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Javier E

Opinion | Is Pain a Sensation or an Emotion? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pain-opioids.html

pain sensation emotion treatment opioids

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The United States uses a third of the world’s opioids but a fifth of Americans still say they suffer from chronic pain.
  • This has forced many to take a step back and ponder the very nature of pain, to understand how best to alleviate it.
  • The ancient Greeks considered pain a passion — an emotion rather than a sensation like touch or smell.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • In the 19th century, the secularization of Western society led to the secularization of pain. It was no longer a passion to be endured but a sensation to be quashed.
  • The concept of pain as a purely physical phenomenon reached its zenith in the 1990s
  • having pain designated a “fifth vital sign,” alongside blood pressure, temperature and breathing and heart rate.
  • This coincided with the release of long-acting opioids like OxyContin. Doctors believed they now had an effective remedy for their patients’ suffering
  • looking back it’s clear that using opioids to treat chronic pain — backaches, bum knees and the like — might well be considered the worst medical mistake of our era.
  • ecades of research suggests that opiates provide little to no benefit for chronic noncancer pain
  • Why is this? Studies have shown that opioids can reduce patients’ pain thresholds.
  • They can also result in a condition called opioid-induced hyperalgesia, in which people feel more and more pain as they are prescribed higher and higher doses of opioids
  • the mind does play a pivotal role in the experience of pain. After a pain signal reaches the brain, it undergoes significant reprocessing.
  • How much something hurts can vary depending on factors like your expectations, your mood and how distracted you are
  • pain is contagious and transmittable.
  • Conditions like depression and anxiety greatly increase the chance of developing chronic pain, while patients who experience pain are at high risk of developing depression or anxiety
  • there is considerable overlap in the areas of the brain that deal with pain and emotion.
  • Objectively, there is no doubt that illnesses and injuries can cause immense suffering. The question is how severe that suffering is, and how long it lasts
  • pain sensitivity varies significantly among people, most likely as a result of genetic differences.
  • rug companies greatly underplayed the risks of opioids, while billions of dollars in marketing told people that pills were the only answer to their ailments.
  • future doctors should be taught that pain is part of the story of the person who suffers from it, not just a separate physical phenomenon.
  • this education should incorporate ways to avoid prescribing opioids for chronic use.
  • Perhaps the most important tool physicians need to manage pain is empathy.
  • Physical therapy that doesn’t just manipulate joints but also addresses the context pain comes alive in, encourages optimism and builds emotional resilience has been found to be more effective.
  • unfortunately our health system encourages doctors to see as many patients as possible as quickly as possible. We need to change how physicians are paid in order to give them the time to really talk with patients about their pain.
  • I felt that the pain was my body’s way of telling me that something was wrong, and I didn’t want to silence that voice with a temporary fix.
  • What pulled me out after almost a year of agony was not just rigorous physical therapy that molded my spine back into shape but also the kindness of my friends, my family and my future wife.
  • a spiritual and emotional experience alleviated through prayers rather than prescriptions.
g-dragon

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness in Buddhism - 1 views

www.thoughtco.com/ndations-of-mindfulness-450066

buddhism mindfulness foundations

shared by g-dragon on 05 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Mindfulness is one of the most basic practices of Buddhism. It is part of the Eightfold Path and is one of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment.
  • The four foundations are frames of reference, usually taken up one at a time. In this way, the student begins with a simple mindfulness of breath and progresses to mindfulness of everything. These four foundations are often taught in the context of meditation, but if your daily practice is chanting, that can work, too.
  • This is an awareness of the body as body—something experienced as breath and flesh and bone.
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  • Most introductory mindfulness exercises focus on the breath.
  • As the ability to maintain awareness gets stronger, the practitioner becomes aware of the whole body.
  • In some schools of Buddhism, this exercise might include an awareness of aging and mortality.
  • Body awareness is taken into movement. Chanting and rituals are opportunities to be mindful of body as it moves, and in this way we train ourselves to be mindful when we aren't meditating, too. In some schools of Buddhism nuns and monks have practiced martial arts as a way of bringing meditative focus into movement, but many day-to-day activities can be used as "body practice."
  • The second foundation is mindfulness of feelings, both bodily sensations and emotions.
  • In other words, it is not "my" feelings, and feelings do not define who you are. There are just feelings.
  • Sometimes this can be uncomfortable. What can come up might surprise us. Humans have an amazing capacity to ignore our own anxieties and anger and even pain, sometimes. But ignoring sensations we don't like is unhealthy. As we learn to observe and fully acknowledge our feelings, we also see how feelings dissipate.
  • The third foundation is mindfulness of mind or consciousness.
  • Citta is more like consciousness or awareness.
  • It is a consciousness or awareness that is not made up of ideas. However, neither is it the pure awareness that is the fifth ​skandha.
  • Another way of thinking of this foundation is "mindfulness of mental states." Like sensations or emotions, our states of mind come and go. Sometimes we are sleepy; sometimes we are restless. We learn to observe our mental states dispassionately, without judgment or opinion.
  • The fourth foundation is mindfulness of dharma. Here we open ourselves to the whole world, or at least the world that we experience.
  • Dharma is a Sanskrit word that can be defined many ways. You can think of it as "natural law" or "the way things are."
  • Dharma can refer to the doctrines of the Buddha. And dharma can refer to phenomena as m manifestations of reality.
  • mindfulness of mental objects
  • In this foundation, we practice awareness of the inter-existence of all things. We are aware that they are temporary, without self-essence, and conditioned by everything else.
Javier E

Soviet history: Stalin and his cursed cause | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...68-stalin-and-his-cursed-cause

stalin historiography

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Unlike other biographies that have focused on the most sensational episodes in the dictator’s life, it sets Stalin firmly in the historical context: the rise (and eventual fall) of what the author calls the “Red Empire”.
  • Mr Gellately’s latest work has a good claim to be the best single-volume account of the darkest period in Russian history.
  • It is also a worthy successor to his “Lenin, Stalin, Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (2008), which compared and contrasted the three monsters.
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  • Where Stalin excelled, again and again, was in ruthlessness and attention to detail. He paid minute attention to extending Soviet rule in places conquered at the war’s end. He took great interest in details of science and cultural policy, fearing even the faintest breach in communist omniscience.
  • For all the havoc he wreaked on the countryside, Stalin knew next to nothing about it (he seems to have visited farms only once, in 1928).
  • Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman failed to grasp their counterpart’s malevolence. Winston Churchill made casual deals that consigned millions of people to slavery and torment. The foreigners thought Stalin was a curmudgeonly ally to be coaxed and cajoled. He treated them as enemies to be outwitted. Far from provoking Stalin into unnecessary hostility, the Western powers were not nearly tough enough.
Javier E

David Simon | Barack Obama And The Death Of Normal - 0 views

davidsimon.com/evitabilities-and-barack-obama

us hierarchy normal coalition plurality conservative demographics

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • America is different now, more so with every election cycle. Ronald Reagan won his mandate in an America in which 89 percent of the voters were white. That number is down to 72 percent and falling. Fifty thousand new Latino citizens achieve the voting age every month. America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political irrelevance.
  • Eighty years ago, the Democratic party became a national utilitarian enterprise, molding the immigrant waves of Irish and Italian and Jew into a voting bloc that stunned the political opposition and transformed American society, creating the world’s greatest economic engine in the form of a consumer class with vast discretionary income. The New Deal asserted for American progress — shaping and influencing administrations both Democratic and Republican — for three decades before running aground on the shoals of the civil rights movement, resulting racial fears and resentments, and, of course, the Southern strategy of political cynics
  • right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from dramatic change that is certain and immutable. A man of color is president for the second time, and this happened despite a struggling economic climate and a national spirit of general discontent. He has been returned to office over the specific objections of the mass of white men. He has instead been re-elected by women, by people of color, by homosexuals, by people of varying religions or no religion whatsoever. Behold the New Jerusalem. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a white man, of course. There’s nothing wrong with being anything. That’s the point.
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  • This election marks a moment in which the racial and social hierarchy of America is upended forever. No longer will it mean more politically to be a white male than to be anything else. Evolve, or don’t. Swallow your resentments, or don’t. But the votes are going to be counted, more of them with each election. Arizona will soon be in play. And in a few cycles, even Texas. And those wishing to hold national office in these United States will find it increasingly useless to argue for normal, to attempt to play one minority against each other, to turn pluralities against the feared “other” of gays, or blacks, or immigrants, or, incredibly in this election cycle, our very wives and lovers and daughters, fellow citizens who demand to control their own bodies.
  • now, normal isn’t white or straight or Christian. There is no normal. That word, too, means less with every moment. And those who continue to argue for such retrograde notions as a political reality will become less germane and more ridiculous with every passing year.
Javier E

