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AOC Isn't Using 'Verbal Blackface'-She's Code-Switching - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...586723 language code black english
shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • another misimpression about Black English: that only uneducated people can be considered “authentic” in using it. This partly reflects a sense that Black English is a mere matter of grammatical flubs, a legacy of inadequate education. That analysis of Black English has been resoundingly refuted by shelves and shelves of research by linguists. Yet even someone who acknowledges that Black English is not broken language might suppose that it is rooted solely in being black and, roughly, poor.
  • poor black people are by no means the only ones who code-switch into Black English. Worldwide, people code-switch into nonstandard dialects as part of the general palette of human expression: The nonstandard dialect can connote warmth, surprise, anger, flirtation, intimacy. Obama and Ocasio-Cortez are no less authentic in their use of Black English than people such as Cornel West and Keegan-Michael Key, educated black people who code-switch constantly and beautifully.
  • Code-switching, however, is often about seasoning, sprinkling, decoration
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • why would it be wrong for a politician to seek to connect to black audiences by sprinkling her speech with some of their dialect, which she grew up hearing and using herself? After all, language is fundamentally designed for connection. People often note that their speech tends to meld itself to the speech of those around them, such that they end up having a multilayered linguistic identity. Ocasio-Cortez has one.
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How to Hear Sign Language - Megan Garber - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281062 language science technology
shared by Ellie McGinnis on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Signs and speech use different methods to express themselves; that divide alone makes the everyday translation of sign-to-speech, and speech-to-sign, particularly challenging.
  • Scientists at Microsoft and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, however, think they have found a way to bridge the gulf
  • The deaf person signs, and the system renders both a written and a spoken translation of those gestures.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Which means that the interactions between the deaf and the hearing could soon become much less friction-filled than they've been in the past.
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When Mismatched Voices and Lips Make Your Brain Play Tricks - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...lip-reading-mcgurk-effect.html
shared by dicindioha on 05 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The good news is, the human brain is flexible and efficient. This helps us make sense of the world. But the bad news is, the human brain is flexible and efficient. This means the brain can sometimes make mistakes.
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 05 Mar 17
       
      This is a great way to say what we talked about with human perception and survival reflexes!
  • You can watch this tension play out when the brain tries to connect auditory and visual speech.
  • By comparing mathematical models for how the brain integrates senses important in detecting speech, they found that the brain uses vision, hearing and experience when making sense of speech.
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 05 Mar 17
       
      mathematical modeling involved too
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “But it turns out that what their face is doing is actually profoundly influencing what you are perceiving.”
  • The brain asks itself: “Is it likely that these two things go together or not?”
  • “In science we’ve assumed that people do that, always put together everything,” Dr. Beauchamp said. “It turns out that might not be right.”
  • brain most likely processes information about lip movements and sound in a part of the brain called the superior temporal sulcus.
  • clinicians understand and improve your hearing as you age, Dr. Magnotti said.
  • dicindioha on 05 Mar 17
     
    This is really interesting because it relates to sense perception, and how we connect our eyes and ears. Our brains try to make sense of things and put things together that might not always go together. It's always funny when you watch a video that you saw before with a new voice over, and it really looks like it's happening. I did not think of this as being connected to TOK, but it is. I also found it really interesting that learning more about the McGurk effect could help clinicians improve hearing as we get older.
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It's Win-Win When Trump and the Democrats Work Together - 0 views

nymag.com/...e-democrats-work-together.html violence leftist antifa New Left oppression speech silence ideology liberation culture history
shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • The “punch a Nazi” thread that became popular earlier this year among the left-liberal journalistic class opened my eyes to this, as more than a few liberal thought leaders loved it when they saw a video of Richard Spencer being clocked by a masked thug.
  • How has political violence now become acceptable on lefty Twitter and among one in five college students? I’d argue that it’s too easy to overlook the influence of the neo-Marxist ideology now pervasive on countless campuses — specifically the late philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s concepts of “violence of defense” and “violence of aggression” in the context of what he called “repressive tolerance.” For parts of the New Left, racist democratic capitalism perpetuates so much systemic oppression that any defense of it or acquiescence in it amounts to violence against the victims. Therefore violence in defense of the victims is perfectly defensible. It just levels the playing field.
