become so hopelessly divided.
  • it could be that nothing whatsoever would have changed. No matter what their timing, and regardless of their aptness, concerns about new media rarely seem to make a difference. Objections get steamrolled. The new technology takes over. And years later, when we look back and think, How strange that we were so perturbed, the effects of that technology may well be invisible.
peterconnelly

Trump aide Peter Navarro indicted for contempt of Jan. 6 Capitol probe - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...-6-capitol-probe-subpoena.html

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Trump White House trade advisor Peter Navarro was arrested at an airport Friday on a federal indictment charging him with two counts of contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
  • The House of Representatives in April voted to ask the U.S. Justice Department to criminally prosecute Navarro and Dan Scavino, another former Trump aide, for failing to comply with their subpoenas.
  • During the proceeding, he railed against prosecutors for alleging colluding with a “partisan Congress” and the White House of Democratic President Joe Biden.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “Who are these people? This is not America,” Navarro said. “I was a distinguished public servant for four years.”
  • A Feb. 9 letter to Navarro from the House committee issued with the subpoena said the panel had reason to believe he had information relevant to the investigation in the riot and invasion of the Capitol, which disrupted for hours the certification by a joint session of Congress of the election of Biden.
  • Navarro called the circumstances of that arrest an example of “prosecutorial misconduct.”
  • Navarro argues in his suit that the committee was improperly created and that its subpoenas, as a result, are unenforceable.
  • Navarro is next due to appear in court on June 17.
peterconnelly

Donald Trump is pushing an insane conspiracy about the Georgia governor's race - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

CNN.com

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • (CNN)One week ago, Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp crushed former Sen. David Perdue by 52(!) points in a high-profile primary fight.
  • On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Perdue, suggested that something was fishy about that race.
  • So, because Trump's record of endorsements in 2022 is generally strong, the fact that he endorsed a bunch of candidates in Georgia who lost must mean that there were shenanigans happening.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "Something stinks in Georgia," concludes Robinson. "The numbers are funny because many of these races were rigged."
  • According to Robinson, those numbers are "funny" and "rigged." Which is a pretty big claim to make without any evidence other than a month-old poll and suggestions that Trump's endorsement had mattered in other states and, therefore, had to matter more in Georgia.
  • Georgia Republicans are, yes, generally supportive of Trump. But there remains some lingering resentment that Trump's relentless focus on the 2020 election may have cost the GOP two Senate seats in January 2021 runoffs -- and, with them, the Senate majority. Therefore, backing candidates solely because they are willing to endorse Trump's baseless election claims may be less appealing to Georgia Republican voters than voters in other states where Trump's endorsement has mattered more.
  • That seems slightly more plausible than Robinson's fact-free suggestion of hundreds of thousands of votes being somehow manipulated to hurt Trump, right?
peterconnelly

How an Organized Republican Effort Punishes Companies for Climate Action - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...blicans-blackrock-climate.html