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nary-science-of-junk-food.html

food nutrition science technology oligopoly economics culture profit addiction

shared by Javier E on 27 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Today, one in three adults is considered clinically obese, along with one in five kids, and 24 million Americans are afflicted by type 2 diabetes, often caused by poor diet, with another 79 million people having pre-diabetes. Even gout, a painful form of arthritis once known as “the rich man’s disease” for its associations with gluttony, now afflicts eight million Americans.
  • The public and the food companies have known for decades now — or at the very least since this meeting — that sugary, salty, fatty foods are not good for us in the quantities that we consume them. So why are the diabetes and obesity and hypertension numbers still spiraling out of control? It’s not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive
  • the powerful sensory force that food scientists call “mouth feel.” This is the way a product interacts with the mouth, as defined more specifically by a host of related sensations, from dryness to gumminess to moisture release.
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  • the mouth feel of soda and many other food items, especially those high in fat, is second only to the bliss point in its ability to predict how much craving a product will induce.
  • He organized focus-group sessions with the people most responsible for buying bologna — mothers — and as they talked, he realized the most pressing issue for them was time. Working moms strove to provide healthful food, of course, but they spoke with real passion and at length about the morning crush, that nightmarish dash to get breakfast on the table and lunch packed and kids out the door.
  • as the focus swung toward kids, Saturday-morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different message: “All day, you gotta do what they say,” the ads said. “But lunchtime is all yours.”
  • When it came to Lunchables, they did try to add more healthful ingredients. Back at the start, Drane experimented with fresh carrots but quickly gave up on that, since fresh components didn’t work within the constraints of the processed-food system, which typically required weeks or months of transport and storage before the food arrived at the grocery store. Later, a low-fat version of the trays was developed, using meats and cheese and crackers that were formulated with less fat, but it tasted inferior, sold poorly and was quickly scrapped.
  • One of the company’s responses to criticism is that kids don’t eat the Lunchables every day — on top of which, when it came to trying to feed them more healthful foods, kids themselves were unreliable. When their parents packed fresh carrots, apples and water, they couldn’t be trusted to eat them. Once in school, they often trashed the healthful stuff in their brown bags to get right to the sweets.
  • This idea — that kids are in control — would become a key concept in the evolving marketing campaigns for the trays. In what would prove to be their greatest achievement of all, the Lunchables team would delve into adolescent psychology to discover that it wasn’t the food in the trays that excited the kids; it was the feeling of power it brought to their lives.
  • The prevailing attitude among the company’s food managers — through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern — was one of supply and demand. “People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.”
  • at last count, including sales in Britain, they were approaching the $1 billion mark. Lunchables was more than a hit; it was now its own category
  • he holds the entire industry accountable. “What do University of Wisconsin M.B.A.’s learn about how to succeed in marketing?” his presentation to the med students asks. “Discover what consumers want to buy and give it to them with both barrels. Sell more, keep your job! How do marketers often translate these ‘rules’ into action on food? Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt. . . . So formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low-cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then ‘supersize’ to sell more. . . . And advertise/promote to lock in ‘heavy users.’ Plenty of guilt to go around here!”
  • men in the eastern part of Finland had the highest rate of fatal cardiovascular disease in the world. Research showed that this plague was not just a quirk of genetics or a result of a sedentary lifestyle — it was also owing to processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers. (The Finnish response worked. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would come to be marked prominently with the warning “High Salt Content.” By 2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift — along with improved medical care — was accompanied by a 75 percent to 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.)
  • I tracked Lin down in Irvine, Calif., where we spent several days going through the internal company memos, strategy papers and handwritten notes he had kept. The documents were evidence of the concern that Lin had for consumers and of the company’s intent on using science not to address the health concerns but to thwart them. While at Frito-Lay, Lin and other company scientists spoke openly about the country’s excessive consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin said to me on more than one occasion, “people get addicted to salt
  • the marketing team was joined by Dwight Riskey, an expert on cravings who had been a fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, where he was part of a team of scientists that found that people could beat their salt habits simply by refraining from salty foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity. He had also done work on the bliss point, showing how a product’s allure is contextual, shaped partly by the other foods a person is eating, and that it changes as people age. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay was having so much trouble selling new snacks. The largest single block of customers, the baby boomers, had begun hitting middle age. According to the research, this suggested that their liking for salty snacks — both in the concentration of salt and how much they ate — would be tapering off.
  • Riskey realized that he and his colleagues had been misreading things all along. They had been measuring the snacking habits of different age groups and were seeing what they expected to see, that older consumers ate less than those in their 20s. But what they weren’t measuring, Riskey realized, is how those snacking habits of the boomers compared to themselves when they were in their 20s. When he called up a new set of sales data and performed what’s called a cohort study, following a single group over time, a far more encouraging picture — for Frito-Lay, anyway — emerged. The baby boomers were not eating fewer salty snacks as they aged. “In fact, as those people aged, their consumption of all those segments — the cookies, the crackers, the candy, the chips — was going up,” Riskey said. “They were not only eating what they ate when they were younger, they were eating more of it.” In fact, everyone in the country, on average, was eating more salty snacks than they used to. The rate of consumption was edging up about one-third of a pound every year, with the average intake of snacks like chips and cheese crackers pushing past 12 pounds a year
  • Riskey had a theory about what caused this surge: Eating real meals had become a thing of the past.
  • “We looked at this behavior, and said, ‘Oh, my gosh, people were skipping meals right and left,’ ” Riskey told me. “It was amazing.” This led to the next realization, that baby boomers did not represent “a category that is mature, with no growth. This is a category that has huge growth potential.”
  • The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing new products and instead embraced the industry’s most reliable method for getting consumers to buy more: the line extension.
  • He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”
  • Frito-Lay acquired Stacy’s Pita Chip Company, which was started by a Massachusetts couple who made food-cart sandwiches and started serving pita chips to their customers in the mid-1990s. In Frito-Lay’s hands, the pita chips averaged 270 milligrams of sodium — nearly one-fifth a whole day’s recommended maximum for most American adults — and were a huge hit among boomers.
  • There’s a paradox at work here. On the one hand, reduction of sodium in snack foods is commendable. On the other, these changes may well result in consumers eating more. “The big thing that will happen here is removing the barriers for boomers and giving them permission to snack,” Carey said. The prospects for lower-salt snacks were so amazing, he added, that the company had set its sights on using the designer salt to conquer the toughest market of all for snacks: schools
  • The company’s chips, he wrote, were not selling as well as they could for one simple reason: “While people like and enjoy potato chips, they feel guilty about liking them. . . . Unconsciously, people expect to be punished for ‘letting themselves go’ and enjoying them.” Dichter listed seven “fears and resistances” to the chips: “You can’t stop eating them; they’re fattening; they’re not good for you; they’re greasy and messy to eat; they’re too expensive; it’s hard to store the leftovers; and they’re bad for children.” He spent the rest of his memo laying out his prescriptions, which in time would become widely used not just by Frito-Lay but also by the entire industry.
  • Dichter advised Frito-Lay to move its chips out of the realm of between-meals snacking and turn them into an ever-present item in the American diet. “The increased use of potato chips and other Lay’s products as a part of the regular fare served by restaurants and sandwich bars should be encouraged in a concentrated way,”
  • the largest weight-inducing food was the potato chip. The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself — all of this combines to make it the perfect addictive food. “The starch is readily absorbed,” Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, told me. “More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike” — which can result in a craving for more.
  • If Americans snacked only occasionally, and in small amounts, this would not present the enormous problem that it does. But because so much money and effort has been invested over decades in engineering and then relentlessly selling these products, the effects are seemingly impossible to unwind.
  • Todd Putman, who worked at Coca-Cola from 1997 to 2001, said the goal became much larger than merely beating the rival brands; Coca-Cola strove to outsell every other thing people drank, including milk and water. The marketing division’s efforts boiled down to one question, Putman said: “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?”
Javier E

The impresario-elect | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-donald-trump-impresario-elect

trump demagogue populism

shared by Javier E on 21 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • All candidates worry about pleasing their supporters or building coalitions, even as they craft policies that reflect their core beliefs. But it is striking how often public acclaim is Mr Trump’s first and last concern.
  • Explaining in an interview with the New York Times why it would be “nice” for America and Russia to fight Islamic State together, he imagined how, if his plan succeeded: “The people will stand up and give me a massive hand.
  • The president-elect reportedly argued that Mr Romney “looks the part” of a world statesman—sounding more like a casting agent than a man assembling a government.
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  • Mr Trump had just begun a thunderous attack on Hillary Clinton’s health policies when he was distracted by a “Drain the Swamp” sign. “Look at that,” he marvelled. When his team had coined the phrase three days earlier he had disliked it, he confided. But then he used it and “the place went crazy.” Now, he beamed, “It’s the hottest, it’s like, trending all over the world…So we like that expression.”
  • America has elected an impresario-president. Imagine him peering past theatre footlights through clouds of cigar smoke, checking that every row is full and each face rapt. There is no guarantee that will make him a pragmatist: indeed, perhaps because he has so few fixed beliefs (beyond protectionism), he has appointed ideologues to key positions, like a vaudeville boss crafting a playbill to sell every last seat. His team so far includes hardline nationalists alongside conservative technocrats like his chosen transport secretary, Elaine Chao
  • If Washington grandees are shocked, they misunderstand Mr Trump. He has a knack for sensation. Applause is his drug. Elites are naive to imagine that this will make him more manageable. It is his show now.
Javier E

