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Student loan debt: Here are 7 ways the $1.6 trillion toll affects the U.S. economy - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-loan-debt-is-doing-us-economy
shared by caelengrubb on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • American families are carrying about $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, a massive burden that amounts to nearly 8 percent of national income. That share has roughly doubled since the mid-2000s.
  • Years of research show that such post-college debt compels people to put off marriage and home ownership. It also stifles entrepreneurship and career paths.
  • Student loan debt is taking a bite out of the housing market
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  • A $1,000 increase in student loan debt, researchers found, lowered the odds of marriage by 2 percent a month among female bachelor’s degree recipients in the first four years after graduation. That finding has been bolstered by more recent research showing a similar trend.
  • Student loan debt is hampering the growth of small businesses
  • a significant and economically meaningful negative correlation” between rising student loan debt and falling small-business formation. The mechanism isn’t hard to grasp: If you’re paying off a student loan, you’re less able to pull together the cash needed to start a business.
  • The authors note that small businesses are responsible for “approximately 60 percent of net employment activity in the U.S.”
  • Student loan debt is delaying marriage and family formation
  • This year, the Federal Reserve issued a report showing that student loan debt prevented about 400,000 young families from purchasing homes, accounting for about a quarter of the drop in home-ownership rates in this demographic from 2005 to 2014
  • Student loan debt makes it harder to weather financial crises
  • From 2007 to 2009, households with student loans saw 12.4 percent of their total net worth evaporate, while the net worth of those without such loans fell by 9.3 percent
  • Student loan debt is preventing young people from saving for retirement
  • Student loan debt can cause graduates to give up on their dreams
  • The returns on higher education aren’t what they once were
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Your Pandemic Tech Habits - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pandemic-tech-habits.html
shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Your Pandemic Tech Habits
  • Therapy from afar. Books on the iPad. Friends via screens. Here’s the tech that’s sustained us.
  • A rock musician and a chamber orchestra violinist discovered apps that allowed them to play music with others far away. A woman in Toronto says she’s learned how to take courses and order groceries online, but she longs to be with her great-grandsons.
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  • Some of you said you had formed new habits that you think might stick, including meditating online and gathering weekly with pals over Zoom.
  • Some readers said they were grateful for virtual stand-ins but could not wait to get back to the library and hugging their family members.
  • This year, reading together has strengthened our bond at a distance. He calls me all of the time, asking me to please read him another story.
  • During lockdown, we discovered we could use an app called JamKazam to play music together over the internet in real time.
  • reading e-books on my iPad
  • To be honest, I miss holding a physical book in my hand, turning a page and the satisfying feeling of closing the book when you’ve finished.
  • My new tech habit is meditation class by Zoom. I have never before been able to successfully meditate
  • But being at home, in my most comfortable chair in front of the fireplace with a cup of coffee has worked for me. Meditation has been a great tool to help me cope with the stress and anxiety of this terrible, no-good year.
  • I started drawing cartoons that highlight how our lives have changed during the pandemic
  • I’ve been able to maintain my social ties with my musician friends and make some new musical friends as well. Last, but not least, I am encouraged to keep practicing.
  • My new habit is ordering groceries online and no contact pickup
  • My “shoppers” have done an outstanding job! It’s a true improvement that should remain in place
  • I am 86 years old and haven’t hugged anyone in my family for one year. But I’ve learned to use Zoom and to order my groceries online, both of which helped me keep myself fed, independent and sane
  • I’ve attended services at my synagogue without having to put on my snow boots. I’ve gone to art galleries and operas without having to dress up or worry about where to park.
  • My psychologist is now doing telehealth visits, and I love it. It’s my hope that this becomes a permanent option in the future.
  • Not only for me, but for the multitudes of people who need mental health care and aren’t in a position to access it in person.
  • I teach ballet to older women. When we had to stop dancing together in person, I was motivated to find a way to deliver a class in some form. With an iPhone, my teenager’s tripod and the tech advice of my three adult children and my son-in-law, I was able to quickly learn to record a ballet class, edit it on my laptop, make a YouTube channel, upload the video and share it.
  • I purchased Duolingo and brushed up on French and picked up Arabic and German.
  • I go to an annual girls’ weekend trip on Lake Gaston with five other women. That had to be canceled last year. We’ve instituted a weekly Zoom call on Tuesday nights after we put the kids to bed to catch up with each other and talk and laugh, and sometimes cry.
  • It’s brought us even closer together than the usual once per year weekend could
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Opinion | What Facebook Fed the Baby Boomers - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ok-disinformation-boomers.html facebook psychology
shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • n mid-October I asked two people I’d never met to give me their Facebook account passwords for three weeks leading up to and after Election Day. I wanted to immerse myself in the feeds of a type of person who has become a trope of sorts in our national discussion about politics and disinformation: baby boomers with an attachment to polarizing social media.
  • Despite Facebook’s reputation as a leading source for conspiracy theories and misinformation, what goes on in most average Americans’ news feeds is nearly impossible for outsiders to observe.
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Anti-ageing effects of protein restriction unpacked - 0 views

www.nature.com/...d41586-020-03662-x
shared by tonycheng6 on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The idea that dietary restriction can be used as a tool to increase lifespan has been a centrepiece of ageing research for decades. But the mechanisms by which dietary restriction might act, and the specific nutritional components involved, remain unclear.
  • Both dietary protein restriction (which results in low levels of leucine and other BCAAs) and inhibition of mTOR can extend lifespan in animals
  • Flies that carry a mutation in this residue have lower mTOR activity than do controls. They are also longer-lived, and are protected against the negative lifespan-shortening effects of a high-protein diet.
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  • In contrast to a previous study6, they observed a robust lifespan extension in male mice fed a BCAA-restricted diet throughout life, equal to the benefits of dietary protein restriction.
  • Interestingly, female mice showed no lifespan extension from BCAA or dietary protein restriction, and if BCAA restriction was started during middle age, the benefits on males were greatly reduced. Thus, both studies collectively point to mTOR as a primary mediator of the benefits associated with BCAA restriction (Fig. 1).
  • A clear picture is emerging of how specific amino acids are sensed by sestrin to regulate mTOR signalling and autophagy and so preserve the function of intestinal stem cells during ageing.
  • Genetic background is crucial in the response to dietary restriction, with an identical low-calorie regimen increasing lifespan in some mouse strains but shortening it in others
  • There is also evidence that dietary restriction initiated later in life might have reduced benefits in rodents and, in some cases, result in premature death
  • Taken together, these observations suggest that although protein- and BCAA-restricted diets are a powerful research tool for exploring the fundamental mechanisms of ageing, it is premature to recommend adoption by the general population.
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The Power of Positive Thinking: Too Much and Never Enough - The Bulwark - 1 views

thebulwark.com/king-too-much-and-never-enough psychological COVID-19 current events
shared by huffem4 on 27 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Peale was exceptional for cutting the flock some spiritual slack, encouraging them to look for the sunny side and conquer their inferiority complexes. In his world, you can have the economic gains minus the guilt, which seems perfectly suited to the American sensibility.
  • The book sold millions of copies and was eventually translated into more than 40 languages, and Peale, from his pulpit at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, became central to the spiritual life of the family of Fred Trump Sr., his wife, Mary, and the four Trump children, including the future president.
  • it was also well suited to justifying and exacerbating the pathologies of the Trump family and businesses
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  • Mary Trump (the president’s niece who also happens to have a Ph.D. in psychology) paints a portrait of Fred Trump Sr. as a sociopath, utterly uninterested in entering into the moral, emotional, and psychological world of his family or its members. In keeping with Peale’s teaching, he would no more hear about his wife’s or children’s problems than he would accept a failed business deal
  • Fred would just say, “Everything’s great, right Toots?” refusing to acknowledge, much less accommodate, her illness. 
