We think of computers as emotionless automatons and artificial intelligence as stoic, zen-like programs, mirroring Mr. Spock, devoid of prejudice and unable to be swayed by emotion.
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url
6More
Prejudice AI? Machine Learning Can Pick up Society's Biases | Big Think - 1 views
-
They say that AI picks up our innate biases about sex and race, even when we ourselves may be unaware of them. The results of this study were published in the journal Science.
- ...2 more annotations...
-
I just feel like this is so ironic. As the parents of the AI, humans themselves can't even be equal , how can we expect the robot we made to be perform perfect humanity and embrace flawless equality. I think equality itself is flawed. How can we define equality? Just like we cannot define fairness, we cannot define equality. I think this robot picking up racist remarks just shows that how children become racist. It also reflects how powerful the cultural context and social norms are. They can shape us subconsciously. --Sissi (4/20/2017)
9More
Before Kyle Rittenhouse's Murder Trial, a Debate Over Terms Like 'Victim' - The New Yor... - 0 views
-
A judge’s decision that the word “victim” generally could not be used in court to refer to the people shot by Kyle Rittenhouse after protests in Kenosha, Wis., last year drew widespread attention and outrage this week.
-
Mr. Rittenhouse, who has been charged with six criminal counts, including first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide in the deaths of two men and the wounding of another, is expected to argue that he fired his gun because he feared for his life.
-
The experts said the term “victim” can appear prejudicial in a court of law, heavily influencing a jury by presupposing which people have been wronged.
- ...6 more annotations...
-
This week, as Judge Schroeder ruled on a motion by the prosecution, he also said that he would allow the terms “looters” and “rioters” to be used to refer to the men who were shot
-
Prosecutors say he was a violent vigilante who illegally possessed the rifle and whose actions resulted in chaos and bloodshed.
-
State law in Wisconsin allows a person to fire in self-defense if the shooter “reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself.”Editors’ PicksTo Save a Swirling Season, Atlanta Turned to Soft ServeThink You Know the 1960s? ‘The Shattering’ Asks You to Think Again.
-
Prosecutors have repeatedly tried to introduce evidence of Mr. Rittenhouse’s associations with the far-right Proud Boys, as well as a cellphone video taken weeks before the shootings in Kenosha in which Mr. Rittenhouse suggested that he wished he had his rifle so he could shoot men leaving a pharmacy. The judge did not allow either as evidence for trial.
-
Thomas Binger, a prosecutor, argued that the judge was creating a “double standard” and said that the words he sought to have prohibited — relating to rioting and other damage — were “as loaded, if not more loaded, than the term ‘victim.’
28More
Businesses May Benefit From Sharing Covid Testing Resources, Study Suggests - The New Y... - 0 views
-
Universities and other institutions looking to protect themselves from Covid-19 may benefit from sharing their testing resources with the wider community, a new study suggests.
-
Last year, when the National Football League decided to stage its season in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it went all-in on testing
- ...24 more annotations...
-
Between Aug. 1 and the Super Bowl in early February, the N.F.L. administered almost one million tests to players and staff.
-
When the coronavirus closed down the country last spring, many colleges and universities sought her advice on how to safely reopen.
-
Now, a new analysis suggests that schools, businesses and other organizations that want to keep themselves safe should think beyond strictly themselves.
-
By dedicating a substantial proportion of their tests to people in the surrounding community, institutions could reduce the number of Covid-19 cases among their members by as much as 25 percent, researchers report in a new paper, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal.
-
“If you’ve been in enough outbreaks you just understand that testing in a box doesn’t makes sense. These things are communicable, and they’re coming in from the community.”
-
“We want to start using more sophisticated modeling and probably economic theory to inform what an optimal testing program would look like.”
-
Dr. Sabeti is an epidemic veteran, part of teams that responded to an Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and a mumps outbreak in the Boston area a few years later.
-
The University of Illinois is testing its students, faculty and staff twice a week and has conducted more than 1.6 million tests since July.
-
At a time when testing resources were in short supply, many of these institutions were proposing intensive, expensive testing regimens focused entirely on their own members
-
‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”
-
‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”
-
Using real-world data from C.M.U., the researchers created a baseline scenario in which 1 percent of people at the school, and 6 percent of those in the surrounding county, were infected by the coronavirus, and the university was testing 12 percent of its members every day.
-
Under these conditions, the researchers found, if the university used all of its tests on its own members, it would have roughly 200 Covid-19 cases after 40 days
-
The researchers then tweaked the model’s parameters in various ways: What if the virus were more prevalent? What if students and staff did not report all their contacts? What if they were better about mask-wearing and social distancing? What if the university deployed more tests, or fewer?