Fake news is 'killing people's minds', says Apple boss Tim Cook | Technology | The Guar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...minds-says-apple-boss-tim-cook

fake news apple technology politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • “We are going through this period of time right here where unfortunately some of the people that are winning are the people that spend their time trying to get the most clicks, not tell the most truth,” Cook told the Daily Telegraph. “It’s killing people’s minds, in a way.”
  • “All of us technology companies need to create some tools that help diminish the volume of fake news. We must try to squeeze this without stepping on freedom of speech and of the press, but we must also help the reader. Too many of us are just in the ‘complain’ category right now and haven’t figured out what to do.”
  • He said that a crackdown would mean that “truthful, reliable, non-sensational, deep news outlets will win”, adding: “The [rise of fake news] is a short-term thing. I don’t believe that people want that.”
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  • It said: “The average American saw and remembered 0.92 pro-Trump fake news stories and 0.23 pro-Clinton fake news stories, with just over half of those who recalled seeing fake news stories believing them.
  • A study by economists at Stanford University and New York University published two months after November’s US presidential election found that in the run-up to the vote, fake anti-Clinton stories had been shared 30 million times on Facebook, while those favouring her were shared eight million times.
  • But it called into question the power of fake news reports spread on social media to alter the outcome of the election, saying that, “for fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single fake article would need to have had the same persuasive effect as 36 television campaign ads”.
  • He added: “It has to be ingrained in the schools, it has to be ingrained in the public. There has to be a massive campaign. We have to think through every demographic... It’s almost as if a new course is required for the modern kid, for the digital kid.
maxwellokolo

Officer pleads not guilty in Philando Castile killing - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 28 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 28 Feb 17
     
    The killing July 6 became a sensation on social media when Castile's fiancee, Diamond Reynolds, live-streamed its aftermath on Facebook. Reynolds' 4-year-old daughter was also in the car at the time. Yanez faces trial May 30 in Ramsey County Court in downtown St. Paul.
Javier E

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...3806504577181351486558984.html

adolescence teenage brain research development learning experience brain science psychology

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.
  • The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again
  • The first of these systems has to do with emotion and motivation. It is very closely linked to the biological and chemical changes of puberty and involves the areas of the brain that respond to rewards. This is the system that turns placid 10-year-olds into restless, exuberant, emotionally intense teenagers, desperate to attain every goal, fulfill every desire and experience every sensation. Later, it turns them back into relatively placid adults.
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  • adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults.
  • What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers
  • In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence—tuning up just the prefrontal wiring you'd need as an adult. But you'd do all that under expert adult supervision and in the protected world of childhood
  • The second crucial system in our brains has to do with control; it channels and harnesses all that seething energy. In particular, the prefrontal cortex reaches out to guide other parts of the brain, including the parts that govern motivation and emotion. This is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making, that encourages long-term planning and delays gratification.
  • This control system depends much more on learning. It becomes increasingly effective throughout childhood and continues to develop during adolescence and adulthood, as we gain more experience.
  • Expertise comes with experience.
  • In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship. Children have lots of chances to practice the skills that they need to accomplish their goals as adults, and so to become expert planners and actors.
  • In contemporary life, the relationship between these two systems has changed dramatically. Puberty arrives earlier, and the motivational system kicks in earlier too. At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups.
  • there is more and more evidence that genes are just the first step in complex developmental sequences, cascades of interactions between organism and environment, and that those developmental processes shape the adult brain. Even small changes in developmental timing can lead to big changes in who we become.
  • The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences.
  • Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.
  • An ever longer protected period of immaturity and dependence—a childhood that extends through college—means that young humans can learn more than ever before. There is strong evidence that IQ has increased dramatically as more children spend more time in school
  • children know more about more different subjects than they ever did in the days of apprenticeships.
  • Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies.
  • this new explanation based on developmental timing elegantly accounts for the paradoxes of our particular crop of adolescents.
  • First, experience shapes the brain.
  • the brain is so powerful precisely because it is so sensitive to experience. It's as true to say that our experience of controlling our impulses make the prefrontal cortex develop as it is to say that prefrontal development makes us better at controlling our impulses
  • Second, development plays a crucial role in explaining human nature
  • Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.
  • Brain research is often taken to mean that adolescents are really just defective adults—grown-ups with a missing part.
  • But the new view of the adolescent brain isn't that the prefrontal lobes just fail to show up; it's that they aren't properly instructed and exercised
  • Instead of simply giving adolescents more and more school experiences—those extra hours of after-school classes and homework—we could try to arrange more opportunities for apprenticeship
  • Summer enrichment activities like camp and travel, now so common for children whose parents have means, might be usefully alternated with summer jobs, with real responsibilities.
  • Javier E on 06 Feb 12
     
    The two brain systems, the increasing gap between them, and the implications for adolescent education.
  • anonymous on 06 Feb 12
     
    "In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship" (Gopnik). Similarly to the way that Marx pointed out the economic shift from hunter-gatherer to farmer to (eventually) capitalist societies, Gopnik underlines the societal shift- especially in teenagers. While I think that some of the changes in teenagers are due to evolution and development (as proven through some of the medical tests mentioned in the article), I think that this issue may relate back to parenting. As the article about French parenting pointed out, it has become a very obvious fact that many (specifically American) parents simply do not have good techniques, and this could effect the way that their child develops and behaves. I also think that another possible explanation to this issue is that there is more expected of teenagers, scholarly, then before; however, as the article mentioned, the real-world experience is lacking. By raising the academic bar higher and higher, it may actually cause more students to, essentially, "burn out" before everything that they have learned can be applied: "What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?" (Gopnik)
Maria Delzi

BBC News - Obama orders curbs on NSA data use - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-us-canada-25785573

shared by Maria Delzi on 17 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Obama orders curbs on NSA data use
  • President Barack Obama has ordered curbs on the use of bulk data collected by US intelligence agencies, saying civil liberties must be respected.
  • Mr Obama said such data had prevented terror attacks at home and abroad, but that in tackling threats the government risked over-reaching itself. However civil liberties groups have said the changes do not go far enoug
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Edward Snowden, the former contractor at the US National Security Agency (NSA) who leaked the information, is wanted in the US for espionage and is now living in exile in Russia.
  • The leaked documents revealed that the US collects massive amounts of electronic data from communications of private individuals around the world, and that it has spied on foreign leader
  • The latest revelations claim that US agencies have collected and stored almost 200 million text messages every day across the globe.
  • 'Rights are protected'
  • In his much-anticipated speech at the Department of Justice, Mr Obama said he would not apologise for the effectiveness of US intelligence operations, and insisted that nothing he had seen indicated they had sought to break the law.
  • It was necessary for the US to continue collecting large amounts of data, he said, but acknowledged that doing so allowed for "the potential of abuse".
  • "The reforms I'm proposing today should give the American people greater confidence that their rights are being protected, even as our intelligence and law enforcement agencies maintain the tools they need to keep us safe," he said.
  • He has asked the attorney general and the
  • intelligence community to draw up plans for such metadata to be held by a third party, with the NSA required to seek legal permission before it could access them.
  • A panel of independent privacy advocates would also sit on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) which has responsibility for giving permission for mass surveillance programmes.
  • "should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don't threaten our national security".
  • "This applies to foreign leaders as well," he said, promising that from now on the US "will not monitor the communications of heads of state and government of our close friends and allies".
  • But he was also critical of nations he said "feign surprise" over the leaks but "privately acknowledge that America has special responsibilities as the world's only superpower" and have used the information gathered for their own purposes.
  • Mr Obama said he would not "dwell on Mr Snowden's actions or his motivations", but warned that the "sensational way" the NSA details had come to light had potentially jeopardised US operations "for years to come".
  • Mr Obama's reforms were welcomed as progress in some quarters, but others argued they did not go far enough in protecting individuals.
  • "President Obama's surveillance adjustments will be remembered as music on the Titanic unless his administration adopts deeper reforms," said Steven W. Hawkins, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
Javier E

The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices - Derek ... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...267255

