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criscimagnael

3 Reasons Why Smart Technology Is Actually Making Us Less Productive | Inc.com - 0 views

www.inc.com/...making-us-less-productive.html

shared by criscimagnael on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • Here's the thing though--as a parent, I probably shouldn't have to depend on a $400 piece of smart technology to remind me to, you know, show up.Except, unfortunately, I do.
  • The downside is that I've noticed that as our dependence on technology increases, our actual productivity decreases. I think technology is really good at making it easier to stay busy, but busy isn't the same thing as productive.
  • 1. Notifications are basically technology's drug. 
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  • Except, all I do all day is tap icons with red dots like a digital version of whack-a-mole, trying to get rid of all the notifications. Research has shown that this constant stimulation on our devices raises the dopamine in our brains, which basically means they are like drugs. 
  • It's hard to be productive when you stop to look at your phone every 10-12 minutes.
  • It's true, technology has allowed us to do some pretty incredible things. I can't argue with the fact that it has allowed us to solve problems that were previously insurmountable, but at a very basic level, all of this smart technology has made us dumb. Mostly, I think it's because of how much we now depend on it for even the most basic things. 
  • Here's the thing. If you don't use a muscle, after a while you'll lose it.  Sure, it's not technically a muscle, but if you stop using your brain because your watch tells you when it's time to go to a meeting, or stand up, or use the bathroom-- can we at least agree you're not getting any smarter? The more we hand over to machines what makes us unique as humans--our ability to think, process, and make decisions--the less we stretch and grow our capacity to do those things. 
  • Have you ever sat in a restaurant and looked around? Of course not, the last time you were in a restaurant you were busy looking at your phone. But if you had, you would have seen a bunch of other people who were doing the same thing. A room full of people, all sitting at tables with presumably other people they know and have some level of affection for, staring at an illuminated screen. 
  • But it has also increased the space in our relationships to the point where we don't talk, we Slack.
  • igital conversations are very different than real-world conversations. When smart technology helps remove barriers to communication, that's a good thing. But when we substitute technology for relationships and real conversations, it has real-world consequences.
Javier E

Opinion | What College Students Need Is a Taste of the Monk's Life - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ental-health-smart-phones.html

ultimate question cognitive resilience courses technology dependence purpose mission monastery distraction education learning knowledge