  • Hence it’s okay to punch a Nazi, but not okay to punch a communist. It’s defensible for an oppressed person of color to assault a white person but never the other way round. Hence a recent discussion in The Guardian about whether cold-cocking a racist is defensible: “A punch may be uncivil, but racism is worse.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Actually, speech is not just interchangeable with violence; even silence is! One of the more popular signs at the rally in Boston a few weeks back was the following: “White Silence = Violence.” If you are not actively speaking out against white supremacy, in other words, you are actively enforcing it. Once you’ve apologized for being born white, and asked permission to speak, your next and only step is to inveigh against racism/sexism, etc. … or be accused of being a white supremacist yourself. At some point your head begins to explode. What is this: a Maoist boot camp?
  • We often discuss these things in the media without understanding the core ideas that animate them. But it’s important to understand that for the social-justice left, there is nothing irrational about any of this. If you take their ideas seriously, oppressive speech is violence and self-defense is legitimate. Violence is therefore not some regrettable incident. Violence to achieve liberation is a key part of the ideology they believe in.
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BBC - Future - Will emoji become a new language? - 2 views

www.bbc.com/...ll-emoji-become-a-new-language bbc language emoji psychology grammar
shared by kushnerha on 19 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Emoji are now used in around half of every sentence on sites like Instagram, and Facebook looks set to introduce them alongside the famous “like” button as a way of expression your reaction to a post.
  • If you were to believe the headlines, this is just the tipping point: some outlets have claimed that emoji are an emerging language that could soon compete with English in global usage. To many, this would be an exciting evolution of the way we communicate; to others, it is linguistic Armageddon.
  • Do emoji show the same characteristics of other communicative systems and actual languages? And what do they help us to express that words alone can’t say?When emoji appear with text, they often supplement or enhance the writing. This is similar to gestures that appear along with speech. Over the past three decades, research has shown that our hands provide important information that often transcends and clarifies the message in speech. Emoji serve this function too – for instance, adding a kissy or winking face can disambiguate whether a statement is flirtatiously teasing or just plain mean.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • This is a key point about language use: rarely is natural language ever limited to speech alone. When we are speaking, we constantly use gestures to illustrate what we mean. For this reason, linguists say that language is “multi-modal”. Writing takes away that extra non-verbal information, but emoji may allow us to re-incorporate it into our text.
  • Emoji are not always used as embellishments, however – sometimes, strings of the characters can themselves convey meaning in a longer sequence on their own. But to constitute their own language, they would need a key component: grammar.
  • A grammatical system is a set of constraints that governs how the meaning of an utterance is packaged in a coherent way. Natural language grammars have certain traits that distinguish them. For one, they have individual units that play different roles in the sequence – like nouns and verbs in a sentence. Also, grammar is different from meaning
  • When emoji are isolated, they are primarily governed by simple rules related to meaning alone, without these more complex rules. For instance, according to research by Tyler Schnoebelen, people often create strings of emoji that share a common meaning
  • This sequence has little internal structure; even when it is rearranged, it still conveys the same message. These images are connected solely by their broader meaning. We might consider them to be a visual list: “here are all things related to celebrations and birthdays.” Lists are certainly a conventionalised way of communicating, but they don’t have grammar the way that sentences do.
  • What if the order did matter though? What if they conveyed a temporal sequence of events? Consider this example, which means something like “a woman had a party where they drank, and then opened presents and then had cake”:
  • In all cases, the doer of the action (the agent) precedes the action. In fact, this pattern is commonly found in both full languages and simple communication systems. For example, the majority of the world’s languages place the subject before the verb of a sentence.
  • These rules may seem like the seeds of grammar, but psycholinguist Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues have found this order appears in many other systems that would not be considered a language. For example, this order appears when people arrange pictures to describe events from an animated cartoon, or when speaking adults communicate using only gestures. It also appears in the gesture systems created by deaf children who cannot hear spoken languages and are not exposed to sign languages.
  • describes the children as lacking exposure to a language and thus invent their own manual systems to communicate, called “homesigns”. These systems are limited in the size of their vocabularies and the types of sequences they can create. For this reason, the agent-act order seems not to be due to a grammar, but from basic heuristics – practical workarounds – based on meaning alone. Emoji seem to tap into this same system.
  • Nevertheless, some may argue that despite emoji’s current simplicity, this may be the groundwork for emerging complexity – that although emoji do not constitute a language at the present time, they could develop into one over time.
