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Seven Lessons In Economic Leadership From Ancient Egypt - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...-leadership-from-ancient-egypt economics reform theory financial crisis financial bubble egypt
shared by Javier E on 11 May 18 - No Cached
  • Although there are plenty of grounds for rage against the big banks, the challenge is to sort out which are the activities that grow the real economy of goods and services, and which are the activities that are essentially a zero-sum game of socially useless gambling?
  • The situation today is that the zero-sum games of the financial sector aren’t just a tiny sideshow. They have grown exponentially and have become almost the main game of the financial sector.
  • When finance becomes the end, not the means, then the result is what analyst Gautam Mukunda calls “excessive financialization” of the economy, as his excellent article by “The Price of Wall Street Power” in the June 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review makes clear.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Quite apart from the “unbalanced power” of the financial sector, and the tendency of a super-sized financial sector to cause increasingly bad global financial crashes, excessive financialization leads to resources being misallocated. “In many of the financial sector’s segments that have grown fastest since deregulation—like investment banks—the transactions are primarily zero-sum.”
  • However in times of rapid technological transformation like today, the role of the economic priesthood in protecting its own interests can become a massively destabilizing.
  • Thus we know from the history of the last couple of hundred years that in times of rapid technological transformation, the financial sector tends to become disconnected from the real economy
  • This has occurred a number of times in the last few hundred years, including the Canal Mania (England—1790s), the Rail Mania (England—1840s), the Gilded Age (US: 1880s—early 1900s) the Roaring Twenties (US—1920s) and the Big Banks of today.
  • Getting to safety is not made any easier by the fact the modern economic priesthood—the managers of large firms and the banks—has, like their ancient Egyptian forbears, found ways to participate in the casino economy and benefit from “making money out of money”, even as the economy as a whole suffers.  As Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
  • Just as the ancient Egyptian economic priesthood clung to power as the economy stagnated, so today the economic priesthood shows no signs of relinquishing their gains or their power. The appetite and expectation of extraordinary returns is still there.
  • “Corporate chieftains rationally choose financial engineering—debt-financed share buybacks, for example—over capital investment in property, plants and equipment. Financial markets reward shareholder activism. Institutional investors extend their risk parameters to beat their benchmarks… But real economic growth—averaging just a bit above 2 percent for the fifth year in a row—remains sorely lacking.”
  • As a result, the economy remains in the “Great Stagnation”(Tyler Cowen), also known as “the Secular Stagnation (Larry Summers). It is running on continuing life support from the Federal Reserve. Large enterprises still appear to be profitable. The appearance, though not the reality, of economic well-being has been sufficient to make the stock market soa
  • Just as no change was possible in ancient Egyptian society so long as the economic priesthood colluded to preserve the status quo, so the excesses and prevarications of the Financial Sector will continue so long as the regulators remain its cheerleaders.
  • Just listen to the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Mary Jo White at Stanford University Rock Center for Corporate Governance speaking to directors. In her speech, she makes no secret of her view that the overall corporate arrangements are sound. The job of the SEC, as outlined in the speech, is to find the odd individual who might be doing something wrong. The idea that the large-scale activities of the major banks might be socially corrosive is not even alluded.
  • Thus in times of transformational technology, there is a huge expansion of investment, driven by the financial sector. Wealthy investors begin to expect outsized returns and so there is over-investment. The resulting bubbles in due course burst
  • Just as in ancient Egypt, no progress was possible so long as the myths and rituals of the economic priesthood and their offerings to the gods were widely accepted as real indicators of what was going on, so today no progress is possible so long as the myths and rituals of the modern economic priesthood still has a pervasive hold of people’s minds
  • In the modern economy, the myths and rituals of the economic priesthood are built on the notion that the purpose of a firm is to maximize shareholder value and the notion that if the share price is increasing, things are going well. These ideas are the intellectual underpinnings of the zero-sum activities of the financial sector for “making money out of money”, by whatever means possible
  • Like the myths and rituals of the priests of ancient Egypt, shareholder value theory is espoused with religious overtones. Shareholder value, which even Jack Welch has called “the dumbest idea in the world,” remains pervasive in business, even though it is responsible for massive offshoring of manufacturing, thereby destroying major segments of the US economy, undermining US capacity to compete in international markets and killing the economic recovery.
  • If instead society decides that the financial sector should concentrate on its socially important function of financing the real economy and providing financial security for an ever wider circle of citizens and enterprises, we could enjoy an era of growth and lasting prosperity.
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How to avoid covid-19 hoax stories? - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ry-citizens-identify-fake-news disinformation fake news detection misinformation false
shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • How good are people at sifting out fake news?
  • we’ve been investigating whether ordinary individuals who encounter news when it first appears online — before fact-checkers like Snopes and PolitiFacts have an opportunity to issue reports about an article’s veracity — are able to identify whether articles contain true or false information.
  • Unfortunately, it seems quite difficult for people to identify false or misleading news, and the limited number of coronavirus news stories in our collection are no exception
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Over a 13-week period, our study allowed us to capture people’s assessments of fresh news articles in real time. Each day of the study, we relied on a fixed, pre-registered process to select five popular articles published within the previous 24 hours
  • The five articles were balanced between conservative, liberal and non-partisan sources, as well as from mainstream news websites and from websites known to produce fake news. In total, we sent 150 total articles to 90 survey respondents each
  • We also sent these articles separately to six independent fact checkers, and treated their most common response — true, false/misleading, or cannot determine — for each article as the “correct’’ answer for that article.
  • When shown an article that was rated “true” by the professional fact checkers, respondents correctly identified the article as true 62 percent of the time. When the source of the true news story was a mainstream news source, respondents correctly identified the article as true 73 percent of the time.
  • However, for each article the professional fact checkers rated “false/misleading,” the study participants were as likely to say it was true as they were to say it was false or misleading. And roughly one-third of the time they told us they were unable to determine the veracity of the article. In other words, people on the whole were unable to correctly classify false or misleading news.
  • four of the articles in our study that fact checkers rated as false or misleading were related to the coronavirus.
  • All four articles promoted the unfounded rumor that the virus was intentionally developed in a laboratory. Although accidental releases of pathogens from labs have previously caused significant morbidity and mortality, in the current pandemic multiple pieces of evidence suggest this virus is of natural origin. There’s little evidence that the virus was manufactured or altered.
  • Only 30 percent of participants correctly classified them as false or misleading.
  • respondents seemed to have more trouble deciding what to think about false covid-19 stories, leading to a higher proportion of “could not determine” responses than we saw for the stories on other topics our professional fact checkers rated as “false/misleading.” This finding suggests that it may be particularly difficult to identify misinformation in newly emerging topics
  • Study participants with higher levels of education did better on identifying both fake news overall and coronavirus-related fake news — but were far from being able to correctly weed out misinformation all of the time
  • In fact, no group, regardless of education level, was able to correctly identify the stories that the professional fact checkers had labeled as false or misleading more than 40 percent of the time.
