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It's Not Just the Discord Leak. Group Chats Are the Internet's New Chaos Machine. - The... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673738 social media chaos internet group in-group dynamics
shared by Javier E on 15 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Digital bulletin-board systems—proto–group chats, you could say—date back to the 1970s, and SMS-style group chats popped up in WhatsApp and iMessage in 2011.
  • As New York magazine put it in 2019, group chats became “an outright replacement for the defining mode of social organization of the past decade: the platform-centric, feed-based social network.”
  • unlike the Facebook feed or Twitter, where posts can be linked to wherever, group chats are a closed system—a safe and (ideally) private space. What happens in the group chat ought to stay there.
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  • In every group chat, no matter the size, participants fall into informal roles. There is usually a leader—a person whose posting frequency drives the group or sets the agenda. Often, there are lurkers who rarely chime in
  • Larger group chats are not immune to the more toxic dynamics of social media, where competition for attention and herd behavior cause infighting, splintering, and back-channeling.
  • The investor panic that led to the swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March was effectively caused by runaway group-chat dynamics. “It wasn’t phone calls; it wasn’t social media,” a start-up founder told Bloomberg in March. “It was private chat rooms and message groups.
  • thanks to the private nature of the group chats, this information largely stayed out of the public eye. As Bloomberg reported, “By the time most people figured out that a bank run was a possibility … it was already well underway.”
  • It’s enough to make one think, as the writer Max Read argued, that “venture-capitalist group chats are a threat to the global economy.” Now you might also say they are a threat to national security.
  • Unlike traditional social media or even forums and message boards, group chats are nearly impossible to monitor.
  • as our digital social lives start to splinter off from feeds and large audiences and into siloed areas, a different kind of unpredictability and chaos awaits. Where social networks create a context collapse—a process by which information meant for one group moves into unfamiliar networks and is interpreted by outsiders—group chats seem to be context amplifiers
  • group chats provide strong relationship dynamics, and create in-jokes and lore. For decades, researchers have warned of the polarizing effects of echo chambers across social networks; group chats realize this dynamic fully.
  • Weird things happen in echo chambers. Constant reinforcement of beliefs or ideas might lead to group polarization or radicalization. It may trigger irrational herd behavior such as, say, attempting to purchase a copy of the Constitution through a decentralized autonomous organization
  • Obsession with in-group dynamics might cause people to lose touch with the reality outside the walls of a particular community; the private-seeming nature of a closed group might also lull participants into a false sense of security, as it did with Teixiera.
  • the age of the group chat appears to be at least as unpredictable, swapping a very public form of volatility for a more siloed, incalculable version
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Synthetic Thinking | Jerome Groopman | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...hetic-thinking-jerome-groopman medicine political theory writing synthesis progress adaptation identity
shared by Javier E on 27 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Did you hope to combine chemistry and political philosophy in some way in your medical career?
  • Chemistry requires synthetic thinking. You have to bring disparate pieces of knowledge together in order to look for a chemical structure. Political philosophy, to some degree, also involves disparate aspects of knowledge: economics, sociology, history, pure philosophy
  • I found that in medicine, you don’t have an answer when you start out. You’re looking for clues that are often distributed in different places: family history, as there might be a genetic predisposition; social history, because the person smoked or was exposed to a toxin; the physical examination, where you find that an organ might be disordered. Add to that the blood test, the CAT scan, all of it, but most importantly, the person, the psychology of the person you’re dealing with. It’s the same kind of synthetic process as political philosophy, but in a different dimension.
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  • Writing, especially the kind of writing that I do, brings together narrative, science, sometimes history, and an appreciation for the person who might be at the center of the narrative.
  • The greatest influence on me was Oliver Sacks, because he could capture people as people, and he always integrated serious science into his pieces.
  • The two subjects that were most prominent for him, as I once wrote for you, were identity and adaptation: Who is this person, despite their illness? How does that illness interface with their behavior and their decisions, how do people perceive them from the outside, and how do they try to find meaning and adapt to what looks like a disability, but sometimes—not always, but sometimes—gives them hidden strength?
  • I’ve gone from witnessing the depths of disability and death, like with AIDS: I saw some of the first people with AIDS in California, in 1982 or so. The average lifespan was six months. They were mostly young gay men, and it was devastating, the infections they got, the cancers they got. Now, with all the new drugs that have been developed, someone who gets HIV is projected to have a normal lifespan. From six months to fifty years: it’s miraculous
  • that’s part of what keeps you going: the belief that things can advance in a meaningful way.
  • Are there any major or interesting medical stories that the public doesn’t know enough about? 