  • Fred Jr. was then further abused, repeatedly denied authority, second-guessed at every turn, and blamed for every problem, setback, and failure in a perverse tag-team between Fred Sr. and Donald. The abuse fed his alcoholism, which, in the family’s Peale-informed understanding, was not a disease requiring treatment but the result of Fred Jr.’s negative thinking
  • Peale wanted people to be hopeful, kind, and optimistic, and to become “people persons.” The Trump family heard the positive thinking, personal empowerment parts, which integrated easily with its win-at-all-cost ideology, but they, or at least Donald, missed the bits about seeking counsel from others and living a life of dependence upon God.
  • These are the problem-solving strategies that Donald Trump brought to his marriages, six corporate bankruptcies, presidential campaign, and now, what increasingly appears to be a failed presidency.
  • The consistent element in each of these has been to deny negative realities and keep moving. The casinos, the airline, the football league, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump University . . . all bear the same markings of hyper optimism and overpromise/underdeliver salesmanship
  • Trump’s just doing what he’s always done: conquering the challenge by blinding himself to it, just the way Reverend Peale taught him and his father insisted upon. 
  • My AEI colleague, Brad Wilcox, documented that men who identified as “evangelical” but infrequently attend church were more likely to engage in domestic violence than evangelicals who regularly attended church, mainline Protestants and those who never attend church. Wilcox believes this results from a kind of doctrinal cherry-picking—big on authority, sovereignty, and power but closed to other-directed teachings like altruism and self-sacrifice. Weak attachment to religious faith tends to put some of the worst behaviors on steroids.  
  • Fred Jr.’s deepening alcoholism only elicited increasing abuse from his father and brother seemingly under the theory that if they were hard enough on him he would turn around. Even in his final crisis, afflicted by fatal, alcohol-induced cardiac problems, no member of the family went with him to the hospital (Donald Trump went to a movie instead). Dying, it appears, is the result of late-stage negative thought.
  • “prosperity gospel” (a belief popularized by televangelists that God intends Christians to be healthy and wealthy)
  • The purpose of these psychological and spiritual practices is to free individuals from self-doubt and feelings of inferiority and help them to become the people God truly intends them to be: happy, wealthy, popular, and professionally successful.
  • Now we have Trump COVID-19 and it’s following the same pattern. The virus is “very well under control” and “going to fade away.”
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Computers Already Learn From Us. But Can They Teach Themselves? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-supervised-unsupervised.html
shared by pier-paolo on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • We teach computers to see patterns, much as we teach children to read. But the future of A.I. depends on computer systems that learn on their own, without supervision, researchers say.
  • When a mother points to a dog and tells her baby, “Look at the doggy,” the child learns what to call the furry four-legged friends. That is supervised learning. But when that baby stands and stumbles, again and again, until she can walk, that is something else.Computers are the same.
  • ven if a supervised learning system read all the books in the world, he noted, it would still lack human-level intelligence because so much of our knowledge is never written down.
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  • upervised learning depends on annotated data: images, audio or text that is painstakingly labeled by hordes of workers. They circle people or outline bicycles on pictures of street traffic. The labeled data is fed to computer algorithms, teaching the algorithms what to look for. After ingesting millions of labeled images, the algorithms become expert at recognizing what they have been taught to see.
  • There is also reinforcement learning, with very limited supervision that does not rely on training data. Reinforcement learning in computer science,
  • is modeled after reward-driven learning in the brain: Think of a rat learning to push a lever to receive a pellet of food. The strategy has been developed to teach computer systems to take actions.
  • A more inclusive term for the future of A.I., he said, is “predictive learning,” meaning systems that not only recognize patterns but also p
  • redict outcomes and choose a course of action. “Everybody agrees we need predictive learning, but we disagree about how to get there,”
  • My money is on self-supervised learning,” he said, referring to computer systems that ingest huge amounts of unlabeled data and make sense of it all without supervision or reward. He is working on models that learn by observation, accumulating enough background knowledge that some sort of common sense can emerge.
  • A huge fraction of what we do in our day-to-day jobs is constantly refining our mental models of the world and then using those mental models to solve problems,” he said. “That encapsulates an awful lot of what we’d like A.I. to do.”Image
  • Currently, robots can operate only in well-defined environments with little variation.
  • “Our working assumption is that if we build sufficiently general algorithms, then all we really have to do, once that’s done, is to put them in robots that are out there in the real world doing real things,”
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The economy is in for tough times, but here's a roadmap for recovery from the coronavir... - 0 views

www.marketwatch.com/...rom-the-coronavirus-2020-03-13 economy research Knowledge education
shared by sanderk on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Not for the next few months. The government still doesn’t know how widely the coronavirus has spread across America because of repeated snafus creating a test and it will take time to contain it. Until then large parts of the economy —schools, sports leagues, workplaces, cultural sites — are likely to remain shut down or operating on a limited basis.
  • The economy could shrink as much as 4% to 5% in the second quarter and trigger a sharp increase in unemployment, according to the most pessimistic Wall Street forecasts. The last time that happened was during the 2007-2009 Great Recession.
  • The vast majority of economists predict the U.S. will start to rebound later in the year, though they are split over how soon and how fast. Some like Donabedian see a rapid recovery starting in the summer. Others predict a short recession that extends through the fall.
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  • “There’s going to be a lot of bad news in the next three to four months,” said David Donabedian, chief investment officer of CIBC Private Wealth Management. “It will be pretty ugly. It is sure going to feel like a recession for awhile.”
  • If the U.S. achieves the same success as say, South Korea, the hope is that spread of the coronavirus will taper off by early summer, when illnesses such as the flu and cold also tend to weaken because of the heat and humidity.
  • “Some countries have proven that if you take precautionary measures such as social distancing you can get in front of this virus and contain it or at least slow it down,” said Sal Guatieri, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets.
  • The Fed has already cut a key interest rate on March 3 and could reduce it to basically zero by next week. The lowest rates in modern times is already encouraging a fusillade of mortgage refinancings that will put more money in family’s pockets.
  • Congress, for its part, is assembling what’s likely to be the first in a series of steps to cushion the blow to individuals and businesses most likely to suffer. A pending bill includes free testing, paid sick leave, emergency jobless benefits and small-business bridge loans.Economists says an overwhelming federal response is critical.
  • Still, even relative optimists such as Guatieri say there’s still too much uncertainty to feel confident. He and Wells Fargo’s Bullard say their firms have been changing their forecasts almost daily in the past week as the situation deteriorated. What’s made matters worse is simply not knowing the scope of the problem
  • “We’re not getting the insight into where we are or where we are going,” Bullard said. “So we’re all just speculating.”
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Computers Are Learning to Read-But They're Still Not So Smart | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...-but-theyre-still-not-so-smart research artificial intelligence pattern recognition
shared by johnsonel7 on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • computers still weren’t very good at understanding the written word. Sure, they had become decent at simulating that understanding in certain narrow domains, like automatic translation or sentiment analysis (for example, determining if a sentence sounds “mean or nice,” he said). But Bowman wanted measurable evidence of the genuine article: bona fide, human-style reading comprehension in English. So he came up with a test
  • The machines bombed. Even state-of-the-art neural networks scored no higher than 69 out of 100 across all nine tasks: a D-plus, in letter grade terms. Bowman and his coauthors weren’t surprised. Neural networks — layers of computational connections built in a crude approximation of how neurons communicate within mammalian brains
  • It produced a GLUE score of 80.5. On this brand-new benchmark designed to measure machines’ real understanding of natural language — or to expose their lack thereof — the machines had jumped from a D-plus to a B-minus in just six months.
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  • The only problem is that perfect rulebooks don’t exist, because natural language is far too complex and haphazard to be reduced to a rigid set of specifications.
