Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

YouTube is the new television, with more than 1.5 billion users, and videos the site recommends have the power to influence viewpoints around the world.

Those recommendations often present divisive, misleading or false content despite changes the site has recently made to highlight more-neutral fare, a Wall Street Journal investigation found.

Behind that growth is an algorithm that creates personalized playlists. YouTube says these recommendations drive more than 70% of its viewing time, making the algorithm among the single biggest deciders of what people watch.

ared Daimond’s seminal work Guns, Germs, and Steel has many flaws, but it provides some useful anecdotes about how narrative and consciousness shapes human organization progresses

Past critical transformations of thought can help us see how we need to transform ourselves now in order to survive the future.

something both ancient and immediate: the way we define who is in our tribe plays a critical role in what kind of social organization we can build and maintain

a headline changes the way people read an article and the way they remember it. The headline frames the rest of the experience.

Psychologists have long known that first impressions really do matter—what we see, hear, feel, or experience in our first encounter with something colors how we process the rest of it. Articles are no exception.

By drawing attention to certain details or facts, a headline can affect what existing knowledge is activated in your head.

Is there a voting system that can be relied on to distill the will of a group of people? Arrow’s impossibility theorem regarding voting and combining preferences put him in the rarefied group of economists with theorems named after them.

Drawing upon mathematical logic, it shows that there is no possible voting scheme that can consistently and sensibly reflect the preferences of a set of individuals with diverse views

Any scheme that could ever be invented will be at risk of perverse outcomes, where, for example, the choice between options A and B is affected by the presence or absence of option C; or where a vote switch by one person toward option A makes it less likely to prevail.

YouTube said on Sunday that it was investigating the simmering complaints by some users that its family-friendly “restricted mode” wrongly filters out some lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender videos.

In a statement, YouTube said that many videos featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender content were unaffected by the filter, an optional parental-control setting, and that it only targeted those that discussed sensitive topics such as politics, health and sexuality.

In a statement, YouTube described restricted mode as “an optional feature used by a very small subset of users who want to have a more limited YouTube experience.”

During the first week in May, they received text messages or emails from schools that had accepted them but had not heard back. The messages all hinted at a particular question: Might a larger discount prompt you to come here after all?

These invitations raise ethical questions in higher education: Schools are not supposed to dangle discounts in front of people who have committed to other institutions.

“In just trying to talk about how competitive and cutthroat this business is right now, this has brought it up to another level that I have never seen before,”

WASHINGTON — President Trump announced on Thursday that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, weakening efforts to combat global warming and embracing isolationist voices in his White House who argued that the agreement was a pernicious threat to the economy and American sovereignty.

drawing support from members of his Republican Party but widespread condemnation from political leaders, business executives and environmentalists around the globe.

. The Paris agreement was intended to bind the world community into battling rising temperatures in concert, and the departure of the Earth’s second-largest polluter is a major blow.

Sometimes, it occurs when a person suffers a nearly fatal accident or life-threatening situation. In others, they are born with a developmental disorder, such as autism.

This is known as savant syndrome. Of course, it’s exceedingly rare.

Upon entering the bathroom and turning on the faucet, he saw “lines emanating out perpendicularly from the flow.” He couldn’t believe it.

Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information, just as amateurs do.

just like with classical music, we do not appraise wine in the way that we expect. 

Priceonomics revisited this seemingly damning research: the lack of correlation between wine enjoyment and price in blind tastings, the oenology students tricked by red food dye into describing a white wine like a red, a distribution of medals at tastings equivalent to what one would expect from pure chance, the grand crus described like cheap wines and vice-versa when the bottles are switched.

Not only have Buddhist thinkers for millenniums been making very much the kinds of claims that Western philosophers and psychologists make — many of these claims are looking good in light of modern Western thought.

In fact, in some cases Buddhist thought anticipated Western thought, grasping things about the human mind, and its habitual misperception of reality, that modern psychology is only now coming to appreciate.

“Things exist but they are not real.” I agree with Gopnik that this sentence seems a bit hard to unpack. But if you go look at the book it is taken from, you’ll find that the author himself, Mu Soeng, does a good job of unpacking it.

David Broockman, a Stanford University assistant professor, and Joshua Kalla, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed data from 49 field experiments—state, local, and federal campaigns that let political scientists access their data to evaluate their methods

For every flyer stuck in a mailbox, every door knocked by an earnest volunteer, and every candidate message left on an answering machine, there was no measurable change in voting outcomes. Even early outreach efforts, which are somewhat more successful at persuading voters, tend to fade from memory by Election Day.

Broockman and Kalla also estimated that the effect of television and online ads is zero, although only a small portion of their data speaks directly to that point.