shared by Javier E on 26 May 23 - No Cached
  • When she registered last fall for the seminar known around campus as the monk class, she wasn’t sure what to expect.
  • “You give up technology, and you can’t talk for a month,” Ms. Rodriguez told me. “That’s all I’d heard. I didn’t know why.” What she found was a course that challenges students to rethink the purpose of education, especially at a time when machine learning is getting way more press than the human kind.
  • Each week, students would read about a different monastic tradition and adopt some of its practices. Later in the semester, they would observe a one-month vow of silence (except for discussions during Living Deliberately) and fast from technology, handing over their phones to him.
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  • Yes, he knew they had other classes, jobs and extracurriculars; they could make arrangements to do that work silently and without a computer.
  • The class eased into the vow of silence, first restricting speech to 100 words a day. Other rules began on Day 1: no jewelry or makeup in class. Men and women sat separately and wore different “habits”: white shirts for the men, women in black. (Nonbinary and transgender students sat with the gender of their choice.)
  • Dr. McDaniel discouraged them from sharing personal information; they should get to know one another only through ideas. “He gave us new names, based on our birth time and day, using a Thai birth chart,”
  • “We were practicing living a monastic life. We had to wake up at 5 a.m. and journal every 30 minutes.”
  • If you tried to cruise to a C, you missed the point: “I realized the only way for me to get the most out of this class was to experience it all,” she said. (She got Dr. McDaniel’s permission to break her vow of silence in order to talk to patients during her clinical rotation.)
  • Dr. McDaniel also teaches a course called Existential Despair. Students meet once a week from 5 p.m. to midnight in a building with comfy couches, turn over their phones and curl up to read an assigned novel (cover to cover) in one sitting — books like James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” and José Saramago’s “Blindness.” Then they stay up late discussing it.
  • The course is not about hope, overcoming things, heroic stories,” Dr. McDaniel said. Many of the books “start sad. In the middle they’re sad. They stay sad. I’m not concerned with their 20-year-old self. I’m worried about them at my age, dealing with breast cancer, their dad dying, their child being an addict, a career that never worked out — so when they’re dealing with the bigger things in life, they know they’re not alone.”
  • Both courses have long wait lists. Students are hungry for a low-tech, introspective experience —
  • Research suggests that underprivileged young people have far fewer opportunities to think for unbroken stretches of time, so they may need even more space in college to develop what social scientists call cognitive endurance.
  • Yet the most visible higher ed trends are moving in the other direction
  • Rather than ban phones and laptops from class, some professors are brainstorming ways to embrace students’ tech addictions with class Facebook and Instagram accounts, audience response apps — and perhaps even including the friends and relatives whom students text during class as virtual participants in class discussion.
  • Then there’s that other unwelcome classroom visitor: artificial intelligence.
  • stop worrying and love the bot by designing assignments that “help students develop their prompting skills” or “use ChatGPT to generate a first draft,” according to a tip sheet produced by the Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington University in St. Louis.
  • It’s not at all clear that we want a future dominated by A.I.’s amoral, Cheez Whiz version of human thought
  • It is abundantly clear that texting, tagging and chatbotting are making students miserable right now.
  • One recent national survey found that 60 percent of American college students reported the symptoms of at least one mental health problem and that 15 percent said they were considering suicide
  • A recent meta-analysis of 36 studies of college students’ mental health found a significant correlation between longer screen time and higher risk of anxiety and depression
  • And while social media can sometimes help suffering students connect with peers, research on teenagers and college students suggests that overall, the support of a virtual community cannot compensate for the vortex of gossip, bullying and Instagram posturing that is bound to rot any normal person’s self-esteem.
  • We need an intervention: maybe not a vow of silence but a bold move to put the screens, the pinging notifications and creepy humanoid A.I. chatbots in their proper place
  • it does mean selectively returning to the university’s roots in the monastic schools of medieval Europe and rekindling the old-fashioned quest for meaning.
  • Colleges should offer a radically low-tech first-year program for students who want to apply: a secular monastery within the modern university, with a curated set of courses that ban glowing rectangles of any kind from the classroom
  • Students could opt to live in dorms that restrict technology, too
  • I prophesy that universities that do this will be surprised by how much demand there is. I frequently talk to students who resent the distracting laptops all around them during class. They feel the tug of the “imaginary string attaching me to my phone, where I have to constantly check it,”
  • Many, if not most, students want the elusive experience of uninterrupted thought, the kind where a hash of half-baked notions slowly becomes an idea about the world.
  • Even if your goal is effective use of the latest chatbot, it behooves you to read books in hard copies and read enough of them to learn what an elegant paragraph sounds like. How else will students recognize when ChatGPT churns out decent prose instead of bureaucratic drivel?
  • Most important, students need head space to think about their ultimate values.
  • His course offers a chance to temporarily exchange those unconscious structures for a set of deliberate, countercultural ones.
  • here are the student learning outcomes universities should focus on: cognitive endurance and existential clarity.
  • Contemplation and marathon reading are not ends in themselves or mere vacations from real life but are among the best ways to figure out your own answer to the question of what a human being is for
  • When students finish, they can move right into their area of specialization and wire up their skulls with all the technology they want, armed with the habits and perspective to do so responsibly
  • it’s worth learning from the radicals. Dr. McDaniel, the religious studies professor at Penn, has a long history with different monastic traditions. He grew up in Philadelphia, educated by Hungarian Catholic monks. After college, he volunteered in Thailand and Laos and lived as a Buddhist monk.
  • e found that no amount of academic reading could help undergraduates truly understand why “people voluntarily take on celibacy, give up drinking and put themselves under authorities they don’t need to,” he told me. So for 20 years, he has helped students try it out — and question some of their assumptions about what it means to find themselves.
  • “On college campuses, these students think they’re all being individuals, going out and being wild,” he said. “But they’re in a playpen. I tell them, ‘You know you’ll be protected by campus police and lawyers. You have this entire apparatus set up for you. You think you’re being an individual, but look at your four friends: They all look exactly like you and sound like you. We exist in these very strict structures we like to pretend don’t exist.’”
  • Colleges could do all this in classes integrated with general education requirements: ideally, a sequence of great books seminars focused on classic texts from across different civilizations.
  • “For the last 1,500 years, Benedictines have had to deal with technology,” Placid Solari, the abbot there, told me. “For us, the question is: How do you use the tool so it supports and enhances your purpose or mission and you don’t get owned by it?”
  • for novices at his monastery, “part of the formation is discipline to learn how to control technology use.” After this initial time of limited phone and TV “to wean them away from overdependence on technology and its stimulation,” they get more access and mostly make their own choices.
  • Evan Lutz graduated this May from Belmont Abbey with a major in theology. He stressed the special Catholic context of Belmont’s resident monks; if you experiment with monastic practices without investigating the whole worldview, it can become a shallow kind of mindfulness tourism.
  • The monks at Belmont Abbey do more than model contemplation and focus. Their presence compels even non-Christians on campus to think seriously about vocation and the meaning of life. “Either what the monks are doing is valuable and based on something true, or it’s completely ridiculous,” Mr. Lutz said. “In both cases, there’s something striking there, and it asks people a question.”
  • Pondering ultimate questions and cultivating cognitive endurance should not be luxury goods.
  • David Peña-Guzmán, who teaches philosophy at San Francisco State University, read about Dr. McDaniel’s Existential Despair course and decided he wanted to create a similar one. He called it the Reading Experiment. A small group of humanities majors gathered once every two weeks for five and a half hours in a seminar room equipped with couches and a big round table. They read authors ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre to Frantz Fanon
  • “At the beginning of every class I’d ask students to turn off their phones and put them in ‘the Basket of Despair,’ which was a plastic bag,” he told me. “I had an extended chat with them about accessibility. The point is not to take away the phone for its own sake but to take away our primary sources of distraction. Students could keep the phone if they needed it. But all of them chose to part with their phones.”
  • Dr. Peña-Guzmán’s students are mostly working-class, first-generation college students. He encouraged them to be honest about their anxieties by sharing his own: “I said, ‘I’m a very slow reader, and it’s likely some or most of you will get further in the text than me because I’m E.S.L. and read quite slowly in English.’
  • For his students, the struggle to read long texts is “tied up with the assumption that reading can happen while multitasking and constantly interacting with technologies that are making demands on their attention, even at the level of a second,”
  • “These draw you out of the flow of reading. You get back to the reading, but you have to restart the sentence or even the paragraph. Often, because of these technological interventions into the reading experience, students almost experience reading backward — as constant regress, without any sense of progress. The more time they spend, the less progress they make.”
  • Dr. Peña-Guzmán dismissed the idea that a course like his is suitable only for students who don’t have to worry about holding down jobs or paying off student debt. “I’m worried by this assumption that certain experiences that are important for the development of personality, for a certain kind of humanistic and spiritual growth, should be reserved for the elite, especially when we know those experiences are also sources of cultural capital,
  • Courses like the Reading Experiment are practical, too, he added. “I can’t imagine a field that wouldn’t require some version of the skill of focused attention.”
  • The point is not to reject new technology but to help students retain the upper hand in their relationship with i
  • Ms. Rodriguez said that before she took Living Deliberately and Existential Despair, she didn’t distinguish technology from education. “I didn’t think education ever went without technology. I think that’s really weird now. You don’t need to adapt every piece of technology to be able to learn better or more,” she said. “It can form this dependency.”
  • The point of college is to help students become independent humans who can choose the gods they serve and the rules they follow rather than allow someone else to choose for them
  • The first step is dethroning the small silicon idol in their pocket — and making space for the uncomfortable silence and questions that follow
Javier E