  • Could an emerging “emoji visual language” be developing in a similar way, with actual grammatical structure? To answer that question, you need to consider the intrinsic constraints on the technology itself.Emoji are created by typing into a computer like text. But, unlike text, most emoji are provided as whole units, except for the limited set of emoticons which convert to emoji, like :) or ;). When writing text, we use the building blocks (letters) to create the units (words), not by searching through a list of every whole word in the language.
  • emoji force us to convey information in a linear unit-unit string, which limits how complex expressions can be made. These constraints may mean that they will never be able to achieve even the most basic complexity that we can create with normal and natural drawings.
  • What’s more, these limits also prevent users from creating novel signs – a requisite for all languages, especially emerging ones. Users have no control over the development of the vocabulary. As the “vocab list” for emoji grows, it will become increasingly unwieldy: using them will require a conscious search process through an external list, not an easy generation from our own mental vocabulary, like the way we naturally speak or draw. This is a key point – it means that emoji lack the flexibility needed to create a new language.
  • we already have very robust visual languages, as can be seen in comics and graphic novels. As I argue in my book, The Visual Language of Comics, the drawings found in comics use a systematic visual vocabulary (such as stink lines to represent smell, or stars to represent dizziness). Importantly, the available vocabulary is not constrained by technology and has developed naturally over time, like spoken and written languages.
  • grammar of sequential images is more of a narrative structure – not of nouns and verbs. Yet, these sequences use principles of combination like any other grammar, including roles played by images, groupings of images, and hierarchic embedding.
  • measured participants’ brainwaves while they viewed sequences one image at a time where a disruption appeared either within the groupings of panels or at the natural break between groupings. The particular brainwave responses that we observed were similar to those that experimenters find when violating the syntax of sentences. That is, the brain responds the same way to violations of “grammar”, whether in sentences or sequential narrative images.
  • I would hypothesise that emoji can use a basic narrative structure to organise short stories (likely made up of agent-action sequences), but I highly doubt that they would be able to create embedded clauses like these. I would also doubt that you would see the same kinds of brain responses that we saw with the comic strip sequences.
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Opinion | The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...free-speech-idaho.html
shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges
  • Republican lawmakers try to cancel diversity programs.
  • I wrote that right-wing legislatures trying to ban critical race theory from public schools and institutions were a far more direct threat to free speech than what’s often called cancel culture.
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  • Some opponents of critical race theory responded that these bans aren’t meant to prohibit teaching about critical race theory; that they are, rather, meant to protect individuals, especially children, from coerced speech and indoctrination.
  • “They also take issue with the way this theory is being imposed on schoolchildren, many of whom have been forced to denounce immutable parts of themselves, such as their skin color and sex, in C.R.T. struggle sessions.”
  • I don’t like struggle sessions; I think critical race theory as it developed in the academy is intellectually rich, but some of the ways it’s been adapted by workplace diversity trainers and education consultants seem risible.
  • Rosen referred to a Nevada lawsuit by a Black woman who accused a charter school of making life miserable for her mixed-race son because he rejected certain ideas about privilege and oppression; if the details in it are true, he was seriously mistreated.
  • right-wing caricature of progressive public schools as pampered re-education camps
  • This week, they were reinstated, but online only and “asynchronously,” without any live discussions.
  • The budget bill also banned state colleges and universities from using any appropriated funds to “support social justice ideology student activities, clubs, events and organizations on campus,”
  • The Idaho Statesman quoted one lawmaker saying of schools, “They’re going to get the message.”
  • “a series of concerns, culminating in allegations that a student or students have been humiliated and degraded in class on our campus for their beliefs and values.”
  • But it’s hard to see how whatever happened implicated 52 different classes, and the political pressure the university is under is undeniable.
  • this month called for millions of dollars in cuts to education funding targeting “social justice programming and critical race theory.”
  • “Many legislators, frustrated with B.S.U., want to defund the social justice agenda by reducing higher education spending.”
  • “We’ve seen a spate of these bills across the country, and some of them are more concerning than others,”
  • “It’s comparable, I think, to what happened in Hungary, where the government there cracked down on, or banished essentially, the teaching of gender studies.”
  • “Integral to almost all the attacks is the implication that gender studies itself is not an academic discipline, but something larger and more mendacious,”
  • Relatively powerless academics were demonized as dangerous subversives.
  • The right likes to pretend that social justice-inflected academic disciplines are full of ideological commissars browbeating conservative students.