companies climate action new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • In Texas, a new law bars the state’s retirement and investment funds from doing business with companies that the state comptroller says are boycotting fossil fuels.
  • Conservative lawmakers in 15 other states are promoting similar legislation.
  • Across the country, Republican lawmakers and their allies have launched a campaign to try to rein in what they see as activist companies trying to reduce the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • In doing so, Mr. Moore and others have pushed climate change from the scientific realm into the political battles already raging over topics like voting rights, abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. issues.
  • “There is a coordinated effort to chill corporate engagement on these issues,” said Daniella Ballou-Aares
  • They have worked alongside a nonprofit organization that has run television ads, dispatched roaming billboard trucks and rented out a Times Square billboard criticizing BlackRock for championing what they call woke causes, including environmentalism.
  • That activism has often put companies at odds with the Republican Party, traditionally the ally of big business.
  • as pressure has grown from consumers and liberal groups to take action, corporations have warmed to the notion of using capital and markets to create a cleaner economy
  • When President Trump declared in 2017 that he would pull the United States from the Paris climate accord, more than 2,000 businesses and investors — including Apple, Amazon and Mars — signed a pledge to continue to work toward climate goals.
  • “Every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a net-zero world,” Mr. Fink wrote. “The question is, will you lead, or will you be led?”
  • And in January, Mr. Moore pulled about $20 million out of a fund managed by BlackRock because the firm has encouraged other companies to reduce emissions. BlackRock still manages several billion for West Virginia’s state retirement system. “We’re divesting from BlackRock because they’re divesting from us,” Mr. Moore said in an interview.
  • “These big banks are virtue signaling because they are woke,”
  • Mr. Fink of BlackRock has emerged as a main target of conservatives.
  • “We are perhaps the world’s largest investor in fossil fuel companies, and, as a long-term investor in these companies, we want to see these companies succeed and prosper,” BlackRock’s head of external affairs, Dalia Blass, wrote in a letter to Texas regulators in January.
  • “BlackRock is trying to have it all ways, acting like it is trying to please everyone.”
  • “ESG is a scam,” he said on Twitter on this month. “It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.” Shortly after that he shared a meme that declared an ESG score “determines how compliant your business is with the leftist agenda.”
  • “Climate change is not a financial risk that we need to worry about,” adding, “Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years?”
  • That view is at odds with the findings of the world’s leading climate scientists. A major United Nations report warned last month that the world could reach a threshold by the end of this decade beyond which the dangers of global warming — including worsening floods, droughts and wildfires — will grow considerably. In 2021, there were 20 weather or climate-related disasters in the United States that each cost more than $1 billion in losses, according to the federal government.
  • “Our ambition is to be the leading bank supporting the global economy in the transition to net zero,” he said.
peterconnelly

Meta Will Give Researchers More Information on Political Ad Targeting - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ta-political-ad-targeting.html

meta new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said it planned to give outside researchers more detailed information on how political ads were targeted across its platform, providing insight into the ways that politicians, campaign operatives and political strategists buy and use ads ahead of the midterm elections.
  • The information includes which interest categories — such as “people who like dogs” or “people who enjoy the outdoors” — were chosen to aim an ad at someone.
  • While Meta has given outsiders some access into how its political ads were used in the past, it has restricted the amount of information that could be seen, citing privacy reasons.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “By making advertiser targeting criteria available for analysis and reporting on ads run about social issues, elections and politics, we hope to help people better understand the practices used to reach potential voters on our technologies,” the company said in a statement.
  • Meta said it had been bound by privacy rules and regulations on what types of data it could share with outsiders. In an interview, Jeff King, a vice president in Meta’s business integrity unit, said the company had hired thousands of workers over the past few years to review those privacy issues.
  • “Every single thing we release goes through a privacy review now,” he said. “We want to make sure we give people the right amount of data, but still remain privacy conscious while we do it.”
peterconnelly

Can Stimulating the Vagus Nerve Improve Mental Health? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vagus-nerve-mental-health.html

mental health new york times

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The term “vagus nerve” is actually shorthand for thousands of fibers. They are organized into two bundles that run from the brain stem down through each side of the neck and into the torso, branching outward to touch our internal organs, said Dr. Kevin J. Tracey, a neurosurgeon and president of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Northwell Health’s research center in New York.
  • Scientists first began examining the vagus nerve in the late 1800s to investigate whether stimulating it could be a potential treatment for epilepsy. They later discovered that a side effect of activating the nerve was an improvement in mood. Today, researchers are examining how the nerve can affect psychiatric disorders, among other conditions.
  • Researchers are now recruiting patients for the largest clinical trial to date examining to what degree vagus nerve stimulation may help patients with depression who have been unable to find relief with other treatments.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In general, one of the problems with treating depression “is that we’ve got a lot of medications that pretty much do the same thing,” Dr. Aaronson said. And when patients do not respond to those medications, “we don’t have a lot of novel stuff.”
  • The activity of the vagus nerve is difficult to measure directly, especially given how complex it is. But because some vagus nerve fibers connect with the heart, experts can indirectly measure cardiac vagal tone — or the way in which your nervous system regulates your heart — by looking at your heart rate variability, which are the fluctuations in the amount of time between your heartbeats, on an EKG.
  • Holding your breath and submerging your face in cold water can trigger the “diving reflex,” a response that slows the heart beat and constricts blood vessels. Some people who have tried it report that it has a calming effect and can even reduce insomnia. Others wrap an ice pack in cloth and place it on their chest to relieve anxiety.
  • “For wellness, try to maintain high vagus nerve activity through mindfulness, exercise and paced breathing,” Dr. Tracey said. “These are all very good for you.”
criscimagnael