What Is Mastodon and Why Are People Leaving Twitter for It? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...astodon-twitter-elon-musk.html

twitter substitute social Media social media

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Mastodon is a part of the Fediverse, or federated universe, a group of federated platforms that share communication protocols.
  • Unlike Twitter, Mastodon presents posts in chronological order, rather than based on an algorithm.
  • It also has no ads; Mastodon is largely crowdfunded
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  • Most servers are funded by the people who use them.
  • The servers that Mastodon oversees — Mastodon Social and Mastodon Online — are funded through Patreon, a membership and subscription service platform often used by content creators.
  • Although Mastodon visually resembles Twitter, its user experience is more akin to that of Discord, a talking and texting app where people also join servers that have their own cultures and rules.
  • Unlike Twitter and Discord, Mastodon does not have the ability to make its users, or the people who create servers, do anything.
  • But servers can dictate how they interact with one another — or whether they interact at all in a shared stream of posts. For example, when Gab used Mastodon’s code, Mastodon Social and other independent servers blocked Gab’s server, so posts from Gab did not appear on the feeds of people using those servers.
  • Like an email account, your username includes the name of the server itself. For example, a possible username on Mastodon Social would be janedoe@mastodon.social. Regardless of which server you sign up with, you can interact with people who use other Mastodon servers, or you can switch to another one
  • Once you sign up for an account, you can post “toots,” which are Mastodon’s version of tweets. You can also boost other people’s toots, the equivalent of a retweet.
  • Javier E on 08 Nov 22
     
    owned
Javier E

How stress weathers our bodies, causing illness and premature aging - Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...stress-chronic-illness-aging

stress despair health inequality psychology

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Stress is a physiological reaction that is part of the body’s innate programming to protect against external threats.
  • When danger appears, an alarm goes off in the brain, activating the body’s sympathetic nervous system — the fight-or-flight system. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is activated. Hormones, such as epinephrine and cortisol, flood the bloodstream from the adrenal glands.
  • The heart beats faster. Breathing quickens. Blood vessels dilate. More oxygen reaches large muscles. Blood pressure and glucose levels rise. The immune system’s inflammatory response activates, promoting quick healing.
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  • Life brings an accumulation of unremitting stress, especially for those subjected to inequity — and not just from immediate and chronic threats. Even the anticipation of those menaces causes persistent damage.
  • The body produces too much cortisol and other stress hormones, straining to bring itself back to normal. Eventually, the body’s machinery malfunctions.
  • The constant strain — the chronic sources of stress — resets what is “normal,” and the body begins to change.
  • t is the repeated triggering of this process year after year — the persistence of striving to overcome barriers — that leads to poor health.
  • Blood pressure remains high. Inflammation turns chronic. In the arteries, plaque forms, causing the linings of blood vessels to thicken and stiffen. That forces the heart to work harder. It doesn’t stop there. Other organs begin to fail.
  • , that people’s varied life experiences affect their health by wearing down their bodies. And second, she said: “People are not just passive victims of these horrible exposures. They withstand them. They struggle against them. These are people who weather storms.”
  • It isn’t just living in an unequal society that makes people sick. It’s the day-in, day-out effort of trying to be equal that wears bodies down.
  • Weathering doesn’t start in middle age.
  • It begins in the womb. Cortisol released into a pregnant person’s bloodstream crosses the placenta, which helps explain why a disproportionate number of babies born to parents who live in impoverished communities or who experience the constant scorn of discrimination are preterm and too small.
  • The argument weathering is trying to make is these are things we can change, but we have to understand them in their complexity,” Geronimus said. “This has to be a societal project, not the new app on your phone that will remind you to take deep breaths when you’re feeling stress.”
Javier E