  • in conservative places like Idaho, it’s the professors, many of them untenured, who feel intimidated.
  • “With the climate as it is, I wouldn’t doubt that folks are starting to look over their shoulder,”
  • When it comes to the campaign against critical race theory, the fear is part of the point.
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My dad predicted Trump in 1985 - it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World | Med... - 2 views

www.theguardian.com/...il-postman-trump-orwell-huxley crisis culture entertainment discourse technology Huxley
shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • But an image? One never says a picture is true or false. It either captures your attention or it doesn’t. The more TV we watched, the more we expected – and with our finger on the remote, the more we demanded – that not just our sitcoms and cop procedurals and other “junk TV” be entertaining but also our news and other issues of import.
  • This was, in spirit, the vision that Huxley predicted way back in 1931, the dystopia my father believed we should have been watching out for. He wrote:
  • What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Today, the average weekly screen time for an American adult – brace yourself; this is not a typo – is 74 hours (and still going up)
  • The soundbite has been replaced by virality, meme, hot take, tweet. Can serious national issues really be explored in any coherent, meaningful way in such a fragmented, attention-challenged environment?
  • how engaged can any populace be when the most we’re asked to do is to like or not like a particular post, or “sign” an online petition?
  • How seriously should anyone take us, or should we take ourselves, when the “optics” of an address or campaign speech – raucousness, maybe actual violence, childishly attention-craving gestures or facial expressions – rather than the content of the speech determines how much “airtime” it gets, and how often people watch, share and favorite it?
  • Our public discourse has become so trivialized, it’s astounding that we still cling to the word “debates” for what our presidential candidates do onstage when facing each other.
  • Who can be shocked by the rise of a reality TV star, a man given to loud, inflammatory statements, many of which are spectacularly untrue but virtually all of which make for what used to be called “good television”?
  • Who can be appalled when the coin of the realm in public discourse is not experience, thoughtfulness or diplomacy but the ability to amuse – no matter how maddening or revolting the amusement?
  • “Television is a speed-of-light medium, a present-centered medium,” my father wrote. “Its grammar, so to say, permits no access to the past … history can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.”
  • Later in that passage, Czesław Miłosz, winner of the Nobel prize for literature, is cited for remarking in his 1980 acceptance speech that that era was notable for “a refusal to remember”; my father notes Miłosz referencing “the shattering fact that there are now more than one hundred books in print that deny that the Holocaust ever took place”.
  • “An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan,” my father wrote. “Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us … [but] who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?”
  • I wish I could tell you that, for all his prescience, my father also supplied a solution. He did no
  • First: treat false allegations as an opportunity. Seek information as close to the source as possible.
  • Second: don’t expect “the media” to do this job for you. Some of its practitioners do, brilliantly and at times heroically. But most of the media exists to sell you things.
  • Finally, and most importantly, it should be the responsibility of schools to make children aware of our information environments, which in many instances have become our entertainment environments
  • We must teach our children, from a very young age, to be skeptics, to listen carefully, to assume everyone is lying about everything. (Well, maybe not everyone.)
  • “what is required of us now is a new era of responsibility … giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship.”
  • we need more than just hope for a way out. We need a strategy, or at least some tactics.
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The Difference Between a Language and a Dialect - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...424704
shared by caelengrubb on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
  • The very fact that “language” and “dialect” persist as separate concepts implies that linguists can make tidy distinctions for speech varieties worldwide. But in fact, there is no objective difference between the two: Any attempt you make to impose that kind of order on reality falls apart in the face of real evidence.
  • The idea of distinguishing “languages” from “dialects” is of no logical use here. As often as not, it’s more that speech is a little different from place to place, such that a person can get along speaking when in the town a few valleys over; one starts having trouble the further away he gets; and after a traveling a certain distance can no longer understand a thing anyone is saying.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Worldwide, some mutually understandable ways of speaking, which one might think of as “dialects” of one language, are actually treated as separate languages
  • It turns out that it’s also impossible to determine precisely where one “language” leaves off and another begins
  • As such, English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on “intelligibility”: If you can understand it without training, it’s a dialect of your own language; if you can’t, it’s a different language
  • The only thing that can save an attempt to impose a formal definition on the terms “language” and “dialect” now is perhaps to be found in popular usage, which suggests that languages are written and standardized and have a literature, while dialects are oral, without codified rules, and have no literature.