  • Researchers simply fed their neural networks massive amounts of written text copied from freely available sources like Wikipedia — billions of words, preformatted into grammatically correct sentences — and let the networks derive next-word predictions on their own. In essence, it was like asking the person inside a Chinese room to write all his own rules, using only the incoming Chinese messages for reference.“The great thing about this approach is it turns out that the model learns a ton of stuff about syntax,”
  • The nonsequential nature of the transformer represented sentences in a more expressive form, which Uszkoreit calls treelike. Each layer of the neural network makes multiple, parallel connections between certain words while ignoring others — akin to a student diagramming a sentence in elementary school. These connections are often drawn between words that may not actually sit next to each other in the sentence. “Those structures effectively look like a number of trees that are overlaid,” Uszkoreit explained.
  • But instead of concluding that BERT could apparently imbue neural networks with near-Aristotelian reasoning skills, they suspected a simpler explanation: that BERT was picking up on superficial patterns in the way the warrants were phrased.
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Donald Trump's trade wars have not been 'easy to win'  | Financial Times - 0 views

www.ft.com/...98-36ed-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4
shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The phase one trade agreement between the US and China signed on Wednesday is only a truce in the trade war, rather than a major reversal of the tariffs imposed since 2018. Nevertheless, it halts a dangerous political momentum.
  • Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs describes this as a “subtraction of the negatives”. Paradoxically, the worse the effects on US growth rates in the past two years, the greater the scope for a bounceback this year. Mr Trump’s initial confidence about the effects of trade protection was based on a belief that China’s bilateral trade surplus with the US would force President Xi Jinping to make major policy concessions to safeguard his own export sector. The outcome was rather different: China retaliated with similar measures and this damaged American manufacturers. 
  • The damage to financial and business confidence triggered by the trade announcements hurt US growth still further. The tightening in financial conditions caused by the rising dollar and the collapse in equities late in 2018 would probably have been more severe if the Fed had not reduced policy interest rates by 75 basis points since then.
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  • The good news is that part of this overall drag may disappear before the end of 2020, boosting American GDP growthby at least half a percentage point.What about the longer-term benefits of the trade deal?The purchase of $200bn of additional US exports in the energy, agriculture, manufacturing and services sectors, spread over two years, will reduce the bilateral trade deficit with China. But many of these exports will probably be redirected from elsewhere and will not boost US domestic output in those sectors. Longer term, China’s business restrictions, including alleged unfair trading practices, appear to be easing. Given the political boost from the phase one deal, Chinese economic reformers such as vice-premier Liu He may be in the ascendancy in Beijing for a while. 
  • The trade war has significantly damaged US growth in 2018-19Since President Donald Trump became more aggressive in his threats about trade protection early in 2018, US tariffs on Chinese goods have risen markedly, prompting retaliation from China. There have been only a few comprehensive studies on the overall impact of tariffs on the US growth rate. A notable exception is the work of Jan Hatzius’s US economics team at Goldman Sachs. They have estimated the possible impact of rising tariffs on net trade flows, real incomes, financial conditions and business confidence, and have combined these effects to produce the aggregate growth estimates shown in the graph below. As the negative effects of rising tariffs fade in 2020, the US growth rate is expected to be boosted by at least half a percentage point.
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Climate change threatens lives and futures of over 19 million children in Bangladesh - 0 views

www.unicef.org/...19-million-children-bangladesh
shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • “Climate change is deepening the environmental threat faced by families in Bangladesh’s poorest communities, leaving them unable to keep their children properly housed, fed, healthy and educated,” said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore, who visited Bangladesh in early March 2019. “In Bangladesh and around the world, climate change has the potential to reverse many of the gains that countries have achieved in child survival and development.”
  • Climate change clouds the future of children in Bangladesh, points out that Bangladesh’s flat topography, dense population and weak infrastructure make it uniquely vulnerable to the powerful and unpredictable forces that climate change is compounding.
  • The threat is felt from the flood and drought-prone lowlands in the country’s north to its storm-ravaged coastline along the Bay of Bengal.
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  • UNICEF says that a combination of extreme weather events – such as flooding, storm surges, cyclones and droughts – and longer-term phenomena directly related to climate change – such as sea level rise and salt water intrusion – are forcing families deeper into poverty and displacement. In the process, children’s access to education and health services is severely disrupted.
  • Around 12 million of the children most affected live in and around the powerful river systems which flow through Bangladesh and regularly burst their banks.
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MIT creates "Norman" - a "psychopathic AI" raised on Reddit | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...-at-mit-create-psychopathic-ai Psychology Teaching AI
shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • They did it to prove that AI itself isn't inherently bad and evil, more-so that AI can be bad if fed bad and evil data.
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Being happier will help you live longer, so learn how to be happier - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Science has been exploring the connection between happiness and longevity for some time. A 2011 analysis of nearly 4,000 Brits found those who said they felt content, happy or excited on a typical day were up to 35% less likely to die prematurely. In a 2016 study, a positive outlook was associated with longer life for nearly 4,000 older French men and women studied over 22 years.
  • According to research on the Positive Psychology Center website, striving for well-being will allow you to perform better at work, have better relationships, a stronger immune system, fewer sleep problems, lower levels of burnout, better physical health and -- you'll live longer.
  • "Happiness comes in different sizes and flavors," said cardiologist Dr. Alan Rozanski, a professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who studies optimism."There is the transient type, fed by such things as a walk in a park, spending time with a friend, or eating that ice cream you love," he continued. "But these feelings of happiness come and go."
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  • "People who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected," said Harvard psychiatrist Robert Waldinger in his popular TEDx talk. "And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic."
  • The lessons aren't about wealth or fame or working harder and harder," Waldinger said. "The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period."
  • "In fact, the more positive the person, the greater the protection from heart attacks, stroke and any cause of death," said Mt. Sinai's Rozanski, who was the lead author on the study.
  • A sense of purpose and meaning in your life is a big part of living a longer, happier life, according to psychology professor Lyle Ungar, who has developed what he calls the Well-Being Map. It rates every US county on such psychological factors as openness, trust, agreeableness and neuroticism.
  • "If your sole duty is to achieve the best for yourself, life becomes just too stressful, too lonely -- you are set up to fail. Instead, you need to feel you exist for something larger, and that very thought takes off some of the pressure."
  • SpiritualityStudies by the Pew Research Center show that actively religious people are more likely than less- or non-religious people to describe themselves as "very happy." They also share some traits that could improve their chance at a longer, happy life: They are less likely to smoke and drink, and more likely to join clubs and volunteer at charities.
  • "I'm surprised how good religion is for people," Ungar said. "Religious people are more agreeable, they're happier, they live longer."It doesn't have to be a traditional religion. Layard points out that spiritual practices ranging from meditation to positive psychology to cognitive therapy can also feed an inner life.
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Opinion | Richard Powers on What We Can Learn From Trees - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-podcast-richard-powers.html trees buddhism immanence nature stewardship science knowledge
shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Theo and Robin have a nightly ritual where they say a prayer that Alyssa, the deceased wife and mother, taught them: May all sentient beings be free from needless suffering. That prayer itself comes from the four immeasurables in the Buddhist tradition.
  • When we enter into or recover this sense of kinship that was absolutely fundamental to so many indigenous cultures everywhere around the world at many, many different points in history, that there is no radical break between us and our kin, that even consciousness is shared, to some degree and to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, then death stops seeming like the enemy and it starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining.
  • Look, I’m 64 years old. I can remember sitting in psychology class as an undergraduate and having my professor declare that no, of course animals don’t have emotions because they don’t have an internal life. They don’t have conscious awareness. And so what looks to you like your dog being extremely happy or being extremely guilty, which dogs do so beautifully, is just your projection, your anthropomorphizing of those other creatures. And this prohibition against anthropomorphism created an artificial gulf between even those animals that are ridiculously near of kin to us, genetically.