X accounts Elon Musk recommended for Israel-Hamas war news belong to a teenager, Georgia soldier - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-hamas-accounts-london-georgia

musk twitter extremism radicalization propaganda amplification research bias

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • A social media account recommended by Elon Musk for its coverage of the Israeli war with Hamas with a long history of antisemitic posts is connected to a southwest London teenager, according to research and a text exchange with the account.
  • Both accounts were among seven cited a week ago by researchers at the University of Washington as the “new elites” of influence on X, with more than 1.6 billion combined views in the first three days of the war.
  • “Most of the accounts also use video and images frequently, framed in emotional ways,” researchers wrote. “Strikingly, many of these accounts have received prior promotion from X owner Elon Musk, either through direct recommendation or through Musk’s account replying to their content, which may explain some of their dominance of 'news Twitter.’”
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  • By that point, @WarMonitors had drawn 132 million views and @sentdefender 302 million views. The University of Washington report said the seven accounts were achieving more views than established media accounts despite having fewer followers.
  • Both of the accounts describe themselves as news aggregators and reporters of “open-source intelligence,” mainly conveying items that have already surfaced elsewhere to a new audience. (The @sentdefender account’s display name is OSINTdefender).
  • Unlike more established open-source accounts, they often do not cite a source, let alone include links to the media in which they appear with more context.
  • The behavior, though, seems optimized for X’s latest changes, which Musk has said are designed to keep people from on the app instead of clicking away to read or watch more. Musk has also taken steps to reduce the traffic going from X to large media organizations, including eliminating headlines from posted articles.
Javier E

His Job Was to Make Instagram Safe for Teens. His 14-Year-Old Showed Him What the App Was Really Like. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ens-harassment-safety-5d991be1