rational choice rationality psychology consumer economics

shared by Javier E on 20 May 15 - No Cached
  • Atlantic.displayRandomElement('#header li.business .sponsored-dropdown-item'); Derek Thompson - Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for the website. More Derek has also written for Slate, BusinessWeek, and the Daily Beast. He has appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including NPR, the BBC, CNBC, and MSNBC. All Posts RSS feed Share Share on facebook Share on linkedin Share on twitter « Previous Thompson Email Print Close function plusOneCallback () { $(document).trigger('share'); } $(document).ready(function() { var iframeUrl = "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"; var toolsClicked = false; $('#toolsTop').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'top'; }); $('#toolsBottom').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'bottom'; }); $('#thanksForSharing a.hide').click(function() { $('#thanksForSharing').hide(); }); var onShareClickHandler = function() { var top = parseInt($(this).css('top').replace(/px/, ''), 10); toolsClicked = (top > 600) ? 'bottom' : 'top'; }; var onIframeReady = function(iframe) { var win = iframe.contentWindow; // Don't show the box if there's no ad in it if (win.$('.ad').children().length == 1) { return; } var visibleAds = win.$('.ad').filter(function() { return !($(this).css('display') == 'none'); }); if (visibleAds.length == 0) { // Ad is hidden, so don't show return; } if (win.$('.ad').hasClass('adNotLoaded')) { // Ad failed to load so don't show return; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('display', 'block'); var top; if(toolsClicked == 'bottom' && $('#toolsBottom').length) { top = $('#toolsBottom')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsBottom').height() - 310; } else { top = $('#toolsTop')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsTop').height() + 10; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('left', (-$('#toolsTop').offset().left + 60) + 'px'); $('#thanksForSharing').css('top', top + 'px'); }; var onShare = function() { // Close "Share successful!" AddThis plugin popup if (window._atw && window._atw.clb && $('#at15s:visible').length) { _atw.clb(); } if (iframeUrl == null) { return; } $('#thanksForSharingIframe').attr('src', "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"); $('#thanksForSharingIframe').load(function() { var iframe = this; var win = iframe.contentWindow; if (win.loaded) { onIframeReady(iframe); } else { win.$(iframe.contentDocument).ready(function() { onIframeReady(iframe); }) } }); }; if (window.addthis) { addthis.addEventListener('addthis.ready', function() { $('.articleTools .share').mouseover(function() { $('#at15s').unbind('click', onShareClickHandler); $('#at15s').bind('click', onShareClickHandler); }); }); addthis.addEventListener('addthis.menu.share', function(evt) { onShare(); }); } // This 'share' event is used for testing, so one can call // $(document).trigger('share') to get the thank you for // sharing box to appear. $(document).bind('share', function(event) { onShare(); }); if (!window.FB || (window.FB && !window.FB._apiKey)) { // Hook into the fbAsyncInit function and register our listener there var oldFbAsyncInit = (window.fbAsyncInit) ? window.fbAsyncInit : (function() { }); window.fbAsyncInit = function() { oldFbAsyncInit(); FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); }; } else if (window.FB) { FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); } }); The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices By Derek Thompson he
  • First, making a choice is physically exhausting, literally, so that somebody forced to make a number of decisions in a row is likely to get lazy and dumb.
  • Second, having too many choices can make us less likely to come to a conclusion. In a famous study of the so-called "paradox of choice", psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar found that customers presented with six jam varieties were more likely to buy one than customers offered a choice of 24.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • neurologists are finding that many of the biases behavioral economists perceive in decision-making start in our brains. "Brain studies indicate that organisms seem to be on a hedonic treadmill, quickly habituating to homeostasis," McFadden writes. In other words, perhaps our preference for the status quo isn't just figuratively our heads, but also literally sculpted by the hand of evolution inside of our brains.
  • The third check against the theory of the rational consumer is the fact that we're social animals. We let our friends and family and tribes do our thinking for us
  • Many of our mistakes stem from a central "availability bias." Our brains are computers, and we like to access recently opened files, even though many decisions require a deep body of information that might require some searching. Cheap example: We remember the first, last, and peak moments of certain experiences.
  • The popular psychological theory of "hyperbolic discounting" says people don't properly evaluate rewards over time. The theory seeks to explain why many groups -- nappers, procrastinators, Congress -- take rewards now and pain later, over and over again. But neurology suggests that it hardly makes sense to speak of "the brain," in the singular, because it's two very different parts of the brain that process choices for now and later. The choice to delay gratification is mostly processed in the frontal system. But studies show that the choice to do something immediately gratifying is processed in a different system, the limbic system, which is more viscerally connected to our behavior, our "reward pathways," and our feelings of pain and pleasure.
  • the final message is that neither the physiology of pleasure nor the methods we use to make choices are as simple or as single-minded as the classical economists thought. A lot of behavior is consistent with pursuit of self-interest, but in novel or ambiguous decision-making environments there is a good chance that our habits will fail us and inconsistencies in the way we process information will undo us.
  • Our brains seem to operate like committees, assigning some tasks to the limbic system, others to the frontal system. The "switchboard" does not seem to achieve complete, consistent communication between different parts of the brain. Pleasure and pain are experienced in the limbic system, but not on one fixed "utility" or "self-interest" scale. Pleasure and pain have distinct neural pathways, and these pathways adapt quickly to homeostasis, with sensation coming from changes rather than levels
  • Social networks are sources of information, on what products are available, what their features are, and how your friends like them. If the information is accurate, this should help you make better choices. On the other hand, it also makes it easier for you to follow the crowd rather than engaging in the due diligence of collecting and evaluating your own information and playing it against your own preferences
Javier E

Agincourt was a battle like no other … but how do the French remember it? | W... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...versary-how-french-remember-it

UK France battle history decisive

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Almost everything about the Anglo-French bloodbath at the place known as “Azincourt” is disputed, apart from the sensational outcome
  • ome say the French-English ratio was six to one. Recent scholarship puts the disparity at four to three. Most agree that Henry fielded perhaps 1,500 men-at-arms and about 6,000 archers.
  • Overall, the death toll was appalling. French sources suggest that they lost between 4,000 and 10,000 men. Almost as bad, from the French point of view, its governing elite, including dukes and bishops, was annihilated.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Estimates of the English dead, by contrast, range from improbable (100) to plausible (1,500).
  • The year 1415 should have been the definitive riposte to 1066, but the after-life of Agincourt is not straightforward. This is so for perhaps three reasons.
  • In the first place, not even Shakespeare could swallow the Agincourt Kool-Aid. In 1599, cheerfully plundering The Famous Victories of Henry V, he wrote Henry V, one of his most popular plays. On closer examination, however, Shakespeare is far from gung-ho.
  • Second, there’s the enduring controversy (which Shakespeare does address) about the king’s cold-blooded execution of his French prisoners, a debate bedevilled by double standards: Henry must be judged by his mores, not ours.
  • Third, Agincourt suffers from being one-sided. In the renewal of a great myth, all parties must participate. 2015 is also the 200th anniversary of Waterloo, a defeat whose afterlife is as much celebrated in France as in Britain.
  • When it comes to Agincourt, the French, who generally idolise military matters, are either silent or ignorant. “This was just such a bad defeat,” says Georges-Picot. She adds that this humiliation is not taught in schools, where Henry V of England is unknown. It is almost as if neither the battle nor its victor had ever been.
  • Curator Leduc has put together an enthralling historical display in the museum at Les Invalides: 100 years of French military history, beginning with the shame of Azincourt but culminating in Marignano.
Javier E

Researchers Propose Earth's 'Anthropocene' Age of Humans Began With Fallout and Plastic... - 0 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...egan-with-fallout-and-plastics

anthropocene geology human effects

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • we’ve left the Holocene behind — that’s the geological epoch since the end of the last ice age — and entered “a post-Holocene…geological age of our own making,” now best known as the Anthropocene.
  • the Anthropocene Working Group (because of my early writings, I’m a lay member), has moved substantially from asking whether such a transition has occurred to deciding when.
  • 1950 as the starting point, indicated by a variety of markers, including the global spread of carbon isotopes from nuclear weapon detonations starting in 1945 and the mass production and disposal of plastics.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • There’s little predictability in how things will play out after this anthropogenic jolt, especially in the living world. [More on the “great acceleration” behind the jolt is here.]
  • That’s a very different sensation than, say, mourning the end of nature. It’s more a celebration, in a way — a deeper acceptance of our place on the planet, with all of our synthetic trappings, and our faults, as fundamentally natural.
  • on whether it’s possible to have a “good Anthropocene.” Kolbert’s Twitter post last spring nicely captured their view:
  • Taking full ownership of the Anthropocene won’t be easy. The necessary feeling is a queasy mix of excitement and unease. I’ve compared it to waking up in the first car on the first run of a new roller coaster that hasn’t been examined fully by engineers.
  • Once you begin to get the many feedbacks bouncing off each other and bouncing off the Earth system, it’s going to be very hard to follow what’s going to happen, particularly biologically…. One could not imagine, at the very end of the Cretaceous, the beginning of the Tertiary, that the mammals — these itty-bitty little squeaky furry things, would take over – effectively taking the position that the dinosaurs held for so long. All we can say is that, for sure, it will be different. We’re going down a different trouser leg of history.
  • in the broadest sense we have to embrace the characteristics, good and bad, that make humans such a rare thing — a species that has become a planet-scale force.
  • “The way I would like to see it is in, say, 100 years in the future the London Geological Society will look back and consider this period…a transition from the lesser Anthropocene to the greater Anthropocene.”
  • Fully integrating this awareness into our personal choices and societal norms and policies will take time. It is “the great work,” as Thomas Berry put it.
  • Technology alone will not do the trick. Another keystone to better meshing humanity’s infinite aspirations with life on a finite planet will be slowly shifting value systems from the foundation up
  • Edward O. Wilson’s “Biophilia” was a powerful look outward at the characteristics of the natural world that we inherently cherish.
  • Now we need a dose of what I’ve taken to calling anthropophilia, as well.
  • We have to accept ourselves, flaws and all, in order to move beyond what has been something of an unconscious, species-scale pubescent growth spurt, enabled by fossil fuels in place of testosterone.
  • We’re stuck with “The World With Us.” It’s time to grasp that uncomfortable, but ultimately hopeful, idea.
silveiragu