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  • I don’t know if that sounds too complicated. But the point is, it’s not just giving up domination. It’s giving up this sense of separateness in favor of a sense of kinship. And those people who do often wonder how they failed to see how much continuity there is in the more-than-human world with the human world.
  • to go from terror into being and into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social and economic and cultural things. If the experiment is sacred, how can we possibly justify our food systems, for instance?
  • when I first went to the Smokies and hiked up into the old growth in the Southern Appalachians, it was like somebody threw a switch. There was some odd filter that had just been removed, and the world sounded different and smelled different.
  • richard powersYeah. In human exceptionalism, we may be completely aware of evolutionary continuity. We may understand that we have a literal kinship with the rest of creation, that all life on Earth employs the same genetic code, that there is a very small core of core genes and core proteins that is shared across all the kingdoms and phyla of life. But conceptually, we still have this demented idea that somehow consciousness creates a sanctity and a separation that almost nullifies the continuous elements of evolution and biology that we’ve come to understand.
  • if we want to begin this process of rehabilitation and transformation of consciousness that we are going to need in order to become part of the living Earth, it is going to be other kinds of minds that give us that clarity and strength and diversity and alternative way of thinking that could free us from this stranglehold of thought that looks only to the maximizing return on investment in very leverageable ways.
  • richard powersIt amazed me to get to the end of the first draft of “Bewilderment” and to realize how much Buddhism was in the book, from the simplest things.
  • I think there is nothing more science inflected than being out in the living world and the more-than-human world and trying to understand what’s happening.
  • And of course, we can combine this with what we were talking about earlier with death. If we see all of evolution as somehow leading up to us, all of human, cultural evolution leading up to neoliberalism and here we are just busily trying to accumulate and make meaning for ourselves, death becomes the enemy.
  • And you’re making the point in different ways throughout the book that it is the minds we think of as unusual, that we would diagnose as having some kind of problem or dysfunction that are, in some cases, are the only ones responding to the moment in the most common sense way it deserves. It is almost everybody else’s brain that has been broken.
  • it isn’t surprising. If you think of the characteristics of this dominant culture that we’ve been talking about — the fixation on control, the fixation on mastery, the fixation on management and accumulation and the resistance of decay — it isn’t surprising that that culture is also threatened by difference and divergence. It seeks out old, stable hierarchies — clear hierarchies — of control, and anything that’s not quite exploitable or leverageable in the way that the normal is terrifying and threatening.
  • And the more I looked for it, the more it pervaded the book.
  • ezra kleinI’ve heard you say that it has changed the way you measure a good day. Can you tell me about that?richard powersThat’s true.I suppose when I was still enthralled to commodity-mediated individualist market-driven human exceptionalism — we need a single word for this
  • And since moving to the Smokies and since publishing “The Overstory,” my days have been entirely inverted. I wake up, I go to the window, and I look outside. Or I step out onto the deck — if I haven’t been sleeping on the deck, which I try to do as much as I can in the course of the year — and see what’s in the air, gauge the temperature and the humidity and the wind and see what season it is and ask myself, you know, what’s happening out there now at 1,700 feet or 4,000 feet or 5,000 feet.
  • let me talk specifically about the work of a scientist who has herself just recently published a book. It’s Dr. Suzanne Simard, and the book is “Finding the Mother Tree.” Simard has been instrumental in a revolution in our way of thinking about what’s happening underground at the root level in a forest.
  • it was a moving moment for me, as an easterner, to stand up there and to say, this is what an eastern forest looks like. This is what a healthy, fully-functioning forest looks like. And I’m 56 years old, and I’d never seen it.
  • the other topics of that culture tend to circle back around these sorts of trends, human fascinations, ways of magnifying our throw weight and our ability and removing the last constraints to our desires and, in particular, to eliminate the single greatest enemy of meaning in the culture of the technological sublime that is, itself, such a strong instance of the culture of human separatism and commodity-mediated individualist capitalism— that is to say, the removal of death.
  • Why is it that we have known about the crisis of species extinction for at least half a century and longer? And I mean the lay public, not just scientists. But why has this been general knowledge for a long time without public will demanding some kind of action or change
  • And when you make kinship beyond yourself, your sense of meaning gravitates outwards into that reciprocal relationship, into that interdependence. And you know, it’s a little bit like scales falling off your eyes. When you do turn that corner, all of the sources of anxiety that are so present and so deeply internalized become much more identifiable. And my own sense of hope and fear gets a much larger frame of reference to operate in.
  • I think, for most of my life, until I did kind of wake up to forests and to trees, I shared — without really understanding this as a kind of concession or a kind of subscription — I did share this cultural consensus that meaning is a private thing that we do for ourselves and by ourselves and that our kind of general sense of the discoveries of the 19th and 20th century have left us feeling a bit unsponsored and adrift beyond the accident of human existence.
  • The largest single influence on any human being’s mode of thought is other human beings. So if you are surrounded by lots of terrified but wishful-thinking people who want to believe that somehow the cavalry is going to come at the last minute and that we don’t really have to look inwards and change our belief in where meaning comes from, that we will somehow be able to get over the finish line with all our stuff and that we’ll avert this disaster, as we have other kinds of disasters in the past.
  • I think what was happening to me at that time, as I was turning outward and starting to take the non-human world seriously, is my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me but all of these other ways of being that I could make kinship with.
  • And I think I was right along with that sense that somehow we are a thing apart. We can make purpose and make meaning completely arbitrarily. It consists mostly of trying to be more in yourself, of accumulating in one form or another.
  • I can’t really be out for more than two or three miles before my head just fills with associations and ideas and scenes and character sketches. And I usually have to rush back home to keep it all in my head long enough to get it down on paper.
  • for my journey, the way to characterize this transition is from being fascinated with technologies of mastery and control and what they’re doing to us as human beings, how they’re changing what the capacities and affordances of humanity are and how we narrate ourselves, to being fascinated with technologies and sciences of interdependence and cooperation, of those sciences that increase our sense of kinship and being one of many, many neighbors.
  • And that’s an almost impossible persuasion to rouse yourself from if you don’t have allies. And I think the one hopeful thing about the present is the number of people trying to challenge that consensual understanding and break away into a new way of looking at human standing is growing.
  • And when you do subscribe to a culture like that and you are confronted with the reality of your own mortality, as I was when I was living in Stanford, that sense of stockpiling personal meaning starts to feel a little bit pointless.
  • And I just head out. I head out based on what the day has to offer. And to have that come first has really changed not only how I write, but what I’ve been writing. And I think it really shows in “Bewilderment.” It’s a totally different kind of book from my previous 12.
  • the marvelous thing about the work, which continues to get more sophisticated and continues to turn up newer and newer astonishments, is that there was odd kind of reciprocal interdependence and cooperation across the species barrier, that Douglas firs and birches were actually involved in these sharing back and forth of essential nutrients. And that’s a whole new way of looking at forest.
  • she began to see that the forests were actually wired up in very complex and identifiable ways and that there was an enormous system of resource sharing going on underground, that trees were sharing not only sugars and the hydrocarbons necessary for survival, but also secondary metabolites. And these were being passed back and forth, both symbiotically between the trees and the fungi, but also across the network to other trees so that there were actually trees in wired up, fungally-connected forests where large, dominant, healthy trees were subsidizing, as it were, trees that were injured or not in favorable positions or damaged in some way or just failing to thrive.
  • so when I was still pretty much a card-carrying member of that culture, I had this sense that to become a better person and to get ahead and to really make more of myself, I had to be as productive as possible. And that meant waking up every morning and getting 1,000 words that I was proud of. And it’s interesting that I would even settle on a quantitative target. That’s very typical for that kind of mindset that I’m talking about — 1,000 words and then you’re free, and then you can do what you want with the day.