  • Taken together, our findings suggest that there is widespread potential for vulnerability to misinformation when it first appears online. This is especially worrying during the current pandemic
  • In the current environment, misinformation has the potential to undermine social distancing efforts, to lead people to hoard supplies, or to promote the adoption of potentially dangerous fake cures.
  • our findings suggest that non-trivial numbers of people will believe false information to be true when they first encounter it. And it suggests that efforts to remove coronavirus-related misinformation will need to be swift — and implemented early in an article’s life-cycle — to stop the spread of something else that’s dangerous: misinformation.
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People have no idea which sciences are robust | Ars Technica - 1 views

arstechnica.com/...idea-which-sciences-are-robust knowledge science certainty
shared by fischerry on 06 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • People have no idea which sciences are robust
  • If there’s one thing everyone needs to understand about science, it’s that science is uncertain. It’s a process of gradually getting closer to the truth, with self-correcting mechanisms built in. Unfortunately, communicating this uncertainty without undermining trust in science is tricky.
  • fischerry on 06 Mar 17
     
    Relates to my essay.
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Trump Will Withdraw U.S. From Paris Climate Agreement - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...p-paris-climate-agreement.html
shared by dicindioha on 04 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — President Trump announced on Thursday that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, weakening efforts to combat global warming and embracing isolationist voices in his White House who argued that the agreement was a pernicious threat to the economy and American sovereignty.
  • drawing support from members of his Republican Party but widespread condemnation from political leaders, business executives and environmentalists around the globe.
  • . The Paris agreement was intended to bind the world community into battling rising temperatures in concert, and the departure of the Earth’s second-largest polluter is a major blow.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • A statement from the White House press secretary said the president “reassured the leaders that America remains committed to the trans-Atlantic alliance and to robust efforts to protect the environment.”
  • The president’s speech was his boldest and most sweeping assertion of an “America first” foreign policy doctrine since he assumed office four months ago.
  • “At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country?” Mr. Trump said. “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore. And they won’t be.”
  • said the decision would ultimately harm the economy by ceding the jobs of the future in clean energy and technology to overseas competitors.
  • In his remarks, Mr. Trump listed sectors of the United States economy that would lose revenue and jobs if the country remained part of the accord, citing a study — vigorously disputed by environmental groups — asserting that the agreement would cost 2.7 million jobs by 2025.
  • “Even in the absence of American leadership; even as this administration joins a small handful of nations that reject the future; I’m confident that our states, cities, and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet we’ve got,” Mr. Obama said.
  • In recent days, Mr. Trump withstood withering criticism from European counterparts who accused him of shirking America’s role as a global leader and America’s responsibility as history’s largest emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gasses.
  • shortsightedness about the planet and a reckless willingness to shatter longstanding diplomatic relationships.
  • “It undermines America’s standing in the world and threatens to damage humanity’s ability to solve the climate crisis in time.”
  • dicindioha on 04 Jun 17
     
    maybe he believes this will help in the short term, but our generation will end up dealing with a lot of the effects. the US is already a leader in pollution emissions; this can only make that worse. that means it is up to individuals to take responsibility for emissions now that the country is not presented that way.
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The Science of Snobbery: How We're Duped Into Thinking Fancy Things Are Better - The At... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...279571 psychology judgment intuition bias unconscious expertise perception
shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information, just as amateurs do.
  • just like with classical music, we do not appraise wine in the way that we expect. 
  • Priceonomics revisited this seemingly damning research: the lack of correlation between wine enjoyment and price in blind tastings, the oenology students tricked by red food dye into describing a white wine like a red, a distribution of medals at tastings equivalent to what one would expect from pure chance, the grand crus described like cheap wines and vice-versa when the bottles are switched.
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  • Taste does not simply equal your taste buds. It draws on information from all our senses as well as context. As a result, food is susceptible to the same trickery as wine. Adding yellow food dye to vanilla pudding leads people to experience a lemony taste. Diners eating in the dark at a chic concept restaurant confuse veal for tuna. Branding, packaging, and price tags are equally important to enjoyment. Cheap fish is routinely passed off as its pricier cousins at seafood and sushi restaurants. 
  • Just like with wine and classical music, we often judge food based on very different criteria than what we claim. The result is that our perceptions are easily skewed in ways we don’t anticipate. 
  • What does it mean for wine that presentation so easily trumps the quality imbued by being grown on premium Napa land or years of fruitful aging? Is it comforting that the same phenomenon is found in food and classical music, or is it a strike against the authenticity of our enjoyment of them as well? How common must these manipulations be until we concede that the influence of the price tag of a bottle of wine or the visual appearance of a pianist is not a trick but actually part of the quality?
  • To answer these questions, we need to investigate the underlying mechanism that leads us to judge wine, food, and music by criteria other than what we claim to value. And that mechanism seems to be the quick, intuitive judgments our minds unconsciously make
  • this unknowability also makes it easy to be led astray when our intuition makes a mistake. We may often be able to count on the price tag or packaging of food and wine for accurate information about quality. But as we believe that we’re judging based on just the product, we fail to recognize when presentation manipulates our snap judgments.
  • Participants were just as effective when watching 6 second video clips and when comparing their ratings to ratings of teacher effectiveness as measured by actual student test performance. 
  • The power of intuitive first impressions has been demonstrated in a variety of other contexts. One experiment found that people predicted the outcome of political elections remarkably well based on silent 10 second video clips of debates - significantly outperforming political pundits and predictions made based on economic indicators.
  • In a real world case, a number of art experts successfully identified a 6th century Greek statue as a fraud. Although the statue had survived a 14 month investigation by a respected museum that included the probings of a geologist, they instantly recognized something was off. They just couldn’t explain how they knew.
  • Cases like this represent the canon behind the idea of the “adaptive unconscious,” a concept made famous by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. The basic idea is that we constantly, quickly, and unconsciously do the equivalent of judging a book by its cover. After all, a cover provides a lot of relevant information in a world in which we don’t have time to read every page.
  • Gladwell describes the adaptive unconscious as “a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”
  • In a famous experiment, psychologist Nalini Ambady provided participants in an academic study with 30 second silent video clips of a college professor teaching a class and asked them to rate the effectiveness of the professor.
  • In follow up experiments, Chia-Jung Tsay found that those judging musicians’ auditions based on visual cues were not giving preference to attractive performers. Rather, they seemed to look for visual signs of relevant characteristics like passion, creativity, and uniqueness. Seeing signs of passion is valuable information. But in differentiating between elite performers, it gives an edge to someone who looks passionate over someone whose play is passionate
  • Outside of these more eccentric examples, it’s our reliance on quick judgments, and ignorance of their workings, that cause people to act on ugly, unconscious biases
  • It’s also why - from a business perspective - packaging and presentation is just as important as the good or service on offer. Why marketing is just as important as product. 
  • Gladwell ends Blink optimistically. By paying closer attention to our powers of rapid cognition, he argues, we can avoid its pitfalls and harness its powers. We can blindly audition musicians behind a screen, look at a piece of art devoid of other context, and pay particular attention to possible unconscious bias in our performance reports.
  • But Gladwell’s success in demonstrating how the many calculations our adaptive unconscious performs without our awareness undermines his hopeful message of consciously harnessing its power.