  • The idea of genetic treatments. Often when people hear the words “genetics” or “DNA” or “RNA,” they shut down. The challenge is how to make it accessible.
  • There’s a wonderful line in the Talmud that says, “Whoever saves a single life saves the whole world.” There might be only a few hundred people in the whole country who have a particular genetic disorder. I
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Opinion | Gen Z slang terms are influenced by incels - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gen-z-slang-terms-incels slang language social media intel diffusion
shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Incels (as they’re known) are infamous for sharing misogynistic attitudes and bitter hostility toward the romantically successful
  • somehow, incels’ hateful rhetoric has bizarrely become popularized via Gen Z slang.
  • it’s common to hear the suffix “pilled” as a funny way to say “convinced into a lifestyle.” Instead of “I now love eating burritos,” for instance, one might say, “I’m so burritopilled.” “Pilled” as a suffix comes from a scene in 1999’s “The Matrix” where Neo (Keanu Reeves) had to choose between the red pill and the blue pill, but the modern sense is formed through analogy with “blackpilled,” an online slang term meaning “accepting incel ideology.
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  • the popular suffix “maxxing” for “maximizing” (e.g., “I’m burritomaxxing” instead of “I’m eating a lot of burritos”) is drawn from the incel idea of “looksmaxxing,” or “maximizing attractiveness” through surgical or cosmetic techniques.
  • Then there’s the word “cucked” for “weakened” or “emasculated.” If the taqueria is out of burritos, you might be “tacocucked,” drawing on the incel idea of being sexually emasculated by more attractive “chads.
  • finally, we have the word “sigma” for “assertive male,” which comes from an incel’s desired position outside the social hierarchy.
  • there’s a dark side to the site as well — certain boards, like /r9k/, are known breeding grounds for incel discussion, and the source of the incel words being used today.
  • These slang terms developed on 4chan precisely because of the site’s anonymity. Since users don’t have identifiable aliases, they signal their in-group status through performative fluency in shared slang
  • Memes and niche vocabulary become a form of cultural currency, fueling their proliferation.
  • From there, those words filter out to more mainstream websites such as Reddit and eventually become popularized by viral memes and TikTok trends. Social media algorithms do the rest of the work by curating recommended content for viewers.
  • Because these terms often spread in ironic contexts, people find them funny, engage with them and are eventually rewarded with more memes featuring incel vocabulary.
  • Creators are not just aware of this process — they are directly incentivized to abet it. We know that using trending audio helps our videos perform better and that incorporating popular metadata with hashtags or captions will help us reach wider audiences
  • kids aren’t actually saying “cucked” because they’re “blackpilled”; they’re using it for the same reason all kids use slang: It helps them bond as a group. And what are they bonding over? A shared mockery of incel ideas.
  • These words capture an important piece of the Gen Z zeitgeist. We should therefore be aware of them, keeping in mind that they’re being used ironically.
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Peter Higgs, physicist who discovered Higgs boson, dies aged 94 | Peter Higgs | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...vered-higgs-boson-dies-aged-94 physicist physics universe model higgs boson
shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Peter Higgs, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who discovered a new particle known as the Higgs boson, has died.Higgs, 94, who was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2013 for his work in 1964 showing how the boson helped bind the universe together by giving particles their mass
  • “A giant of particle physics has left us,” Ellis told the Guardian. “Without his theory, atoms could not exist and radioactivity would be a force as strong as electricity and magnetism.
  • “His prediction of the existence of the particle that bears his name was a deep insight, and its discovery at Cern in 2012 was a crowning moment that confirmed his understanding of the way the Universe works.”
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  • The particle that carries his name is perhaps the single most stunning example of how seemingly abstract mathematical ideas can make predictions which turn out to have huge physical consequences.”
  • The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel, said at the time the standard model of physics which underpins the scientific understanding of the universe “rests on the existence of a special kind of particle: the Higgs particle. This particle originates from an invisible field that fills up all space.“Even when the universe seems empty this field is there. Without it, we would not exist, because it is from contact with the field that particles acquire mass. The theory proposed by Englert and Higgs describes this process.”
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AlphaProof, a New A.I. from Google DeepMind, Scores Big at the International Math Olymp... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-math-alphaproof-deepmind.html math AI methods strategy research knowledge language
shared by Javier E on 25 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • Last week the DeepMind researchers got out the gong again to celebrate what Alex Davies, a lead of Google DeepMind’s mathematics initiative, described as a “massive breakthrough” in mathematical reasoning by an A.I. system.
  • A pair of Google DeepMind models tried their luck with the problem set in the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad, or I.M.O., held from July 11 to July 22 about 100 miles west of London at the University of Bath.