  • there will be a threshold, as there have been for these other great social transformations that we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades where somehow it goes from an outsider position to absolutely mainstream and common sense.
  • I am persuaded by those scholars who have showed the degree to which the concept of nature is itself an artificial construction that’s born of cultures of human separatism. I believe that everything that life does is part of the living enterprise, and that includes the construction of cities. And there is no question at all the warning that you just gave about nostalgia creating a false binary between the built world and the true natural world is itself a form of cultural isolation.
  • Religion is a technology to discipline, to discipline certain parts of the human impulse. A lot of the book revolves around the decoded neurofeedback machine, which is a very real literalization of a technology, of changing the way we think
  • one of the things I think that we have to take seriously is that we have created technologies to supercharge some parts of our natural impulse, the capitalism I think should be understood as a technology to supercharge the growth impulse, and it creates some wonders out of that and some horrors out of that.
  • richard powersSure. I base my machine on existing technology. Decoded neurofeedback is a kind of nascent field of exploration. You can read about it; it’s been publishing results for a decade. I first came across it in 2013. It involves using fMRI to record the brain activity of a human being who is learning a process, interacting with an object or engaged in a certain emotional state. That neural activity is recorded and stored as a data structure. A second subsequent human being is then also scanned in real time and fed kinds of feedback based on their own internal neural activity as determined by a kind of software analysis of their fMRI data structures.
  • And they are queued little by little to approximate, to learn how to approximate, the recorded states of the original subject. When I first read about this, I did get a little bit of a revelation. I did feel my skin pucker and think, if pushed far enough, this would be something like a telepathy conduit. It would be a first big step in answering that age-old question of what does it feel like to be something other than we are
  • in the book I simply take that basic concept and extend it, juke it up a little bit, blur the line between what the reader might think is possible right now and what they might wonder about, and maybe even introduce possibilities for this empathetic transference
  • ezra kleinOne thing I loved about the role this played in the book is that it’s highlighting its inverse. So a reader might look at this and say, wow, wouldn’t that be cool if we had a machine that could in real time change how we think and change our neural pathways and change our mental state in a particular direction? But of course, all of society is that machine,
  • Robin and Theo are in an airport. And you’ve got TVs everywhere playing the news which is to say playing a constant loop of outrage, and disaster, and calamity. And Robbie, who’s going through these neural feedback sessions during this period, turns to his dad and says, “Dad, you know how the training’s rewiring my brain? This is what is rewiring everybody else.”
  • ezra kleinI think Marshall McLuhan knew it all. I really do. Not exactly what it would look like, but his view and Postman’s view that we are creating a digital global nervous system is a way they put it, it was exactly right. A nervous system, it was such the exact right metaphor.
  • the great insight of McLuhan, to me, what now gets called the medium is the message is this idea that the way media acts upon us is not in the content it delivers. The point of Twitter is not the link that you click or even the tweet that you read; it is that the nature and structure of the Twitter system itself begins to act on your system, and you become more like it.If you watch a lot of TV, you become more like TV. If you watch a lot of Twitter, you become more like Twitter, Facebook more like Facebook. Your identities become more important to you — that the content is distraction from the medium, and the medium changes you
  • it is happening to all of us in ways that at least we are not engaging in intentionally, not at that level of how do we want to be transformed.
  • richard powersI believe that the digital neural system is now so comprehensive that the idea that you could escape it somewhere, certainly not in the Smokies, even more remotely, I think, becomes more and more laughable. Yeah, and to build on this idea of the medium being the message, not the way in which we become more like the forms and affordances of the medium is that we begin to expect that those affordances, the method in which those media are used, the physiological dependencies and castes of behavior and thought that are required to operate them and interact with them are actual — that they’re real somehow, and that we just take them into human nature and say no, this is what we’ve always wanted and we’ve simply been able to become more like our true selves.
  • Well, the warpage in our sense of time, the warpage in our sense of place, are profound. The ways in which digital feedback and the affordances of social media and all the rest have changed our expectations with regard to what we need to concentrate on, what we need to learn for ourselves, are changing profoundly.
  • If you look far enough back, you can find Socrates expressing great anxiety and suspicion about the ways in which writing is going to transform the human brain and human expectation. He was worried that somehow it was going to ruin our memories. Well, it did up to a point — nothing like the way the digital technologies have ruined our memories.
  • my tradition is Jewish, the Sabbath is a technology, is a technology to create a different relationship between the human being, and time, and growth, and productive society than you would have without the Sabbath which is framed in terms of godliness but is also a way of creating separation from the other impulses of the weak.
  • Governments are a technology, monogamy is a technology, a religiously driven technology, but now one that is culturally driven. And these things do good and they do bad. I’m not making an argument for any one of them in particular. But the idea that we would need to invent something wholly new to come up with a way to change the way human beings act is ridiculous
  • My view of the story of this era is that capitalism was one of many forces, and it has become, in many societies, functionally the only one that it was in relationship with religion, it was in relationship with more rooted communities.
  • it has become not just an economic system but a belief system, and it’s a little bit untrammeled. I’m not an anti-capitalist person, but I believe it needs countervailing forces. And my basic view is that it doesn’t have them anymore.
  • the book does introduce this kind of fable, this kind of thought experiment about the way the affordances that a new and slightly stronger technology of empathy might deflect. First of all, the story of a little boy and then the story of his father who’s scrambling to be a responsible single parent. And then, beyond that, the community of people who hear about this boy and become fascinated with him as a narrative, which again ripples outward through these digital technologies in ways that can’t be controlled or whose consequences can be foreseen.
  • I’ve talked about it before is something I’ve said is that I think a push against, functionally, materialism and want is an important weight in our society that we need. And when people say it is the way we’ll deal with climate change in the three to five year time frame, I become much more skeptical because to the point of things like the technology you have in the book with neural feedback, I do think one of the questions you have to ask is, socially and culturally, how do you move people’s minds so you can then move their politics?
  • You’re going to need something, it seems to me, outside of politics, that changes humans’ sense of themselves more fundamentally. And that takes a minute at the scale of billions.
  • richard powersWell, you are correct. And I don’t think it’s giving away any great reveal in the book to say that a reader who gets far enough into the story probably has this moment of recursive awareness where they, he or she comes to understand that what Robin is doing in this gradual training on the cast of mind of some other person is precisely what they’re doing in the act of reading the novel “Bewilderment” — by living this act of active empathy for these two characters, they are undergoing their own kind of neurofeedback.
  • The more we understand about the complexities of living systems, of organisms and the evolution of organisms, the more capable it is to feel a kind of spiritual awe. And that certainly makes it easier to have reverence for the experiment beyond me and beyond my species. I don’t think those are incommensurable or incompatible ways of knowing the world. In fact, I think to invoke one last time that Buddhist precept of interbeing, I think there is a kind of interbeing between the desire, the true selfless desire to understand the world out there through presence, care, measurement, attention, reproduction of experiment and the desire to have a spiritual affinity and shared fate with the world out there. They’re really the same project.
  • richard powersWell, sure. If we turn back to the new forestry again and researchers like Suzanne Simard who were showing the literal interconnectivity across species boundaries and the cooperation of resource sharing between different species in a forest, that is rigorous science, rigorous reproducible science. And it does participate in that central principle of practice, or collection of practices, which always requires the renunciation of personal wish and ego and prior belief in favor of empirical reproduction.
  • I’ve begun to see people beginning to build out of the humbling sciences a worldview that seems quite spiritual. And as you’re somebody who seems to me to have done that and it has changed your life, would you reflect on that a bit?
  • So much of the book is about the possibility of life beyond Earth. Tell me a bit about the role that’s playing. Why did you make the possibility of alien life in the way it might look and feel and evolve and act so central in a book about protecting and cherishing life here?