-
Unsurprisingly, the more testing the university did, and the more information it had about its members’ close contacts, the fewer Covid-19 cases there were
-
But in virtually every scenario, sharing at least some tests with the broader community led to fewer cases than hoarding them.
-
“A virus does not respect geographic boundaries,” Dr. Pollock said. “It is ludicrous to think that you can get control of an acute infectious respiratory disease like Covid-19, in a city like Davis that hosts a very large university, without coordinated public health measures that connect both the university and the community.”
-
There are barriers to the more altruistic approach, including internal political pressure to use testing resources in house and concerns about legal liability.
-
the researchers hope that their model convinces at least some institutions to rethink their strategy, not only during this epidemic but also in future ones.
-
“An outbreak is an opportunity to buy a lot of community good will, or to burn a lot of community good will,” Dr. Sabeti said. “We could have spent an entire year building up that relationship between organizations and institutions and their communities. And we would have done all that hard work together, as opposed to everybody turning inward.”
-
"'You're in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,'" she recalled. "'And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you'll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it's burning to the ground.'"
11More
Why Joe Biden will almost certainly pick a black woman as VP - CNNPolitics - 0 views
-
It now seems a near-certainty that he will (and should) name a black woman as his vice presidential running mate.
-
Floyd's death has sparked (mostly) peaceful protests around the country, not just about police brutality but also about the deep and abiding racial inequalities present in American society.
- ...8 more annotations...
-
Biden helped to write the 1994 crime bill, a law that has been widely panned -- particularly by members of the black community -- for its impact on levels of incarceration, among other reverberations.
-
Biden owes his status as the presumptive presidential nominee almost entirely to black voters -- particularly those in South Carolina. Biden's campaign was faltering badly -- he had finished 4th in Iowa, 5th in New Hampshire and 2nd in Nevada -- prior to the February 29 Palmetto State primary. According to exit polling, black voters made up a majority (56%) of the South Carolina primary electorate and went overwhelmingly (61%) for Biden. His victory in the state propelled him to a series of wins on Super Tuesday -- just three days later -- and, at that point, the nomination was his.
-
It will be a plus to have an African American woman. It will be a plus to have a Latino. It will be a plus to have a woman."
-
non-college educated voters who went with Trump, had Clinton been able to drive black turnout to the level it was during Obama's two victories, she almost certainly would have won.
-
Now, simply putting a person of color on the ticket doesn't mean that you win the votes of black people or ensure they turn out in large numbers. But politics at the presidential level is often about symbolism. And who Biden picks as his vice president will be his best chance to reveal how he views his party, the country and the world -- and what he prioritizes amongst the many, many issues facing the US at the moment.
-
Even before Biden's "you ain't black" gaffe and the uprising following George Floyd's murder, California Sen. Kamala Harris (age 55), who was both the first African American and Indian American elected to the Senate from California, was at the top of my VP rankings. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (50 years old) and Florida Rep. Val Demings (63 years old) were in the Top 6. Now? It's hard to see three more people more likely to be the pick. (Stay tuned for my new rankings on Thursday!)
16More
shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 13
- No Cached
Social Media and the Devolution of Friendship: Full Essay (Pts I & II) » Cybo... - 1 views
thesocietypages.org/...friendship-full-essay-pts-i-ii
friendship devolution social media social culture
![](/images/link.gif)
-
social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.
-
the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.
-
I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.
- ...13 more annotations...
-
Through social media, “sharing with friends” is rationalized to the point of relentless efficiency. The current apex of such rationalization is frictionless sharing: we no longer need to perform the labor of telling our individual friends about what we read online, or of copy-pasting links and emailing them to “the list,” or of clicking a button for one-step posting of links on our Facebook walls. With frictionless sharing, all we have to do is look, or listen; what we’ve read or watched or listened to is then “shared” or “scrobbled” to our Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or whatever other online profiles. Whether we share content actively or passively, however, we feel as though we’ve done our half of the friendship-labor by ‘pushing’ the information to our walls, streams, and tumblelogs. It’s then up to our friends to perform their halves of the friendship-labor by ‘pulling’ the information we share from those platforms.
-
We’re busy people; we like the idea of making one announcement on Facebook and being done with it, rather than having to repeat the same story over and over again to different friends individually. We also like not always having to think about which friends might like which stories or songs; we like the idea of sharing with all of our friends at once, and then letting them sort out amongst themselves who is and isn’t interested. Though social media can create burdensome expectations to keep up with strong ties, weak ties, and everyone in between, social media platforms can also be very efficient. Using the same moment of friendship-labor to tend multiple friendships at once kills more birds with fewer stones.
