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lucieperloff

Opinion | What Keeps Facebook's Election Security Chief Up at Night? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...acebook-election-security.html

social media technology knowledge bias

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Others, including President Trump and his campaign, have used the platform to spread false information about voting while some partisans try to undermine the public’s faith in the U.S. election system.
  • cybersecurity, which is hacking, phishing and exploiting Facebook’s technical assets. The other is influence operations, which is both foreign (Russia, Iran, China) and domestic actors manipulating public debate with disinformation or in other ways.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      both different and both prevalent
  • That’s also because government organizations, civil society groups and journalists are all helping to identify this.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      people are working together for the common good
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • We’ve seen Russian actors intentionally use content posted by innocent Americans. We see other people post and share content from Russian campaigns. It doesn’t mean they’re actually connected. In fact, most times they’re not.
  • Influence operations are essentially weaponized uncertainty.
  • One of the most effective countermeasures in all of this is an informed public.
  • And there are so many opportunities to leverage that complexity to run a perception hack. A perception hack is an attempt to create a perception that there is a large scale influence operation when in fact there is no evidence to support it.
  • It’s our job to keep this debate as authentic as possible by putting more information and context out there. We can force pages that are pushing information to disclose who is behind them
  • We are living through a historic election with so many complex pieces to monitor. The piece that I and my team can help with is that we can make sure we secure this debate.
  • My counterpart at Twitter says I call him more than his mother does. We’re spending lots of time and exchanging information to try and stay ahead of this.
  • Between 2016 and next week we’ll have worked to protect more than 200 elections across the world. It’s critical to focus on next week, but we also have to remember Myanmar has an election five days later.
huffem4

Critical Theory - New Discourses - 1 views

newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical-theory

politics psychology knowledge critical theory

shared by huffem4 on 20 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • According to these theorists, a “critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery,” acts as a “liberating … influence,” and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers” of human beings (Horkheimer 1972, 246).
  • Because such theories aim to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many “critical theories” in the broader sense have been developed. They have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies.
  • The Critical Theory of the “Institute for Social Research,” which is better known as the Frankfurt School, focused on power analyses that began from a Marxist (or Marxian) perspective with an aim to understand why Marxism wasn’t proving successful in Western contexts. It rapidly developed a “post-Marxist” position that criticized Marx’s primary focus on economics and expanded his views on power, alienation, and exploitation into all aspects of post-Enlightenment Western culture. These theorists sometimes referred to themselves as “cultural Marxists,” and were referred to that way by others, but the term “cultural Marxism” is now more commonly used to describe (a misconception of) postmodernism (see also, neo-Marxism) or a certain anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
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  • a Traditional Theory is meant to be descriptive of some phenomenon, usually social, and aims to understand how it works and why it works that way, a Critical Theory should proceed from a prescriptive normative moral vision for society, describe how the item being critiqued fails that vision (usually in a systemic sense), and prescribe activism to subvert, dismantle, disrupt, overthrow, or change it—that is, generally, to break and then remake society in accordance with the particular critical theory’s prescribed vision
  • One of the ambitions of the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School was to address cultural power in a way that allowed an awakening of working-class consciousness out of the ideology of capitalism in order to overcome it.
  • Critical theories in a broader sense are largely understood to be the critical study of various types of power relations within myriad aspects of culture, often under a broad rubric referred to in general as “cultural studies.”
  • They are to be found within many disciplines and subdisciplines within the theoretical humanities, including cultural studies, media studies, gender studies, ethnic/race/whiteness/black studies, sexuality/LGBT/trans studies, postcolonial, indigenous, and decolonial studies, disability studies, and fat studies. Critical theories of various kinds are also to be found within (but not necessarily dominant over) other fields of the humanities, social sciences, and arts, including English (literature), sociology, philosophy, art, history and, particularly, pedagogy (theory of education).
  • The focus on identity, experiences, and activism, rather than an attempt to find truth, leads to conflict with empirical scholars and undermines public confidence in the worth of scholarship that uses this approach.
anonymous

How to Do School When Motivation Has Gone Missing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...enagers-motivation-school.html

motivation education

shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Educational psychologists recognize two main kinds of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic.
  • Intrinsic motivation takes over when we have a deep and genuine interest in a task or topic and derive satisfaction from the work or learning itself.
  • Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, gets us to work by putting the outcome — like a paycheck or a good grade — in mind.
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  • When what we’re doing feels fascinating, such as reading a book we can’t put down, we’re propelled by intrinsic motivation; when we pay attention in a class or meeting by promising ourselves 10 minutes of online shopping for seeing it through, we’re summoning extrinsic motivation.
  • Should adults be cheerleaders for our teenagers? Opinion is split. Some researchers contend that praise helps to cultivate intrinsic motivation, while others say that it undermines it by introducing an extrinsic reward
  • Young people may find themselves intrinsically motivated on Mondays, but not Fridays, or at the start of an evening study session but not as the night wears o
  • In practice, this means that young people should be given as much say over their learning as possible, such as giving them options for how to solve problems, approach unfamiliar topics or practice new skills.
  • It’s also true that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation aren’t mutually exclusive
  • There is, however, an area of consensus: the utility of praise depends on how it’s done. Specifically, praise fosters intrinsic motivation when it’s sincere, celebrates effort rather than talent (“you worked really hard,” vs. “you’re so smart”) and communicates encouragement, not pressure (“you’re doing really well,” vs. “you’re doing really well, as I hoped you would”)
  • Adults should be ready to stand back and admire the fantastic solutions that young people land upon themselves.
  • I recently learned of a 10th-grader who makes time-lapse videos of herself while she does her homework. Knowing that she’s on camera keeps her focused, and having a record of her efforts (and the amusing faces she makes while concentrating) turns out to be a powerful reward. While intrinsic motivation has its upsides, there should be no shame in the external motivation game. It’s about getting the work done.
  • anonymous on 03 Nov 20
     
    This tells of some tactics for parents to use to keep kids motivated, and some methods teens themselves use.
knudsenlu

Trumpism isn't an ideology. It's a psychology - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...psychology-20180306-story.html

psychology trump culture politics language

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • For the last couple of years, I've been banging my spoon on my highchair about how Trumpism isn't a political or ideological movement so much as a psychological phenomenon. This was once a controversial position on the right and the left. Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon devoted considerable resources to promoting Trumpist candidates who supposedly shared President Trump's worldview and parroted his rhetoric, including anti-globalism, economic nationalism and crude insults of "establishment" politicians. Those schemes largely came to naught.
  • On the left, there's an enormous investment in the idea that Trump isn't a break with conservatism but the apotheosis of it. This is a defensible, or at least understandable claim if you believe conservatism has always been an intellectually vacuous bundle of racial and cultural resentments. But if that were the case, Commentary magazine's Noah Rothman recently noted, you would not see so many mainstream and consistent conservatives objecting to Trump's behavior.
  • Trump has said countless times that he thinks his gut is a better guide than the brains of his advisors. He routinely argues that the presidents and policymakers who came before him were all fools and weaklings. That's narcissism, not ideology, talking.
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  • Trump's biggest fans have stuck by him and often reflect or echo his irrationality, discovering ever more extravagant ways to justify the president's behavior. (Krein's decision to renounce Trump was unusual.) When Trump attacked Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, Jerry Falwell Jr. of Liberty University tweeted his support, floating the idea that Sessions was an anti-Trump deep cover operative who endorsed Trump to undermine his presidency from within. It seems Trumpism is infectious. If this infection becomes a pandemic — a cult of personality — one could fairly call Trumpism a movement. But psychology would still be the best way to understand it.
knudsenlu