  • As a former world-class tennis player and coach of over 50 years, Braden is a perfect example of the ideas behind thin slicing. But if he can’t figure out what his unconscious is up to when he recognizes double faults, why should anyone else expect to be up to the task?
  • flawed judgment in fields like medicine and investing has more serious consequences. The fact that expertise is so tricky leads psychologist Daniel Kahneman to assert that most experts should seek the assistance of statistics and algorithms in making decisions.
  • In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes our two modes of thought: System 1, like the adaptive unconscious, is our “fast, instinctive, and emotional” intuition. System 2 is our “slower, more deliberative, and more logical” conscious thought. Kahneman believes that we often leave decisions up to System 1 and generally place far “too much confidence in human judgment” due to the pitfalls of our intuition described above.
  • Not every judgment will be made in a field that is stable and regular enough for an algorithm to help us make judgments or predictions. But in those cases, he notes, “Hundreds of studies have shown that wherever we have sufficient information to build a model, it will perform better than most people.”
  • Experts can avoid the pitfalls of intuition more easily than laypeople. But they need help too, especially as our collective confidence in expertise leads us to overconfidence in their judgments. 
  • This article has referred to the influence of price tags and context on products and experiences like wine and classical music concerts as tricks that skew our perception. But maybe we should consider them a real, actual part of the quality.
  • Losing ourselves in a universe of relativism, however, will lead us to miss out on anything new or unique. Take the example of the song “Hey Ya!” by Outkast. When the music industry heard it, they felt sure it would be a hit. When it premiered on the radio, however, listeners changed the channel. The song sounded too dissimilar from songs people liked, so they responded negatively. 
  • It took time for people to get familiar with the song and realize that they enjoyed it. Eventually “Hey Ya!” became the hit of the summer.
  • Many boorish people talking about the ethereal qualities of great wine probably can't even identify cork taint because their impressions are dominated by the price tag and the wine label. But the classic defense of wine - that you need to study it to appreciate it - is also vindicated. The open question - which is both editorial and empiric - is what it means for the industry that constant vigilance and substantial study is needed to dependably appreciate wine for the product quality alone. But the questions is relevant to the enjoyment of many other products and experiences that we enjoy in life.
  • Maybe the most important conclusion is to not only recognize the fallibility of our judgments and impressions, but to recognize when it matters, and when it doesn’t
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Climatologist Michael E Mann: 'Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes' ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...omism-climate-crisis-interview climate response strategy solutions 2021 personal strategy activism
shared by Javier E on 04 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • the “inactivists”, as I call them, haven’t given up; they have simply shifted from hard denial to a new array of tactics that I describe in the book as the new climate war.
  • Who is the enemy in the new climate war?It is fossil fuel interests, climate change deniers, conservative media tycoons, working together with petrostate actors like Saudi Arabia and Russia. I call this the coalition of the unwilling.
  • Today Russia uses cyberware – bot armies and trolls – to get climate activists to fight one another and to seed arguments on social media. Russian trolls have attempted to undermine carbon pricing in Canada and Australia, and Russian fingerprints have been detected in the yellow-vest protests in France.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • I am optimistic about a favourable shift in the political wind. The youth climate movement has galvanised attention and re-centred the debate on intergenerational ethics. We are seeing a tipping point in public consciousness. That bodes well. There is still a viable way forward to avoid climate catastrophe.
  • You can see from the talking points of inactivists that they are really in retreat. Republican pollsters like Frank Luntz have advised clients in the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who carry water for them that you can’t get away with denying climate change any more.
  • Let’s dig into deniers’ tactics. One that you mention is deflection. What are the telltale signs?Any time you are told a problem is your fault because you are not behaving responsibly, there is a good chance that you are being deflected from systemic solutions and policies
  • Blaming the individual is a tried and trusted playbook that we have seen in the past with other industries. In the 1970s, Coca Cola and the beverage industry did this very effectively to convince us we don’t need regulations on waste disposal. Because of that we now have a global plastic crisis. The same tactics are evident in the gun lobby’s motto, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, which is classic deflection
  • look at BP, which gave us the world’s first individual carbon footprint calculator. Why did they do that? Because BP wanted us looking at our carbon footprint not theirs.
  • Of course lifestyle changes are necessary but they alone won’t get us where we need to be. They make us more healthy, save money and set a good example for others.
  • But we can’t allow the forces of inaction to convince us these actions alone are the solution and that we don’t need systemic changes
  • I don’t eat meat. We get power from renewable energy. I have a plug-in hybrid vehicle. I do those things and encourage others to do them. but i don’t think it is helpful to shame people people who are not as far along as you.
  • Instead, let’s help everybody to move in that direction. That is what policy and system change is about: creating incentives so even those who don’t think about their environmental footprint are still led in that direction.
  • Another new front in the new climate war is what you call “doomism”. What do you mean by that?Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement
  • They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponise environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair.
  • Many of the prominent doomist narratives – [Jonathan] Franzen, David Wallace-Wells, the Deep Adaptation movement – can be traced back to a false notion that an Arctic methane bomb will cause runaway warming and extinguish all life on earth within 10 years. This is completely wrong. There is no science to support that.
  • Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes. It can be enabling and empowering as long as you don’t get stuck there. It is up to others to help ensure that experience can be cathartic.
  • the entry of new participants. Bill Gates is perhaps the most prominent. His new book, How to Prevent a Climate Disaster, offers a systems analyst approach to the problem, a kind of operating system upgrade for the planet. What do you make of his take?I want to thank him for using his platform to raise awareness of the climate crisis
  • I disagree with him quite sharply on the prescription. His view is overly technocratic and premised on an underestimate of the role that renewable energy can play in decarbonising our civilisation
  • If you understate that potential, you are forced to make other risky choices, such as geoengineering and carbon capture and sequestration. Investment in those unproven options would crowd out investment in better solutions.
  • Gates writes that he doesn’t know the political solution to climate change. But the politics are the problem buddy. If you don’t have a prescription of how to solve that, then you don’t have a solution and perhaps your solution might be taking us down the wrong path.
  • What are the prospects for political change with Joe Biden in the White House?Breathtaking. Biden has surprised even the most ardent climate hawks in the boldness of his first 100 day agenda, which goes well beyond any previous president, including Obama when it comes to use of executive actions. He has incorporated climate policy into every single government agency and we have seen massive investments in renewable energy infrastructure, cuts in subsidies for fossil fuels, and the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.
  • On the international front, the appointment of John Kerry, who helped negotiate the Paris Accord, has telegraphed to the rest of the world that the US is back and ready to lead again
  • That is huge and puts pressure on intransigent state actors like [Australian prime minister] Scott Morrison, who has been a friend of the fossil fuel industry in Australia. Morrison has changed his rhetoric dramatically since Biden became president. I think that creates an opportunity like no other.
  • Have the prospects for that been helped or hindered by Covid?I see a perfect storm of climate opportunity. Terrible as the pandemic has been, this tragedy can also provide lessons, particularly on the importance of listening to the word of science when facing risks
  • Out of this crisis can come a collective reconsideration of our priorities. How to live sustainably on a finite planet with finite space, food and water. A year from now, memories and impacts of coronavirus will still feel painful, but the crisis itself will be in the rear-view mirror thanks to vaccines. What will loom larger will be the greater crisis we face – the climate crisis.