  • Namely, it’s the implication that there is something lesser about a “dialect.
  • As often as not, obscure, unwritten “dialects” are much more grammatically complicated than familiar “languages.”
  • A language, then, is indeed a dialect with an army and a navy; or, more to the point, a language is a dialect that got put up in the shop window.
  • In popular usage, a language is written in addition to being spoken, while a dialect is just spoken. But in the scientific sense, the world is buzzing with a cacophony of qualitatively equal “dialects,” often shading into one another like colors (and often mixing, too), all demonstrating how magnificently complicated human speech can be.
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Study sheds new light on how the brain distinguishes speech from noise -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201220103941.htm
shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • strongly influences sound processing in an important auditory region of the brain. The neuromodulator, acetylcholine, may even help the main auditory brain circuitry distinguish speech from noise.
  • strongly influences sound processing in an important auditory region of the brain. The neuromodulator, acetylcholine, may even help the main auditory brain circuitry distinguish speech from noise.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      This reminds me of a concept we covered in class. The brain searches for patterns in any type of sound, which is something we talked and read about. I'm assuming this article will have something to do with that idea.
  • it has rarely been studied at the more fundamental levels of the brain,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      So, in a sense, they're going back to the basics.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • "This study will likely bring new attention in the field to the ways in which circuits like this, widely considered a 'simple' one, are in fact highly complex and subject to modulatory influence like higher regions of the brain,"
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Cool. I wonder how research like this applies to medicine, or if it does at all. I always think research has more value if it's able to impact someone's life in a medical sense.
  • Additionally, they describe novel anatomical projections that provide acetylcholine input to the MNTB.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      So, contrary to my previous belief, the science is more complicated than just pattens.
  • "You can think of this modulation as akin to shifting an antenna's position to eliminate static for your favorite radio station."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I love when complex info or science is translated into simpler terms or analogies like this.
  • the researchers identified for the first time a set of completely unknown connections in the brain between the modulatory centers and this important area of the auditory system.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      First time finds is very exciting!
  • understanding how other sensory information is processed in the brain.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      cool!
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How Did Language Begin? | Linguistic Society of America - 0 views

www.linguisticsociety.org/...how-did-language-begin
shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The question is not how languages gradually developed over time into the languages of the world today. Rather, it is how the human species developed over time so that we - and not our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos - became capable of using language.
  • Human language can express thoughts on an unlimited number of topics (the weather, the war, the past, the future, mathematics, gossip, fairy tales, how to fix the sink...). It can be used not just to convey information, but to solicit information (questions) and to give orders.
  • Every human language has a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, built up from several dozen speech sounds
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Animal communication systems, in contrast, typically have at most a few dozen distinct calls, and they are used only to communicate immediate issues such as food, danger, threat, or reconciliation. Many of the sorts of meanings conveyed by chimpanzee communication have counterparts in human 'body language'.
  • The basic difficulty with studying the evolution of language is that the evidence is so sparse. Spoken languages don't leave fossils, and fossil skulls only tell us the overall shape and size of hominid brains, not what the brains could do
  • All present-day languages, including those of hunter-gatherer cultures, have lots of words, can be used to talk about anything under the sun, and can express negation. As far back as we have written records of human language - 5000 years or so - things look basically the same.
  • According to current thinking, the changes crucial for language were not just in the size of the brain, but in its character: the kinds of tasks it is suited to do - as it were, the 'software' it comes furnished with.
  • So the properties of human language are unique in the natural world.
  • About the only definitive evidence we have is the shape of the vocal tract (the mouth, tongue, and throat): Until anatomically modern humans, about 100,000 years ago, the shape of hominid vocal tracts didn't permit the modern range of speech sounds. But that doesn't mean that language necessarily began the
  • Some researchers even propose that language began as sign language, then (gradually or suddenly) switched to the vocal modality, leaving modern gesture as a residue.
  • . In an early stage, sounds would have been used to name a wide range of objects and actions in the environment, and individuals would be able to invent new vocabulary items to talk about new things
  • In order to achieve a large vocabulary, an important advance would have been the ability to 'digitize' signals into sequences of discrete speech sounds - consonants and vowels - rather than unstructured calls.
  • These two changes alone would yield a communication system of single signals - better than the chimpanzee system but far from modern language. A next plausible step would be the ability to string together several such 'words' to create a message built out of the meanings of its parts.