I Miss Barack Obama - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...i-miss-barack-obama.html

barack obama politics US culture

shared by silveiragu on 10 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • As this primary season has gone along, a strange sensation has come over me: I miss Barack Obama
  • Now, obviously I disagree with a lot of Obama’s policy decisions.
  • But over the course of this campaign it feels as if there’s been a decline in behavioral standards across the board. Many of the traits of character and leadership that Obama possesses, and that maybe we have taken too much for granted, have suddenly gone missing or are in short supply.
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  • The first and most important of these is basic integrity
  • He and his wife have not only displayed superior integrity themselves, they have mostly attracted and hired people with high personal standards.
  • all sorts of unsightly characters floating around politics, including in the Clinton camp and in Gov. Chris Christie’s administration
  • Second, a sense of basic humanity.
  • Donald Trump has spent much of this campaign vowing to block Muslim immigration. You can only say that if you treat Muslim Americans as an abstraction. President Obama, meanwhile, went to a mosque, looked into people’s eyes and gave a wonderful speech reasserting their place as Americans.
  • Imagine if Barack and Michelle Obama joined the board of a charity
  • You’d be happy to have such people in your community. Could you say that comfortably about Ted Cruz?
  • Third, a soundness in his decision-making process.
  • Take health care. Passing Obamacare was a mighty lift that led to two gigantic midterm election defeats.
  • Sanderscare would take employer coverage away from tens of millions of satisfied customer
  • This is epic social disruption
  • Fourth, grace under pressure.
  • Fifth, a resilient sense of optimism
  • To hear Sanders or Trump, Cruz and Ben Carson campaign is to wallow in the pornography of pessimism, to conclude that this country is on the verge of complete collapse.
  • But there is a tone of ugliness creeping across the world, as democracies retreat, as tribalism mounts, as suspiciousness and authoritarianism take center stage.Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him.
  • silveiragu on 10 Feb 16
     
    Interesting as we study governmental crises in history to consider the popular and political usage of the term. 
Javier E

James Madison's Mob-Rule Fears Have Been Realized - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...568351

democracy government Founding history

shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • To prevent factions from distorting public policy and threatening liberty, Madison resolved to exclude the people from a direct role in government. “A pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction,” Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 10.”
  • The Framers designed the American constitutional system not as a direct democracy but as a representative republic, where enlightened delegates of the people would serve the public good. They also built into the Constitution a series of cooling mechanisms intended to inhibit the formulation of passionate factions, to ensure that reasonable majorities would prevail.
  • Madison, however, thought Plato’s small-republic thesis was wrong. He believed that the ease of communication in small republics was precisely what had allowed hastily formed majorities to oppress minorities. “Extend the sphere” of a territory, Madison wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Madison predicted that America’s vast geography and large population would prevent passionate mobs from mobilizing. Their dangerous energy would burn out before it could inflame others.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Madison’s worst fears of mob rule have been realized—and the cooling mechanisms he designed to slow down the formation of impetuous majorities have broken.
  • We are living, in short, in a Madisonian nightmare. How did we get here, and how can we escape?
  • During the election of 1912, the progressive populists Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson insisted that the president derived his authority directly from the people. Since then, the office has moved in precisely the direction the Founders had hoped to avoid: Presidents now make emotional appeals, communicate directly with voters, and pander to the mob.
  • Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms have accelerated public discourse to warp speed, creating virtual versions of the mob. Inflammatory posts based on passion travel farther and faster than arguments based on reason. Rather than encouraging deliberation, mass media undermine it by creating bubbles and echo chambers in which citizens see only those opinions they already embrace.
  • The polarization of Congress, reflecting an electorate that has not been this divided since about the time of the Civil War, has led to ideological warfare between parties that directly channels the passions of their most extreme constituents and donors—precisely the type of factionalism the Founders abhorred.
  • Whatever benefits the parties offered in the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, have long since disappeared. The moderating effects of parties were undermined by a series of populist reforms, including the direct election of senators, the popular-ballot initiative, and direct primaries in presidential elections, which became widespread in the 1970s.
  • As the historian Sean Wilentz has noted, the great movements for constitutional and social change in the 19th century—from the abolition of slavery to the Progressive movement—were the product of strong and diverse political parties.
  • The Founders’ greatest failure of imagination was in not anticipating the rise of mass political parties. The first parties played an unexpected cooling function, uniting diverse economic and regional interests through shared constitutional visions
  • More recently, geographical and political self-sorting has produced voters and representatives who are willing to support the party line at all costs. After the Republicans took both chambers of Congress in 1994, the House of Representatives, under Speaker Newt Gingrich, adjusted its rules to enforce party discipline, taking power away from committee chairs and making it easier for leadership to push bills into law with little debate or support from across the aisle.
  • The rise of what the presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called the “imperial presidency” has unbalanced the equilibrium among the three branches. Modern presidents rule by executive order rather than consulting with Congress. They direct a massive administrative state, with jurisdiction over everything from environmental policy to the regulation of the airwaves.
  • The passions, hyper-partisanship, and split-second decision making that Madison feared from large, concentrated groups meeting face-to-face have proved to be even more dangerous from exponentially larger, dispersed groups that meet online.
  • some promising, if modest, fixes are on the horizon. Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who leads an independent commission that will examine the impact of Facebook on democracy, notes one step the company has taken to address the problem of “clickbait,” which lures users with sensational headlines. Articles that persuade many users to click previously appeared high on Facebook’s News Feed. The company now prioritizes those articles users have actually taken the time to read.
  • “The democratic character of the internet is itself posing a threat to democracy, and there’s no clear solution to the problem,” Persily told me. “Censorship, delay, demotion of information online, deterrence, and dilution of bad content—all pose classic free-speech problems, and everyone should be concerned at every step of the government regulatory parade.”
  • At the moment, the combination of low voter turnout and ideological extremism has tended to favor very liberal or very conservative candidates in primaries. Thanks to safe districts created by geographic self-sorting and partisan gerrymandering, many of these extremists go on to win the general election. Today, all congressional Republicans fall to the right of the most conservative Democrat, and all congressional Democrats fall to the left of the most liberal Republican. In the 1960s, at times, 50 percent of the lawmakers overlapped ideologically.
  • The best way of promoting a return to Madisonian principles, however, may be one Madison himself identified: constitutional education. In recent years, calls for more civic education have become something of a national refrain. But the Framers themselves believed that the fate of the republic depended on an educated citizenry. Drawing again on his studies of ancient republics, which taught that broad education of citizens was the best security against “crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty,” Madison insisted that the rich should subsidize the education of the poor.
  • The civics half of the educational equation is crucial. Recent studies have suggested that higher education can polarize citizens rather than ensuring the rule of reason: Highly educated liberals become more liberal, and highly educated conservatives more conservative
  • Today, passion has gotten the better of us. The preservation of the republic urgently requires imparting constitutional principles to a new generation and reviving Madisonian reason in an impetuous world.
Javier E

Opinion | How Capitalism Betrayed Privacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...privacy-capitalism.html

capitalism privacy surveillance

shared by Javier E on 16 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • For much of human history, what we now call “privacy” was better known as being rich
  • depended on another, even more impressive achievement: the creation of a middle class
  • The historical link between privacy and the forces of wealth creation helps explain why privacy is under siege today. It reminds us, first, that mass privacy is not a basic feature of human existence but a byproduct of a specific economic arrangemen
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • in a capitalist country, our baseline of privacy depends on where the money is. And today that has changed.
  • The forces of wealth creation no longer favor the expansion of privacy but work to undermine it
  • We have witnessed the rise of what I call “attention merchants” and what the sociologist Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” — the commodification of our personal data by tech giants like Facebook a
  • We face a future in which active surveillance is such a routine part of business that for most people it is nearly inescapable
  • we are on the road back to serfdom.
  • stronger privacy protections. But that will require laws that do not merely tinker with but fundamentally alter the economics of privacy.
  • In the United States, it is safe to say, privacy “won” the 20th century. Its crowning triumph was the Supreme Court’s recognition in 1965 of a constitutional right to privacy
  • By the 1960s the rise of a propertied middle class had put each man in his “castle,”
  • new technologies coupled with new theories of value have transformed the economics of privacy. A drastic decrease in the cost of mass surveillance (thanks to the internet) has increased the value of two types of asset: our data and our attention.
  • The race to maximize those assets by companies big and small has made surveillance a growth industry. It is in this sense that capitalism has begun to change sides.
  • the richest companies in the world now generate wealth by putting as many trackers, devices and screens inside our homes and as close to our bodies as possible
  • money can be made by consolidating everything that is known about an individual.
  • There is good reason to believe that, if nothing is done, gratuitous surveillance will be built into nearly every business and business model.
  • Some have argued that there’s no need to be concerned
  • The end result is selling people stuff, not sending them to Siberia.
  • data and surveillance networks created for one purpose can and will be used for others. You must assume that any personal data that Facebook or Android keeps are data that governments around the world will try to get o
  • once you realize you’re being watched, it is a tough sensation to shake. As our experiences with social media have made all too clear, we act differently when we know we are “on the record.”
  • Mass privacy is the freedom to act without being watched and thus, in a sense, to be who we really are — not who we want others to think we are. At stake, then, is something akin to the soul.
  • To be truly effective, privacy laws must seek to change the incentives that foster gratuitous surveillance and the reckless accumulation of personalized data. We need strong bans, including those that prohibit companies from sharing their customers’ personal information
  • companies that repeatedly fail to protect sensitive data need to face dire consequences.
Javier E