-
sometimes we like the devolution of friendship. When we have to ‘pull’ friendship-content instead of receiving it in a ‘push’, we can pick and choose which content items to pull. We can ignore the baby pictures, or the pet pictures, or the sushi pictures—whatever it is our friends post that we only pretend to care about
-
I’ve been thinking since, however, on what it means to view our friends as “generalized others.” I may now feel like less of like “creepy stalker” when I click on a song in someone’s Spotify feed, but I don’t exactly feel ‘shared with’ either. Far as I know, I’ve never been SpotiVaguebooked (or SubSpotified?); I have no reason to think anyone is speaking to me personally as they listen to music, or as they choose not to disable scrobbling (if they make that choice consciously at all). I may have been granted the opportunity to view something, but it doesn’t follow that what I’m viewing has anything to do with me unless I choose to make it about me. Devolved friendship means it’s not up to us to interact with our friends personally; instead it’s now up to our friends to make our generalized broadcasts personal.
-
While I won’t go so far as to say they’re definitely ‘problems,’ there are two major things about devolved friendship that I think are worth noting. The first is the non-uniform rationalization of friendship-labor, and the second is the depersonalization of friendship-labor.
-
In short, “sharing” has become a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but “being shared with” has become much more time-consuming, demanding, and inefficient (especially if we don’t ignore most of our friends most of the time). Given this, expecting our friends to keep up with our social media content isn’t expecting them to meet us halfway; it’s asking them to take on the lion’s share of staying in touch with us. Our jobs (in this role) have gotten easier; our friends’ jobs have gotten harder.
-
Personal interaction doesn’t just happen on Spotify, and since I was hoping Spotify would be the New Porch, I initially found Spotify to be somewhat lonely-making. It’s the mutual awareness of presence that gives companionate silence its warmth, whether in person or across distance. The silence within Spotify’s many sounds, on the other hand, felt more like being on the outside looking in. This isn’t to say that Spotify can’t be social in a more personal way; once I started sending tracks to my friends, a few of them started sending tracks in return. But it took a lot more work to get to that point, which gets back to the devolution of friendship (as I explain below).
-
Within devolved friendship interactions, it takes less effort to be polite while secretly waiting for someone to please just stop talking.
-
When we consider the lopsided rationalization of ‘sharing’ and ‘shared with,’ as well as the depersonalization of frictionless sharing and generalized broadcasting, what becomes clear is this: the social media deck is stacked in such a way as to make being ‘a self’ easier and more rewarding than being ‘a friend.’
-
It’s easy to share, to broadcast, to put our selves and our tastes and our identity performances out into the world for others to consume; what feedback and friendship we get in return comes in response to comparatively little effort and investment from us. It takes a lot more work, however, to do the consumption, to sift through everything all (or even just some) of our friends produce, to do the work of connecting to our friends’ generalized broadcasts so that we can convert their depersonalized shares into meaningful friendship-labor.
-
We may be prosumers of social media, but the reward structures of social media sites encourage us to place greater emphasis on our roles as share-producers—even though many of us probably spend more time consuming shared content than producing it. There’s a reason for this, of course; the content we produce (for free) is what fuels every last ‘Web 2.0’ machine, and its attendant self-centered sociality is the linchpin of the peculiarly Silicon Valley concept of “Social” (something Nathan Jurgenson and I discuss together in greater detail here). It’s not super-rewarding to be one of ten people who “like” your friend’s shared link, but it can feel rewarding to get 10 “likes” on something you’ve shared—even if you have hundreds or thousands of ‘friends.’ Sharing is easy; dealing with all that shared content is hard.
-
t I wonder sometimes if the shifts in expectation that accompany devolved friendship don’t migrate across platforms and contexts in ways we don’t always see or acknowledge. Social media affects how we see the world—and how we feel about being seen in the world—even when we’re not engaged directly with social media websites. It’s not a stretch, then, to imagine that the affordances of social media platforms might also affect how we see friendship and our obligations as friends most generally.
1More
Why Picking Up The Phone Is Good For Humanity - 0 views
9More
shared by kushnerha on 28 Apr 16
- No Cached
When Was America Greatest? - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...when-was-america-greatest.html
new york times politics memory bias greatness patriotism research
![](/images/link.gif)
-
The slogan evokes a time when America was stronger and more prosperous. But Mr. Trump doesn’t specify whether he’s expressing nostalgia for the 1950s — or 10 years ago. That vagueness is reflected by his voters, according to the results of a new survey, conducted online by the digital media and polling company Morning Consult.
-
Trump supporters offered a wide range of answers, with no distinct pattern. The most popular choice was the year 2000. But 1955, 1960, 1970 and 1985 were also popular. More than 2 percent of Trump’s supporters picked 2015, when Mr. Trump’s campaign began.