The Theory That Explains the Structure of the Internet - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...553562

structure internet theory science research knowledge technology

shared by knudsenlu on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • A paper posted online last month has reignited a debate about one of the oldest, most startling claims in the modern era of network science: the proposition that most complex networks in the real world—from the World Wide Web to interacting proteins in a cell—are “scale-free.” Roughly speaking, that means that a few of their nodes should have many more connections than others, following a mathematical formula called a power law, so that there’s no one scale that characterizes the network.
  • Purely random networks do not obey power laws, so when the early proponents of the scale-free paradigm started seeing power laws in real-world networks in the late 1990s, they viewed them as evidence of a universal organizing principle underlying the formation of these diverse networks. The architecture of scale-freeness, researchers argued, could provide insight into fundamental questions such as how likely a virus is to cause an epidemic, or how easily hackers can disable a network.
  • Amazingly simple and far-reaching natural laws govern the structure and evolution of all the complex networks that surround us,” wrote Barabási (who is now at Northeastern University in Boston) in Linked. He later added: “Uncovering and explaining these laws has been a fascinating roller-coaster ride during which we have learned more about our complex, interconnected world than was known in the last hundred years.”
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  • “These results undermine the universality of scale-free networks and reveal that real-world networks exhibit a rich structural diversity that will likely require new ideas and mechanisms to explain,” wrote the study’s authors, Anna Broido and Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
  • Network scientists agree, by and large, that the paper’s analysis is statistically sound. But when it comes to interpreting its findings, the paper seems to be functioning like a Rorschach test, in which both proponents and critics of the scale-free paradigm see what they already believed to be true. Much of the discussion has played out in vigorous Twitter debates.
  • The scale-free paradigm in networks emerged at a historical moment when power laws had taken on an outsize role in statistical physics. In the 1960s and 1970s, they had played a key part in universal laws that underlie phase transitions in a wide range of physical systems, a finding that earned Kenneth Wilson the 1982 Nobel Prize in physics. Soon after, power laws formed the core of two other paradigms that swept across the statistical-physics world: fractals, and a theory about organization in nature called self-organized criticality.
  • From the beginning, though, the scale-free paradigm also attracted pushback. Critics pointed out that preferential attachment is far from the only mechanism that can give rise to power laws, and that networks with the same power law can have very different topologies. Some network scientists and domain experts cast doubt on the scale-freeness of specific networks such as power grids, metabolic networks, and the physical internet.
  • If you were to observe 1,000 falling objects instead of just a rock and a feather, Clauset says, a clear picture would emerge of how both gravity and air resistance work. But his and Broido’s analysis of nearly 1,000 networks has yielded no similar clarity. “It is reasonable to believe a fundamental phenomenon would require less customized detective work” than Barabási is calling for, Clauset wrote on Twitter.
annabaldwin_

End to Health Care Subsidies Puts Congress in a Tight Spot - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...acare-insurance-subsidies.html

Trump healthcare USA politics injustice

shared by annabaldwin_ on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • President Trump’s decision to cut off critical payments to health insurance companies ratcheted up the pressure on Congress on Friday to take action to protect consumers from soaring premiums, while also adding a combustible new issue to negotiations to avert a government shutdown this year.
  • It came just hours after he signed an executive order that also undermined the health law by encouraging the development of lower-cost insurance policies not subject to the Affordable Care Act’s rigorous coverage standards.
  • “Our patients will ultimately pay the price,” said Dr. David O. Barbe
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  • The premium increases would be felt most by middle-class consumers who do not qualify for federal aid with either their premiums or their out-of-pocket costs.
tongoscar

'The Police Do Nothing': Thugs Attack Protesters with Impunity in Bolivia - 0 views

www.breitbart.com/...st-protesters-impunity-bolivia

shared by tongoscar on 03 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Protesters noted that, even disregarding the fact that the constitution banned him from running before the judicial intervention, Morales appeared to be only narrowly defeating opponent Carlos Mesa before the electoral commission abruptly shut down an electronic count.
  • A woman can be heard echoing the journalist, saying, “The police aren’t doing anything!”
  • “Most of the injured who arrived at clinics and hospitals showed injuries produced by firearms, stab wounds, burns, and concussions,”
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  • The mining industry has traditionally supported Morales.
  • “The interim OAS (Organisation of American States) mission report has identified substantial shortcomings of the electoral process, notably the unexpected interruption of the publication of the voting results, that undermine the necessary credibility and transparency,”
tongoscar

List of biggest threats to the US in 2020: Iran, Russia, China, ISIS - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/eats-to-the-us-in-2020-2019-12

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Russia has launched a vast propaganda and disinformation campaign in Europe to undermine the liberal democracies that have opposed its expansionist agenda, actively backs armed militias in eastern Ukraine, and performs provocative military exercises and patrols. 
  • During Trump's three years in power, US relations with Iran have fallen to their worst point in decades.Tensions reached a new low on January 3 when a US drone assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the nation's top military commander and a revered figure in the country.
  • China continues to rebuild and modernize its military, and expand its influence beyond its borders. The nation — which is projected to become the world's biggest economy by around 2050 — has broadcasted the new might of the People's Liberation Army with huge live-fire military exercises.It continues to wage economic war on the US, using an army of hackers and spies to steal vital economic information, part of the backdrop for Trump's trade war.
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  • President Donald Trump has made much of his summits with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un, and the personal bond he has forged with the leader of the brutally repressive and reclusive regime.But he has little to show for it in terms of concrete achievements reducing its threat to the US. 
katherineharron

How coronavirus hypocrisy is tarnishing Boris Johnson's government (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 29 May 20 - No Cached
  • Johnson has proved staunch in his defense of his close ally since the latter was accused of breaking the UK's strict lockdown by driving 260 miles with his wife, who he admits was displaying some symptoms of coronavirus, and young son to be near his extended family.
  • In quarantine-fatigued Britain, however, where many have agonized over the command to stay away from frightened, sick and dying relatives, the Prime Minister's words have not gone down well. Highly unusually, several of his own Conservative MPs are now calling for Cummings to be sacked, and even the government-friendly Daily Mail asked: "What Planet Are They On?" of his decision to stand by his man.
  • In one of the more moving responses, Helen Goodman, until December the Labour Party MP for Durham, the northern town Cummings visited to stay in a property belonging to his parents, said she was "appalled" by his behavior, given her own father had died alone from Covid-19 in a local care home after she obeyed the rules and did not visit.
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  • Saying he had no regrets, he added: "I believe in all circumstances I behaved reasonably and legally. The legal rules do not inevitably cover all circumstances - including those I found myself in." Also on Monday, Johnson expressed "regret" for the "confusion, anger and pain" experienced by the British people as a result of the controversy; when pressed on whether he believes Cummings' decision has compromised the government's coronavirus message, Johnson doubled down on his support for Cummings, asserting, "I do not believe that anybody at Number 10 has done anything to undermine our message."
  • "The regulations made clear, I believe, that risks to the health of a small child were an exceptional situation."
  • To talk of the British sense of fair play is almost a cliché. But there is certainly a particular sensitivity among Britons to suggestions of hypocrisy which have thus far thwarted Cummings' attempts to brush off criticism of his excursion, and which contrast with, say, the relative lack of fuss in the US over the revelation that Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump's daughter, traveled from Washington DC to New Jersey to celebrate Passover last month.
  • A controversial figure who relishes his role as an outsider, he also has a common touch when it comes to distilling a message with a brilliance complemented by Johnson's own flair for capturing the national mood. So while it was Johnson, then-Mayor of London, who in 2016 sensed an appetite for leaving the EU which his more senior colleagues missed, it was Cummings, head of the Vote Leave Campaign, who boiled it down to the simple and devastatingly effective slogan of "Take Back Control."
  • For a man known for his gregarious nature, the British Prime Minister has few close political friends; his inexperienced cabinet was appointed as much for their loyalty and support for his key policy of leading the UK out of the European Union as any long-term affinity with Johnson.
  • At the start of the lockdown, Dr. Catherine Calderwood, Scotland's Chief Medical Officer, fell on her sword after admitting two overnight visits at her seaside holiday cottage, having fronted the campaign urging Scots to stay home. Though Calderwood apologized for her actions and initially said she planned to stay on in her post, she later released a statement that she had quit and acknowledging that the "justifiable focus" on her actions could pose a distraction to the response to the pandemic.
  • As senior adviser since summer 2019 when Johnson became Prime Minister, the notoriously prickly Cummings has rubbed many Downing Street denizens the wrong way. But when coronavirus hit, it was he who crafted the message, "Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives," which has come to define Britain's battle against the virus and the protective shield the country threw around its beloved health service.
  • The hitherto wildly popular Johnson's favorability ratings have begun to slip while a recent poll by YouGov found 49% disapproved of the Prime Minister's path out of lockdown compared to 36% who supported it.
  • The former Chief Constable of Durham Police, Mike Barton, has warned that Cummings' behavior, and the Prime Minister's defense of it, will make attempts to enforce the lockdown impossible, potentially endangering the slow but steady progress the UK has made in reducing the spread of the virus.
  • The consequences could be even more serious if a mass loss of faith in both the Johnson government and his lockdown results in the public breaking the rules just at the moment the Prime Minister is urging them to stand firm.
katherineharron