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Too Much High-Intensity Exercise May Be Bad for Your Health - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...exercise-hiit.html
shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Too Much High-Intensity Exercise May Be Bad for Your Health
  • A new study hints that excessive HIIT may harm your mitochondria, the energy generators found in every cell of your body.
  • If high-intensity exercise is good for us, is more necessarily better?
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Maybe not, according to an admonitory new study of the molecular effects of high-intensity interval training
  • suggesting that the benefits of extremely vigorous exercise may depend on just how much we do.
  • for example, that intense bursts of exercise increase the number of mitochondria in our muscle cells, and more mitochondria are thought to contribute to better cellular and metabolic health.
  • HIIT also may have unexpected downsides. In a study I wrote about in January, people who worked out with HIIT routines three times a week for six weeks did not improve their blood pressure or body fat as much as people who exercised far more moderately five times a week.
  • by being sedentary for four days each week, the intense exercisers in the study may have undermined the otherwise potent effects of their HIIT sessions.
  • These volunteers visited the researchers’ lab for tests of their current fitness and metabolic health, including blood-sugar levels over the course of a day.
  • Then they compared how people’s bodies had changed week over week.
  • At first, the findings were encouraging. By the end of week two, the riders were pedaling harder and appeared to be getting fitter, with better daily blood-sugar control and more total mitochondria in their muscle cells.
  • But something began to go wrong during week three. The volunteers’ ability to generate power while cycling flattened, and their subsequent muscle biopsies showed sputtering mitochondria, each of which was now producing only about 60 percent as much energy as during the previous week. The riders’ blood-sugar control also slipped, with se
  • The researchers are not sure precisely what changes within their volunteers’ bodies and muscles precipitated the negative results in week three.
  • Even so, the findings strongly suggest that anyone interested in high-intensity interval training start small, Mr. Flockhart says. Train a few times a week and on the remaining days, maybe take a walk.
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 21
     
    We're constantly discovering more about the body, even if it seems contradictory to prior thought.
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Confirmation bias in the utilization of others' opinion strength | Nature Neuroscience - 0 views

www.nature.com/...s41593-019-0549-2
shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Humans tend to discount information that undermines past choices and judgments. This
  • confirmation bias has significant impact on domains ranging from politics to science and education. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying this fundamental characteristic of belief formation. Here we report a mechanism underlying the confirmation bias. Specifically, we provide evidence for a failure to use the strength of others’ disconfirming opinions to alter confidence in judgments, but adequate use when opinions are confirmatory. This bias is related to reduced neural sensitivity to the strength of others’ opinions in the posterior medial prefrontal cortex when opinions are disconfirming. Our results demonstrate that existing judgments alter the neural representation of information strength, leaving the individual less likely to alter opinions in the face of disagreement.
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My Mom Believes In QAnon. I've Been Trying To Get Her Out. - 0 views

www.buzzfeednews.com/...on-parents-millennial-children QAnon conspiracy theory language psychology
shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • An early adopter of the QAnon mass delusion, on board since 2018, she held firm to the claim that a Satan-worshipping cabal of child sex traffickers controlled the world and the only person standing in their way was Trump. She saw him not merely as a politician but a savior, and she expressed her devotion in stark terms.
  • “The prophets have said Trump is anointed,” she texted me once. “God is using him to finally end the evil doings of the cabal which has hurt humanity all these centuries… We are in a war between good & evil.”
  • By 2020, I’d pretty much given up on swaying my mom away from her preferred presidential candidate. We’d spent many hours arguing over basic facts I considered indisputable. Any information I cited to prove Trump’s cruelty, she cut down with a corresponding counterattack. My links to credible news sources disintegrated against a wall of outlets like One America News Network, Breitbart, and Before It’s News. Any cracks I could find in her positions were instantly undermined by the inconvenient fact that I was, in her words, a member of “the liberal media,” a brainwashed acolyte of the sprawling conspiracy trying to take down her heroic leader.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • The irony gnawed at me: My entire vocation as an investigative reporter was predicated on being able to reveal truths, and yet I could not even rustle up the evidence to convince my own mother that our 45th president was not, in fact, the hero she believed him to be. Or, for that matter, that John F. Kennedy Jr. was dead. Or that Tom Hanks had not been executed for drinking the blood of children.
  • The theories spun from Q’s messages seemed much easier to disprove. Oprah Winfrey couldn’t have been detained during a wave of deep state arrests because we could still see her conducting live interviews on television. Trump’s 4th of July speech at Mount Rushmore came to an end without John F. Kennedy Jr. revealing he was alive and stepping in as the president’s new running mate. The widespread blackouts that her Patriot friend’s “source from the Pentagon” had warned about failed to materialize. And I could testify firsthand that the CIA had no control over my newsroom’s editorial decisions.
  • “I believe the Holy Spirit led me to the QAnons to discover the truth which is being suppressed,” she texted me. “Otherwise, how would I be able to know the truth if the lamestream media suppresses the truth?”
  • Through the years, I’d battled against conspiracy theories my mom threw at me that were far more formidable than QAnon. I’d been stumped when she asked me to prove that Beyoncé wasn’t an Illuminati member, dumbfounded when research studies I sent her weren’t enough to reach an agreement on vaccine efficacy, and too worn down to say anything more than “that’s not true” when confronted with false allegations of murders committed by prominent politicians.
  • Eventually, I accepted the impasse. It didn’t seem healthy that every conversation we had would devolve into a circuitous debate about which one of us was on the side of the bad guys. So I tried to pick my battles.
  • But what I had dismissed as damaging inconsistencies turned out to be the core strength of the belief system: It was alive, flexible, sprouting more questions than answers, more clues to study, an investigation playing out in real time, with the fate of the world at stake.
  • With no overlap between our filters of reality, I was at a loss for any facts that would actually stick.
  • Meanwhile, she wondered where she’d gone wrong with me
  • She regretted not taking politics more seriously when I was younger. I’d grown up blinkered by American privilege, trained to ignore the dirty machinations securing my comforts. My mom had shed that luxury long ago.
  • The year my mom began falling down QAnon rabbit holes, I turned the age she was when she first arrived in the States. By then, I was no longer sure that America was worth the cost of her migration. When the real estate market collapsed under the weight of Wall Street speculation, she had to sell our house at a steep loss to avoid foreclosure and her budding career as a realtor evaporated. Her near–minimum wage jobs weren’t enough to cover her bills, so her credit card debts rose. She delayed retirement plans because she saw no path to breaking even anytime soon, though she was hopeful that a turnaround was on the horizon. Through the setbacks and detours, she drifted into the arms of the people and beliefs I held most responsible for her troubles.
  • With a fervor I knew was futile, I’d tell my mom she was missing the real conspiracy: The powerful people shaping policy to benefit their own interests, to maintain wealth and white predominance, through tax cuts and voter suppression, were commandeering her support solely by catering to her stance on the one issue she cared most about.