Can Forensic Science Be Trusted? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...629632

shared by criscimagnael on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • When asked, years later, why she had failed to photograph what she said she’d seen on the enhanced bedsheet, Yezzo replied, “This is one time that I didn’t manage to get it soon enough.” She added: “Operator error.”
  • The words were deployed as definitive by prosecutors—“the evidence is uncontroverted by the scientist, totally uncontroverted”
  • Michael Donnelly, now a justice on the Ohio Supreme Court, did not preside over this case, but he has had ample exposure to the use of forensic evidence. “As a trial judge,” he told me, “I sat there for 14 years. And when forensics experts testified, the jury hung on their every word.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Forensic science, which drives the plots of movies and television shows, is accorded great respect by the public. And in the proper hands, it can provide persuasive insight. But in the wrong hands, it can trap innocent people in a vise of seeming inerrancy—and it has done so far too often. What’s more, although some forensic disciplines, such as DNA analysis, are reliable, others have been shown to have serious limitations.
  • Yezzo is not like Annie Dookhan, a chemist in a Massachusetts crime laboratory who boosted her productivity by falsifying reports and by “dry labbing”—that is, reporting results without actually conducting any tests.
  • Nor is Yezzo like Michael West, a forensic odontologist who claimed that he could identify bite marks on a victim and then match those marks to a specific person.
  • The deeper issue with forensic science lies not in malfeasance or corruption—or utter incompetence—but in the gray area where Yezzo can be found. Her alleged personal problems are unusual: Only because of them did the details of her long career come to light.
  • to the point of alignment; how rarely an analyst’s skills are called into question in court; and how seldom the performance of crime labs is subjected to any true oversight.
  • More than half of those exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing had been wrongly convicted based on flawed forensic evidence.
  • The quality of the work done in crime labs is almost never audited.
  • Even the best forensic scientists can fall prey to unintentional bias.
  • Study after study has demonstrated the power of cognitive bias.
  • Cognitive bias can of course affect anyone, in any circumstance—but it is particularly dangerous in a criminal-justice system where forensic scientists have wide latitude as well as some incentive to support the views of prosecutors and the police.
Javier E

Opinion | The Right Is All Wrong About Masculinity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...asculinity-twitter-hawley.html

men masculinity right-wing education

shared by Javier E on 28 May 23 - No Cached
  • Indeed, the very definition of “masculinity” is up for grabs
  • In 2019, the American Psychological Association published guidelines that took direct aim at what it called “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression” — declaring it to be, “on the whole, harmful.”
  • Aside from “dominance,” a concept with precious few virtuous uses, the other aspects of traditional masculinity the A.P.A. cited have important roles to play. Competitiveness, aggression and stoicism surely have their abuses, but they also can be indispensable in the right contexts. Thus, part of the challenge isn’t so much rejecting those characteristics as it is channeling and shaping them for virtuous purposes.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • traditionally “masculine” virtues are not exclusively male. Women who successfully model these attributes are all around us
  • Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If—” is one of the purest distillations of restraint as a traditional manly virtue. It begins with the words “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” The entire work speaks of the necessity of calmness and courage.
  • Stoicism carried to excess can become a dangerous form of emotional repression, a stifling of necessary feelings. But the fact that the kind of patience and perseverance that marks stoicism can be taken too far is not to say that we should shun it. In times of conflict and crisis, it is the calm man or woman who can see clearly.
  • If you spend much time at all on right-wing social media — especially Twitter these days — or listening to right-wing news outlets, you’ll be struck by the sheer hysteria of the rhetoric, the hair-on-fire sense of emergency that seems to dominate all discourse.
  • Catastrophic rhetoric is omnipresent on the right. Let’s go back to the “groomer” smear. It’s a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality, you’re not just wrong; you’re a “groomer” or “soft on pedos.
  • But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness
  • Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults.
  • Jonah Goldberg wrote an important piece cataloging the sheer pettiness of the young online right. “Everywhere I look these days,” he wrote, “I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks.” As Jonah noted, there are those who now believe it shows “courage and strength to be coarse or bigoted.”
  • Hysteria plus cruelty is a recipe for violence. And that brings us back to Mr. Hawley. For all of its faults when taken to excess, the traditional masculinity of which he claims to be a champion would demand that he stand firm against a howling mob. Rather, he saluted it with a raised fist — and then ran from it when it got too close and too unruly.
  • American men are in desperate need of virtuous purpose.
  • I reject the idea that traditional masculinity, properly understood, is, “on the whole, harmful.” I recognize that it can be abused, but it is good to confront life with a sense of proportion, with calm courage and conviction.
  • One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received reflects that wisdom. Early in my legal career, a retired federal judge read a brief that I’d drafted and admonished me to “write with regret, not outrage.”
  • Husband your anger, he told me. Have patience. Gain perspective. So then, when something truly is terrible, your outrage will mean something. It was the legal admonition against crying wolf.
Javier E