Trump's language is his tell on Syria -- Meanwhile in America - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Ever since Donald Trump became president, critics have worried that his rudimentary knowledge of global affairs, erratic decisions and politicized foreign policy would get people killed. It's happening now. "You are leaving us to be slaughtered," Gen. Mazloum Kobani Abdi, commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces told a senior US official last week. Trump's abandonment of Kurdish allies in Syria has triggered a humanitarian crisis, and as Turkey moves in, there are reports of executions and fears that ISIS members could escape in the chaos.
  • The President is trading on a "bring the troops home" mentality that often follows US military entanglements overseas. It's a politically palatable position because the people dying as a result of his decisions are not American. His language is the tell here: He's using stereotypes about war-mongering Middle Easterners to undermine the idea that the Kurds could be real allies deserving of loyalty -- despite the successful, years-long US-Kurdish alliance against ISIS and before that in Iraq.
  • 'They are coming and they will take everything. May God end America'
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  • This was the despairing prediction of a Kurdish man trying to save his family from the Turkish advance, speaking to CNN's Nick Paton Walsh inside Syria.
  • Over the weekend, Wall Street Journal columnist and former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan summed up Trump's national security leadership like this: "Foreign-policy decisions in this administration look like the ball in a pinball machine in some garish arcade with flashing lights and some frantic guy pushing the levers ping ping ping and thinking he's winning."
  • Finally, some good news. China and the United States seem to have stepped back from the brink with a trade war truce.
manhefnawi

Adult brains don't grow new neurons in hippocampus, study suggests | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...in-hippocampus-makes-new-cells

Memory Undermining Knowledge

shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • In stark contrast to earlier findings, adults do not produce new nerve cells in a brain area important to memory and navigation, scientists conclude after scrutinizing 54 human brains spanning the age spectrum.
katherineharron

Stimulus package: This missing piece could boost the economy (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Coronavirus poses daunting challenges for economic policymakers. Public health efforts to contain the virus rely on "social distancing" by encouraging people to stay home and requiring businesses to reduce their output. In the past, the primary tools the government used to get our economy going focused on raising spending by encouraging people to do more of their usual activities. But that interferes with the public health effort against coronavirus.
  • In a typical recession, these effects are desirable. Unfortunately, what worked in previous recessions won't work for coronavirus. If schools and businesses are closed by order of public health authorities, then lower interest rates and tax cuts do not increase spending much. Instead, people are likely to save the money, undermining the stimulus effect. And if people do spend the money instead of saving it, monetary and fiscal stimulus may harm public health by encouraging people to go out and spend.
Javier E

The Economic Case for Regulating Social Media - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...media-facebook-regulation.html

social media network economics conspiracy theory hate speech addiction platform ad-financed business model click-bait psychology technology

shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter generate revenue by using detailed behavioral information to direct ads to individual users.
  • this bland description of their business model fails to convey even a hint of its profound threat to the nation’s political and social stability.
  • legislators in Congress to propose the breakup of some tech firms, along with other traditional antitrust measures. But the main hazard posed by these platforms is not aggressive pricing, abusive service or other ills often associated with monopoly.
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  • Instead, it is their contribution to the spread of misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories.
  • digital platforms, since the marginal cost of serving additional consumers is essentially zero. Because the initial costs of producing a platform’s content are substantial, and because any company’s first goal is to remain solvent, it cannot just give stuff away. Even so, when price exceeds marginal cost, competition relentlessly pressures rival publishers to cut prices — eventually all the way to zero. This, in a nutshell, is the publisher’s dilemma in the digital age.
  • These firms make money not by charging for access to content but by displaying it with finely targeted ads based on the specific types of things people have already chosen to view. If the conscious intent were to undermine social and political stability, this business model could hardly be a more effective weapon.
  • The algorithms that choose individual-specific content are crafted to maximize the time people spend on a platform
  • As the developers concede, Facebook’s algorithms are addictive by design and exploit negative emotional triggers. Platform addiction drives earnings, and hate speech, lies and conspiracy theories reliably boost addiction.
  • the subscription model isn’t fully efficient: Any positive fee would inevitably exclude at least some who would value access but not enough to pay the fee
  • a conservative think tank, says, for example, that government has no business second-guessing people’s judgments about what to post or read on social media.
  • That position would be easier to defend in a world where individual choices had no adverse impact on others. But negative spillover effects are in fact quite common
  • individual and collective incentives about what to post or read on social media often diverge sharply.
  • There is simply no presumption that what spreads on these platforms best serves even the individual’s own narrow interests, much less those of society as a whole.
  • a simpler step may hold greater promise: Platforms could be required to abandon that model in favor of one relying on subscriptions, whereby members gain access to content in return for a modest recurring fee.
  • Major newspapers have done well under this model, which is also making inroads in book publishing. The subscription model greatly weakens the incentive to offer algorithmically driven addictive content provided by individuals, editorial boards or other sources.
  • Careful studies have shown that Facebook’s algorithms have increased political polarization significantly
  • More worrisome, those excluded would come disproportionately from low-income groups. Such objections might be addressed specifically — perhaps with a modest tax credit to offset subscription fees — or in a more general way, by making the social safety net more generous.
  • Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher widely considered the father of economics, is celebrated for his “invisible hand” theory, which describes conditions under which market incentives promote socially benign outcomes. Many of his most ardent admirers may view steps to constrain the behavior of social media platforms as regulatory overreach.
  • But Smith’s remarkable insight was actually more nuanced: Market forces often promote society’s welfare, but not always. Indeed, as he saw clearly, individual interests are often squarely at odds with collective aspirations, and in many such instances it is in society’s interest to intervene. The current information crisis is a case in point.
Javier E