  • The voice my mom trusted most now was Trump’s. Our disagreements were no longer ideological to her but part of a celestial conflict.
  • “I love you but you have to be on the side of good,” she texted me. “Im sad cuz u have become part of the deep state. May God have mercy on you...I pray you will see the truth of the evil agenda and be on the side of Trump.”
  • She likened her fellow Patriots to the early Christians who spread the word of Jesus at the risk of persecution. She often sent me a meme with a caption about “ordinary people who spent countless hours researching, debating, meditating and praying” for the truth to be revealed to them. “Although they were mocked, dismissed and cast off, they knew their souls had agreed long ago to do this work.”
  • Last summer, as my mom marched in a pink MAGA hat amid maskless crowds, and armed extremists stalked racial justice protests, and a disputed election loomed like a time bomb, I entertained my darkest thoughts about the fate of our country. Was there any hope in a democracy without a shared set of basic facts? Had my elders fled one authoritarian regime only for their children to face another? Amid the gloom, I found only a single morsel of solace: My mom was as hopeful as she’d ever been.
  • I wish I could offer some evidence showing that the gulf between us might be narrowing, that my love, persistence, and collection of facts might be enough to draw her back into a reality we share, and that when our wager about the storm comes due in a few months, she’ll realize that the voices she trusts have been lying to her. But I don’t think that will happen
  • What can I do but try to limit the damage? Send my mom movie recommendations to occupy the free time she instead spends on conspiracy research. Shift our conversations to the common ground of cooking recipes and family gossip. Raise objections when her beliefs nudge her toward dangerous decisions.
  • I now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●
  • understand
  • now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●
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Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in | World news |... - 1 views

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  • Roger Zelazny, published his third novel. In many ways, Lord of Light was of its time, shaggy with imported Hindu mythology and cosmic dialogue. Yet there were also glints of something more forward-looking and political.
  • accelerationism has gradually solidified from a fictional device into an actual intellectual movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential.
  • Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified – either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative.
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  • Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled.
  • Accelerationism, therefore, goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world
  • Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian in their introduction to #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, a sometimes baffling, sometimes exhilarating book, published in 2014, which remains the only proper guide to the movement in existence.
  • “We all live in an operating system set up by the accelerating triad of war, capitalism and emergent AI,” says Steve Goodman, a British accelerationist
  • A century ago, the writers and artists of the Italian futurist movement fell in love with the machines of the industrial era and their apparent ability to invigorate society. Many futurists followed this fascination into war-mongering and fascism.
  • One of the central figures of accelerationism is the British philosopher Nick Land, who taught at Warwick University in the 1990s
  • Land has published prolifically on the internet, not always under his own name, about the supposed obsolescence of western democracy; he has also written approvingly about “human biodiversity” and “capitalistic human sorting” – the pseudoscientific idea, currently popular on the far right, that different races “naturally” fare differently in the modern world; and about the supposedly inevitable “disintegration of the human species” when artificial intelligence improves sufficiently.
  • In our politically febrile times, the impatient, intemperate, possibly revolutionary ideas of accelerationism feel relevant, or at least intriguing, as never before. Noys says: “Accelerationists always seem to have an answer. If capitalism is going fast, they say it needs to go faster. If capitalism hits a bump in the road, and slows down” – as it has since the 2008 financial crisis – “they say it needs to be kickstarted.”
  • On alt-right blogs, Land in particular has become a name to conjure with. Commenters have excitedly noted the connections between some of his ideas and the thinking of both the libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and Trump’s iconoclastic strategist Steve Bannon.
  • “In Silicon Valley,” says Fred Turner, a leading historian of America’s digital industries, “accelerationism is part of a whole movement which is saying, we don’t need [conventional] politics any more, we can get rid of ‘left’ and ‘right’, if we just get technology right. Accelerationism also fits with how electronic devices are marketed – the promise that, finally, they will help us leave the material world, all the mess of the physical, far behind.”
  • In 1972, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus. It was a restless, sprawling, appealingly ambiguous book, which suggested that, rather than simply oppose capitalism, the left should acknowledge its ability to liberate as well as oppress people, and should seek to strengthen these anarchic tendencies, “to go still further … in the movement of the market … to ‘accelerate the process’”.
  • By the early 90s Land had distilled his reading, which included Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard, into a set of ideas and a writing style that, to his students at least, were visionary and thrillingly dangerous. Land wrote in 1992 that capitalism had never been properly unleashed, but instead had always been held back by politics, “the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind”. He dismissed Europe as a sclerotic, increasingly marginal place, “the racial trash-can of Asia”. And he saw civilisation everywhere accelerating towards an apocalypse: “Disorder must increase... Any [human] organisation is ... a mere ... detour in the inexorable death-flow.”
  • With the internet becoming part of everyday life for the first time, and capitalism seemingly triumphant after the collapse of communism in 1989, a belief that the future would be almost entirely shaped by computers and globalisation – the accelerated “movement of the market” that Deleuze and Guattari had called for two decades earlier – spread across British and American academia and politics during the 90s. The Warwick accelerationists were in the vanguard.
  • In the US, confident, rainbow-coloured magazines such as Wired promoted what became known as “the Californian ideology”: the optimistic claim that human potential would be unlocked everywhere by digital technology. In Britain, this optimism influenced New Labour
  • The Warwick accelerationists saw themselves as participants, not traditional academic observers
  • The CCRU gang formed reading groups and set up conferences and journals. They squeezed into the narrow CCRU room in the philosophy department and gave each other impromptu seminars.
  • The main result of the CCRU’s frantic, promiscuous research was a conveyor belt of cryptic articles, crammed with invented terms, sometimes speculative to the point of being fiction.
  • At Warwick, however, the prophecies were darker. “One of our motives,” says Plant, “was precisely to undermine the cheery utopianism of the 90s, much of which seemed very conservative” – an old-fashioned male desire for salvation through gadgets, in her view.
  • K-punk was written by Mark Fisher, formerly of the CCRU. The blog retained some Warwick traits, such as quoting reverently from Deleuze and Guattari, but it gradually shed the CCRU’s aggressive rhetoric and pro-capitalist politics for a more forgiving, more left-leaning take on modernity. Fisher increasingly felt that capitalism was a disappointment to accelerationists, with its cautious, entrenched corporations and endless cycles of essentially the same products. But he was also impatient with the left, which he thought was ignoring new technology
  • lex Williams, co-wrote a Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics. “Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology,” they wrote. “[Our version of] accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose … repurposed towards common ends … towards an alternative modernity.”
  • What that “alternative modernity” might be was barely, but seductively, sketched out, with fleeting references to reduced working hours, to technology being used to reduce social conflict rather than exacerbate it, and to humanity moving “beyond the limitations of the earth and our own immediate bodily forms”. On politics and philosophy blogs from Britain to the US and Italy, the notion spread that Srnicek and Williams had founded a new political philosophy: “left accelerationism”.