  • richard powersI’m glad that we’re slipping this in at the end because yes this framing of the book around this question of are we alone or does the universe want life it’s really important. Theo, Robin’s father, is an astrobiologist.
  • Imagine that everything happens just right so that every square inch of this place is colonized by new forms of experiments, new kinds of life. And the father trying to entertain his son with the story of this remarkable place in the sun just stopping him and saying, Dad, come on, that’s asking too much. Get real, that’s science fiction. That’s the vision that I had when I finished the book, an absolutely limitless sense of just how lucky we’ve had it here.
  • one thing I kept thinking about that didn’t make it into the final book but exists as a kind of parallel story in my own head is the father and son on some very distant planet in some very distant star, many light years from here, playing that same game. And the father saying, OK, now imagine a world that’s just the right size, and it has plate tectonics, and it has water, and it has a nearby moon to stabilize its rotation, and it has incredible security and safety from asteroids because of other large planets in the solar system.
  • they make this journey across the universe through all kinds of incubators, all kinds of petri dishes for life and the possibilities of life. And rather than answer the question — so where is everybody? — it keeps deferring the question, it keeps making that question more subtle and stranger
  • For the purposes of the book, Robin, who desperately believes in the sanctity of life beyond himself, begs his father for these nighttime, bedtime stories, and Theo gives him easy travel to other planets. Father and son going to a new planet based on the kinds of planets that Theo’s science is turning up and asking this question, what would life look like if it was able to get started here?
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Pandemic-Era Politics Are Ruining Public Education - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...622824 learning teaching trends school history ideology books reading research social social media technology psychology
shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head.
  • Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are
  • Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.
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  • It isn’t clear how the American public-school system will survive the COVID years. Teachers, whose relative pay and status have been in decline for decades, are fleeing the field. In 2021, buckling under the stresses of the pandemic, nearly 1 million people quit jobs in public education, a 40 percent increase over the previous year.
  • These kids, and the investments that come with them, may never return—the beginning of a cycle of attrition that could continue long after the pandemic ends and leave public schools even more underfunded and dilapidated than before. “It’s an open question whether the public-school system will recover,” Steiner said. “That is a real concern for democratic education.”
  • The high-profile failings of public schools during the pandemic have become a political problem for Democrats, because of their association with unions, prolonged closures, and the pedagogy of social justice, which can become a form of indoctrination.
  • The party that stands for strong government services in the name of egalitarian principles supported the closing of schools far longer than either the science or the welfare of children justified, and it has been woefully slow to acknowledge how much this damaged the life chances of some of America’s most disadvantaged students.
  • Public education is too important to be left to politicians and ideologues. Public schools still serve about 90 percent of children across red and blue America.
  • Since the common-school movement in the early 19th century, the public school has had an exalted purpose in this country. It’s our core civic institution—not just because, ideally, it brings children of all backgrounds together in a classroom, but because it prepares them for the demands and privileges of democratic citizenship. Or at least, it needs to.
  • What is school for? This is the kind of foundational question that arises when a crisis shakes the public’s faith in an essential institution. “The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens,”
  • “Horace Mann went to his grave having never once uttered the phrase college- and career-ready. We’ve become more accustomed to thinking about the private ends of education. We’ve completely lost the habit of thinking about education as citizen-making.”
  • School can’t just be an economic sorting system. One reason we have a stake in the education of other people’s children is that they will grow up to be citizens.
  • Public education is meant not to mirror the unexamined values of a particular family or community, but to expose children to ways that other people, some of them long dead, think.
  • If the answer were simply to push more and more kids into college, the United States would be entering its democratic prime
  • So the question isn’t just how much education, but what kind. Is it quaint, or utopian, to talk about teaching our children to be capable of governing themselves?
  • The COVID era, with Donald Trump out of office but still in power and with battles over mask mandates and critical race theory convulsing Twitter and school-board meetings, shows how badly Americans are able to think about our collective problems—let alone read, listen, empathize, debate, reconsider, and persuade in the search for solutions.
  • democratic citizenship can, at least in part, be learned.
  • he orthodoxies currently fighting for our children’s souls turn the teaching of U.S. history into a static and morally simple quest for some American essence. They proceed from celebration or indictment toward a final judgment—innocent or guilty—and bury either oppression or progress in a subordinate clause. The most depressing thing about this gloomy pedagogy of ideologies in service to fragile psyches is how much knowledge it takes away from students who already have so little
  • The history warriors build their metaphysics of national good or evil on a foundation of ignorance. In a 2019 survey, only 40 percent of Americans were able to pass the test that all applicants for U.S. citizenship must take, which asks questions like “Who did the United States fight in World War II?” and “We elect a President for how many years?” The only state in which a majority passed was Vermont.
  • A central goal for history, social-studies, and civics instruction should be to give students something more solid than spoon-fed maxims—to help them engage with the past on its own terms, not use it as a weapon in the latest front of the culture wars.
  • W. E. B. Du Bois wrote: “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
  • The truth requires a grounding in historical facts, but facts are quickly forgotten without meaning and context
  • The goal isn’t just to teach students the origins of the Civil War, but to give them the ability to read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up their claims with evidence from original documents.
  • This kind of instruction, which requires teachers to distinguish between exposure and indoctrination, isn’t easy; it asks them to be more sophisticated professionals than their shabby conditions and pay (median salary: $62,000, less than accountants and transit police) suggest we are willing to support.
  • To do that, we’ll need to help kids restore at least part of their crushed attention spans.
  • staring at a screen for hours is a heavy depressant, especially for teenagers.
  • we’ll look back on the amount of time we let our children spend online with the same horror that we now feel about earlier generations of adults who hooked their kids on smoking.
  • “It’s not a choice between tech or no tech,” Bill Tally, a researcher with the Education Development Center, told me. “The question is what tech infrastructure best enables the things we care about,” such as deep engagement with instructional materials, teachers, and other students.
  • The pandemic should have forced us to reassess what really matters in public school; instead, it’s a crisis that we’ve just about wasted.
  • Like learning to read as historians, learning to sift through the tidal flood of memes for useful, reliable information can emancipate children who have been heedlessly hooked on screens by the adults in their lives
  • Finally, let’s give children a chance to read books—good books. It’s a strange feature of all the recent pedagogical innovations that they’ve resulted in the gradual disappearance of literature from many classrooms.
  • The best way to interest young people in literature is to have them read good literature, and not just books that focus with grim piety on the contemporary social and psychological problems of teenagers.
  • We sell them insultingly short in thinking that they won’t read unless the subject is themselves. Mirrors are ultimately isolating; young readers also need windows, even if the view is unfamiliar, even if it’s disturbing
  • connection through language to universal human experience and thought is the reward of great literature, a source of empathy and wisdom.
  • The culture wars, with their atmosphere of resentment, fear, and petty faultfinding, are hostile to the writing and reading of literature.
  • Releasing them to do “research” in the vast ocean of the internet without maps and compasses, as often happens, guarantees that they will drown before they arrive anywhere.
  • The classroom has become a half-abandoned battlefield, where grown-ups who claim to be protecting students from the virus, from books, from ideologies and counter-ideologies end up using children to protect themselves and their own entrenched camps.
  • American democracy can’t afford another generation of adults who don’t know how to talk and listen and think. We owe our COVID-scarred children the means to free themselves from the failures of the past and the present.
  • Students are leaving as well. Since 2020, nearly 1.5 million children have been removed from public schools to attend private or charter schools or be homeschooled.
  • “COVID has encouraged poor parents to question the quality of public education. We are seeing diminished numbers of children in our public schools, particularly our urban public schools.” In New York, more than 80,000 children have disappeared from city schools; in Los Angeles, more than 26,000; in Chicago, more than 24,000.