Free Speech and Civic Virtue between "Fake News" and "Wokeness" | History News Network - 1 views

hnn.us/176633

free speech civic virtue woke fake news bias language

shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • none of these arguments reaches past adversarial notions of democracy. They all characterize free speech as a matter of conflicting rights-claims and competing factions.
  • As long as political polarization precludes rational consensus, she argues, we are left to “[make] personal choices and pronouncements regarding what we are willing (or unwilling) to tolerate, in an attempt to slightly nudge the world in our preferred direction.” Notably, she makes no mention of how we might discern the validity of those preferences or how we might arbitrate between them in cases of conflict.
  • Free speech advocates are hypocritical or ignore some extenuating context, they claim, while those stifling disagreeable or offensive views are merely rectifying past injustices or paying their opponents back in kind, operating practically in a flawed public sphere.
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  • It is telling, however, that the letter’s critics focus on speakers and what they deserve to say far more than the listening public and what we deserve to hear
  • In Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government (1948), Meikeljohn challenges us to approach public discourse from the perspective of the “good man”: that is to say, the virtuous citizen
  • One cannot appreciate the freedom of speech, he writes, unless one sees it as an act of collective deliberation, carried out by “a man who, in his political activities, is not merely fighting for what…he can get, but is eagerly and generously serving the common welfare”
  • Free speech is not only about discovering truth, or encouraging ethical individualism, or protecting minority opinions—liberals’ usual lines of defense—it is ultimately about binding our fate to others’ by “sharing” the truth with our fellow citizens
  • Sharing truth requires mutual respect and a jealous defense of intellectual freedom, so that “no idea, no opinion, no doubt, no belief, no counter belief, no relevant information” is withheld from the electorate
  • For their part, voters must judge these arguments individually, through introspection, virtue, and meditation on the common good. 
  • The “marketplace of ideas” is dangerous because it relieves citizens of exactly these duties. As Meikeljohn writes:   As separate thinkers, we have no obligation to test our thinking, to make sure that it is worthy of a citizen who is one of the ‘rulers of the nation.’ That testing is to be done, we believe, not by us, but by ‘the competition of the market.
  • this is precisely the sort of self-interested posturing that many on the Left resent in their opponents, but which they now propose to embrace as their own, casually accepting the notion that their fellow citizens are incapable of exercising public reason or considering alternative viewpoints with honesty, bravery, humility, and compassion. 
  • In practice, curtailing public speech is likely to worsen polarization and further empower dominant cultural interests. As an ideal (or a lack thereof), it undermines the intelligibility and mutual respect that form the very basis of citizenship.
  • political polarization has induced Americans to abandon “truth-directed methods of persuasion”—such as argumentation and evidence—for a form of non-rational “messaging,” in which “every speech act is classified as friend or foe… and in which very little faith exists as to the rational faculties of those being spoken to.”
  • “In such a context,” she writes, “even the cry for ‘free speech’ invites a nonliteral interpretation, as being nothing but the most efficient way for its advocates to acquire or consolidate power.”
  • Segments of the Right have pushed this sort of political messaging to its cynical extremes—taking Donald Trump’s statements “seriously but not literally” or taking antagonistic positions simply to “own the libs.”
  • Rather than assuming the supremacy of our own opinions or aspersing the motives of those with whom we disagree, our duty as Americans is to think with, learn from, and correct each other.
  • some critics of the Harper’s letter seem eager to reduce all public debate to a form of power politics
  • Trans activist Julia Serano merely punctuates the tendency when she writes that calls for free speech represent a “misconception that we, as a society, are all in the midst of some grand rational debate, and that marginalized people simply need to properly plea our case for acceptance, and once we do, reason-minded people everywhere will eventually come around. This notion is utterly ludicrous.”
  • one could say that critics of the Harper’s letter take the “bad man” as their unit of analysis. By their lights, all participants in public debate are prejudiced, particular, and self-interested
Javier E

Technopoly-Chs. 9,10--Scientism, the great symbol drain - 0 views

scientism science social science narrative objectivity advertising morality authority coherence Postman book notes