Chris Licht Broke Journalism Rules-and CNN - 0 views

plus.thebulwark.com/...s-licht-out-whats-next-for-cnn

journalism rules fairness objectivity impartiality media

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

Silicon Valley's Safe Space - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-star-codex-rationalists.html

ai tech elite rationalism silicon valley knowledge social media technology

shared by Javier E on 10 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • The roots of Slate Star Codex trace back more than a decade to a polemicist and self-described A.I. researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who believed that intelligent machines could end up destroying humankind. He was a driving force behind the rise of the Rationalists.
  • Because the Rationalists believed A.I. could end up destroying the world — a not entirely novel fear to anyone who has seen science fiction movies — they wanted to guard against it. Many worked for and donated money to MIRI, an organization created by Mr. Yudkowsky whose stated mission was “A.I. safety.”
  • The community was organized and close-knit. Two Bay Area organizations ran seminars and high-school summer camps on the Rationalist way of thinking.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • “The curriculum covers topics from causal modeling and probability to game theory and cognitive science,” read a website promising teens a summer of Rationalist learning. “How can we understand our own reasoning, behavior, and emotions? How can we think more clearly and better achieve our goals?”
  • Some lived in group houses. Some practiced polyamory. “They are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson, a University of Texas professor who has stayed in one of the group houses.
  • For Kelsey Piper, who embraced these ideas in high school, around 2010, the movement was about learning “how to do good in a world that changes very rapidly.”
  • Yes, the community thought about A.I., she said, but it also thought about reducing the price of health care and slowing the spread of disease.
  • Slate Star Codex, which sprung up in 2013, helped her develop a “calibrated trust” in the medical system. Many people she knew, she said, felt duped by psychiatrists, for example, who they felt weren’t clear about the costs and benefits of certain treatment.
  • That was not the Rationalist way.
  • “There is something really appealing about somebody explaining where a lot of those ideas are coming from and what a lot of the questions are,” she said.
  • Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab backed by a billion dollars from Microsoft. He was effusive in his praise of the blog.It was, he said, essential reading among “the people inventing the future” in the tech industry.
  • Mr. Altman, who had risen to prominence as the president of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, moved on to other subjects before hanging up. But he called back. He wanted to talk about an essay that appeared on the blog in 2014.The essay was a critique of what Mr. Siskind, writing as Scott Alexander, described as “the Blue Tribe.” In his telling, these were the people at the liberal end of the political spectrum whose characteristics included “supporting gay rights” and “getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots.”
  • But as the man behind Slate Star Codex saw it, there was one group the Blue Tribe could not tolerate: anyone who did not agree with the Blue Tribe. “Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?” he wrote.
  • Mr. Altman thought the essay nailed a big problem: In the face of the “internet mob” that guarded against sexism and racism, entrepreneurs had less room to explore new ideas. Many of their ideas, such as intelligence augmentation and genetic engineering, ran afoul of the Blue Tribe.
  • Mr. Siskind was not a member of the Blue Tribe. He was not a voice from the conservative Red Tribe (“opposing gay marriage,” “getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies”). He identified with something called the Grey Tribe — as did many in Silicon Valley.
  • The Grey Tribe was characterized by libertarian beliefs, atheism, “vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up,” and “reading lots of blogs,” he wrote. Most significantly, it believed in absolute free speech.