  • The event is said to be the premier math competition for the world’s “brightest mathletes,” according to a promotional post on social media.
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  • The human problem-solvers — 609 high school students from 108 countries — won 58 gold medals, 123 silver and 145 bronze. The A.I. performed at the level of a silver medalist, solving four out of six problems for a total of 28 points. It was the first time that A.I. has achieved a medal-worthy performance on an Olympiad’s problems.
  • Nonetheless, Dr. Kohli described the result as a “phase transition” — a transformative change — “in the use of A.I. in mathematics and the ability of A.I. systems to do mathematics.”
  • Dr. Gowers added in an email: “I was definitely impressed.” The lab had discussed its Olympiad ambitions with him a couple of weeks beforehand, so “my expectations were quite high,” he said. “But the program met them, and in one or two instances significantly surpassed them.” The program found the “magic keys” that unlocked the problems, he said.
  • Haojia Shi, a student from China, ranked No. 1 and was the only competitor to earn a perfect score — 42 points for six problems; each problem is worth seven points for a full solution. The U.S. team won first place with 192 points; China placed second with 190.
  • The Google system earned its 28 points for fully solving four problems — two in algebra, one in geometry and one in number theory. (It flopped at two combinatorics problems.) The system was allowed unlimited time; for some problems it took up to three days. The students were allotted only 4.5 hours per exam.
  • “The fact that we’ve reached this threshold, where it’s even possible to tackle these problems at all, is what represents a step-change in the history of mathematics,” he added. “And hopefully it’s not just a step-change in the I.M.O., but also represents the point at which we went from computers only being able to prove very, very simple things toward computers being able to prove things that humans can’t.”
  • “Mathematics requires this interesting combination of abstract, precise and creative reasoning,” Dr. Davies said. In part, he noted, this repertoire of abilities is what makes math a good litmus test for the ultimate goal: reaching so-called artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a system with capabilities ranging from emerging to competent to virtuoso to superhuman
  • In January, a Google DeepMind system named AlphaGeometry solved a sampling of Olympiad geometry problems at nearly the level of a human gold medalist. “AlphaGeometry 2 has now surpassed the gold medalists in solving I.M.O. problems,” Thang Luong, the principal investigator, said in an email.
  • Dr. Hubert’s team developed a new model that is comparable but more generalized. Named AlphaProof, it is designed to engage with a broad range of mathematical subjects. All told, AlphaGeometry and AlphaProof made use of a number of different A.I. technologies.
  • One approach was an informal reasoning system, expressed in natural language. This system leveraged Gemini, Google’s large language model. It used the English corpus of published problems and proofs and the like as training data.
  • The informal system excels at identifying patterns and suggesting what comes next; it is creative and talks about ideas in an understandable way. Of course, large language models are inclined to make things up — which may (or may not) fly for poetry and definitely not for math. But in this context, the L.L.M. seems to have displayed restraint; it wasn’t immune to hallucination, but the frequency was reduced.
  • Another approach was a formal reasoning system, based on logic and expressed in code. It used theorem prover and proof-assistant software called Lean, which guarantees that if the system says a proof is correct, then it is indeed correct. “We can exactly check that the proof is correct or not,” Dr. Hubert said. “Every step is guaranteed to be logically sound.”
  • Another crucial component was a reinforcement learning algorithm in the AlphaGo and AlphaZero lineage. This type of A.I. learns by itself and can scale indefinitely, said Dr. Silver, who is Google DeepMind’s vice-president of reinforcement learning. Since the algorithm doesn’t require a human teacher, it can “learn and keep learning and keep learning until ultimately it can solve the hardest problems that humans can solve,” he said. “And then maybe even one day go beyond those.”
  • Dr. Hubert added, “The system can rediscover knowledge for itself.” That’s what happened with AlphaZero: It started with zero knowledge, Dr. Hubert said, “and by just playing games, and seeing who wins and who loses, it could rediscover all the knowledge of chess. It took us less than a day to rediscover all the knowledge of chess, and about a week to rediscover all the knowledge of Go. So we thought, Let’s apply this to mathematics.”
  • Dr. Gowers doesn’t worry — too much — about the long-term consequences. “It is possible to imagine a state of affairs where mathematicians are basically left with nothing to do,” he said. “That would be the case if computers became better, and far faster, at everything that mathematicians currently do.”
  • “There still seems to be quite a long way to go before computers will be able to do research-level mathematics,” he added. “It’s a fairly safe bet that if Google DeepMind can solve at least some hard I.M.O. problems, then a useful research tool can’t be all that far away.”
  • A really adept tool might make mathematics accessible to more people, speed up the research process, nudge mathematicians outside the box. Eventually it might even pose novel ideas that resonate.
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