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • By Scientism, I mean three interrelated ideas that, taken together, stand as one of the pillars of Technopoly.
  • The first and indispensable idea is, as noted, that the methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior. This idea is the backbone of much of psychology and sociology as practiced at least in America, and largely accounts for the fact that social science, to quote F. A. Hayek, "has cont~ibuted scarcely anything to our understanding of social phenomena." 2
  • The second idea is, as also noted, that social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize society on a rational and humane basis. This implies that technical meansmostly "invisible technologies" supervised by experts-can be designed to control human behavior and set it on the proper course.
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  • The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well. as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality.
  • the spirit behind this scientific ideal inspired several men to believe that the reliable and predictable knowledge that could be obtained about stars and atoms could also be obtained about human behavior.
  • Among the best known of these early "social scientists" were Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Prosper Enfantin, and, of course, Auguste Comte.
  • They held in common two beliefs to which T echnopoly is deeply indebted: that the natural sciences provide a method to unlock the secrets of both the human heart and the direction of social life; that society can be rationally and humanely reorganized according to principles that social science will uncover. It is with these men that the idea of "social engineering" begins and the seeds of Scientism are planted.
  • Information produced by counting may sometimes be valuable in helping a person get an idea, or, even more so, in providing support for an idea. But the mere activity of counting does not make science.
  • Nor does observing th_ings, though it is sometimes said that if one is empirical, one is scientific. To be empirical means to look at things before drawing conclusions. Everyone, therefore, is an empiricist, with the possible exception of paranoid schizophrenics.
  • What we may call science, then, is the quest to find the immutable and universal laws that govern processes, presuming that there are cause-and-effect relations among these processes. It follows that the quest to understand human behavior and feeling can in no sense except the most trivial be called science.
  • Scientists do strive to be empirical and where possible precise, but it is also basic to their enterprise that they maintain a high degree of objectivity, which means that they study things independently of what people think or do about them.
  • I do not say, incidentally, that the Oedipus complex and God do not exist. Nor do I say that to believe in them is harmful-far from it. I say only that, there being no tests that could, in principle, show them to be false, they fall outside the purview Scientism 151 of science, as do almost all theories that make up the content of "social science."
  • in the nineteenth centu~, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture.
  • This fact relieves the scientist of inquiring into their values and motivations and for this reason alone separates science from what is called social science, consigning the methodology of the latter (to quote Gunnar Myrdal) to the status of the "metaphysical and pseudo-objective." 3
  • The status of social-science methods is further reduced by the fact that there are almost no experiments that will reveal a social-science theory to be false.
  • et us further suppose that Milgram had found that 100 percent of his 1 subjecl:s did what they were told, with or without Hannah Arendt. And now let us suppose that I tell you a story of a Scientism 153 group of people who in some real situation refused to comply with the orders of a legitimate authority-let us say, the Danes who in the face of Nazi occupation helped nine thousand Jews escape to Sweden. Would you say to me that this cannot be so because Milgram' s study proves otherwise? Or would you say that this overturns Milgram's work? Perhaps you would say that the Danish response is not relevant, since the Danes did not regard the Nazi occupation as constituting legitimate autho!ity. But then, how would we explain the cooperative response to Nazi authority of the French, the Poles, and the Lithuanians? I think you would say none of these things, because Milgram' s experiment qoes not confirm or falsify any theory that might be said to postulate a law of human nature. His study-which, incidentally, I find both fascinating and terrifying-is not science. It is something else entirely.
  • Freud, could not imagine how the book could be judged exemplary: it was science or it was nothing. Well, of course, Freud was wrong. His work is exemplary-indeed, monumental-but scarcely anyone believes today that Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Weber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margaret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing-and Stanley Milgram was doing-is documenting the behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture.
  • the stories of social r~searchers are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature; that is to say, both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms. Their interpretations cannot be proved or disproved but will draw their appeal from the power of their language, the depth of their explanations, the relevance of their examples, and the credibility of their themes.
  • And all of this has, in both cases, an identifiable moral purpose.
  • The words "true" and "false" do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no natural laws from which they are derived. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researcher or writer.
  • Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors.
  • Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and conspiring, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed b~urgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanite driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomaniac redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B. F. Skinner gave us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology.
  • Why do such social researchers tell their stories? Essentially for didactic and moralistic purposes. These men and women tell their stories for the same reason the Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus told their stories (and for the same reason D. H. Lawrence told his).
  • Moreover, in their quest for objectivity, scientists proceed on the assumption that the objects they study are indifferent to the fact that they are being studied.
  • If, indeed, the price of civilization is repressed sexuality, it was not Sigmund Freud who discovered it. If the consciousness of people is formed by their material circumstances, it was not Marx who discovered it. If the medium is the message, it was not McLuhan who discovered it. They have merely retold ancient stories in a modem style.
  • Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.
  • Only in knowing ~omething of the reasons why they advocated education can we make sense of the means they suggest. But to understand their reas.ons we must also understand the narratives that governed their view of the world. By narrative, I mean a story of human history that gives meaning to the past, explains the present, and provides guidance for the future.
  • In Technopoly, it is not Scientism 159 enough to say, it is immoral and degrading to allow people to be homeless. You cannot get anywhere by asking a judge, a politician, or a bureaucrat to r~ad Les Miserables or Nana or, indeed, the New Testament. Y 01.i must show that statistics have produced data revealing the homeless to be unhappy and to be a drain on the economy. Neither Dostoevsky nor Freud, Dickens nor Weber, Twain nor Marx, is now a dispenser of legitimate knowledge. They are interesting; they are ''.worth reading"; they are artifacts of our past. But as for "truth," we must tum to "science."
  • In Technopoly, it is not enough for social research to rediscover ancient truths or to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people. In T echnopoly, it is an insult to call someone a "moralizer." Nor is it sufficient for social research to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity.
  • Such a program lacks the aura of certain knowledge that only science can provide. It becomes necessary, then, to transform psychology, sociology, and anthropology into "sciences," in which humanity itself becomes an object, much like plants, planets, or ice cubes.
  • That is why the commonplaces that people fear death and that children who come from stable families valuing scholarship will do well in school must be announced as "discoveries" of scientific enterprise. In this way, social resear~hers can see themselves, and can be seen, as scientists, researchers without bias or values, unburdened by mere opinion. In this way, social policies can be claimed to rest on objectively determined facts.
  • given the psychological, social, and material benefits that attach to the label "scientist," it is not hard to see why social researchers should find it hard to give it up.
  • Our social "s'cientists" have from the beginning been less tender of conscience, or less rigorous in their views of science, or perhaps just more confused about the questions their procedures can answer and those they cannot. In any case, they have not been squeamish about imputing to their "discoveries" and the rigor of their procedures the power to direct us in how we ought rightly to behave.
  • It is less easy to see why the rest of us have so willingly, even eagerly, cooperated in perpetuating the same illusion.
  • When the new technologies and techniques and spirit of men like Galileo, Newton, and Bacon laid the foundations of natural science, they also discredited the authority of earlier accounts of the physical world, as found, for example, in the great tale of Genesis. By calling into question the truth of such accounts in one realm, science undermined the whole edifice of belief in sacred stories and ultimately swept away with it the source to which most humans had looked for moral authority. It is not too much to say, I think, that the desacralized world has been searching for an alternative source of moral authority ever since.
  • We welcome them gladly, and the claim explicitly made or implied, because we need so desperately to find some source outside the frail and shaky judgments of mortals like ourselves to authorize our moral decisions and behavior. And outside of the authority of brute force, which can scarcely be called moral, we seem to have little left but the authority of procedures.
  • It is not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural scien\:e to the human world.
  • This, then, is what I mean by Scientism.
  • It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called "science" can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like "What is life, and when, and why?" "Why is death, and suffering?" 'What is right and wrong to do?" "What are good and evil ends?" "How ought we to think and feel and behave?
  • Science can tell us when a heart begins to beat, or movement begins, or what are the statistics on the survival of neonates of different gestational ages outside the womb. But science has no more authority than you do or I do to establish such criteria as the "true" definition of "life" or of human state or of personhood.
  • Social research can tell us how some people behave in the presence of what they believe to be legitimate authority. But it cannot tell us when authority is "legitimate" and when not, or how we must decide, or when it may be right or wrong to obey.
  • To ask of science, or expect of science, or accept unchallenged from science the answers to such questions is Scientism. And it is Technopoly's grand illusion.
  • In the institutional form it has taken in the United States, advertising is a symptom of a world-view 'that sees tradition as an obstacle to its claims. There can, of course, be no functioning sense of tradition without a measure of respect for symbols. Tradition is, in fact, nothing but the acknowledgment of the authority of symbols and the relevance of the narratives that gave birth to them. With the erosion of symbols there follows a loss of narrative, which is one of the most debilitating consequences of Technopoly' s power.
  • What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research, which meahs orienting business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable. The business of business becomes pseudo-therapy; the consumer, a patient reassl.,lred by psychodramas.
  • At the moment, 1t 1s considered necessary to introduce computers to the classroom, as it once was thought necessary to bring closed-circuit television and film to the classroom. To the question "Why should we do this?" the answer is: "To make learning more efficient and more interesting." Such an answer is considered entirely adequate, since in T ~chnopoly efficiency and interest need no justification. It is, therefore, usually not noticed that this answer does not address the question "What is learning for?"
  • What this means is that somewhere near the core of Technopoly is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to further the interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of consumers.
  • In the twentieth century, such metaphors and images have come largely from the pens of social historians and researchers. ·Think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erikson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Tuchman, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists.
  • social idea that must be advanced through education.
  • Confucius advocated teaching "the Way" because in tradition he saw the best hope for social order. As our first systematic fascist, Plato wished education to produce philosopher kings. Cicero argued that education must free the student from the tyranny of the present. Jefferson thought the purpose of education is to teach the young how to protect their liberties. Rousseau wished education to free the young from the unnatural constraints of a wicked and arbitrary social order. And among John Dewey's aims was to help the student function without certainty in a world of constant change and puzzling· ambiguities.
  • The point is that cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe. The alternative is to live without meaning, the ultimate negation of life itself.
  • It is also to the point to say that each narrative is given its form and its emotional texture through a cluster of symbols that call for respect and allegiance, even devotion.
  • by definition, there can be no education philosophy that does not address what learning is for. Confucius, Plato, Quintilian, Cicero, Comenius, Erasmus, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Russell, Montessori, Whitehead, and Dewey--each believed that there was some transcendent political, spiritual, or
  • The importance of the American Constitution is largely in its function as a symbol of the story of our origins. It is our political equivalent of Genesis. To mock it, to• ignore it, to circwnvent it is to declare the irrelevance of the story of the United States as a moral light unto the world. In like fashion, the Statue of Liberty is the key symbol of the story of America as the natural home of the teeming masses, from anywhere, yearning to be free.
  • There are those who believe--as did the great historian Arnold Toynbee-that without a comprehensive religious narrative at its center a culture must decline. Perhaps. There are, after all, other sources-mythology, politics, philosophy, and science; for example--but it is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent orjgin and power.
  • This does not mean that the mere existence of such a narrative ensures a culture's stability and strength. There are destructive narratives. A narrative provides meaning, not necessarily survival-as, for example, the story provided by Adolf Hitler to the German nation in t:he 1930s.
  • What story does American education wish to tell now? In a growing Technopoly, what do we believe education is for?
  • The answers are discouraging, and one of. them can be inferred from any television commercial urging the young to stay in school. The commercial will either imply or state explicitly that education will help the persevering student to get a ·good job. And that's it. Well, not quite. There is also the idea that we educate ourselves to compete with the Japanese or the Germans in an economic struggle to be number one.
  • Young men, for example, will learn how to make lay-up shots when they play basketball. To be able to make them is part of the The Great Symbol Drain 177 definition of what good players are. But they do not play basketball for that purpose. There is usually a broader, deeper, and more meaningful reason for wanting to play-to assert their manhood, to please their fathers, to be acceptable to their peers, even for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the game itself. What you have to do to be a success must be addressed only after you have found a reason to be successful.
  • Bloom's solution is that we go back to the basics of Western thought.
  • He wants us to teach our students what Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Saint Augustine, and other luminaries have had to say on the great ethical and epistemological questions. He believes that by acquainting themselves with great books our students will acquire a moral and intellectual foundation that will give meaning and texture to their lives.
  • Hirsch's encyclopedic list is not a solution but a description of the problem of information glut. It is therefore essentially incoherent. But it also confuses a consequence of education with a purpose. Hirsch attempted to answer the question "What is an educated person?" He left unanswered the question "What is an education for?"
  • Those who reject Bloom's idea have offered several arguments against it. The first is that such a purpose for education is elitist: the mass of students would not find the great story of
  • Western civilization inspiring, are too deeply alienated from the past to find it so, and would therefore have difficulty connecting the "best that has been thought and said" to their own struggles to find q1eaning in their lives.
  • A second argument, coming from what is called a "leftist" perspective, is even more discouraging. In a sense, it offers a definition of what is meant by elitism. It asserts that the "story of Western civilization" is a partial, biased, and even oppressive one. It is not the story of blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, women, homosexuals-of any people who are not white heterosexual males of Judea-Christian heritage. This claim denies that there is or can be a national culture, a narrative of organizing power and inspiring symbols which all citizens can identify with and draw sustenance from. If this is true, it means nothing less than that our national symbols have been drained of their power to unite, and that education must become a tribal affair; that is, each subculture must find its own story and symbols, and use them as the moral basis of education.
  • nto this void comes the Technopoly story, with its emphasis on progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without cost. The T echnopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that· suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.
  • It answers Bloom by saying that the story of Western civilization is irrelevant; it answers the political left by saying there is indeed a common culture whose name is T echnopoly and whose key symbol is now the computer, toward which there must be neither irreverence nor blasphemy. It even answers Hirsch by saying that there are items on his list that, if thought about too deeply and taken too seriously, will interfere with the progress of technology.
Javier E