  • The essay on these tribes, Mr. Altman told me, was an inflection point for Silicon Valley. “It was a moment that people talked about a lot, lot, lot,” he said.
  • And in some ways, two of the world’s prominent A.I. labs — organizations that are tackling some of the tech industry’s most ambitious and potentially powerful projects — grew out of the Rationalist movement.
  • In 2005, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, befriended Mr. Yudkowsky and gave money to MIRI. In 2010, at Mr. Thiel’s San Francisco townhouse, Mr. Yudkowsky introduced him to a pair of young researchers named Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis. That fall, with an investment from Mr. Thiel’s firm, the two created an A.I. lab called DeepMind.
  • Like the Rationalists, they believed that A.I could end up turning against humanity, and because they held this belief, they felt they were among the only ones who were prepared to build it in a safe way.
  • In 2014, Google bought DeepMind for $650 million. The next year, Elon Musk — who also worried A.I. could destroy the world and met his partner, Grimes, because they shared an interest in a Rationalist thought experiment — founded OpenAI as a DeepMind competitor. Both labs hired from the Rationalist community.
  • Mr. Aaronson, the University of Texas professor, was turned off by the more rigid and contrarian beliefs of the Rationalists, but he is one of the blog’s biggest champions and deeply admired that it didn’t avoid live-wire topics.
  • “It must have taken incredible guts for Scott to express his thoughts, misgivings and questions about some major ideological pillars of the modern world so openly, even if protected by a quasi-pseudonym,” he said
  • In late June of last year, not long after talking to Mr. Altman, the OpenAI chief executive, I approached the writer known as Scott Alexander, hoping to get his views on the Rationalist way and its effect on Silicon Valley. That was when the blog vanished.
  • The issue, it was clear to me, was that I told him I could not guarantee him the anonymity he’d been writing with. In fact, his real name was easy to find because people had shared it online for years and he had used it on a piece he’d written for a scientific journal. I did a Google search for Scott Alexander and one of the first results I saw in the auto-complete list was Scott Alexander Siskind.
  • More than 7,500 people signed a petition urging The Times not to publish his name, including many prominent figures in the tech industry. “Putting his full name in The Times,” the petitioners said, “would meaningfully damage public discourse, by discouraging private citizens from sharing their thoughts in blog form.” On the internet, many in Silicon Valley believe, everyone has the right not only to say what they want but to say it anonymously.
  • I spoke with Manoel Horta Ribeiro, a computer science researcher who explores social networks at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He was worried that Slate Star Codex, like other communities, was allowing extremist views to trickle into the influential tech world. “A community like this gives voice to fringe groups,” he said. “It gives a platform to people who hold more extreme views.”
  • I assured her my goal was to report on the blog, and the Rationalists, with rigor and fairness. But she felt that discussing both critics and supporters could be unfair. What I needed to do, she said, was somehow prove statistically which side was right.
  • When I asked Mr. Altman if the conversation on sites like Slate Star Codex could push people toward toxic beliefs, he said he held “some empathy” for these concerns. But, he added, “people need a forum to debate ideas.”
  • In August, Mr. Siskind restored his old blog posts to the internet. And two weeks ago, he relaunched his blog on Substack, a company with ties to both Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator. He gave the blog a new title: Astral Codex Ten. He hinted that Substack paid him $250,000 for a year on the platform. And he indicated the company would give him all the protection he needed.
Javier E