  • This has led some researchers to propose that the system of 'protolanguage' is still present in modern human brains, hidden under the modern system except when the latter is impaired or not yet developed.
  • Again, it's very hard to tell. We do know that something important happened in the human line between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago: This is when we start to find cultural artifacts such as art and ritual objects, evidence of what we would call civilization.
  • One tantalizing source of evidence has emerged recently. A mutation in a gene called FOXP2 has been shown to lead to deficits in language as well as in control of the face and mouth. This gene is a slightly altered version of a gene found in apes, and it seems to have achieved its present form between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.
  • Nevertheless, if we are ever going to learn more about how the human language ability evolved, the most promising evidence will probably come from the human genome, which preserves so much of our species' history. The challenge for the future will be to decode it.
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Hearing ghost voices relies on pseudoscience and fallibility of human perception - 0 views

theconversation.com/lity-of-human-perception-48160
shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Hearing ghost voices relies on pseudoscience and fallibility of human perception
  • Nontrivial numbers of Americans believe in the paranormal.
  • Part of the attraction of the audio recorder for paranormal researchers is its apparent objectivity. How could a skeptic refute the authenticity of a spirit captured by an unbiased technical instrument? To the believers, EVP seem like incontrovertible evidence of communications from beyond.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • But recent research in my lab suggested that people don’t agree much about what, if anything, they hear in the EVP sounds – a result readily explained by the fallibility of human perception.
  • In some instances, alleged EVP are the voices of the investigators or interference from radio transmissions – problems that indicate shoddy data collection practices. Other research, however, has suggested that EVP have been captured under acoustically controlled circumstances in recording studios.
  • when people said they heard a voice in the EVP, only 13% agreed about exactly what the voice said. To compare, 95% percent of people on average agreed about what the voice said when they heard actual speech.
  • People’s expectations about what they’re supposed to hear can result in the illusory perception of tones, nature sounds, machine sounds, and even voices when only acoustic white noise – like the sound of a detuned radio – exists.
  • Interpretations of speech in noise – a situation similar to EVP where the alleged voice is difficult to discern – can shift entirely based upon what the listener expects to hear.
  • In my lab, we recently conducted an experiment to examine how expectations might influence the perception of purported EVP
  • So suggesting a paranormal research topic mattered only when the audio was ambiguous.
  • Research in mainstream psychology has shown that people will readily perceive words in strings of nonsensical speech sounds.
  • These findings suggest that paranormal researchers should not use their own subjective judgments to confirm the contents of EVP.
  • But perhaps most importantly, we showed that the mere suggestion of a paranormal research context made people more likely to hear voices in ambiguous stimuli, although they couldn’t agree on what the voices were saying.
  • pareidolia – the tendency to perceive human characteristics in meaningless perceptual patterns
  • There are many visual examples of pareidolia – things like seeing human faces in everyday objects (such as Jesus in a piece of toast).
  • Research from cognitive psychology has shown that paranormal believers may be especially prone to misperceiving chance events.
  • Another characteristic of pseudoscience is a lack of integration with related areas of inquiry. There is a rich history of using experimental methods to examine auditory perception, yet EVP enthusiasts are either unaware or willfully ignorant of this relevant work.
  • parsimony – the idea that the simplest explanation is preferred
  • we need a theory to account for how and why a human listener sometimes misperceives ambiguous stimuli.
  • In fact, this very tendency is one of many well-documented cognitive shortcuts that may have adaptive value. A voice may indicate the presence of a potential mate or foe, so it may be useful to err on the side of perceiving agency in ambiguous auditory stimuli.
  • Currently, there is only limited, tentative evidence to link exposure to pseudoscience on television to pseudoscientific beliefs. Still, one study showed that people find paranormal research to be more credible and scientific when it is shown using technological tools such as recording devices. Other evidence has suggested that popular opinion may outweigh scientific credibility when people evaluate pseudoscientific claims.
  • anonymous on 03 Nov 20
     
    Why do we hear voices or weird noises and think of spooky stories or ghosts? It all has to do with perception of the audible information we're taking in and how we've been influenced about this topic.
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J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues - J.K. ... - 0 views

www.jkrowling.com/...g-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues gender free speech censorship trans psychology
shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.
  • All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’.
  • On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour
  • Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.
  • ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists
  • why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?
  • I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.
  • Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women
  • I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge.