Delba Winthrop on Aristotle and Democracy | Harvard Magazine - 0 views

www.harvardmagazine.com/...arvey-mansfield-delba-winthrop

democracy aristotle philosophy harvard

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • I supervised this dissertation and knew it was something terrific, but I doubted it could be published because it was so terse and so far from the mainstream. It had received the Leo Strauss Award from the American Political Science Association as the best dissertation in political philosophy in 1974, but this was a citation of contested value for those who disagreed with Leo Strauss. Nonetheless, I tried to get her to revise it for publication during her lifetime, and she always refused, saying she needed to know more Aristotle (an infinite task). Then, 10 years after she died and at the urging of friends, I put it up at Chicago (my publisher for the most part), and to my great surprise, it sailed through, praised to the skies. It would have been more Harvard if this Harvard dissertation were being published by Harvard University Press, but it’s an honor that the Harvard government department will appreciate.  And it ought to cause a commotion among Aristotle scholars, as well as start waves that ought to reach the wider circles of thoughtful citizens in democracies. These are two “oughts” of the kind that in our age of haste sometimes takes time to be fulfilled.What does Delba Winthrop find and propose?
  • She punctures the complacency with which we defend democracy as the best or even the only legitimate form of government, and turns to Aristotle for justification of democracy. In Aristotle’s day and in ours, democrats want inclusiveness; they want above all to include everyone as part of a whole. But what is a whole?
  • The assertive quality of political speech, the argumentative character of argument, is shown to have a crucial role in philosophy itself, where human reason must claim its due as a contribution to the whole of the universe. Political science has the double task of teaching citizens how to include everyone and of teaching those who want to understand the thought that sustains democracy.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This is a question for both politics and philosophy, and Winthrop shows that Aristotle pursues the answer in his Politics. She uncovers his insights into politics from philosophy, and even more his insights into philosophy from politics.
  • Her interpretation begins with the difficult ambiguities in Aristotle’s text and explains them as necessary to his meaning, not accidents in the supposed notes of his students.  Her stated motto is, “Nothing is so obscure that it is not meant to be found,” and this guides her penetrating imagination to many hints hitherto unnoticed or dismissed in the text. Hers is an interpretation in the fullest sense, so much that—at least for the Politics—readers will have the sensation of having entered a new realm of surprising coherence and exactness
  • Winthrop wants to restore the eminence Aristotle once enjoyed that has been forgotten, more often than knowingly rejected, by modern philosophers and political scientists
Javier E

The Politics of 'The Shallows' - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ics-of-the-shallows-1475192583

reading superficial internet culture media movies books history politics

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • What impact has the modern media environment had on the 2016 campaign?
  • modern media realities make everything intellectually thinner, shallower. Everything moves fast; we talk not of the scandal of the day but the scandal of the hour, reducing a great event, a presidential campaign, into an endless river of gaffes.
  • This year I am seeing something, especially among the young of politics and journalism. They have received most of what they know about political history through screens.
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  • they have seen the movie and not read the book.
  • Their understanding of history, even recent history, is superficial. They grew up in the internet age and have filled their brainspace with information that came in the form of pictures and sounds. They learned through sensation, not through books, which demand something deeper from your brain
  • Reading forces you to imagine, question, ponder, reflect. It provides a deeper understanding of political figures and events.
  • A movie is received passively: You sit back, see, hear. Books demand and reward. When you read them your knowledge base deepens and expands. In time that depth comes to inform your work, sometimes in ways of which you’re not fully conscious.
  • In the past 18 months I talked to three young presidential candidates—people running for president, real grown-ups—who, it was clear to me by the end of our conversations, had, in their understanding of modern American political history, seen the movie and not read the book.
  • Two of them, I’ve come to know, can recite whole pages of dialogue from movies. (It is interesting to me that the movies our politicians have most memorized are “The Godfather” Parts I and II.)
  • Everyone in politics is getting much of what they know through the internet, through Google searches and Wikipedia. They can give you a certain sense of things but are by nature quick and shallow reads that link to other quick and shallow reads.
  • Sometimes subjects are treated in a tendentious manner, reflecting the biases or limited knowledge of the writer.
  • If you get your information mostly through the Web, you’ll get stuck in “The Shallows,” which is the name of a book by Nicholas Carr about what the internet is doing to our brains
  • Media, he reminds us, are not just channels of information: “They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.”
  • The internet is chipping away at our “capacity for concentration and contemplation.” “Once I was a scuba driver in the sea of words,” writes Mr. Carr. “Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
  • If you can’t read deeply you will not be able to think deeply. If you can’t think deeply you will not be able to lead well, or report well.
Javier E