Musk, SBF, and the Myth of Smug, Castle-Building Nerds - 0 views

newsletters.theatlantic.com/...-of-smug-castle-building-nerds

myth nerds founder genius cult tech responsibility social media twitter crypto

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Experts in content moderation suggested that Musk’s actual policies lacked any coherence and, if implemented, would have all kinds of unintended consequences. That has happened with verification. Almost every decision he makes is an unforced error made with extreme confidence in front of a growing audience of people who already know he has messed up, and is supported by a network of sycophants and blind followers who refuse to see or tell him that he’s messing up. The dynamic is … very Trumpy!
  • As with the former president, it can be hard at times for people to believe or accept that our systems are so broken that a guy who is clearly this inept can also be put in charge of something so important. A common pundit claim before Donald Trump got into the White House was that the gravity of the job and prestige of the office might humble or chasten him.
  • The same seems true for Musk. Even people skeptical of Musk’s behavior pointed to his past companies as predictors of future success. He’s rich. He does smart-people stuff. The rockets land pointy-side up!
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Time and again, we learned there was never a grand plan or big ideas—just weapons-grade ego, incompetence, thin skin, and prejudice against those who don’t revere him.
  • Despite all the incredible, damning reporting coming out of Twitter and all of Musk’s very public mistakes, many people still refuse to believe—even if they detest him—that he is simply incompetent.
  • What is amazing about the current moment is that, despite how ridiculous it all feels, a fundamental tenet of reality and logic appears to be holding true: If you don’t know what you’re doing or don’t really care, you’ll run the thing you’re in charge of into the ground, and people will notice.
  • And so the moment feels too dumb and too on the nose to be real and yet also very real—kind of like all of reality in 2022.
  • I don’t really know where any of this will lead, but one interesting possibility is that Musk gets increasingly reactionary and trollish in his politics and stewardship of Twitter.
  • Leaving the politics aside, from a basic customer-service standpoint this is generally an ill-advised way for the owner of a company to treat an elected official when that elected official wishes to know why your service has failed them. The reason it is ill-advised is because then the elected official could tweet something like what Senator Markey tweeted on Sunday: “One of your companies is under an FTC consent decree. Auto safety watchdog NHTSA is investigating another for killing people. And you’re spending your time picking fights online. Fix your companies. Or Congress will.”
  • It seems clear that Musk, like any dedicated social-media poster, thrives on validation, so it makes sense that, as he continues to dismantle his own mystique as an innovator, he might look for adoration elsewhere
  • Recent history has shown that, for a specific audience, owning the libs frees a person from having to care about competency or outcome of their actions. Just anger the right people and you’re good, even if you’re terrible at your job. This won’t help Twitter’s financial situation, which seems bleak, but it’s … something!
  • Bankman-Fried, the archetype, appealed to people for all kinds of reasons. His narrative as a philanthropist, and a smart rationalist, and a stone-cold weirdo was something people wanted to buy into because, generally, people love weirdos who don’t conform to systems and then find clever ways to work around them and become wildly successful as a result.
  • Bankman-Fried was a way that a lot of people could access and maybe obliquely understand what was going on in crypto. They may not have understood what FTX did, but they could grasp a nerd trying to leverage a system in order to do good in the world and advance progressive politics. In that sense, Bankman-Fried is easy to root for and exciting to cover. His origin story and narrative become more important than the particulars of what he may or may not be doing.
  • the past few weeks have been yet another reminder that the smug-nerd-genius narrative may sell magazines, and it certainly raises venture funding, but the visionary founder is, first and foremost, a marketing product, not a reality. It’s a myth that perpetuates itself. Once branded a visionary, the founder can use the narrative to raise money and generate a formidable net worth, and then the financial success becomes its own résumé. But none of it is real.
  • Adversarial journalism ideally questions and probes power. If it is trained on technology companies and their founders, it is because they either wield that power or have the potential to do so. It is, perhaps unintuitively, a form of respect for their influence and potential to disrupt. But that’s not what these founders want.
  • even if all tech coverage had been totally flawless, Silicon Valley would have rejected adversarial tech journalism because most of its players do not actually want the responsibility that comes with their potential power. They want only to embody the myth and reap the benefits. They want the narrative, which is focused on origins, ambitions, ethos, and marketing, and less on the externalities and outcomes.
  • Looking at Musk and Bankman-Fried, it would appear that the tech visionaries mostly get their way. For all the complaints of awful, negative coverage and biased reporting, people still want to cheer for and give money to the “‘smug nerds building castles in the sky.’” Though they vary wildly right now in magnitude, their wounds are self-inflicted—and, perhaps, the result of believing their own hype.
  • That’s because, almost always, the smug-nerd-genius narrative is a trap. It’s one that people fall into because they need to believe that somebody out there is so brilliant, they can see the future, or that they have some greater, more holistic understanding of the world (or that such an understanding is possible)
  • It’s not unlike a conspiracy theory in that way. The smug-nerd-genius narrative helps take the complexity of the world and make it more manageable.
  • Putting your faith in a space billionaire or a crypto wunderkind isn’t just sad fanboydom; it is also a way for people to outsource their brain to somebody else who, they believe, can see what they can’t
  • the smug nerd genius is exceedingly rare, and, even when they’re not outed as a fraud or a dilettante, they can be assholes or flawed like anyone else. There aren’t shortcuts for making sense of the world, and anyone who is selling themselves that way or buying into that narrative about them should read to us as a giant red flag.
Javier E