-
Political science research suggests that Americans’ optimism can be influenced by whether their political party is in the White House. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Democrats feel better than Republicans about current circumstances.
- ...6 more annotations...
-
In March, Pew asked people whether life was better for people like them 50 years ago — and a majority of Republicans answered yes. Trump supporters were the most emphatic, with 75 percent saying things were better in the mid-1960s.Democrats, though, were less enthusiastic about the past. Forty-eight percent said life was better now than it was 50 years ago, while 17 percent of Democrats said it was the same, and only 28 percent said it was worse.
-
In the Morning Consult survey, 44 percent of people over all said America’s greatest years were ahead of it, while 36 percent said those years had already passed. But in an election when America’s past greatness has played such a starring role, we wanted to see more details about just how voters saw the past and the future.
-
So, when was the greatest year?Over all, 2000 was the most popular choice, a preference that cut across political party, candidate preference, gender and age. The year’s popularity may partly reflect people’s fondness for round numbers. But many voters explained their choice by referring to a greater sense of security. The Sept. 11 attacks occurred the following year. (An election year also has something for all partisans to grab onto. Bill Clinton was president that year, but George W. Bush won the election to replace him.)
-
Some people, of course, reached farther back into history. The year the Declaration of Independence was signed, 1776, got a few votes. One person chose 1789, the year the Constitution took effect. One person chose 1800. One chose 1860, the year Southern states began to secede from the Union. But most answers were of a more recent vintage.
-
partisan patterns in views of America’s greatness. Republicans, over all, recall the late 1950s and the mid-1980s most fondly. Sample explanations: “Reagan.” “Economy was booming.” “No wars!” “Life was simpler.” “Strong family values.” The distribution of Trump supporters’ greatest years is somewhat similar to the Republican trend, but more widely dispersed over the last 70 years.
-
Democrats seem to think America’s greatest days were more recent; they were more likely to pick a year in the 1990s, or since 2000. After 2000, their second-most-popular answer was 2016. Sample explanations: “We’re getting better.” “Improving social justice.” “Technology.” Even 2008, a year of financial collapse, was pretty popular, perhaps because President Obama was also elected that year.
4More
Keeping the Boardroom Out of the Bedroom - The New York Times - 0 views
-
I never allowed myself to be vulnerable with my husband because I didn’t realize that it was a requirement for an intimate, connected relationship. Back then, I didn’t even know what an intimate, connected relationship was. I only thought in terms of tasks and achievements.
-
Surely, I had thought, my firefighter boyfriend would wait an hour or two for me without complaint. But if he had, would we still be together today?
-
I found this article very interesting. The author was a strong woman and she wasn't able to switch her mode between her role as a successful businesswoman and a wife. People always tend to be eccentric. Although everybody knows that we have to stand from the perspective of other to make a better decision. It reminded me of that my mom complained to me many times that I didn't followed the time that she was going to pick me up. However, I was only thinking in my perspective and even think about how tired my mom was after a day of work. People should contribute equally to maintain a good relationship. --Sissi (3/24/2017)
13More
Democrats skeptical about SEC nominee's ties to Wall Street - The Washington Post - 0 views
-
Jay Clayton, on Thursday defended his ability to regulate Wall Street despite spending decades helping big banks weather government scrutiny
-
Clayton said, he would make sure “our markets are fair, open, orderly, and efficient and . . . that investors are protected
-
New York lawyer's deep connections to Wall Street, particularly Goldman Sachs, and inexperience with corporate prosecutions drew skepticism from Democrats
- ...9 more annotations...
-
Clayton, who made more than $7 million last year, is among six people with ties to Goldman Sachs chosen by Trump to serve in his administration.
-
He was warmly received by Republicans on the committee, who praised his financial industry experience.
-
It seems a little surprising to me that a person's success in a field in which we are asking them to now lead an agency could be a criticism,” said Sen. Mike Crapo
-
It should be easier, and cheaper, for companies to sell stock on the public markets, Clayton told them.
-
In those cases, Warren said, if the rest of SEC's four commissioners vote along partisan lines, the investigations would stall and the firms could escape being held responsible.
-
“I think individual prosecutions, particularly in the white-collar area, have a significant effect on behavior,” Clayton said. “I want to be clear: Companies should be held responsible.”
-
Warren said she wants the SEC chair to look into and “put a stop to” any trading advantages Icahn might reap while serving in his new role.
-
This article talks about Trump's pick for the SEC, who formerly advised on the deal where Warren Buffet salvaged Goldmann and Sachs with a $5 billion dollar investment. The article says some question his ability, then, to make sure that companies are held responsible for mistakes in the market. He wants to ensure our markets are "fair" which we know is not a term associated with efficiency, so it will be interesting to see if this occurs.