Washington Monthly | How to Fix Facebook-Before It Fixes Us - 0 views

washingtonmonthly.com/...ix-facebook-before-it-fixes-us

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shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Smartphones changed the advertising game completely. It took only a few years for billions of people to have an all-purpose content delivery system easily accessible sixteen hours or more a day. This turned media into a battle to hold users’ attention as long as possible.
  • And it left Facebook and Google with a prohibitive advantage over traditional media: with their vast reservoirs of real-time data on two billion individuals, they could personalize the content seen by every user. That made it much easier to monopolize user attention on smartphones and made the platforms uniquely attractive to advertisers. Why pay a newspaper in the hopes of catching the attention of a certain portion of its audience, when you can pay Facebook to reach exactly those people and no one else?
  • Wikipedia defines an algorithm as “a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.” Algorithms appear value neutral, but the platforms’ algorithms are actually designed with a specific value in mind: maximum share of attention, which optimizes profits.
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  • They do this by sucking up and analyzing your data, using it to predict what will cause you to react most strongly, and then giving you more of that.
  • Algorithms that maximize attention give an advantage to negative messages. People tend to react more to inputs that land low on the brainstem. Fear and anger produce a lot more engagement and sharing than joy
  • The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.
  • for mass media, this was constrained by one-size-fits-all content and by the limitations of delivery platforms. Not so for internet platforms on smartphones. They have created billions of individual channels, each of which can be pushed further into negativity and extremism without the risk of alienating other audience members
  • On Facebook, it’s your news feed, while on Google it’s your individually customized search results. The result is that everyone sees a different version of the internet tailored to create the illusion that everyone else agrees with them.
  • It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic. I’m no expert on British politics, but it seemed likely that Facebook might have had a big impact on the vote because one side’s message was perfect for the algorithms and the other’s wasn’t. The “Leave” campaign made an absurd promise—there would be savings from leaving the European Union that would fund a big improvement in the National Health System—while also exploiting xenophobia by casting Brexit as the best way to protect English culture and jobs from immigrants. It was too-good-to-be-true nonsense mixed with fearmongering.
  • Facebook was a much cheaper and more effective platform for Leave in terms of cost per user reached. And filter bubbles would ensure that people on the Leave side would rarely have their questionable beliefs challenged. Facebook’s model may have had the power to reshape an entire continent.
  • Tristan Harris, formerly the design ethicist at Google. Tristan had just appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss the public health threat from social networks like Facebook. An expert in persuasive technology, he described the techniques that tech platforms use to create addiction and the ways they exploit that addiction to increase profits. He called it “brain hacking.”
  • The most important tool used by Facebook and Google to hold user attention is filter bubbles. The use of algorithms to give consumers “what they want” leads to an unending stream of posts that confirm each user’s existing beliefs
  • Continuous reinforcement of existing beliefs tends to entrench those beliefs more deeply, while also making them more extreme and resistant to contrary facts
  • No one stopped them from siphoning off the profits of content creators. No one stopped them from gathering data on every aspect of every user’s internet life. No one stopped them from amassing market share not seen since the days of Standard Oil.
  • Facebook takes the concept one step further with its “groups” feature, which encourages like-minded users to congregate around shared interests or beliefs. While this ostensibly provides a benefit to users, the larger benefit goes to advertisers, who can target audiences even more effectively.
  • We theorized that the Russians had identified a set of users susceptible to its message, used Facebook’s advertising tools to identify users with similar profiles, and used ads to persuade those people to join groups dedicated to controversial issues. Facebook’s algorithms would have favored Trump’s crude message and the anti-Clinton conspiracy theories that thrilled his supporters, with the likely consequence that Trump and his backers paid less than Clinton for Facebook advertising per person reached.
  • The ads were less important, though, than what came next: once users were in groups, the Russians could have used fake American troll accounts and computerized “bots” to share incendiary messages and organize events.
  • Trolls and bots impersonating Americans would have created the illusion of greater support for radical ideas than actually existed.
  • Real users “like” posts shared by trolls and bots and share them on their own news feeds, so that small investments in advertising and memes posted to Facebook groups would reach tens of millions of people.
  • A similar strategy prevailed on other platforms, including Twitter. Both techniques, bots and trolls, take time and money to develop—but the payoff would have been huge.
  • 2016 was just the beginning. Without immediate and aggressive action from Washington, bad actors of all kinds would be able to use Facebook and other platforms to manipulate the American electorate in future elections.
  • Renee DiResta, an expert in how conspiracy theories spread on the internet. Renee described how bad actors plant a rumor on sites like 4chan and Reddit, leverage the disenchanted people on those sites to create buzz, build phony news sites with “press” versions of the rumor, push the story onto Twitter to attract the real media, then blow up the story for the masses on Facebook.
  • It was sophisticated hacker technique, but not expensive. We hypothesized that the Russians were able to manipulate tens of millions of American voters for a sum less than it would take to buy an F-35 fighter jet.
  • Algorithms can be beautiful in mathematical terms, but they are only as good as the people who create them. In the case of Facebook and Google, the algorithms have flaws that are increasingly obvious and dangerous.
  • Thanks to the U.S. government’s laissez-faire approach to regulation, the internet platforms were able to pursue business strategies that would not have been allowed in prior decades. No one stopped them from using free products to centralize the internet and then replace its core functions.
  • To the contrary: the platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas.
  • No one stopped them from running massive social and psychological experiments on their users. No one demanded that they police their platforms. It has been a sweet deal.
  • Facebook and Google are now so large that traditional tools of regulation may no longer be effective.
  • The largest antitrust fine in EU history bounced off Google like a spitball off a battleship.
  • It reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel: a technology celebrated for bringing people together is exploited by a hostile power to drive people apart, undermine democracy, and create misery. This is precisely what happened in the United States during the 2016 election.
  • We had constructed a modern Maginot Line—half the world’s defense spending and cyber-hardened financial centers, all built to ward off attacks from abroad—never imagining that an enemy could infect the minds of our citizens through inventions of our own making, at minimal cost
  • Not only was the attack an overwhelming success, but it was also a persistent one, as the political party that benefited refuses to acknowledge reality. The attacks continue every day, posing an existential threat to our democratic processes and independence.
  • Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms were manipulated by the Russians to shift outcomes in Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, and unless major changes are made, they will be manipulated again. Next time, there is no telling who the manipulators will be.
  • Unfortunately, there is no regulatory silver bullet. The scope of the problem requires a multi-pronged approach.
  • Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies. Helping those people accept the truth is a priority. I recommend that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others be required to contact each person touched by Russian content with a personal message that says, “You, and we, were manipulated by the Russians. This really happened, and here is the evidence.” The message would include every Russian message the user received.
  • This idea, which originated with my colleague Tristan Harris, is based on experience with cults. When you want to deprogram a cult member, it is really important that the call to action come from another member of the cult, ideally the leader.
  • decentralization had a cost: no one had an incentive to make internet tools easy to use. Frustrated by those tools, users embraced easy-to-use alternatives from Facebook and Google. This allowed the platforms to centralize the internet, inserting themselves between users and content, effectively imposing a tax on both sides. This is a great business model for Facebook and Google—and convenient in the short term for customers—but we are drowning in evidence that there are costs that society may not be able to afford.
  • Second, the chief executive officers of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others—not just their lawyers—must testify before congressional committees in open session
  • This is important not just for the public, but also for another crucial constituency: the employees who keep the tech giants running. While many of the folks who run Silicon Valley are extreme libertarians, the people who work there tend to be idealists. They want to believe what they’re doing is good. Forcing tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg to justify the unjustifiable, in public—without the shield of spokespeople or PR spin—would go a long way to puncturing their carefully preserved cults of personality in the eyes of their employees.
  • We also need regulatory fixes. Here are a few ideas.
  • First, it’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans. They distort the “public square” in a way that was never possible in history, no matter how many anonymous leaflets you printed.
  • At a minimum, the law could require explicit labeling of all bots, the ability for users to block them, and liability on the part of platform vendors for the harm bots cause.
  • Second, the platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition.
  • An underappreciated aspect of the platforms’ growth is their pattern of gobbling up smaller firms—in Facebook’s case, that includes Instagram and WhatsApp; in Google’s, it includes YouTube, Google Maps, AdSense, and many others—and using them to extend their monopoly power.
  • This is important, because the internet has lost something very valuable. The early internet was designed to be decentralized. It treated all content and all content owners equally. That equality had value in society, as it kept the playing field level and encouraged new entrants.
  • There’s no doubt that the platforms have the technological capacity to reach out to every affected person. No matter the cost, platform companies must absorb it as the price for their carelessness in allowing the manipulation.
  • Third, the platforms must be transparent about who is behind political and issues-based communication.
  • Transparency with respect to those who sponsor political advertising of all kinds is a step toward rebuilding trust in our political institutions.
  • Fourth, the platforms must be more transparent about their algorithms. Users deserve to know why they see what they see in their news feeds and search results. If Facebook and Google had to be up-front about the reason you’re seeing conspiracy theories—namely, that it’s good for business—they would be far less likely to stick to that tactic
  • Allowing third parties to audit the algorithms would go even further toward maintaining transparency. Facebook and Google make millions of editorial choices every hour and must accept responsibility for the consequences of those choices. Consumers should also be able to see what attributes are causing advertisers to target them.
  • Fifth, the platforms should be required to have a more equitable contractual relationship with users. Facebook, Google, and others have asserted unprecedented rights with respect to end-user license agreements (EULAs), the contracts that specify the relationship between platform and user.
  • All software platforms should be required to offer a legitimate opt-out, one that enables users to stick with the prior version if they do not like the new EULA.
  • “Forking” platforms between old and new versions would have several benefits: increased consumer choice, greater transparency on the EULA, and more care in the rollout of new functionality, among others. It would limit the risk that platforms would run massive social experiments on millions—or billions—of users without appropriate prior notification. Maintaining more than one version of their services would be expensive for Facebook, Google, and the rest, but in software that has always been one of the costs of success. Why should this generation get a pass?
  • Sixth, we need a limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by internet platforms. Customers understand that their “free” use of platforms like Facebook and Google gives the platforms license to exploit personal data. The problem is that platforms are using that data in ways consumers do not understand, and might not accept if they did.
  • Not only do the platforms use your data on their own sites, but they also lease it to third parties to use all over the internet. And they will use that data forever, unless someone tells them to stop.
  • There should be a statute of limitations on the use of consumer data by a platform and its customers. Perhaps that limit should be ninety days, perhaps a year. But at some point, users must have the right to renegotiate the terms of how their data is used.
  • Seventh, consumers, not the platforms, should own their own data. In the case of Facebook, this includes posts, friends, and events—in short, the entire social graph. Users created this data, so they should have the right to export it to other social networks.
  • It would be analogous to the regulation of the AT&T monopoly’s long-distance business, which led to lower prices and better service for consumers.
  • Eighth, and finally, we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly. Since the Reagan era, antitrust law has operated under the principle that monopoly is not a problem so long as it doesn’t result in higher prices for consumers.
  • Under that framework, Facebook and Google have been allowed to dominate several industries—not just search and social media but also email, video, photos, and digital ad sales, among others—increasing their monopolies by buying potential rivals like YouTube and Instagram.
  • While superficially appealing, this approach ignores costs that don’t show up in a price tag. Addiction to Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms has a cost. Election manipulation has a cost. Reduced innovation and shrinkage of the entrepreneurial economy has a cost. All of these costs are evident today. We can quantify them well enough to appreciate that the costs to consumers of concentration on the internet are unacceptably high.
Javier E

'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth | Technology... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...tubes-algorithm-distorts-truth