Don't Do TikTok - by Jonathan V. Last - The Triad - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...dont-do-tiktok

social media bias TikTok propaganda china disinformation manipulation culture policy

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • The small-bore concern is personal data. TikTok is basically Chinese spyware. The platform is owned by a Chinese company, Bytedance, which, like all Chinese companies, operates at the pleasure of the Chinese Communist Party.1 Anyone from Bytedance who wants to look into an American user’s TikTok data can do so. And they do it on the reg.
  • But personal data isn’t the big danger. The big danger is that TikTok decides what videos people see. Recommendations are driven entirely by the company’s black-box algorithm. And since TikTok answers to the Chinese Communist Party, then if the ChiComs tell TikTok to start pushing certain videos to certain people, that’s what TikTok will do.
  • It’s a gigantic propaganda engine. Making TikTok your platform of choice is the equivalent of using RT as your primary news source.
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  • TikTok accounts run by the propaganda arm of the Chinese government have accumulated millions of followers and tens of millions of views, many of them on videos editorializing about U.S. politics without clear disclosure that they were posted by a foreign government.
  • The accounts are managed by MediaLinks TV, a registered foreign agent and Washington D.C.-based outpost of the main Chinese Communist Party television news outlet, China Central Television. The largest of them are @Pandaorama, which features cute videos about Chinese culture, @The…Optimist, which posts about sustainability, and @NewsTokss, which features coverage of U.S. national and international news.
  • In the run-up to the 2022 elections, the @NewsTokss account criticized some candidates (mostly Republicans), and favored others (mostly Democrats). A video from July began with the caption “Cruz, Abbott Don’t Care About Us”; a video from October was captioned “Rubio Has Done Absolutely Nothing.” But @NewsTokss did not target only Republicans; another October video asked viewers whether they thought President Joe Biden’s promise to sign a bill codifying abortion rights was a “political manipulation tactic.” Nothing in these videos disclosed to viewers that they were being pushed by a foreign government.
  • any Chinese play for Taiwan would be accompanied by TikTok aggressively pushing content in America designed to divide public opinion and weaken America’s commitment to Taiwan’s defense.
  • With all the official GOP machinations against gay marriage, it seems like if McConnell wanted that bill to fail, he could have pressured two Republican senators to vote against it. He said nothing. Trump said nothing. DeSantis said nothing. There was barely a whimper of protest from those who could have influenced this. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz engaged in theatrics, but no one actually used their power to stop this.
  • They let it pass because they don’t care and they want it to go away as an issue. And that goes for the MAGA GOP as well. Opposition to it in politics is all theater and will have a shelf life in riling up the base.
  • Evangelical religious convictions might be for one man + one woman marriage. But, the civil/political situation is far different from that and it’s worth recognizing where the GOP actually stands. They could have stopped this. They didn’t. That point should be clear, especially to their evangelical base who looks to the GOP to save America for them.
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