social media bias technology psychology meta facebook instagram

shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The experience of young users on Meta’s Instagram—where Bejar had spent the previous two years working as a consultant—was especially acute. In a subsequent email to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, one statistic stood out: One in eight users under the age of 16 said they had experienced unwanted sexual advances on the platform over the previous seven days.
  • For Bejar, that finding was hardly a surprise. His daughter and her friends had been receiving unsolicited penis pictures and other forms of harassment on the platform since the age of 14, he wrote, and Meta’s systems generally ignored their reports—or responded by saying that the harassment didn’t violate platform rules.
  • “I asked her why boys keep doing that,” Bejar wrote to Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants. “She said if the only thing that happens is they get blocked, why wouldn’t they?”
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  • For the well-being of its users, Bejar argued, Meta needed to change course, focusing less on a flawed system of rules-based policing and more on addressing such bad experiences
  • The company would need to collect data on what upset users and then work to combat the source of it, nudging those who made others uncomfortable to improve their behavior and isolating communities of users who deliberately sought to harm others.
  • “I am appealing to you because I believe that working this way will require a culture shift,” Bejar wrote to Zuckerberg—the company would have to acknowledge that its existing approach to governing Facebook and Instagram wasn’t working.
  • During and after Bejar’s time as a consultant, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said, the company has rolled out several product features meant to address some of the Well-Being Team’s findings. Those features include warnings to users before they post comments that Meta’s automated systems flag as potentially offensive, and reminders to be kind when sending direct messages to users like content creators who receive a large volume of messages. 
  • Meta’s classifiers were reliable enough to remove only a low single-digit percentage of hate speech with any degree of precision.
  • Bejar was floored—all the more so when he learned that virtually all of his daughter’s friends had been subjected to similar harassment. “DTF?” a user they’d never met would ask, using shorthand for a vulgar proposition. Instagram acted so rarely on reports of such behavior that the girls no longer bothered reporting them. 
  • Meta’s own statistics suggested that big problems didn’t exist. 
  • Meta had come to approach governing user behavior as an overwhelmingly automated process. Engineers would compile data sets of unacceptable content—things like terrorism, pornography, bullying or “excessive gore”—and then train machine-learning models to screen future content for similar material.
  • While users could still flag things that upset them, Meta shifted resources away from reviewing them. To discourage users from filing reports, internal documents from 2019 show, Meta added steps to the reporting process. Meta said the changes were meant to discourage frivolous reports and educate users about platform rules. 
  • The outperformance of Meta’s automated enforcement relied on what Bejar considered two sleights of hand. The systems didn’t catch anywhere near the majority of banned content—only the majority of what the company ultimately removed
  • “Please don’t talk about my underage tits,” Bejar’s daughter shot back before reporting his comment to Instagram. A few days later, the platform got back to her: The insult didn’t violate its community guidelines.
  • Also buttressing Meta’s statistics were rules written narrowly enough to ban only unambiguously vile material. Meta’s rules didn’t clearly prohibit adults from flooding the comments section on a teenager’s posts with kiss emojis or posting pictures of kids in their underwear, inviting their followers to “see more” in a private Facebook Messenger group. 
  • “Mark personally values freedom of expression first and foremost and would say this is a feature and not a bug,” Rosen responded
  • Narrow rules and unreliable automated enforcement systems left a lot of room for bad behavior—but they made the company’s child-safety statistics look pretty good according to Meta’s metric of choice: prevalence.
  • Defined as the percentage of content viewed worldwide that explicitly violates a Meta rule, prevalence was the company’s preferred measuring stick for the problems users experienced.
  • According to prevalence, child exploitation was so rare on the platform that it couldn’t be reliably estimated, less than 0.05%, the threshold for functional measurement. Content deemed to encourage self-harm, such as eating disorders, was just as minimal, and rule violations for bullying and harassment occurred in just eight of 10,000 views. 
  • “There’s a grading-your-own-homework problem,”
  • Meta defines what constitutes harmful content, so it shapes the discussion of how successful it is at dealing with it.”
  • It could reconsider its AI-generated “beauty filters,” which internal research suggested made both the people who used them and those who viewed the images more self-critical
  • the team built a new questionnaire called BEEF, short for “Bad Emotional Experience Feedback.
  • A recurring survey of issues 238,000 users had experienced over the past seven days, the effort identified problems with prevalence from the start: Users were 100 times more likely to tell Instagram they’d witnessed bullying in the last week than Meta’s bullying-prevalence statistics indicated they should.
  • “People feel like they’re having a bad experience or they don’t,” one presentation on BEEF noted. “Their perception isn’t constrained by policy.
  • they seemed particularly common among teens on Instagram.
  • Among users under the age of 16, 26% recalled having a bad experience in the last week due to witnessing hostility against someone based on their race, religion or identity
  • More than a fifth felt worse about themselves after viewing others’ posts, and 13% had experienced unwanted sexual advances in the past seven days. 
  • The vast gap between the low prevalence of content deemed problematic in the company’s own statistics and what users told the company they experienced suggested that Meta’s definitions were off, Bejar argued
  • To minimize content that teenagers told researchers made them feel bad about themselves, Instagram could cap how much beauty- and fashion-influencer content users saw.
  • Proving to Meta’s leadership that the company’s prevalence metrics were missing the point was going to require data the company didn’t have. So Bejar and a group of staffers from the Well-Being Team started collecting it
  • And it could build ways for users to report unwanted contacts, the first step to figuring out how to discourage them.
  • One experiment run in response to BEEF data showed that when users were notified that their comment or post had upset people who saw it, they often deleted it of their own accord. “Even if you don’t mandate behaviors,” said Krieger, “you can at least send signals about what behaviors aren’t welcome.”
  • But among the ranks of Meta’s senior middle management, Bejar and Krieger said, BEEF hit a wall. Managers who had made their careers on incrementally improving prevalence statistics weren’t receptive to the suggestion that the approach wasn’t working. 
  • After three decades in Silicon Valley, he understood that members of the company’s C-Suite might not appreciate a damning appraisal of the safety risks young users faced from its product—especially one citing the company’s own data. 
  • “This was the email that my entire career in tech trained me not to send,” he says. “But a part of me was still hoping they just didn’t know.”
  • “Policy enforcement is analogous to the police,” he wrote in the email Oct. 5, 2021—arguing that it’s essential to respond to crime, but that it’s not what makes a community safe. Meta had an opportunity to do right by its users and take on a problem that Bejar believed was almost certainly industrywide.
  • fter Haugen’s airing of internal research, Meta had cracked down on the distribution of anything that would, if leaked, cause further reputational damage. With executives privately asserting that the company’s research division harbored a fifth column of detractors, Meta was formalizing a raft of new rules for employees’ internal communication.
  • Among the mandates for achieving “Narrative Excellence,” as the company called it, was to keep research data tight and never assert a moral or legal duty to fix a problem.
  • “I had to write about it as a hypothetical,” Bejar said. Rather than acknowledging that Instagram’s survey data showed that teens regularly faced unwanted sexual advances, the memo merely suggested how Instagram might help teens if they faced such a problem.
  • The hope that the team’s work would continue didn’t last. The company stopped conducting the specific survey behind BEEF, then laid off most everyone who’d worked on it as part of what Zuckerberg called Meta’s “year of efficiency.
  • If Meta was to change, Bejar told the Journal, the effort would have to come from the outside. He began consulting with a coalition of state attorneys general who filed suit against the company late last month, alleging that the company had built its products to maximize engagement at the expense of young users’ physical and mental health. Bejar also got in touch with members of Congress about where he believes the company’s user-safety efforts fell short. 
Javier E

Every Annoying Letterboxd Behavior - Freddie deBoer - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...y-annoying-letterboxd-behavior

social media language bias

shared by Javier E on 21 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • as a social network it’s a) made up of humans who are b) trying to stand out from the crowd like a goth at the homecoming pep rally.
  • Here’s a list of some of the many annoying things people do
  • Like-whoring by writing tweets instead of reviews. Like-whoring is the basic problem with every social network depraved enough to have a “like” function, of course. The most obvious like-whoring behavior on Letterboxd is the shoehorned-in one-liner review. On rare occasions, these are funny and apt and really say something; mostly, they’re people desperately trying to appear witty to strangers and succeeding only in appearing desperate
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  • Doing the opposite by writing a dissertation. The endless look-at-me-I’m-so-cute one-line reviews are a constant on Letterboxd, but there’s plenty that go too far the other way, too. I love a good longform review that does a deep dive and carefully considers themes, of a kind that wasn’t really possible in the era of all-print media. But this is not the venue. Start a blog like everybody else.
  • match your engagement to the structure of the network.
  • Fake contrarianism.
  • Comparing your taste to some other party who you know will be unpopular with other users.
  • Utterly superficial appeals to facile political critiques. These are usually wrong, and when right are shooting the fattest of fish in the smallest of barrels. Yes, Gone With the Wind is pretty fucked up in 2023 political terms! Where would we be without your wisdom to guide us? Using politics to inform a review is great. Explaining why the implicit or explicit political themes of a movie are trouble is fine. Arriving at a pat political condemnation as a substitute for having an aesthetic take on a movie is boring and pointless.
  • Inventing your own scoring system in a network with a five-star system. 78/100! B+! Three boxes of popcorn! There’s a star system right there baked into the app, jackass.
  • Pretending to believe (but not really believing) that people won’t recognize your name as a professional film critic
Javier E