  • Two years later, in 2015, they expanded the manifesto into a slightly more concrete book, Inventing the Future. It argued for an economy based as far as possible on automation, with the jobs, working hours and wages lost replaced by a universal basic income. The book attracted more attention than a speculative leftwing work had for years, with interest and praise from intellectually curious leftists
  • Even the thinking of the arch-accelerationist Nick Land, who is 55 now, may be slowing down. Since 2013, he has become a guru for the US-based far-right movement neoreaction, or NRx as it often calls itself. Neoreactionaries believe in the replacement of modern nation-states, democracy and government bureaucracies by authoritarian city states, which on neoreaction blogs sound as much like idealised medieval kingdoms as they do modern enclaves such as Singapore.
  • Land argues now that neoreaction, like Trump and Brexit, is something that accelerationists should support, in order to hasten the end of the status quo.
  • In 1970, the American writer Alvin Toffler, an exponent of accelerationism’s more playful intellectual cousin, futurology, published Future Shock, a book about the possibilities and dangers of new technology. Toffler predicted the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence, cryonics, cloning and robots working behind airline check-in desks
  • Land left Britain. He moved to Taiwan “early in the new millennium”, he told me, then to Shanghai “a couple of years later”. He still lives there now.
  • In a 2004 article for the Shanghai Star, an English-language paper, he described the modern Chinese fusion of Marxism and capitalism as “the greatest political engine of social and economic development the world has ever known”
  • Once he lived there, Land told me, he realised that “to a massive degree” China was already an accelerationist society: fixated by the future and changing at speed. Presented with the sweeping projects of the Chinese state, his previous, libertarian contempt for the capabilities of governments fell away
  • Without a dynamic capitalism to feed off, as Deleuze and Guattari had in the early 70s, and the Warwick philosophers had in the 90s, it may be that accelerationism just races up blind alleys. In his 2014 book about the movement, Malign Velocities, Benjamin Noys accuses it of offering “false” solutions to current technological and economic dilemmas. With accelerationism, he writes, a breakthrough to a better future is “always promised and always just out of reach”.
  • “The pace of change accelerates,” concluded a documentary version of the book, with a slightly hammy voiceover by Orson Welles. “We are living through one of the greatest revolutions in history – the birth of a new civilisation.”
  • Shortly afterwards, the 1973 oil crisis struck. World capitalism did not accelerate again for almost a decade. For much of the “new civilisation” Toffler promised, we are still waiting
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Thieves of experience: On the rise of surveillance capitalism - 1 views

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  • Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.
  • By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.
  • Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.
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  • By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers
  • this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders.
  • Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational byproducts of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms
  • Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.
  • The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.
  • So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?
  • Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.
  • he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.
  • internet companies operate in what Zuboff terms “extreme structural independence from people.” When databases displace goods as the engine of the economy, our own interests, as consumers but also as citizens, cease to be part of the negotiation. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market’s invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.
  • Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well.
  • In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.
  • In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.
  • The researchers recruited 520 undergraduates at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available working-memory capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.
  • the “integration of smartphones into daily life” appears to cause a “brain drain” that can diminish such vital mental skills as “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.”
  •  Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking.
  • They found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly.
  • A study of nearly a hundred secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.
  • Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains
  • Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.
  • In a 2013 study conducted at the University of Essex in England, 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for ten minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, half without a phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. “The mere presence of mobile phones,” the researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust” and diminished “the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.”
  • The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware o
  •  Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking — that has, in the psychological jargon, “salience.”
  • even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a “supernormal stimulus,” one that can “hijack” attention whenever it is part of our surroundings — and it is always part of our surroundings.
  • Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.
  • The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities that make it so appealing to us — its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability — are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds.
  • Phone makers like Apple and Samsung and app writers like Facebook, Google and Snap design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours
  • Social media apps were designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology,” former Facebook president Sean Parker said in a recent interview. “[We] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
  • A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it’s not that simple.
  • As strange as it might seem, people’s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores
  • In a seminal 2011 study published in Science, a team of researchers — led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner — had a group of volunteers read forty brief, factual statements (such as “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003”) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be erased.
  • Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn’t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it
  • The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect” and noted its broad implications: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”
  • as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.”
  • Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.
  • As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices. “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” the scholars concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.”
  • That insight sheds light on society’s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.
  • A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.
  • When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning
  • We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.
  • Google’s once-patient investors grew restive, demanding that the founders figure out a way to make money, preferably lots of it.
  • nder pressure, Page and Brin authorized the launch of an auction system for selling advertisements tied to search queries. The system was designed so that the company would get paid by an advertiser only when a user clicked on an ad. This feature gave Google a huge financial incentive to make accurate predictions about how users would respond to ads and other online content. Even tiny increases in click rates would bring big gains in income. And so the company began deploying its stores of behavioral data not for the benefit of users but to aid advertisers — and to juice its own profits. Surveillance capitalism had arrived.
  • Google’s business now hinged on what Zuboff calls “the extraction imperative.” To improve its predictions, it had to mine as much information as possible from web users. It aggressively expanded its online services to widen the scope of its surveillance.
  • Through Gmail, it secured access to the contents of people’s emails and address books. Through Google Maps, it gained a bead on people’s whereabouts and movements. Through Google Calendar, it learned what people were doing at different moments during the day and whom they were doing it with. Through Google News, it got a readout of people’s interests and political leanings. Through Google Shopping, it opened a window onto people’s wish lists,
  • The company gave all these services away for free to ensure they’d be used by as many people as possible. It knew the money lay in the data.
  • the organization grew insular and secretive. Seeking to keep the true nature of its work from the public, it adopted what its CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, called a “hiding strategy” — a kind of corporate omerta backed up by stringent nondisclosure agreements.
  • Page and Brin further shielded themselves from outside oversight by establishing a stock structure that guaranteed their power could never be challenged, neither by investors nor by directors.
  • What’s most remarkable about the birth of surveillance capitalism is the speed and audacity with which Google overturned social conventions and norms about data and privacy. Without permission, without compensation, and with little in the way of resistance, the company seized and declared ownership over everyone’s information
  • The companies that followed Google presumed that they too had an unfettered right to collect, parse, and sell personal data in pretty much any way they pleased. In the smart homes being built today, it’s understood that any and all data will be beamed up to corporate clouds.
  • Google conducted its great data heist under the cover of novelty. The web was an exciting frontier — something new in the world — and few people understood or cared about what they were revealing as they searched and surfed. In those innocent days, data was there for the taking, and Google took it
  • Google also benefited from decisions made by lawmakers, regulators, and judges — decisions that granted internet companies free use of a vast taxpayer-funded communication infrastructure, relieved them of legal and ethical responsibility for the information and messages they distributed, and gave them carte blanche to collect and exploit user data.
  • Consider the terms-of-service agreements that govern the division of rights and the delegation of ownership online. Non-negotiable, subject to emendation and extension at the company’s whim, and requiring only a casual click to bind the user, TOS agreements are parodies of contracts, yet they have been granted legal legitimacy by the court
  • Law professors, writes Zuboff, “call these ‘contracts of adhesion’ because they impose take-it-or-leave-it conditions on users that stick to them whether they like it or not.” Fundamentally undemocratic, the ubiquitous agreements helped Google and other firms commandeer personal data as if by fiat.