17More
shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 13
- No Cached
How to Make Your Own Luck | Brain Pickings - 0 views
www.brainpickings.org/...how-to-make-your-own-luck
creativity journals habit luck openness risk career expertise innovation
![](/images/link.gif)
-
editor Jocelyn Glei and her team at Behance’s 99U pull together another package of practical wisdom from 21 celebrated creative entrepreneurs. Despite the somewhat self-helpy, SEO-skewing title, this compendium of advice is anything but contrived. Rather, it’s a no-nonsense, experience-tested, life-approved cookbook for creative intelligence, exploring everything from harnessing the power of habit to cultivating meaningful relationships that enrich your work to overcoming the fear of failure.
-
If the twentieth-century career was a ladder that we climbed from one predictable rung to the next, the twenty-first-century career is more like a broad rock face that we are all free-climbing. There’s no defined route, and we must use our own ingenuity, training, and strength to rise to the top. We must make our own luck.
-
Lucky people take advantage of chance occurrences that come their way. Instead of going through life on cruise control, they pay attention to what’s happening around them and, therefore, are able to extract greater value from each situation… Lucky people are also open to novel opportunities and willing to try things outside of their usual experiences. They’re more inclined to pick up a book on an unfamiliar subject, to travel to less familiar destinations, and to interact with people who are different than themselves.
- ...14 more annotations...
-
This is one of the most important reasons to keep a diary: it can make you more aware of your own progress, thus becoming a wellspring of joy in your workday.
-
We can’t, however, simply will ourselves into better habits. Since willpower is a limited resource, whenever we’ve overexerted our self-discipline in one domain, a concept known as “ego depletion” kicks in and renders us mindless automata in another
-
the key to changing a habit is to invest heavily in the early stages of habit-formation so that the behavior becomes automated and we later default into it rather than exhausting our willpower wrestling with it. Young also cautions that it’s a self-defeating strategy to try changing several habits at once. Rather, he advises, spend one month on each habit alone before moving on to the next
-
the primary benefit of a diary as a purely pragmatic record of your workday productivity and progress — while most dedicated diarists would counter that the core benefits are spiritual and psychoemotional — it does offer some valuable insight into the psychology of how journaling elevates our experience of everyday life:
-
what you do every day is best seen as an iceberg, with a small fraction of conscious decision sitting atop a much larger foundation of habits and behaviors.
-
the authors point to a pattern that reveals the single most important motivator: palpable progress on meaningful work: On the days when these professionals saw themselves moving forward on something they cared about — even if the progress was a seemingly incremental “small win” — they were more likely to be happy and deeply engaged in their work. And, being happier and more deeply engaged, they were more likely to come up with new ideas and solve problems creatively.
-
Although the act of reflecting and writing, in itself, can be beneficial, you’ll multiply the power of your diary if you review it regularly — if you listen to what your life has been telling you. Periodically, maybe once a month, set aside time to get comfortable and read back through your entries. And, on New Year’s Day, make an annual ritual of reading through the previous year.
-
This, they suggest, can yield profound insights into the inner workings of your own mind — especially if you look for specific clues and patterns, trying to identify the richest sources of meaning in your work and the types of projects that truly make your heart sing. Once you understand what motivates you most powerfully, you’ll be able to prioritize this type of work in going forward. Just as important, however, is cultivating a gratitude practice and acknowledging your own accomplishments in the diary:
-
Fields argues that if we move along the Uncertainty Curve either too fast or too slowly, we risk either robbing the project of its creative potential and ending up in mediocrity. Instead, becoming mindful of the psychology of that process allows us to pace ourselves better and master that vital osmosis between freedom and constraint.
-
Schwalbe reminds us of the “impact bias” — our tendency to greatly overestimate the intensity and extent of our emotional reactions, which causes us to expect failures to be more painful than they actually are and thus to fear them more than we should.
-
When we think about taking a risk, we rarely consider how good we will be at reframing a disappointing outcome. In short, we underestimate our resilience.
-
The second reason is focalism. When we contemplate failure from afar, according to Gilbert and Wilson, we tend to overemphasize the focal event (i.e., failure) and overlook all the other episodic details of daily life that help us move on and feel better. The threat of failure is so vivid that it consumes our attention
-
don’t let yourself forget that the good life, the meaningful life, the truly fulfilling life, is the life of presence, not of productivity.
8More
The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption | Brain Pickings - 1 views
-
Brain Pickings — a filtration mechanism that lets into your life things that are interesting, meaningful, creatively and intellectually stimulating, memorable.
-
we’re wired to love certain kinds of information, most notably affirmation, so we seek out information that confirms, rather than challenges, our existing beliefs
- ...5 more annotations...