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Your Bosses Could Have a File on You, and They May Misinterpret It - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-threat-private-companies.html new york times
shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The company you work for may want to know. Some corporate employers fear that employees could leak information, allow access to confidential files, contact clients inappropriately or, in the extreme, bring a gun to the office.
  • at times using behavioral science tools like psychology.
  • But in spite of worries that workers might be, reasonably, put off by a feeling that technology and surveillance are invading yet another sphere of their lives, employers want to know which clock-punchers may harm their organizations.
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  • “There is so much technology out there that employers are experimenting with or investing in,” said Edgar Ndjatou
  • Software can watch for suspicious computer behavior or it can dig into an employee’s credit reports, arrest records and marital-status updates. It can check to see if Cheryl is downloading bulk cloud data or run a sentiment analysis on Tom’s emails to see if he’s getting testier over time. Analysis of this data, say the companies that monitor insider risk, can point to potential problems in the workplace.
  • Organizations that produce monitoring software and behavioral analysis for the feds also may offer conceptually similar tools to private companies, either independently or packaged with broader cybersecurity tools.
  • But corporations are moving forward with their own software-enhanced surveillance. While private-sector workers may not be subjected to the rigors of a 136-page clearance form, private companies help build these “continuous vetting” technologies for the federal government, said Lindy Kyzer of ClearanceJobs. Then, she adds, “Any solution would have private-sector applications.”
  • “Can we build a system that checks on somebody and keeps checking on them and is aware of that person’s disposition as they exist in the legal systems and the public record systems on a continuous basis?” said Chris Grijalva
  • But the interest in anticipating insider threats in the private sector raises ethical questions about what level of monitoring nongovernmental employees should be subject to.
  • “People are starting to understand that the insider threat is a business problem and should be handled accordingly,” said Mr. Grijalva.
  • The linguistic software package they developed, called SCOUT, uses psycholinguistic analysis to seek flags that, among other things, indicate feelings of disgruntlement, like victimization, anger and blame.
  • “The language changes in subtle ways that you’re not aware of,” Mr. Stroz said.
  • There’s not enough information, in other words, to construct algorithms about trustworthiness from the ground up. And that would hold in either the private or the public sector.
  • Even if all that dystopian data did exist, it would still be tricky to draw individual — rather than simply aggregate — conclusions about which behavioral indicators potentially presaged ill actions.
  • “Depending too heavily on personal factors identified using software solutions is a mistake, as we are unable to determine how much they influence future likelihood of engaging in malicious behaviors,” Dr. Cunningham said.
  • “I have focused very heavily on identifying indicators that you can actually measure, versus those that require a lot of interpretation,” Dr. Cunningham said. “Especially those indicators that require interpretation by expert psychologists or expert so-and-sos. Because I find that it’s a little bit too dangerous, and I don’t know that it’s always ethical.”
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Everyone's Over Instagram - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672305 social media instagram
shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • “Gen Z’s relationship with Instagram is much like millennials’ relationship with Facebook: Begrudgingly necessary,” Casey Lewis, a youth-culture consultant who writes the youth-culture newsletter After School, told me over email. “They don’t want to be on it, but they feel it’s weird if they’re not.”
  • a recent Piper Sandler survey found that, of 14,500 teens surveyed across 47 states, only 20 percent named Instagram their favorite social-media platform (TikTok came first, followed by Snapchat).
  • Simply being on Instagram is a very different thing from actively engaging with it. Participating means throwing pictures into a void, which is why it’s become kind of cringe. To do so earnestly suggests a blithe unawareness of your surroundings, like shouting into the phone in public.
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  • In other words, Instagram is giving us the ick: that feeling when a romantic partner or crush does something small but noticeable—like wearing a fedora—that immediately turns you off forever.
  • “People who aren’t influencers only use [Instagram] to watch other people make big announcements,” Lee Tilghman, a former full-time Instagram influencer, told me over the phone. “My close friends who aren’t influencers, they haven’t posted in, like, two years.”
  • although Instagram now has 2 billion monthly users, it faces an existential problem: What happens when the 18-to-29-year-olds who are most likely to use the app, at least in America, age out or go elsewhere? Last year, The New York Times reported that Instagram was privately worried about attracting and retaining the new young users that would sustain its long-term growth—not to mention whose growing shopping potential is catnip to advertisers.
  • Over the summer, these frustrations boiled over. An update that promised, among other things, algorithmically recommended video content that would fill the entire screen was a bridge too far. Users were fed up with watching the app contort itself into a TikTok copycat that prioritized video and recommended posts over photos from friends
  • . Internal documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal show that Instagram users spend 17.6 million hours a day watching Reels, Instagram’s TikTok knockoff, compared with the 197.8 million hours people spend watching TikTok every day. The documents also revealed that Reels engagement has declined by 13.6 percent in recent months, with most users generating “no engagement whatsoever.”
  • Instagram may not be on its deathbed, but its transformation from cool to cringe is a sea change in the social-media universe. The platform was perhaps the most significant among an old generation of popular apps that embodied the original purpose of social media: to connect online with friends and family. Its decline is about not just a loss of relevance, but a capitulation to a new era of “performance” media, in which we create online primarily to reach people we don’t know instead of the people we do
  • . Lavish brand deals, in which an influencer promotes a brand’s product to their audience for a fee, have been known to pay anywhere from $100 to $10,000 per post, depending on the size of the creator’s following and their engagement. Now Tilghman, who became an Instagram influencer in 2015 and at one point had close to 400,000 followers, says she’s seen her rate go down by 80 percent over the past five years. The market’s just oversaturated.
  • The author Jessica DeFino, who joined Instagram in 2018 on the advice of publishing agents, similarly began stepping back from the platform in 2020, feeling overwhelmed by the constant feedback of her following. She has now set up auto-replies to her Instagram DMs: If one of her 59,000 followers sends her a message, they’re met with an invitation to instead reach out to DeFino via email.
  • would she get back on Instagram as a regular user? Only if she “created a private, personal account — somewhere I could limit my interactions to just family and friends,” she says. “Like what Instagram was in the beginning, I guess.”
  • That is if, by then, Instagram’s algorithm-driven, recommendation-fueled, shopping-heavy interface would even let her. Ick.
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Opinion | The Alt-Right Manipulated My Comic. Then A.I. Claimed It. - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...w-algorithim-took-my-work.html AI identity abuse exploitation creator
shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Legally, it appears as though LAION was able to scour what seems like the entire internet because it deems itself a nonprofit organization engaging in academic research. While it was funded at least in part by Stability AI, the company that created Stable Diffusion, it is technically a separate entity. Stability AI then used its nonprofit research arm to create A.I. generators first via Stable Diffusion and then commercialized in a new model called DreamStudio.
  • hat makes up these data sets? Well, pretty much everything. For artists, many of us had what amounted to our entire portfolios fed into the data set without our consent. This means that A.I. generators were built on the backs of our copyrighted work, and through a legal loophole, they were able to produce copies of varying levels of sophistication.
  • eing able to imitate a living artist has obvious implications for our careers, and some artists are already dealing with real challenges to their livelihood.
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  • Greg Rutkowski, a hugely popular concept artist, has been used in a prompt for Stable Diffusion upward of 100,000 times. Now, his name is no longer attached to just his own work, but it also summons a slew of imitations of varying quality that he hasn’t approved. This could confuse clients, and it muddies the consistent and precise output he usually produces. When I saw what was happening to him, I thought of my battle with my shadow self. We were each fighting a version of ourself that looked similar but that was uncanny, twisted in a way to which we didn’t consent.
  • In theory, everyone is at risk for their work or image to become a vulgarity with A.I., but I suspect those who will be the most hurt are those who are already facing the consequences of improving technology, namely members of marginalized groups.
  • In the future, with A.I. technology, many more people will have a shadow self with whom they must reckon. Once the features that we consider personal and unique — our facial structure, our handwriting, the way we draw — can be programmed and contorted at the click of a mouse, the possibilities for violations are endless.