  • n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way
  • Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one
  • but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.
  • there’s a piece missing. While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on
  • hat the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.
  • Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots.
  • All of Facebook’s information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, “is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later.”
  • “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale,” a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. “We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.”
  • This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists
  • Combining rich information on individuals’ behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.
  • it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people’s social lives, that grasped digital media’s full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its “social graph” to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react.
  • spying on the populace is not the end game. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.
  • competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives
  • “The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed . . . . Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.
  • What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not
  • Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.
  • Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public
  • Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agenc
  • As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies’ lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people’s control over their online information and severely restrict the companies’ ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations.
  • The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. “The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight,”
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Union-friendly states enjoy higher economic growth, individual earnings -- ScienceDaily - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210323150819.htm
shared by caelengrubb on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • New research from Mildred Warner, professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University, shows that state laws designed to hinder union activity and indulge corporate entities do not enhance economic productivity.
  • "These interests see union and city power as a threat, which is why there are groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, for example, focused on crafting state laws that erode labor protections and enhance corporate interests."
  • "The anti-union political environment in the U.S. is longstanding," Warner said, "especially in the South, as reflected by right-to-work laws by constraining unions' ability to organize and collect dues."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Unionization rates in the U.S. have declined for decades. "Unionization is highest in the public sector, but this has been challenged by state and local austerity since the recession in 2008-09," Warner said.
  • Warner said that the role of the federal government is to provide funds to states and local governments to support critical public services, such as schools and roads
  • While the federal government can play a redistributive role, as with the recent COVID relief package, this is less likely in states that have more corporate influence in their legislative policymaking,
  • "In the new political economy of place, the corporate interests undermine the potential for inclusive economic growth."
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Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift | Simply Psychology - 0 views

www.simplypsychology.org/Kuhn-Paradigm.html
shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Thomas Kuhn argued that science does not evolve gradually towards truth.
  • Science has a paradigm which remains constant before going through a paradigm shift when current theories can’t explain some phenomenon, and someone proposes a new theory.
  • A scientific revolution occurs when: (i) the new paradigm better explains the observations, and offers a model that is closer to the objective, external reality; and (ii) the new paradigm is incommensurate with the old.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Kuhn looked at the history of science and argued that science does not simply progress by stages based upon neutral observations
  • For Kuhn, the history of science is characterized by revolutions in scientific outlook. Scientists have a worldview or "paradigm"
  • A paradigm is a universally recognizable scientific achievement that, for a time, provides model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.
  • Scientists accept the dominant paradigm until anomalies are thrown up.  Scientists then begin to question the basis of the paradigm itself, new theories emerge which challenge the dominant paradigm and eventually one of these new theories becomes accepted as the new paradigm.
  • A particular work may “define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners.”
  • This is where the paradigm shift occurs.
  • The pre-paradigmatic state refers to a period before a scientific consensus has been reached.
  • Phase 2: Normal Science
  • A paradigm is established which lays the foundations for legitimate work within the discipline. Scientific work then consists in articulation of the paradigm, in solving puzzles that it throws up.
  • It is necessary for normal science to be uncritical. If all scientists were critical of a theory and spent time trying to falsify it, no detailed work would ever get done.
  • Phase 1: Pre-sciencePhase 1: Pre-science
  • Phase 3: Crisis
  • "Normal Science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all of their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like
  • Anomalies become serious, and a crisis develops if the anomalies undermine the basic assumptions of the paradigm and attempts to remove them consistently fail
  • If the anomalies can be resolved, the crisis is over and normal science resumes. If not, there is a scientific revolution which involves a change of paradigm.
  • Revoluti
  • Phase 4: Revolution
  • Eventually a new paradigm will be established, but not as a result of any logically compelling justification.
  • The enormous impact of Thomas Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science: besides "paradigm shift", Kuhn raised the word "paradigm" itself from a term used in certain forms of linguistics to its current broader meaning.
  • For Kuhn, the choice of paradigm was sustained by, but not ultimately determined by, logical processes.
  • Kuhn believed that it represented the consensus of the community of scientists
  • Successive paradigms are incommensurable. Kuhn says that a later paradigm may be a better instrument for solving puzzles than an earlier one.  But if each paradigm defines its own puzzles, what is a puzzle for one paradigm may be no puzzle at all for another
  • Science does not change its paradigm over night. Younger scientists take a new paradigm forward
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Opinion | I Want Trump to Face Justice. But the House Shouldn't Impeach Him. - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rump-impeachment-tom-reed.html bias education
shared by edencottone on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • events of Jan. 6. Our democratic institutions were assaulted.
  • All responsible parties, including President Trump, must face justice.
  • make the wrong decision in how to hold him accountable, it could damage the integrity of our system of justice, further fan the flames of division, and disillusion millions of Americans ─ all while failing to accomplish anything.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • tools that lie before Congress, it is clear that pursuing impeachment only days before President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated is not the answer.
  • inadequate time to reasonably investigate, present and debate articles of impeachment.
  • new administration
  • These aren’t minor concerns. A hasty impeachment could raise a host of consequences that could have a striking impact on the long-term stability of our country.
  • an impeachment on the grounds that they do will inevitably erode the norms around what may be considered constitutionally protected speech.
  • a snap impeachment will undoubtedly fuel the divisions between our citizens at a time when the wounds of Jan. 6 are still raw.
  • We cannot rush to judgment simply because we want retribution or, worse, because we want to achieve a particular political outcome.
  • opportunity to build bridges and unite the American people around our shared values.
  • new Congress
  • Failing to do so will undermine our efforts to bring people together.
  • Congress long after Mr. Trump has left office, inhibiting Congress’s ability to tackle the Covid-19 crisis, reignite our economy and other pressing issues.
  • a too-quick impeachment will not suddenly change the minds of millions of Americans who still do not recognize the election of President-elect Biden as legitimate.
  • rushed proceedings will be seen as validating the view that impeachment is part of a multiyear campaign to delegitimize Mr. Trump’s 2016 election.
  • detriment of the Constitution.
  • I implore our congressional leaders and Mr. Biden to take a moment to consider what is at stake.
  • options include censure, criminal proceedings and actions under the 14th Amendment, after a complete and thorough investigation into the events leading up to the assault on the Capitol.
  • I acknowledged Joe Biden as president-elect on Nov. 7.
  • But make no mistake, our Constitution is the bedrock of our great nation.
  • We cannot and should not support a rushed, divisive action simply because the emotions of the moment demand it. That is not the American way.
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Opinion: The jarring, revealing video of Black men cleaning up the Capitol - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html capitol cnn opinion
shared by jmfinizio on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The image is jarring because it's a scene so commonplace, so normal.
  • it's difficult or darn near impossible not to see those decades-deep racial connections
  • An illustration of their importance to the health of this country
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • the racial and income and power inequalities evident in that video shouldn't exist.
  • Black people have always been forced into a kind of Sophie's choice, to love a place that has for too long hated us while knowing that's what's best for us all, nevertheless.