  • The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding
  • The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended i
  • The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility
  • ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.
  • American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said: ‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’
  • her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.
  • The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves.
  • the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.
  • I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria
  • As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens
  • The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law.
  • We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls.
  • From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble.
  • I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive
  • It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class.
  • It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.
  • ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning.
  • I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember.
  • the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.
  • I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection
  • So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.
  • On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’
  • I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.
  • Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.
  • But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it
  • I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces
  • The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.
  • All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.
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The Economic Case for Regulating Social Media - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...media-facebook-regulation.html social media network economics conspiracy theory hate speech addiction platform ad-financed business model click-bait psychology technology
shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter generate revenue by using detailed behavioral information to direct ads to individual users.
  • this bland description of their business model fails to convey even a hint of its profound threat to the nation’s political and social stability.
  • legislators in Congress to propose the breakup of some tech firms, along with other traditional antitrust measures. But the main hazard posed by these platforms is not aggressive pricing, abusive service or other ills often associated with monopoly.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Instead, it is their contribution to the spread of misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories.
  • digital platforms, since the marginal cost of serving additional consumers is essentially zero. Because the initial costs of producing a platform’s content are substantial, and because any company’s first goal is to remain solvent, it cannot just give stuff away. Even so, when price exceeds marginal cost, competition relentlessly pressures rival publishers to cut prices — eventually all the way to zero. This, in a nutshell, is the publisher’s dilemma in the digital age.
  • These firms make money not by charging for access to content but by displaying it with finely targeted ads based on the specific types of things people have already chosen to view. If the conscious intent were to undermine social and political stability, this business model could hardly be a more effective weapon.
  • The algorithms that choose individual-specific content are crafted to maximize the time people spend on a platform
  • As the developers concede, Facebook’s algorithms are addictive by design and exploit negative emotional triggers. Platform addiction drives earnings, and hate speech, lies and conspiracy theories reliably boost addiction.
  • the subscription model isn’t fully efficient: Any positive fee would inevitably exclude at least some who would value access but not enough to pay the fee
  • a conservative think tank, says, for example, that government has no business second-guessing people’s judgments about what to post or read on social media.
  • That position would be easier to defend in a world where individual choices had no adverse impact on others. But negative spillover effects are in fact quite common
  • individual and collective incentives about what to post or read on social media often diverge sharply.
  • There is simply no presumption that what spreads on these platforms best serves even the individual’s own narrow interests, much less those of society as a whole.
  • a simpler step may hold greater promise: Platforms could be required to abandon that model in favor of one relying on subscriptions, whereby members gain access to content in return for a modest recurring fee.
  • Major newspapers have done well under this model, which is also making inroads in book publishing. The subscription model greatly weakens the incentive to offer algorithmically driven addictive content provided by individuals, editorial boards or other sources.
  • Careful studies have shown that Facebook’s algorithms have increased political polarization significantly
  • More worrisome, those excluded would come disproportionately from low-income groups. Such objections might be addressed specifically — perhaps with a modest tax credit to offset subscription fees — or in a more general way, by making the social safety net more generous.
  • Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher widely considered the father of economics, is celebrated for his “invisible hand” theory, which describes conditions under which market incentives promote socially benign outcomes. Many of his most ardent admirers may view steps to constrain the behavior of social media platforms as regulatory overreach.
  • But Smith’s remarkable insight was actually more nuanced: Market forces often promote society’s welfare, but not always. Indeed, as he saw clearly, individual interests are often squarely at odds with collective aspirations, and in many such instances it is in society’s interest to intervene. The current information crisis is a case in point.
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The Supreme Court vs. Social Media - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...upreme-court-social-media.html new york times supreme court social media
shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The Supreme Court handed social media companies a win on Tuesday by blocking, for now, a Texas law that would have banned large apps including Facebook and Twitter from weeding out messages based on the views they expressed.
  • Do sites like Facebook have a First Amendment right to allow some material and not others, or an obligation to distribute almost anything?
  • The First Amendment restricts government censorship, but it doesn’t apply to decisions made by businesses.
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  • Conservative politicians have long complained that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media companies unfairly remove or demote some conservative viewpoints.
  • Associations of internet companies and some constitutional rights groups said that the Texas law violated the First Amendment because it allowed the state to tell private businesses what kinds of speech they could or could not distribute.