The trouble with reactionary politics is that it is fundamentally a feeling, an impulse, a reflex. It’s not a workable program. You can see that in the word itself: it’s a reaction, an emotional response to change. Sure, it can include valuable insights into past mistakes, but it can’t undo them, without massive disruption

I mention this as a way to see more clearly why the right in Britain and America is either unraveling quickly into chaos, or about to inflict probably irreparable damage on a massive scale to their respective countries. Brexit and Trump are the history of Thatcher and Reagan repeating as dangerous farce, a confident, intelligent conservatism reduced to nihilist, mindless reactionism.

But it’s the impossible reactionary agenda that is the core problem. And the reason we have a president increasingly isolated, ever more deranged, legislatively impotent, diplomatically catastrophic, and constitutionally dangerous, is not just because he is a fucking moron requiring an adult day-care center to avoid catastrophe daily.

over 13 years, he has published a series of anthologies—of the contemporary American essay, of the world essay, and now of the historical American essay—that misrepresents what the essay is and does, that falsifies its history, and that contains, among its numerous selections, very little one would reasonably classify within the genre. And all of this to wide attention and substantial acclaim

D’Agata’s rationale for his “new history,” to the extent that one can piece it together from the headnotes that preface each selection, goes something like this. The conventional essay, nonfiction as it is, is nothing more than a delivery system for facts. The genre, as a consequence, has suffered from a chronic lack of critical esteem, and thus of popular attention. The true essay, however, deals not in knowing but in “unknowing”: in uncertainty, imagination, rumination; in wandering and wondering; in openness and inconclusion

Every piece of this is false in one way or another.

Wall Street has long been likened to a casino. Robinhood, an investment app that just filed plans for an initial public offering, makes the comparison more apt than ever.

Similarly, Robinhood’s slick and easy-to-use app resembles a thrill-inducing video game rather than a sober investment tool

Using gamelike features to influence real-life actions can be beneficial, such as when a health app uses rewards and rankings to encourage people to move more or eat healthier food. But there’s a dark side too, and so-called gamification can lead people to forget the real-world consequences of their decisions.

Your Pandemic Tech Habits

Therapy from afar. Books on the iPad. Friends via screens. Here’s the tech that’s sustained us.

A rock musician and a chamber orchestra violinist discovered apps that allowed them to play music with others far away. A woman in Toronto says she’s learned how to take courses and order groceries online, but she longs to be with her great-grandsons.

I Don’t Want Another Family to Lose a Child the Way We Did

The thought of suicide is terrifying, but we have to make talking about it a part of everyday life.

I always felt so blessed watching my boy-girl twins; even as teenagers they would walk arm in arm down the street, chatting and laughing together.

Nearly anywhere you go, it’s easy to find children and adults alike transfixed by their phones, and while texting and social media certainly claim a big part of that attention, increasingly it’s gaming that’s drawing us in.

Last year, the WHO voted to include gaming disorder as an official condition in the draft version of its latest International Classification of Diseases (ICD); the vote finalizes that decision. The WHO’s ICD, currently in its 11th edition, serves as the international standard for diagnosing and treating health conditions.

According to the WHO experts who analyzed studies on gaming behavior, people’s use of gaming is different from their use of the internet, social media, online gambling and online shopping. There isn’t sufficient data, they say, to indicate that people’s reliance on those is a “behavioral addiction” the way gaming can be.

Excellence Runs in the Family. Her Novel’s Heroine Wants Something Else

Kaitlyn Greenidge and her sisters achieved success in their respective fields

In her historical novel, “Libertie,” she focuses on a Black woman who doesn’t yearn to be the first or only one of anything.

Over 3 Million People Took This Course on Happiness. Here’s What Some Learned.

It may seem simple, but it bears repeating: sleep, gratitude and helping other people.

The Yale happiness class, formally known as Psyc 157: Psychology and the Good Life, is one of the most popular classes to be offered in the university’s 320-year history

Confirmation bias occurs when an individual looks for and uses the information to support their own ideas or beliefs. It also means that information not supporting their ideas or beliefs is disregarded. Confirmation bias often happens when we want certain ideas to be true. This leads individuals to stop gathering information when the retrieved evidence confirms their own viewpoints, which can lead to preconceived opinions (prejudices) that are not based on reason or factual knowledge. Individuals then pick out the bits of information that confirm their prejudices. Confirmation bias has a long history. In 1620, Francis Bacon described confirmation bias as: “Once a man’s understanding has settled on something (either because it is an accepted belief or because it pleases him), it draws everything else also to support and agree with it. And if it encounters a larger number of more powerful countervailing examples, it either fails to notice them, or disregards them, or makes fine distinctions to dismiss and reject them, and all this with much dangerous prejudice, to preserve the authority of its first Conceptions.” (Bacon 1620)

The impact of confirmation bias can be at the level of the individual all the way up to institution level. DuBroff showed that confirmation bias influenced expert guidelines on cholesterol and was highly prevalent when conflicts of interests were present (DuBroff 2017). He found that confirmation bias occurred due to a failure to incorporate evidence, or through misrepresentation of the evidence, which had the potential  to skew guideline recommendations