  • Black people cleaning up after a White mob trying to undermine democracy is a powerful image
  • They didn't get caught up in returning hatred with hatred, anger with bitterness, confrontation with balled fists.
7More

The Women 'Fighting For Freedom' In Belarus : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ighting-for-freedom-in-belarus Belarus equality women
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Women have been at the forefront of protests against the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko, whose claim of victory in an August election is widely disputed. Holding flowers and flags, they gather weekly, risking arrest, harassment and beating by security forces.
  • The protests began after Belarus' disputed Aug. 9 reelection. Lukhashenko, who has been in power since 1994, claimed victory over Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the wife of a jailed opposition figure.
  • "It's like at that time you realize that you are there not because you did something, not because you committed a crime. You are there because you are fighting for freedom. And the spirit of people, I mean, I was so amazed," Leuchanka said.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "Not one woman that I have been in a cell with said, 'I am regretting that I did this, I regret that I'm here.' We will continue to fight and speak and raise our voices... Do you understand the strength I am talking about?"
  • "I think it does not just undermine our credibility, but our ability to promote democratic values, to promote democracy, to be what we have always claimed to be and more often than not acted on,"
  • Still, the women of Belarus are looking to the U.S. for support and have high hopes for President-elect Joe Biden.
  • She said the people of Belarus are ready to sacrifice and are sending "a May Day message to the world now."
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Isaac Newton's Influence on Modern Science - 0 views

www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/ns-influence-on-modern-science
shared by mshilling1 on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Aristotelian thought had dominated mathematics and astronomy for centuries, until revolutionaries like Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei challenged those views.
  • The mathematization of physics was a crucial step in the advancement of science. It was realized that the mathematical tools we had at the time weren’t strong enough.
  • By trial and error, Kepler worked and worked until finally, he hit upon the shape that worked—elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus. It turned out to perfectly fit the known observations.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • They were stunning results, but no one knew why they would be true. Aristotle’s circular orbits had a philosophical basis—the perfection of the aether from which everything out there was made.
  • The basic concepts which ordered the universe and the picture of reality they gave rise to had become wobbly, but had not fallen.
  • So, the first law describes the behavior of an object subjected to no external force. The second law then describes the behavior of an object that is subjected to an external force.
  • And so Newton’s success supercharged an intellectual movement developing around him, the Enlightenment. The picture of reality that emerged from the Enlightenment is one in which the universe is well-ordered according to principles that are accessible to the human mind.
  • Again, if a person is on ice skates and someone pushes them, they accelerate forward because of the force and the other person goes backwards because of it. To every action there is always an equal, but opposite reaction.
  • When these three laws of mechanics and the law of universal gravitation are used together, we suddenly have an explanation for Kepler’s elliptical orbits. Not only that, we can explain the tides, the motion of cannonballs, virtually everything we see in the world around us.
  • When these three laws of mechanics and the law of universal gravitation are used together, it was not only successful in terms of explaining and predicting, but, theoretically, it also undermined the old foundation—Aristotle.
  • Newton’s law of universal gravitation is universal. It applies to everything equally. Aristotle’s worldview was enforced by the centralized power of the Catholic Church. Newton’s worldview came not from authority, but from observing, something anyone could do.
  • The bigger the push, the more the change; the heavier the object, the less the change. An object is either subject to a force or it isn’t, so the first two laws are sufficient to describe the behavior of the object.
  • We live in a world that we can understand. Humans are perfectly rational beings, made to understand the world we inhabit.
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Can Neuroscience Debunk Free Will? | Time - 0 views

time.com/...neuroscience-free-will neuroscience free will illusion conscious brain
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • If we truly possess free will, then we each consciously control our decisions and actions. If we feel as if we possess free will, then our sense of control is a useful illusion
  • brain activity underlying a given decision occurs before a person consciously apprehends the decision.
  • thought patterns leading to conscious awareness of what we’re going to do are already in motion before we know we’ll do it.
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  • Without conscious knowledge of why we’re choosing as we’re choosing, the argument follows, we cannot claim to be exercising “free” will.
  • If free will is drained of its power by scientific determinism, free-will supporters argue, then we’re moving down a dangerous path where people can’t be held accountable for their decisions, since those decisions are triggered by neural activity occurring outside of conscious awareness.
  • investigating whether our subjective experience of free will is threatened by the possibility of “neuroprediction” – the idea that tracking brain activity can predict decisions.
  • The students were then given an article to read about a woman named Jill who tested wearing the cap for a month, during which time neuroscientists were able to predict all of her decisions, including which candidates she’d vote for. The technology and Jill were made up for the study.The students were asked whether they thought this technology was plausible and whether they felt that it undermines free will. Eighty percent responded that it is plausible, but most did not believe it threatened free will unless the technology went beyond prediction and veered into manipulation of decisions.
  • Our subjective understanding about how we process information to arrive at a decision isn’t just a theoretical exercise; what we think about it matters.
20More

How the web distorts reality and impairs our judgement skills | Media Network | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...internet-confirmation-bias judgement social media the internet confirmation bias
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • IBM estimates that 90% of the world's online data has been created just in the past two years. What's more, it has made information more accessible than ever before.
  • However, rather than enhancing knowledge, the internet has produced an information glut or "infoxication".
  • Furthermore, since online content is often curated to fit our preferences, interests and personality, the internet can even enhance our existing biases and undermine our motivation to learn new things.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      When we see our preferences constantly being displayed, we are more likely to go back to wherever the information was or utilize that source, website, etc more often.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • these filters will isolate people in information bubbles only partly of their own choosing, and the inaccurate beliefs they form as a result may be difficult to correct."
  • the proliferation of search engines, news aggregators and feed-ranking algorithms is more likely to perpetuate ignorance than knowledge.
  • It would seem that excessive social media use may intensify not only feelings of loneliness, but also ideological isolation.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Would social media networks need to stop exploiting these preferences in order for us to limit ideological isolation?
  • "What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact."
  • Recent studies show that although most people consume information that matches their opinions, being exposed to conflicting views tends to reduce prejudice and enhance creative thinking.
  • the desire to prove ourselves right and maintain our current beliefs trumps any attempt to be creative or more open-minded.
  • "our objects of inquiry are not 'truth' or 'meaning' but rather configurations of consciousness. These are figures or patterns of knowledge, cognitive and practical attitudes, which emerge within a definite historical and cultural context."
  • the internet is best understood as a cultural lens through which we construct – or distort – reality.
  • we can only deal with this overwhelming range of choices by ignoring most of them.
  • trolling is so effective for enticing readers' comments, but so ineffective for changing their viewpoints.
  • Will accumulating facts help you understand the world?
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      We must take an extra step past just reading/learning about facts and develop second order thinking about the claims/facts to truly gain a better sense of what is going on.
  • we have developed a dependency on technology, which has eclipsed our reliance on logic, critical thinking and common sense: if you can find the answer online, why bother thinking?
  • it is conceivable that individuals' capacity to evaluate and produce original knowledge will matter more than the actual acquisition of knowledge.
  • Good judgment and decision-making will be more in demand than sheer expertise or domain-specific knowledge.
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