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shared by Javier E on 02 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • There are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world, which is more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm, which skims and ranks billions of videos to identify 20 “up next” clips that are both relevant to a previous video and most likely, statistically speaking, to keep a person hooked on their screen.
  • Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth
  • YouTube engineers describe it as one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”
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  • Lately, it has also become one of the most controversial. The algorithm has been found to be promoting conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas mass shooting and incentivising, through recommendations, a thriving subculture that targets children with disturbing content
  • One YouTube creator who was banned from making advertising revenues from his strange videos – which featured his children receiving flu shots, removing earwax, and crying over dead pets – told a reporter he had only been responding to the demands of Google’s algorithm. “That’s what got us out there and popular,” he said. “We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took to please the algorithm.”
  • academics have speculated that YouTube’s algorithms may have been instrumental in fuelling disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. “YouTube is the most overlooked story of 2016,” Zeynep Tufekci, a widely respected sociologist and technology critic, tweeted back in October. “Its search and recommender algorithms are misinformation engines.”
  • Those are not easy questions to answer. Like all big tech companies, YouTube does not allow us to see the algorithms that shape our lives. They are secret formulas, proprietary software, and only select engineers are entrusted to work on the algorithm
  • Guillaume Chaslot, a 36-year-old French computer programmer with a PhD in artificial intelligence, was one of those engineers.
  • The experience led him to conclude that the priorities YouTube gives its algorithms are dangerously skewed.
  • Chaslot said none of his proposed fixes were taken up by his managers. “There are many ways YouTube can change its algorithms to suppress fake news and improve the quality and diversity of videos people see,” he says. “I tried to change YouTube from the inside but it didn’t work.”
  • Chaslot explains that the algorithm never stays the same. It is constantly changing the weight it gives to different signals: the viewing patterns of a user, for example, or the length of time a video is watched before someone clicks away.
  • The engineers he worked with were responsible for continuously experimenting with new formulas that would increase advertising revenues by extending the amount of time people watched videos. “Watch time was the priority,” he recalls. “Everything else was considered a distraction.”
  • Chaslot was fired by Google in 2013, ostensibly over performance issues. He insists he was let go after agitating for change within the company, using his personal time to team up with like-minded engineers to propose changes that could diversify the content people see.
  • He was especially worried about the distortions that might result from a simplistic focus on showing people videos they found irresistible, creating filter bubbles, for example, that only show people content that reinforces their existing view of the world.
  • “YouTube is something that looks like reality, but it is distorted to make you spend more time online,” he tells me when we meet in Berkeley, California. “The recommendation algorithm is not optimising for what is truthful, or balanced, or healthy for democracy.”
  • YouTube told me that its recommendation system had evolved since Chaslot worked at the company and now “goes beyond optimising for watchtime”.
  • It did not say why Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006, waited over a decade to make those changes
  • Chaslot believes such changes are mostly cosmetic, and have failed to fundamentally alter some disturbing biases that have evolved in the algorithm
  • It finds videos through a word search, selecting a “seed” video to begin with, and recording several layers of videos that YouTube recommends in the “up next” column. It does so with no viewing history, ensuring the videos being detected are YouTube’s generic recommendations, rather than videos personalised to a user. And it repeats the process thousands of times, accumulating layers of data about YouTube recommendations to build up a picture of the algorithm’s preferences.
  • Each study finds something different, but the research suggests YouTube systematically amplifies videos that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial.
  • When his program found a seed video by searching the query “who is Michelle Obama?” and then followed the chain of “up next” suggestions, for example, most of the recommended videos said she “is a man”
  • He believes one of the most shocking examples was detected by his program in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. As he observed in a short, largely unnoticed blogpost published after Donald Trump was elected, the impact of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was not neutral during the presidential race: it was pushing videos that were, in the main, helpful to Trump and damaging to Hillary Clinton.
  • “It was strange,” he explains to me. “Wherever you started, whether it was from a Trump search or a Clinton search, the recommendation algorithm was much more likely to push you in a pro-Trump direction.”
  • Trump won the electoral college as a result of 80,000 votes spread across three swing states. There were more than 150 million YouTube users in the US. The videos contained in Chaslot’s database of YouTube-recommended election videos were watched, in total, more than 3bn times before the vote in November 2016.
  • “Algorithms that shape the content we see can have a lot of impact, particularly on people who have not made up their mind,”
  • “Gentle, implicit, quiet nudging can over time edge us toward choices we might not have otherwise made.”
  • But what was most compelling was how often Chaslot’s software detected anti-Clinton conspiracy videos appearing “up next” beside other videos.
  • I spent weeks watching, sorting and categorising the trove of videos with Erin McCormick, an investigative reporter and expert in database analysis. From the start, we were stunned by how many extreme and conspiratorial videos had been recommended, and the fact that almost all of them appeared to be directed against Clinton.
  • “This research captured the apparent direction of YouTube’s political ecosystem,” he says. “That has not been done before.”
  • There were too many videos in the database for us to watch them all, so we focused on 1,000 of the top-recommended videos. We sifted through them one by one to determine whether the content was likely to have benefited Trump or Clinton. Just over a third of the videos were either unrelated to the election or contained content that was broadly neutral or even-handed. Of the remaining 643 videos, 551 were videos favouring Trump, while only only 92 favoured the Clinton campaign.
  • The sample we had looked at suggested Chaslot’s conclusion was correct: YouTube was six times more likely to recommend videos that aided Trump than his adversary.
  • The spokesperson added: “Our search and recommendation systems reflect what people search for, the number of videos available, and the videos people choose to watch on YouTube. That’s not a bias towards any particular candidate; that is a reflection of viewer interest.”
  • YouTube seemed to be saying that its algorithm was a neutral mirror of the desires of the people who use it – if we don’t like what it does, we have ourselves to blame. How does YouTube interpret “viewer interest” – and aren’t “the videos people choose to watch” influenced by what the company shows them?
  • Offered the choice, we may instinctively click on a video of a dead man in a Japanese forest, or a fake news clip claiming Bill Clinton raped a 13-year-old. But are those in-the-moment impulses really a reflect of the content we want to be fed?
  • YouTube’s recommendation system has probably figured out that edgy and hateful content is engaging. “This is a bit like an autopilot cafeteria in a school that has figured out children have sweet teeth, and also like fatty and salty foods,” she says. “So you make a line offering such food, automatically loading the next plate as soon as the bag of chips or candy in front of the young person has been consumed.”
  • Once that gets normalised, however, what is fractionally more edgy or bizarre becomes, Tufekci says, novel and interesting. “So the food gets higher and higher in sugar, fat and salt – natural human cravings – while the videos recommended and auto-played by YouTube get more and more bizarre or hateful.”
  • “This is important research because it seems to be the first systematic look into how YouTube may have been manipulated,” he says, raising the possibility that the algorithm was gamed as part of the same propaganda campaigns that flourished on Twitter and Facebook.
  • “We believe that the activity we found was limited because of various safeguards that we had in place in advance of the 2016 election, and the fact that Google’s products didn’t lend themselves to the kind of micro-targeting or viral dissemination that these actors seemed to prefer.”
  • Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, later wrote to the company about the algorithm, which he said seemed “particularly susceptible to foreign influence”. The senator demanded to know what the company was specifically doing to prevent a “malign incursion” of YouTube’s recommendation system. Walker, in his written reply, offered few specifics
  • Tristan Harris, a former Google insider turned tech whistleblower, likes to describe Facebook as a “living, breathing crime scene for what happened in the 2016 election” that federal investigators have no access to. The same might be said of YouTube. About half the videos Chaslot’s program detected being recommended during the election have now vanished from YouTube – many of them taken down by their creators. Chaslot has always thought this suspicious. These were videos with titles such as “Must Watch!! Hillary Clinton tried to ban this video”, watched millions of times before they disappeared. “Why would someone take down a video that has been viewed millions of times?” he asks
  • I shared the entire database of 8,000 YouTube-recommended videos with John Kelly, the chief executive of the commercial analytics firm Graphika, which has been tracking political disinformation campaigns. He ran the list against his own database of Twitter accounts active during the election, and concluded many of the videos appeared to have been pushed by networks of Twitter sock puppets and bots controlled by pro-Trump digital consultants with “a presumably unsolicited assist” from Russia.
  • “I don’t have smoking-gun proof of who logged in to control those accounts,” he says. “But judging from the history of what we’ve seen those accounts doing before, and the characteristics of how they tweet and interconnect, they are assembled and controlled by someone – someone whose job was to elect Trump.”
  • After the Senate’s correspondence with Google over possible Russian interference with YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was made public last week, YouTube sent me a new statement. It emphasised changes it made in 2017 to discourage the recommendation system from promoting some types of problematic content. “We appreciate the Guardian’s work to shine a spotlight on this challenging issue,” it added. “We know there is more to do here and we’re looking forward to making more announcements in the months ahead.”
  • In the months leading up to the election, the Next News Network turned into a factory of anti-Clinton news and opinion, producing dozens of videos a day and reaching an audience comparable to that of MSNBC’s YouTube channel. Chaslot’s research indicated Franchi’s success could largely be credited to YouTube’s algorithms, which consistently amplified his videos to be played “up next”. YouTube had sharply dismissed Chaslot’s research.
  • I contacted Franchi to see who was right. He sent me screen grabs of the private data given to people who upload YouTube videos, including a breakdown of how their audiences found their clips. The largest source of traffic to the Bill Clinton rape video, which was viewed 2.4m times in the month leading up to the election, was YouTube recommendations.
  • The same was true of all but one of the videos Franchi sent me data for. A typical example was a Next News Network video entitled “WHOA! HILLARY THINKS CAMERA’S OFF… SENDS SHOCK MESSAGE TO TRUMP” in which Franchi, pointing to a tiny movement of Clinton’s lips during a TV debate, claims she says “fuck you” to her presidential rival. The data Franchi shared revealed in the month leading up to the election, 73% of the traffic to the video – amounting to 1.2m of its views – was due to YouTube recommendations. External traffic accounted for only 3% of the views.
  • many of the other creators of anti-Clinton videos I spoke to were amateur sleuths or part-time conspiracy theorists. Typically, they might receive a few hundred views on their videos, so they were shocked when their anti-Clinton videos started to receive millions of views, as if they were being pushed by an invisible force.
  • In every case, the largest source of traffic – the invisible force – came from the clips appearing in the “up next” column. William Ramsey, an occult investigator from southern California who made “Irrefutable Proof: Hillary Clinton Has a Seizure Disorder!”, shared screen grabs that showed the recommendation algorithm pushed his video even after YouTube had emailed him to say it violated its guidelines. Ramsey’s data showed the video was watched 2.4m times by US-based users before election day. “For a nobody like me, that’s a lot,” he says. “Enough to sway the election, right?”
  • Daniel Alexander Cannon, a conspiracy theorist from South Carolina, tells me: “Every video I put out about the Clintons, YouTube would push it through the roof.” His best-performing clip was a video titled “Hillary and Bill Clinton ‘The 10 Photos You Must See’”, essentially a slideshow of appalling (and seemingly doctored) images of the Clintons with voiceover in which Cannon speculates on their health. It has been seen 3.7m times on YouTube, and 2.9m of those views, Cannon said, came from “up next” recommendations.
  • his research also does something more important: revealing how thoroughly our lives are now mediated by artificial intelligence.
  • Less than a generation ago, the way voters viewed their politicians was largely shaped by tens of thousands of newspaper editors, journalists and TV executives. Today, the invisible codes behind the big technology platforms have become the new kingmakers.
  • They pluck from obscurity people like Dave Todeschini, a retired IBM engineer who, “let off steam” during the election by recording himself opining on Clinton’s supposed involvement in paedophilia, child sacrifice and cannibalism. “It was crazy, it was nuts,” he said of the avalanche of traffic to his YouTube channel, which by election day had more than 2m views
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