-
It’s a matter of health and survival. Information and power are inherently related. Our ability to process and communicate information is as much an evolutionary advantage as our opposable thumbs.”
-
just like we know we’re products of the food we eat, we must understand just how much we’re products of the information we consume — and consume accordingly.
-
Just as food companies learned that if they want to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar — the stuff that people crave — media companies learned that affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right?”
-
the information diet works best if you think about it not as denying yourself information, but as consuming more of the right stuff and developing healthy habits.“
-
Johnson has provided a toolkit of helpful (mostly) free software for a healthy information diet on the book’s site, ranging from productivity apps to ad blockers to various setting hacks to make your favorite services and social web platforms more conducive to info-wellness.
15More
shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 14
- No Cached
Tinder, the Fast-Growing Dating App, Taps an Age-Old Truth - NYTimes.com - 2 views
www.nytimes.com/...app-taps-an-age-old-truth.html
dating matchmaking app attractiveness research social media psychology
![](/images/link.gif)
-
In the two years since Tinder was released, the smartphone app has exploded, processing more than a billion swipes left and right each day
-
Tinder’s engagement is staggering. The company said that, on average, people log into the app 11 times a day. Women spend as much as 8.5 minutes swiping left and right during a single session; men spend 7.2 minutes. All of this can add up to 90 minutes each day.While conventional online dating sites have been around lo
- ...12 more annotations...
-
On Tinder, there are no questionnaires to fill out. No discussion of your favorite hiking trail, star sign or sexual proclivities. You simply log in through Facebook, pick a few photos that best describe “you” and start swiping.It may seem that what happens next is predictable (the best-looking people draw the most likes, the rest are quickly dismissed), but relationships experts for Tinder say there is something entirely different going on.
-
“Research shows when people are evaluating photos of others, they are trying to access compatibility on not just a physical level, but a social level,” said Jessica Carbino, Tinder’s in-house dating and relationship expert. “They are trying to understand, ‘Do I have things in common with this person?' ”
-
She discovered that Tinder users decoded an array of subtle and not-so-subtle traits before deciding which way to swipe. For example, the style of clothing, the pucker of the lips and even the posture, Ms. Carbino said, tell us a lot about their social circle, if they like to party and their level of confidence.
-
Men also judge attractiveness on factors beyond just anatomy, though in general, men are nearly three times as likely to swipe “like” (in 46 percent of cases) than woman (14 percent).
-
“There is this idea that attraction stems from a very superficial outlook on people, which is false,” Mr. Rad said. “Everyone is able to pick up thousands of signals in these photos. A photo of a guy at a bar with friends around him sends a very different message than a photo of a guy with a dog on the beach.”
-
while computers have become incalculably smarter, the ability of machines and algorithms to match people has remained just as clueless in the view of independent scientists.
-
dating sites like eHarmony and Match.com are more like modern snake oil. “They are a joke, and there is no relationship scientist that takes them seriously as relationship science.”
-
Mr. Finkel worked for more than a year with a group of researchers trying to understand how these algorithm-based dating services could match people, as they claim to do. The team poured through more than 80 years of scientific research about dating and attraction, and was unable to prove that computers can indeed match people together.
-
some dating sites are starting to acknowledge that the only thing that matters when matching lovers is someone’s picture. Earlier this year, OKCupid examined its data and found that a person’s profile picture is, said a post on its Oktrends blog, “worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth... almost nothing.”
-
this doesn’t mean that the most attractive people are the only ones who find true love. Indeed, in many respects, it can be the other way around.
-
a graduate student, published a paper noting that a person’s unique looks are what is most important when trying to find a mate.
-
“There isn’t a consensus about who is attractive and who isn’t,” Mr. Eastwick said in an interview. “Someone that you think is especially attractive might not be to me. That’s true with photos, too.” Tinder’s data team echoed this, noting that there isn’t a cliquey, high school mentality on the site, where one group of users get the share of “like” swipes.
6More
shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 15
- No Cached
The Widening World of Hand-Picked Truths - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...rld-of-hand-picked-truths.html
science Research knowledge postmodernism narrative relativism
![](/images/link.gif)
-
it’s not just organized religions that are insisting on their own alternate truths. On one front after another, the hard-won consensus of science is also expected to accommodate personal beliefs, religious or otherwise, about the safety of vaccines, G.M.O. crops, fluoridation or cellphone radio waves, along with the validity of global climate change.
-
But presenting people with the best available science doesn’t seem to change many minds. In a kind of psychological immune response, they reject ideas they consider harmful.