The New York Times' trans coverage is under fire. The paper needs to listen | Arwa Mahdawi | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-trans-coverage-open-letters

trans debate nyt objectivity bias

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.
  • “In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”
  • This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.
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  • “It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism,” Kahn wrote in the memo. “In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort … We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”
  • Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communication, put out a statement stating that the organization pursues “independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care”. While that was all very diplomatic, the executive editor, Joe Kahn, and opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, sent around a rather more pointed newsroom memo condemning the letters on Thursday.
  • The second letter was signed by more than 100 LGBTQ+ and civil rights groups, including Glaad and the Human Rights Campaign. It expressed support for the contributor letter and accused the Times of platforming “fringe theories” and “dangerous inaccuracies”. It noted that while the Times has produced responsible coverage of trans people, “those articles are not getting front-page placement or sent to app users via push notification like the irresponsible pieces are”. And it observed that rightwing politicians have been using the Times’s coverage of trans issues to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care.
  • Here’s the thing: there is no clear-cut line between advocacy and journalism. All media organizations have a perspective about the world and filter their output (which will, of course, strive to be fairly reported) through that perspective. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. Like it or not, the Times is involved in advocacy. It just needs to step back for a moment and think about who it’s advocating for.
Javier E

Kids and Social Media: a Mental Health Crisis or Moral Panic? - 0 views

samf.substack.com/...d-social-media-a-mental-health

mental health social social media adolescents research psychology

shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • given the range of evidence and the fact that the biggest increases relate to a specific group (teenage girls) and a specific set of issues clustered around anxiety and body image I would assign a high probability to it being a real issue. Especially as it fits the anecdotal conservations I have with headteachers and parents.
  • Is social media the cause?
  • One of the most commonly identified culprits is social media. Until recently I’ve been sceptical for two reasons. First I’m allergic to moral panics.
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  • Secondly as Stuart Ritchie points out in this excellent article, to date the evidence assembled by proponents of the social media theory like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, has shown correlations not causal relationships. Yes, it seems that young people who use social media a lot have worse mental health, but that could easily be because young people with worse mental health choose to use social media more!  
  • recently I’ve shifted to thinking it probably is a major cause for three reasons:
  • 1.       I can’t think of anything else that fits. Other suggested causes just don’t work.
  • Social media does fit, the big increase in take up maps well on to the mental health data and it happened everywhere in rich countries at the same time. The most affected group, teenage girls, are also the ones who report that social media makes them more anxious and body conscious in focus groups
  • It is of course true that correlation doesn’t prove anything but if there’s only one strongly related correlation it’s pretty likely there’s a relationship.
  • 2.       There is no doubt that young people are spending a huge amount of time online now. And that, therefore, must have replaced other activities that involve being out with friends in real life. Three quarters of 12 year olds now have a social media profile and 95% of teenagers use social media regularly. Over half who say they’ve been bullied, say it was on social media.
  •   We finally have the first evidence of a direct causal relationship via a very clever US study using the staged rollout of Facebook across US college campuses to assess the impact on mental health. Not only does it show that mental illness increased after the introduction of Facebook but it also shows that it was particularly pronounced amongst those who were more likely to view themselves unfavourably alongside their peers due to being e.g. overweight or having lower socio-economic status. It is just one study but it nudges me even further towards thinking this a major cause of the problem.
  • I have blocked my (12 year old) twins from all social media apps and will hold out as long as possible. The evidence isn’t yet rock solid but it’s solid enough to make me want to protect them as best I can.
Javier E

GPT-4 has arrived. It will blow ChatGPT out of the water. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...it-will-blow-chatgpt-out-water