Technopoly-Chs. 4.5--The Broken Defenses - 0 views

expert technocracy technopoly information meaning bureaucracy history institutions Postman book notes

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • r ~~~-~st of us. There is almo-~t-n~ ~ wheth;~~ct~~l or imag'l ined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would [ make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.
  • The belief system of a tool-using culture is rather like a brand-new deck of cards. Whether it is a culture of technological simplicity or sophistication, there always exists a more or less comprehensive, ordered world-view, resting on a set of metaphysical or theological assumptions. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design of the universe, but they have no doubt that there is such a design, and their priests and shamans are well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not wholly rational, at least coherent.
  • From the early seventeenth century, when Western culture u~ertook to reorganize itself to accommodate the printing press, until the mid-nineteenth century, no significant technologies were introduced that altered l-he form, volume, or speed of . in~. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press.
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  • That is eseecial1y the case with technical facts.
  • as incomprehensible problems mount, as the con- ~ cept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the T echnopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information. It is like the joke about the man who , complains that the food he is being served in a restaurant is \ inedibleand also that the_ portions are too small
  • The faith of those who believed in Progress was based on the assumption that one could discern a purpose to the human enterprise, even without the theological scaffolding that supported the Christian edifice of belief. Science and technology were the chief instruments of Progress, and · i.Lac_cumulation of reliable in orma on a out nature _1b_n, would bring ignorance, superstition, and suffering to an end.
  • In T ~chnopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quesUo "accesTinformation.
  • But the genie that came out of the bottle proclaiming that information was the new god of culture was a deceiver. It solved the problez:n of information scarcity, the disadvantages o_f wh~s~ious. But it gave no wami g_ahout the dan_gers of information7rttn,
  • !:ion of what is called a_ curriculum was a logical step toward 1./ organizing, limiting, and discriminating among available sources of information. Schools became technocracy's first secular bureaucracies, structures for legitimizing some parts of the flow of infgrmatiQD and di"s.ci.e.diling other earts. School;;ere, in short, a ~eans of governing the ecology of information.
  • James Beniger's The <;antral Revolution, which is among the three or four most important books we have on the lb\b'ect of the relation of informe;ition to culture. In the next chapter, I have relied to a considerable degree on The Control Revolution in my discussion of the breakdown of the control mechanisms,
  • most of the methods by which technocracies. have hoped to keep information from running amok are now dysfunctional. Indeed, one_ ~_i!)!_.Q.L.de£ining_a.I..em Q~ oly is to say that its inf_o_fmation immu is inoperable.
  • Very early ~n, tt..w.as..understood that the printed book had er ate.cl-a ir::ifo · · on crisis and that . =somet ing needed to be done to aintain a measure of control.
  • it is why in _a TechnoE,.oly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence.
  • In - 1480, before the informati9n explosion, there were thirty-four schools in all of England. By 1660, there were 444, one school for every twelve square miles.
  • There were several reasons for the rapid growth of the common school, but none was more obvious than that it was a necessary response to the anxiefies and confusion aroused by information on the loose. The inven-
  • The milieu in which T echnopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., inf~rmation appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds; and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.
  • Abetted ~~orm of ed~~on that in itself has been em _lie~any co~e~ent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, p·olitical, historical, mefaphys1cal, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief.
  • It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a height-
  • ened respect for reason and privacy. It developed new forms of economic activity, such as mechanized production and corporate capitalism, and even gave articulate expression to the possibilities of a humane socialism.
  • There is not a single line written by Jefferson, Adams, Paine, Hamilton, or Franklin that does not take for granted that when information is made available to citizens they are capable of managing it. This is not to say that the Founding Fathers believed information could not be false, misleading, or irrelevant. But they believed that the marketplace of infonpation and ideas was sufficiently ordered so that citizens could make sense of what they read and heard and, through reason, judge ·its μsefulness to their lives. Jefferson's proposals for education, Paine'~ arguments for self-governance, Franklin's arrangements for community affairs assume coherent, commonly shared principles.that allow us to debate such questions as: What are the responsibilities of citizens? What is the nature of education? What constitutes human progress? What are the limitations of social structures?
  • New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books.
  • It is no wonder that the eighteenth century gave us our standard of excellence in the use of reason, as exemplified in the work of Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Vico, Edward Gibbon, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Thomas Paine.
  • I weight the list with America's "Founding Fathers" because technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence irLpr111t. Paine's Common Sense and The Rights of Man, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers were written and printed efforts to make the American experiment appear reasonable to the people, which to the eighteenth-century mind was both necessary and sufficient. To any people whose politics were the politics of the printed page, as Tocqueville said of America, reason and printr ing were inseparable.
  • The presumed close connection among information, reason, and usefulness began to lose its_ legitimacy toward the midnineteenth century with the invention of the telegraph. Prior to the telegraph, information could be moved only as fa~. as a train could travel: al5out thirty-five miles per hour. Prior to the telegraph, information was sought as part of the process of understanding and solvin articular roblems. Prior to the telegraph, informal-ion tended to be of local interest.
  • First Amendment to the United States Constitution stands as a monument to the ideolo_g~~ print. It says: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." In these forty-five words we may find the fundamental values of the literate, reasoning_giind as fostered by the print revolution: a belief in privacy, individuality, intellectual freedom, open criticism, and ~.' adio .
  • telegraphy created the idea of context-free . 1 informatig_n::= that fs'~the idea that the value of information need ;;~t be ti~ to any function it might serve in social and political
  • decision-making and action. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a "thing" that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning. 2
  • a new definition qf information came into being. Here was information that rejected the necessit ·of interco~nectedness, proceeded without conte~rgued for instancy against historic continuity, and offere · ascination· in place of corn !exit and cohe ence.
  • The potential of the telegraph to transform information into a commodity might never have been realized except for its artnershi with the enny ress, which was the first institution to grasp the significance of the annihilation of space and the saleability of irrelevant information.
  • the fourth stage of the information revolution occurred, broadcasting. And then the fifth, computer technology. Each of these brought with it new forms of information, unpre~edented amounts of it, and increased speeds
  • photography was invented at approximately the same time a~phy, and initiated the Ehi:rd stage of the information revolution. Daniel Boorstin has called it "the graphic revolution," bec~use the photograph and other ico~ogr~phs br~ on a massive intrusion of ima es into the symbolic environment:
  • The new imagery, with photography at its forefront, did not merely function as a supplement to language but tended to replace it as our dominant: means for construing, understanding~d testing reaj.ity.
  • ~ the beginning of the seventeenth century, an entirely new information environment had been created by_12rint
  • It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon ex~sed it, has been g~ by the idea of technological progress.
  • The aim is no_t to reduZe ignorance, r . supersti ion, and s ering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies.
  • echnopoly is a state of cttlture., It is also a st~te of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in te0,~logy, finds · .atisf~tions in technolo , and takes its orders from technolog-¥,
  • We proceed under ( the. assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from infori mation glut, information without meaning, information without · .... control mechanisms.
  • Those who feel most comfortable in Technop.oJy are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity's supreme achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved. They also believe that information is an unmixed blessing, which through its continued and uncontrolled production and dissemination offers increased freedom, creativity, and peace of mind.
  • Th_e relationship between information and the mechanisms ( for its control is fairly simple ~ec · ·ology increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, \ control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mech\ anisms ~re needed to cope with new information. When addi1 tional control mechanisms are themselves technical, they in tum I further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquillity and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.
  • any decline in the force of i~~~ti'?n_s makes people vulnerable to information chaos. 1 To say that life is destabilized by weakened institutions is merely to say that information loses its use and therefore becomes a source of confu;~n rather than coherence.
  • T echnop_oly, then, is to say it is what h~pens to society when the defe~ainst informati;~ glut have broken down.
  • Soci~finstitufions sometimes do their work simply by denying people access to information, but principally by directing how much weight and, therefore, value one must give to information. Social institutions are concerned with the meaning of information and can be quite rigorous in enforcing standards of admission.
  • H is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure
  • although legal theory has been taxed to the limit by new information from diverse sources-biology, psychology, and sociology, among themthe rules governing relevance have remained fairly stable. This may account for Americans' overuse of the co~~-~~ as a mean; of finding cohe_!Til.<iAncl__s.tability. As other institutions become I unusabl~ mechanisms for the control of wanton information, the courts stand as a final arbiter of truth.
  • the school as a mechanism for information control. What its standards are can usually be found in, a curriculum or, with even more clarity, in a course catalogue. A college catalogue lists courses, subjects, and fields of study that, taken together, amount to a certified statement of what a serious student ought to think about.