-
Viewed from afar, the world seems almost on the brink of conceding that there are no truths, only competing ideologies — narratives fighting narratives. In this epistemological warfare, those with the most power are accused of imposing their version of reality — the “dominant paradigm” — on the rest, leaving the weaker to fight back with formulations of their own. Everything becomes a version.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
I heard from young anthropologists, speaking the language of postmodernism, who consider science to be just another tool with which Western colonialism further extends its “cultural hegemony” by marginalizing the dispossessed and privileging its own worldview.
-
Science, through this lens, doesn’t discover knowledge, it “manufactures” it, along with other marketable goods.
-
The widening gyre of beliefs is accelerated by the otherwise liberating Internet. At the same time it expands the reach of every mind, it channels debate into clashing memes, often no longer than 140 characters, that force people to extremes and trap them in self-reinforcing bubbles of thought.
14More
shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 11
- No Cached
People Argue Just to Win, Scholars Assert - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...st-to-win-scholars-assert.html
reasoning reason argumentation brain science truth adaptation
![](/images/link.gif)
-
For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth.
-
Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” Truth and accuracy were beside the point.
-
Mr. Sperber wanted to figure out why people persisted in picking out evidence that supported their views and ignored the rest — what is known as confirmation bias — leading them to hold on to a belief doggedly in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.
-
Other scholars have previously argued that reasoning and irrationality are both products of evolution. But they usually assume that the purpose of reasoning is to help an individual arrive at the truth, and that irrationality is a kink in that process, a sort of mental myopia.
-
distortions in reasoning are unintended side effects of blind evolution. They are a result of the way that the brain, a Rube Goldberg mental contraption, processes memory. People are more likely to remember items they are familiar with, like their own beliefs, rather than those of others.
-
In a new paper, he and Hélène Landemore, an assistant professor of political science at Yale, propose that the arguing and assessment skills employed by groups make democratic debate the best form of government for evolutionary reasons, regardless of philosophical or moral rationales.
-
attempts to rid people of biases have failed because reasoning does exactly what it is supposed to do: help win an argument.
-
To Ms. Narvaez, “reasoning is something that develops from experience; it’s a subset of what we really know.” And much of what we know cannot be put into words, she explained, pointing out that language evolved relatively late in human development.
-
Mr. Sperber and Mr. Mercier contend that as people became better at producing and picking apart arguments, their assessment skills evolved as well.
-
“At least in some cultural contexts, this results in a kind of arms race towards greater sophistication in the production and evaluation of arguments,” they write. “When people are motivated to reason, they do a better job at accepting only sound arguments, which is quite generally to their advantage.” Groups are more likely than individuals to come up with better results, they say, because they will be exposed to the best arguments
-
What is revolutionary about argumentative theory is that it presumes that since reason has a different purpose — to win over an opposing group — flawed reasoning is an adaptation in itself, useful for bolstering debating skills.
-
Mr. Mercier and Ms. Landemore, as a practical matter, endorse the theory of deliberative democracy, an approach that arose in the 1980s, which envisions cooperative town-hall-style deliberations. Championed by the philosophers John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, this sort of collaborative forum can overcome the tendency of groups to polarize at the extremes and deadlock,
11More
shared by Javier E on 02 Jul 11
- No Cached
The Backfire Effect « You Are Not So Smart - 0 views
youarenotsosmart.com/...the-backfire-effect
cognitive bias backfire confirmation bias social media individualized
![](/images/link.gif)
-
corrections tended to increase the strength of the participants’ misconceptions if those corrections contradicted their ideologies. People on opposing sides of the political spectrum read the same articles and then the same corrections, and when new evidence was interpreted as threatening to their beliefs, they doubled down. The corrections backfired.
-
Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do it instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens them instead. Over time, the backfire effect helps make you less skeptical of those things which allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.
-
Psychologists call stories like these narrative scripts, stories that tell you what you want to hear, stories which confirm your beliefs and give you permission to continue feeling as you already do. If believing in welfare queens protects your ideology, you accept it and move on.
- ...8 more annotations...
-
Contradictory evidence strengthens the position of the believer. It is seen as part of the conspiracy, and missing evidence is dismissed as part of the coverup.
-
Most online battles follow a similar pattern, each side launching attacks and pulling evidence from deep inside the web to back up their positions until, out of frustration, one party resorts to an all-out ad hominem nuclear strike
-
you can never win an argument online. When you start to pull out facts and figures, hyperlinks and quotes, you are actually making the opponent feel as though they are even more sure of their position than before you started the debate. As they match your fervor, the same thing happens in your skull. The backfire effect pushes both of you deeper into your original beliefs.