AI chatbot evolution assessment

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • GPT-4, in contrast, is a state-of-the-art system capable of creating not just words but describing images in response to a person’s simple written commands.
  • When shown a photo of a boxing glove hanging over a wooden seesaw with a ball on one side, for instance, a person can ask what will happen if the glove drops, and GPT-4 will respond that it would hit the seesaw and cause the ball to fly up.
  • an AI program, known as a large language model, that early testers had claimed was remarkably advanced in its ability to reason and learn new things
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  • hose promises have also fueled anxiety over how people will be able to compete for jobs outsourced to eerily refined machines or trust the accuracy of what they see online.
  • Officials with the San Francisco lab said GPT-4’s “multimodal” training across text and images would allow it to escape the chat box and more fully emulate a world of color and imagery, surpassing ChatGPT in its “advanced reasoning capabilities.”
  • A person could upload an image and GPT-4 could caption it for them, describing the objects and scene.
  • AI language models often confidently offer wrong answers because they are designed to spit out cogent phrases, not actual facts. And because they have been trained on internet text and imagery, they have also learned to emulate human biases of race, gender, religion and class.
  • GPT-4 still makes many of the errors of previous versions, including “hallucinating” nonsense, perpetuating social biases and offering bad advice. It also lacks knowledge of events that happened after about September 2021, when its training data was finalized, and “does not learn from its experience,” limiting people’s ability to teach it new things.
  • Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI in the hope its technology will become a secret weapon for its workplace software, search engine and other online ambitions. It has marketed the technology as a super-efficient companion that can handle mindless work and free people for creative pursuits, helping one software developer to do the work of an entire team or allowing a mom-and-pop shop to design a professional advertising campaign without outside help.
  • it could lead to business models and creative ventures no one can predict.
  • sparked criticism that the companies are rushing to exploit an untested, unregulated and unpredictable technology that could deceive people, undermine artists’ work and lead to real-world harm.
  • the company held back the feature to better understand potential risks. As one example, she said, the model might be able to look at an image of a big group of people and offer up known information about them, including their identities — a possible facial recognition use case that could be used for mass surveillance.
  • OpenAI researchers wrote, “As GPT-4 and AI systems like it are adopted more widely,” they “will have even greater potential to reinforce entire ideologies, worldviews, truths and untruths, and to cement them or lock them in.”
  • “We can agree as a society broadly on some harms that a model should not contribute to,” such as building a nuclear bomb or generating child sexual abuse material, she said. “But many harms are nuanced and primarily affect marginalized groups,” she added, and those harmful biases, especially across other languages, “cannot be a secondary consideration in performance.”
  • OpenAI said its new model would be able to handle more than 25,000 words of text, a leap forward that could facilitate longer conversations and allow for the searching and analysis of long documents.
  • OpenAI developers said GPT-4 was more likely to provide factual responses and less likely to refuse harmless requests
  • Duolingo, the language learning app, has already used GPT-4 to introduce new features, such as an AI conversation partner and a tool that tells users why an answer was incorrect.
  • The company did not share evaluations around bias that have become increasingly common after pressure from AI ethicists.
  • GPT-4 will have competition in the growing field of multisensory AI. DeepMind, an AI firm owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, last year released a “generalist” model named Gato that can describe images and play video games. And Google this month released a multimodal system, PaLM-E, that folded AI vision and language expertise into a one-armed robot on wheels: If someone told it to go fetch some chips, for instance, it could comprehend the request, wheel over to a drawer and choose the right bag.
  • The systems, though — as critics and the AI researchers are quick to point out — are merely repeating patterns and associations found in their training data without a clear understanding of what it’s saying or when it’s wrong.
  • GPT-4, the fourth “generative pre-trained transformer” since OpenAI’s first release in 2018, relies on a breakthrough neural-network technique in 2017 known as the transformer that rapidly advanced how AI systems can analyze patterns in human speech and imagery.
  • The systems are “pre-trained” by analyzing trillions of words and images taken from across the internet: news articles, restaurant reviews and message-board arguments; memes, family photos and works of art.
  • Giant supercomputer clusters of graphics processing chips are mapped out their statistical patterns — learning which words tended to follow each other in phrases, for instance — so that the AI can mimic those patterns, automatically crafting long passages of text or detailed images, one word or pixel at a time.
  • In 2019, the company refused to publicly release GPT-2, saying it was so good they were concerned about the “malicious applications” of its use, from automated spam avalanches to mass impersonation and disinformation campaigns.
  • Altman has also marketed OpenAI’s vision with the aura of science fiction come to life. In a blog post last month, he said the company was planning for ways to ensure that “all of humanity” benefits from “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI — an industry term for the still-fantastical idea of an AI superintelligence that is generally as smart as, or smarter than, the humans themselves.
Javier E

Elusive 'Einstein' Solves a Longstanding Math Problem - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thematics-tiling-einstein.html