  • Texas countered that Facebook, Twitter and the like don’t have such First Amendment protections because they are more like old telegraphs, telephone companies and home internet providers.
  • A federal appeals court recently deemed unconstitutional a Florida law passed last year that similarly tried to restrict social media companies’ discretion over speech.
  • written by Justice Samuel Alito that said: “It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies.”
  • These cases force us to wrestle with a fundamental question about what kind of world we want to live in: Are Facebook, Twitter and YouTube so influential in our world that the government should restrain their decisions, or are they private companies that should have the freedom to set their own rules?
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Opinion: Texas' new social media law affects all of us - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html CNN.com
shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Earlier this month, a federal appeals court ruled that a Texas law, which allows residents to sue social media companies for "censoring" what they post, could go into effect.
  • The biggest challenge facing social media companies today is doing exactly what HB 20 seems to disallow: removing misinformation and hate speech.
  • They can remove toxic content like misinformation and hate speech and get tied up in bottomless, costly lawsuits. They can let their platforms turn into cesspools of hate and misinformation and watch people stop using them altogether. Or they can just stop offering their services in Texas, which also exposes them to potential liability since the law makes it illegal for social media platforms to discriminate against Texans based on their location.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The state law, referred to as HB 20, makes it illegal for large social networks like Facebook and Twitter to "block, ban, remove, de-platform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression."
  • HB 20 does carve out exemptions, including those that allow social networks to remove content that "directly incites criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group" based on certain characteristics, or that "is unlawful expression."
  • We need to fix social networks by removing toxic content. This month's appeals court ruling does the exact opposite and could even deal a fatal blow to social media as we know it. The only thing worse than not fixing the social platforms we have now would be to see them be subject to a constant slew of lawsuits or devolve into platforms that become bastions of hate speech and misinformation. Let's hope Congress doesn't let us down.
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Proposed Brain Mapping Project Faces Significant Hurdles - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...faces-significant-hurdles.html neuroscience language research
shared by Emily Horwitz on 26 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Emily Horwitz on 26 Feb 13
     
    This article was very interesting. It at fist described some of the disconnect between what we understand about scientists and what the scientists understand; in this case, the article argued that, while the 10-year grant to neuroscientific research seems great to the general public, it is extremely complicated to even begin mapping how our neurons interact. What I found the most intriguing though, was the fact that some scientists from UC San Francisco have found the exact part of the brain, as well as their mechanisms, that control our language function. The research concluded that for those who have lost their faculties of speech, by stroke or otherwise, could eventually speak again if a prosthetic was developed. In short, the article conveyed the idea that nothing is ever as simple as it seems; although we try to make advances in science, we often just wind up with a whole other set of problems to solve.
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The Ignorance Caucus - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gman-the-ignorance-caucus.html evidence critical science research Republicans motivated reasoning knowledge
shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
  • even when giving a speech intended to demonstrate his ope
  • nness to new ideas, Mr. Cantor felt obliged to give that caucus a shout-out, calling for a complete end to federal funding of social science research. Because it’s surely a waste of money seeking to understand the society we’re trying to change.
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  • Mr. Cantor’s support for medical research is curiously limited. He’s all for developing new treatments, but he and his colleagues have adamantly opposed “comparative effectiveness research,” which seeks to determine how well such treatments work.
  • , Hillary Clinton said of her Republican critics, “They just will not live in an evidence-based world.”
  • in his home state of Virginia — have engaged in furious witch hunts against scientists who find evidence they don’t like. True, the state has finally agreed to study the growing risk of coastal flooding; Norfolk is among the American cities most vulnerable to climate change. But Republicans in the State Legislature have specifically prohibited the use of the words “sea-level rise.”
  • the parties aren’t just divided on values and policy views, they’re divided over epistemology. One side believes, at least in principle, in letting its policy views be shaped by facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its fixed beliefs.
  • while Democrats, being human, often read evidence selectively and choose to believe things that make them comfortable, there really isn’t anything equivalent to Republicans’ active hostility to collecting evidence in the first place.
  • for all the talk of reforming and reinventing the G.O.P., the ignorance caucus retains a firm grip on the party’s heart and mind.
  • It would be helpful to these discussions if we had a good grasp of the facts about firearms and violence. But we don’t, because back in the 1990s conservative politicians, acting on behalf of the National Rifle Association, bullied federal agencies into ceasing just about all research into the issue.
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