-
you spend much more time considering information you disagree with than you do information you accept. Information which lines up with what you already believe passes through the mind like a vapor, but when you come across something which threatens your beliefs, something which conflicts with your preconceived notions of how the world works, you seize up and take notice. Some psychologists speculate there is an evolutionary explanation. Your ancestors paid more attention and spent more time thinking about negative stimuli than positive because bad things required a response
-
when your beliefs are challenged, you pore over the data, picking it apart, searching for weakness. The cognitive dissonance locks up the gears of your mind until you deal with it. In the process you form more neural connections, build new memories and put out effort – once you finally move on, your original convictions are stronger than ever.
-
The backfire effect is constantly shaping your beliefs and memory, keeping you consistently leaning one way or the other through a process psychologists call biased assimilation.
-
They then separated subjects into two groups; one group said they believed homosexuality was a mental illness and one did not. Each group then read the fake studies full of pretend facts and figures suggesting their worldview was wrong. On either side of the issue, after reading studies which did not support their beliefs, most people didn’t report an epiphany, a realization they’ve been wrong all these years. Instead, they said the issue was something science couldn’t understand. When asked about other topics later on, like spanking or astrology, these same people said they no longer trusted research to determine the truth. Rather than shed their belief and face facts, they rejected science altogether.
-
As social media and advertising progresses, confirmation bias and the backfire effect will become more and more difficult to overcome. You will have more opportunities to pick and choose the kind of information which gets into your head along with the kinds of outlets you trust to give you that information. In addition, advertisers will continue to adapt, not only generating ads based on what they know about you, but creating advertising strategies on the fly based on what has and has not worked on you so far. The media of the future may be delivered based not only on your preferences, but on how you vote, where you grew up, your mood, the time of day or year – every element of you which can be quantified. In a world where everything comes to you on demand, your beliefs may never be challenged.
6More
shared by julia rhodes on 23 Dec 13
- No Cached
How our brain assess bargains - 0 views
medicalxpress.com/...2013-12-brain-bargains.html
brain science language technology knowledge research science bargains brain psychology education
![](/images/link.gif)
-
The 'supermarket shoppers' were brain-scanned to test their reactions to promotions and special offers in a major cutting-edge project by UK-based SBXL, one of Europe's leading shopping behaviour specialists and Bangor University's respected School of Psychology.
-
We know from other research that people are not as good at making rational decisions as they might expect, often using "rules of thumb" and educated guesses to evaluate decisions. Using brain imaging techniques we hope to get a better understanding of how the brain responds to special offers and how this may influence the decisions we make. This also gives us the chance to do some research on how we make decisions in a real world context."
-
Our data also agrees with previous research suggesting that as offers, or decisions get more complex, instead of working things out, our brains take shortcuts, and may guess that an offer is good. Interestingly, in our study people were just as good at selecting good complex offers from bad as they were for less complex ones, suggesting this guessing method may be as good in some cases as "working it out"."
- ...3 more annotations...
-
"It turns out we are not as good at picking good offers as you might expect, with the average shopper in our experiment only picking 60% of good offers compared to bad. We also found that age had a strong negative affect on the ability to choose good offers, with older people less able to choose good offers over bad ones. We find this latter effect very interesting and would like to do some more research to find out why this may be the case."
-
The advantage of using fMRI to image the brain while actively making shopping decisions is that it enables us to see how the whole brain responds, including the 'deeper' areas of the brain, such as those associated with emotion and desire. This lets us understand more about what makes an offer appealing: in some cases the choice appears to be more rational, and in other cases we can see emotional circuitry getting involved in the decision-making process".
-
In particular we are interested in how factors we are unconsciously aware of can override what might be considered the optimal choice based on conscious judgements. We hope this partnership with SBXL will lead to further research in this area."
6More
shared by Javier E on 28 Dec 14
- No Cached
What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage - New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...25love.html
training behavior reward animal technique approximation psychology learning
![](/images/link.gif)
smnasha liked it
-
like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse: he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever.
-
For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard.
-
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock.
-
With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.
-
Enlightened trainers learn all they can about a species, from anatomy to social structure, to understand how it thinks, what it likes and dislikes, what comes easily to it and what doesn't.
7More
FaceApp apologises for 'racist' filter that lightens users' skintone | Technology | The... - 0 views
-
“It is an unfortunate side-effect of the underlying neural network caused by the training set bias, not intended behaviour.”
- ...3 more annotations...
-
This is by no means the first time an app which changes people’s faces have been criticised for racial insensitivity.
-
This article reminds me of an article I read days ago about AI chatting program that picked up racial expression when it is learning in chatting people a lot of people. The faceApp obviously adapt a similar learning program that's similar to that of the AI robot. I think it can partly reflect what the mainstream society is thinking. It unveil this preference of whiter skin tone people have intentionally or subconsciously. This is the mainstream esthetic in the society now. --Sissi (4/26/2017)