  • The Republican Party represented the interests of the rich, who, by definition, had no concern for us.
  • More to the point, in what is omitted from a catalogue, we may learn what a serious student ought not to think about. A college catalogue, in other words, is a formal description of an information management program; it defines and categorizes knowledge, and in so doing systematically excludes, demeans, labels as trivial-i~ a word, disregards certain kinds of information.
  • In the West, the family as an institution for the management of nonbiological information began with the ascendance of print. As books on every conceivable subject become available, parent_~ were forced int°._the roles of guard-· ians'... protectors, nurturers, and arbiters of taste and rectitude. \ Their function was to define what it means to be a child by \ excluding from the family's domain information that would 1. undermine its purpose.
  • all_ theories are oversimplifications, or at least lead to oversimplification. The rule of law is an oversimplification. A curriculum is an oversimplification. So is a family's conception of a child. T~~t is the funt!ion _o._Ltheories-_ to o~~~~ip:lp}}_fy, and thus to assist believers in_ organiziDg, weighting, _ _an~_ excluding information. Therein lies the power of theories.
  • That the family can no longer do this is, I believe, obvious to everyone.
  • Th~-ir weakness is that precisely because they oversimplify, they are vulnerable to attack by new information. When there is too much information to _$_ustaJ12 -~,:Z}I theory, infoLm_a_ti.on._Q.~S<?~es essentially mea11iD_g!~s
  • The political party is another.
  • As a young man growing up in a Democratic-household, I was provided with clear instructions on what value to assign to political events and commentary.
  • The most imposing institutions for the control of information are religio!1 ~nd the st~J:f, .. They do their work in a somewhat more abstract way than do courts, schools, families, or political parties. The_y m?n~g~__Ji;1formation throug~ creation of mytJ:is and stories that express theories about funq1m1entaf question_s_:_ __ 10:_hy are we here, where have we come from, and where are we headed?
  • They followed logically from theory, which was, as I remember it, as follows: Because people need protection, they must align themselves with a political organization. The Democratic Party was entitled to our loyalty because it represented the social and economic interests of the working class, of which our family, relatives, and neighbors were members
  • the Bible also served as an information control mechanism, especially in the moral domain. The Bible gives manifold
  • any educational institution, if it is to function well in the mana~~nt of information, must have a theory about its purpose and meaning-'. .!n'!::!Sl. have the means to give clear expression to its_ theory, and must do so, to a large extent, by excluding information.
  • instructions on what one must do and must not do, as well as guidance on what language to avoid (on pain of committing blasphemy), what ideas to avoid (on pain of committing heresy), what symbols to avoid (on pain of committing idolatry). Necessarily but perhaps._ unfortunately, the Bible also explained how the world came into being in such literal detail that it could not accommodate new information produced by the telescope and subsequent technologies.
  • in observing God's laws, and the detailed requirements of their enactment, believers receive guidance about what books they should not read, about what plays and films they should not see, about what music they should not hear, about what subjects their children should not study, and so on. For strict fundamentalists of the Bible, the theory and what follows from it seal them off from unwanted information, and in that way their actions are invested with meaning, clarity, and, they believe, moral authority.
  • Those who reject the Bible's theory and who believe, let us say, in the theory of Science are also protected from unwanted information. Their theory, for example, instructs them to disregard information about astrology, dianetics, and creationism, which they usually label as medieval superstition or subjective opinion.
  • Their theory fails to give any guidance about moral information and, by definition, gives little weight to information that falls outside the constraints of science. Undeniably, fewer and fewer people are bound in any serious way to Biblical or other religious traditions as a source of compelling attention and authority, the result of which is that they make no f!lOral decisions, onl~_pradical ones. _This is still another way of defining Technopoly. The term is aptly used for a _culture whose av.~ilable theories do not offer guidance about what is acceptable informaHon in the moral domain.
  • thought-world that functions not only without a transcendent; narrative to provide moral underpinnings but also without strong social institutions to control the flood of information produced by technology.
  • In the r case of the United States, the great eighteenth-century revolution was not indifferent to commodity capitalism but was nonetheless infused with profound moral content. The U~!ed States was not merely an experiment in a new form of governance; it wai1nefu1fillmenl-oFGocf s plan. True, Adams, Jeffe;son, and Painere1ected-fne supernatural elements in the Bible,· but they never doubted that their experiment had the imprimatur of \ Providence. People were to be free but for a eurp_9se. Their [ God~giv_e~ig[ifs im li~_? obli ations and responsibilities, not L onfytoGod but to other nations, to which the new republic would be a guide and a showcase of what is possible-w~en reason and spirituality commingle.
  • American Technopoly must rel,y, to an obsessive extent, on technica( ~ethods to control the flow of information. Three such means merit speci attention.
  • The first is bureaucracy, which James Beniger in The Control © Revolution ra°i1l~as atoremost among all technological solutions to the crisis of control."
  • It is an open question whether or not "liberal democracy" in its present form can provide a thought-world of sufficient moral substance to sustain meaningful lives.
  • Vaclav Havel, then newly elected as president of Czechoslovakia, posed in an address to the U.S. Congress. "We still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics," he said. "We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions-if they are to be moral-is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success." What Havel is saying is that it is not enough for his nation to liberate itself from one flawed theory; it is necessary to find another, and he worries that Technopoly provides no answer.
  • Francis Fukuyama is wrong. There is another ideological conflict to be fought-between "liberal democracy" as conceived in the eighteenth century, with all its transcendent moral underpinnings, and T echnopoly, a twentieth-century
  • in at- ~ tempting to make the most rational use of information, bureaucracy ignores all information and ideas that do not contribute to efficiency
  • bureaucracy has no intellectual, I political, or moral theory--,--except for its implicit assumption that efficiency is the principal aim of all social institutions and that other goals are essentially less worthy, if not irrelevant. That is why John Stuart Mill thought bureaucracy a "tyranny" and C. S. Lewis identified it with Hell.
  • in principle a bureaucracy is simply a coordinated series of techniques for reducing the amount of information that requires processing.
  • The transformation of bureaucracy from a set of techniques·> designecfto serve social ~tutions to an auton-;;mous metainstitution that largely serves itself came as a result of several developments in the mid-andlate-nineteenth century: rapid ../ industrial growth, improvements in transportation and commu- ·✓ nication, the extension of government into ever-larger realms of V public and business affairs, the increasing centralization of gov- v ernmental structures.
  • extent that the decision will affect the efficient operations of the J bureaucracy, and takes no responsibility for its human consequences.
  • Along the way, it ceased to be merely a servant of social institutions an
  • became ~ their master. Bureaucracy now not only solves problems but creates them. More important, it defines what our problems are---and they arec!.lways, in the bureaucra!!c view, problems of l . , efficiency.
  • ex~r- (J} tis~ is a second important technical means by which Technopoly s~s furiously to control information.
  • the expert in Techno oly has two characteristics that distinguish im or her from experts of the {i) past. First, Technopoly's experts tend to be ignorant about any matter not directly related to their specialized area.
  • T echnopoly' s experts claim dominion not only_gyer technical matters but also over so@,--12~ichological. and moral · aff~irs.
  • "bureaucrat" has come to mean a person who \ by training, commitment, and even temperament is indifferent ~ ). to both the content and the fatality of a human problem. Th~ \ 'bureaucrat considers the implications of a decision only to the
  • Technical machinery is essential to both the bureaucrat and c:/ the expert, and m~ be regarded as a third mechanism of information control.
  • I have in mind "softer" technologies such as IQ tests, SATs, standardized forms, taxonomies, and opinion polls. Some of these I discuss in detail in chapter eight, "Invisible T echnologies," but I mention them here because their role in reducing the types and quantity of information admitted to a system often goes unnoticed, and therefore their role in redefining traditional concepl::s also· goes unnoticed. There is, for example, no test that can measure a person's intelligenc
  • Th_~-role of t!;_e ~xpert is to concentrate o_l}_one_ .H~ld of knowledge, sift through all that is available, eliminate that -.--:-: __ __:~---------which has no bearing on a problem, and use what is left !Q. !!§Sist in solving a probl~.
  • the expert relies on our believing in the reality of technical machinery, which means we will reify the answers generated by the machinery. We come to believe that our score is our intelligence,· or our capacity for creativity or love or pain. We come to believe that the results of opinion polls are what people believe, as if our beliefs can be encapsulated in such sentences as "I approve" and "I disapprove."
  • it is disas~ \ trou~p!ie~e_~ved by technical means and where efficiency is usually irrelevant, such as in education, law, fa~iiy life, and p·r;blems of p~;;~~al maladjustment.
  • perceptions and judgment declines, bureaucracies, expertise, and technical machinery become the principal means by which, T echnopoly hopes to control information and thereby provide itself with intelligibility and order. The rest of this book tells the · story of why this cannot work, and of the pain and stupidity that are the consequences.
  • Institutions ca~~aked~cisions on the basis of scores and. sfatistics, and. there certainly may be occasions where there is no reasonable alternative. But unless such decisions are made with profound skepticism-that is, acknowledged as being made for administrative convenience-they are delusionary.
  • In Technopoly, the \. delusion is sanctified by our granting inordinate prestige to experts who are armed with sophisticated technical machinery. Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all exeeds are invested with the charisma of priestliness
  • The god they serve does not speak \ of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin "social deviance," which is a statistical concept, and they call evil "psychopathology," which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.
  • As the power of traditional social institutions to organize
Javier E