math problem solution history research

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • after a decade of failed attempts, David Smith, a self-described shape hobbyist of Bridlington in East Yorkshire, England, suspected that he might have finally solved an open problem in the mathematics of tiling: That is, he thought he might have discovered an “einstein.”
  • In less poetic terms, an einstein is an “aperiodic monotile,” a shape that tiles a plane, or an infinite two-dimensional flat surface, but only in a nonrepeating pattern. (The term “einstein” comes from the German “ein stein,” or “one stone” — more loosely, “one tile” or “one shape.”)
  • Your typical wallpaper or tiled floor is part of an infinite pattern that repeats periodically; when shifted, or “translated,” the pattern can be exactly superimposed on itself
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  • An aperiodic tiling displays no such “translational symmetry,” and mathematicians have long sought a single shape that could tile the plane in such a fashion. This is known as the einstein problem.
  • black and white squares also can make weird nonperiodic patterns, in addition to the familiar, periodic checkerboard pattern. “It’s really pretty trivial to be able to make weird and interesting patterns,” he said. The magic of the two Penrose tiles is that they make only nonperiodic patterns — that’s all they can do.“But then the Holy Grail was, could you do with one — one tile?” Dr. Goodman-Strauss said.
  • now a new paper — by Mr. Smith and three co-authors with mathematical and computational expertise — proves Mr. Smith’s discovery true. The researchers called their einstein “the hat,
  • “The most significant aspect for me is that the tiling does not clearly fall into any of the familiar classes of structures that we understand.”
  • “I’m always messing about and experimenting with shapes,” said Mr. Smith, 64, who worked as a printing technician, among other jobs, and retired early. Although he enjoyed math in high school, he didn’t excel at it, he said. But he has long been “obsessively intrigued” by the einstein problem.
  • Sir Roger found the proofs “very complicated.” Nonetheless, he was “extremely intrigued” by the einstein, he said: “It’s a really good shape, strikingly simple.”
  • The simplicity came honestly. Mr. Smith’s investigations were mostly by hand; one of his co-authors described him as an “imaginative tinkerer.”
  • When in November he found a tile that seemed to fill the plane without a repeating pattern, he emailed Craig Kaplan, a co-author and a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo.
  • “It was clear that something unusual was happening with this shape,” Dr. Kaplan said. Taking a computational approach that built on previous research, his algorithm generated larger and larger swaths of hat tiles. “There didn’t seem to be any limit to how large a blob of tiles the software could construct,”
  • The first step, Dr. Kaplan said, was to “define a set of four ‘metatiles,’ simple shapes that stand in for small groupings of one, two, or four hats.” The metatiles assemble into four larger shapes that behave similarly. This assembly, from metatiles to supertiles to supersupertiles, ad infinitum, covered “larger and larger mathematical ‘floors’ with copies of the hat,” Dr. Kaplan said. “We then show that this sort of hierarchical assembly is essentially the only way to tile the plane with hats, which turns out to be enough to show that it can never tile periodically.”
  • some might wonder whether this is a two-tile, not one-tile, set of aperiodic monotiles.
  • Dr. Goodman-Strauss had raised this subtlety on a tiling listserv: “Is there one hat or two?” The consensus was that a monotile counts as such even using its reflection. That leaves an open question, Dr. Berger said: Is there an einstein that will do the job without reflection?
  • “the hat” was not a new geometric invention. It is a polykite — it consists of eight kites. (Take a hexagon and draw three lines, connecting the center of each side to the center of its opposite side; the six shapes that result are kites.)
  • “It’s likely that others have contemplated this hat shape in the past, just not in a context where they proceeded to investigate its tiling properties,” Dr. Kaplan said. “I like to think that it was hiding in plain sight.”
  • Incredibly, Mr. Smith later found a second einstein. He called it “the turtle” — a polykite made of not eight kites but 10. It was “uncanny,” Dr. Kaplan said. He recalled feeling panicked; he was already “neck deep in the hat.”
  • Dr. Myers, who had done similar computations, promptly discovered a profound connection between the hat and the turtle. And he discerned that, in fact, there was an entire family of related einsteins — a continuous, uncountable infinity of shapes that morph one to the next.
  • this einstein family motivated the second proof, which offers a new tool for proving aperiodicity. The math seemed “too good to be true,” Dr. Myers said in an email. “I wasn’t expecting such a different approach to proving aperiodicity — but everything seemed to hold together as I wrote up the details.”
  • Mr. Smith was amazed to see the research paper come together. “I was no help, to be honest.” He appreciated the illustrations, he said: “I’m more of a pictures person.”
Javier E

A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...stagram-child-influencers.html

marketplace girl pedophile influencer social media psychology technology

shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Thousands of accounts examined by The Times offer disturbing insights into how social media is reshaping childhood, especially for girls, with direct parental encouragement and involvement.
  • Some parents are the driving force behind the sale of photos, exclusive chat sessions and even the girls’ worn leotards and cheer outfits to mostly unknown followers. The most devoted customers spend thousands of dollars nurturing the underage relationships.
  • The large audiences boosted by men can benefit the families, The Times found. The bigger followings look impressive to brands and bolster chances of getting discounts, products and other financial incentives, and the accounts themselves are rewarded by Instagram’s algorithm with greater visibility on the platform, which in turn attracts more followers.
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  • One calculation performed by an audience demographics firm found 32 million connections to male followers among the 5,000 accounts examined by The Times.
  • Interacting with the men opens the door to abuse. Some flatter, bully and blackmail girls and their parents to get racier and racier images. The Times monitored separate exchanges on Telegram, the messaging app, where men openly fantasize about sexually abusing the children they follow on Instagram and extol the platform for making the images so readily available.
  • The so-called creator economy surpasses $250 billion worldwide, according to Goldman Sachs, with U.S. brands spending more than $5 billion a year on influencers.
  • The troubling interactions on Instagram come as social media companies increasingly dominate the cultural landscape and the internet is seen as a career path of its own.
  • Nearly one in three preteens lists influencing as a career goal, and 11 percent of those born in Generation Z, between 1997 and 2012, describe themselves as influencers.
  • “It’s like a candy store
  • Health and technology experts have recently cautioned that social media presents a “profound risk of harm” for girls. Constant comparisons to their peers and face-altering filters are driving negative feelings of self-worth and promoting objectification of their bodies, researchers found.
  • he pursuit of online fame, particularly through Instagram, has supercharged the often toxic phenomenon, The Times found, encouraging parents to commodify their children’s images. Some of the child influencers earn six-figure incomes, according to interviews.
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