  • I’ve been playing around with several generators, and so far none have mimicked my style in a way that can directly threaten my career, a fact that will almost certainly change as A.I. continues to improve. It’s undeniable; the A.I.s know me. Most have captured the outlines and signatures of my comics — black hair, bangs, striped T-shirts. To others, it may look like a drawing taking shape.I see a monster forming.
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Is sanity returning to the trans debate? | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...returning-to-the-trans-debate- trans gay UK trends language bias psychology science
shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Mermaids, the UK charity for, in their own words, ‘gender variant and transgender children’ is under the spotlight. Following investigations by the Telegraph and Mail newspapers, as well as demands from critics concerned about child safeguarding, the Charity Commission has launched a regulatory compliance case and have said that they have written to the organisation’s trustees
  • The investigations found that Mermaids has been offering breast binders to girls reportedly as young as 13, and despite children saying their parents opposed the practice. Binding can often cause breathing difficulties, back pain and broken ribs. It was also uncovered that kids have been ‘congratulated’ online for identifying as transgender by staff and volunteers on the charity’s online help centre, with teenagers being advised that puberty blockers are safe and ‘totally reversible’.
  • Mermaids has been given half a million pounds in total from the National Lottery, and lauded by the likes of Emma Watson, Jameela Jamil and even Harry and Meghan. In other words, the charity has had powerful supporters and been like Teflon for a very long time. Starbucks did a fundraiser for them, more than 40 schools invited them in to educate teachers and kids about ‘gender identity’, and a number of corporates sponsor the charity.
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  • There is no such thing as a trans child. Mermaids passionately advocates for the availability of puberty blockers for kids, despite the growing bank of evidence that they can cause a multitude of harms. The vast majority of those prescribed blockers go to take cross-sex hormones further down the line.
  • In the dim and distant past, lobotomies were performed on those with mental illness and psychosis, and today distressed children are being fed the line that they are trapped in the wrong body and that drugs and surgery is the solution. When and how did it become acceptable to pump kids full of harmful hormones and remove healthy body parts as opposed to offering them therapy?
  • I was in court during the cross examination of Mermaids and its supporter, and heard loud and clear its dismissal of the fact that sex is immutable. As far as Mermaids and its lackeys are concerned, all that is necessary to identify and live as the opposite sex is an inner ‘feeling’ of gender identity. The witnesses declared that trans men are men, and trans women, women. They were seemingly unconcerned when presented with the fact that there has been a 4000-plus per cent increase in girls presenting at clinics such as the Tavistock GIDS, claiming to be trans boys.
  • A recent interim report on the Tavistock GIDs recommended that it be closed down in due course, and that much of the ‘treatment’ at the clinic was focused solely on affirming a child’s trans identity and not scrutinising related issues such as mental health issues, autistic disorders, and abuse within the family home.
  • I first contacted Mermaids in 2003, when investigating the notion of ‘trans children’ and was given the cold shoulder. Many other individuals and organisations that have grave concerns about its practices have spoken out, and as a result have been labelled bigots and transphobes. That we are now about to be validated is little comfort, bearing in mind the number of lives ruined by irreversible medical intervention on children who, if supported therapeutically, would likely have grown up to be lesbian or gay.
  • As a result of its spiteful attempt to discredit LGB Alliance, it seems the practice and ideology of Mermaids is now being exposed. In my view it is an organisation led by dangerous ideology that promotes medical intervention to kids that simply need to be supported in who they are and in the bodies they were born with. I believe it deserves to be shut down.
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Opinion | A Nobel Prize for the Economics of Panic - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-bernanke-diamond-dybvig.html economics nobel prize panic bank great recession depression theory
shared by Javier E on 12 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Obviously, Bernanke, Diamond and Dybvig weren’t the first economists to notice that bank runs happen
  • Diamond and Dybvig provided the first really clear analysis of why they happen — and why, destructive as they are, they can represent rational behavior on the part of bank depositors. Their analysis was also full of implications for financial policy.
  • Bernanke provided evidence on why bank runs matter and, although he avoided saying so directly, why Milton Friedman was wrong about the causes of the Great Depression.
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  • Diamond and Dybvig offered a stylized but insightful model of what banks do. They argued that there is always a tension between individuals’ desire for liquidity — ready access to funds — and the economy’s need to make long-term investments that can’t easily be converted into cash.
  • Banks square that circle by taking money from depositors who can withdraw their funds at will — making those deposits highly liquid — and investing most of that money in illiquid assets, such as business loans.
  • So banking is a productive activity that makes the economy richer by reconciling otherwise incompatible desires for liquidity and productive investment. And it normally works because only a fraction of a bank’s depositors want to withdraw their funds at any given time.
  • This does, however, make banks vulnerable to runs. Suppose that for some reason many depositors come to believe that many other depositors are about to cash out, and try to beat the pack by withdrawing their own funds. To meet these demands for liquidity, a bank will have to sell off its illiquid assets at fire sale prices, and doing so can drive an institution that should be solvent into bankruptcy
  • If that happens, people who didn’t withdraw their funds will be left with nothing. So during a panic, the rational thing to do is to panic along with everyone else.
  • There was, of course, a huge wave of banking panics in 1930-31. Many banks failed, and those that survived made far fewer business loans than before, holding cash instead, while many families shunned banks altogether, putting their cash in safes or under their mattresses. The result was a diversion of wealth into unproductive uses. In his 1983 paper, Bernanke offered evidence that this diversion played a large role in driving the economy into a depression and held back the subsequent recovery.
  • In the story told by Friedman and Anna Schwartz, the banking crisis of the early 1930s was damaging because it led to a fall in the money supply — currency plus bank deposits. Bernanke asserted that this was at most only part of the stor
  • a government backstop — either deposit insurance, the willingness of the central bank to lend money to troubled banks or both — can short-circuit potential crises.
  • But providing such a backstop raises the possibility of abuse; banks may take on undue risks because they know they’ll be bailed out if things go wrong.
  • So banks need to be regulated as well as backstopped. As I said, the Diamond-Dybvig analysis had remarkably large implications for policy.
  • From an economic point of view, banking is any form of financial intermediation that offers people seemingly liquid assets while using their wealth to make illiquid investments.
  • This insight was dramatically validated in the 2008 financial crisis.
  • By the eve of the crisis, however, the financial system relied heavily on “shadow banking” — banklike activities that didn’t involve standard bank deposits
  • Such arrangements offered a higher yield than conventional deposits. But they had no safety net, which opened the door to an old-style bank run and financial panic.
  • And the panic came. The conventionally measured money supply didn’t plunge in 2008 the way it did in the 1930s — but repo and other money-like liabilities of financial intermediaries did:
  • Fortunately, by then Bernanke was chair of the Federal Reserve. He understood what was going on, and the Fed stepped in on an immense scale to prop up the financial system.
  • a sort of meta point about the Diamond-Dybvig work: Once you’ve understood and acknowledged the possibility of self-fulfilling banking crises, you become aware that similar things can happen elsewhere.
  • Perhaps the most notable case in relatively recent times was the euro crisis of 2010-12. Market confidence in the economies of southern Europe collapsed, leading to huge spreads between the interest rates on, for example, Portuguese bonds and those on German bonds. The conventional wisdom at the time — especially in Germany — was that countries were being justifiably punished for taking on excessive debt
  • the Belgian economist Paul De Grauwe argued that what was actually happening was a self-fulfilling panic — basically a run on the bonds of countries that couldn’t provide a backstop because they no longer had their own currencies.
  • Sure enough, when Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank at the time, finally did provide a backstop in 2012 — he said the magic words “whatever it takes,” implying that the bank would lend money to the troubled governments if necessary — the spreads collapsed and the crisis came to an end:
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