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

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

ai threat faction technology research language

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

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

www.theatlantic.com/...672371

language ai writing humanities STEM technology

shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • 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

Lawsuit Against Fox Is Shaping Up to Be a Major First Amendment Case - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-lawsuit-first-amendment.html

fox lawsuit freedom truth legal history

shared by Javier E on 15 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • The case threatens a huge financial and reputational blow to Fox, by far the most powerful conservative media company in the country. But legal scholars say it also has the potential to deliver a powerful verdict on the kind of pervasive and pernicious falsehoods — and the people who spread them — that are undermining the country’s faith in democracy.
  • “We’re litigating history in a way: What is historical truth?” said Lee Levine, a noted First Amendment lawyer
  • “Here you’re taking very recent current events and going through a process which, at the end, is potentially going to declare what the correct version of history is.”
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  • The case has caused palpable unease at the Fox News Channel, said several people there,
  • Dominion is trying to build a case that aims straight at the top of the Fox media empire and the Murdochs. In court filings and depositions, Dominion lawyers have laid out how they plan to show that senior Fox executives hatched a plan after the election to lure back viewers who had switched to rival hard-right networks, which were initially more sympathetic than Fox was to Mr. Trump’s voter-fraud claims.
  • Libel law doesn’t protect lies. But it does leave room for the media to cover newsworthy figures who tell them. And Fox is arguing, in part, that’s what shields it from liability.
  • “The harm to Dominion from the lies told by Fox is unprecedented and irreparable because of how fervently millions of people believed them — and continue to believe them,”
  • For Dominion to convince a jury that Fox should be held liable for defamation and pay damages, it has to clear an extremely high legal bar known as the “actual malice” standard. Dominion must show either that people inside Fox knew what hosts and guests were saying about the election technology company was false, or that they effectively ignored information proving that the statements in question were wrong — which is known in legal terms as displaying a reckless disregard for the truth.
  • Dominion’s lawyers have focused some of their questioning in depositions on the decision-making hierarchy at Fox News, according to one person with direct knowledge of the case, showing a particular interest in what happened on election night inside the network in the hours after it projected Mr. Trump would lose Arizona.
  • Fox has also been searching for evidence that could, in effect, prove the Dominion conspiracy theories weren’t really conspiracy theories. Behind the scenes, Fox’s lawyers have pursued documents that would support numerous unfounded claims about Dominion, including its supposed connections to Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan dictator who died in 2013, and software features that were ostensibly designed to make vote manipulation easier.
  • In one interview, Mr. Giuliani falsely claimed that Dominion was owned by a Venezuelan company with close ties to Mr. Chavez, and that it was formed “to fix elections.” (Dominion was founded in Canada in 2002 by a man who wanted to make it easier for blind people to vote.)
  • A spokesman for Dominion declined to comment. In its initial complaint, the company’s lawyers wrote that “The truth matters,” adding, “Lies have consequences.”
  • he hurdle Dominion must clear is whether it can persuade a jury to believe that people at Fox knew they were spreading lies.“Disseminating ‘The Big Lie’ isn’t enough,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor and First Amendment scholar at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. “It has to be a knowing lie.”
Javier E

Roger Scruton and the Fascists Who Love Him - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...r-scruton-and-the-fascists-who

conservatism liberalism Scruton responsibility fascism

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • 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.
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