Sgt Sandes, an infantry soldier in the Serbian Army, lay semi-conscious on the snowy hillside after taking the full blast of a Bulgarian grenade, and would later recall being wrapped up and bundled away like a rabbit in a poacher’s sack.
“I could see nothing,” the trooper wrote. “It was exactly as though I had gone suddenly blind; but I felt the tail of an overcoat sweep across my face. Instinctively I clutched it with my left hand, and must have held on for two or three yards before I fainted. The Serbs have a theory that you must not give water to a wounded man because they say it chills him, so they poured fully half a bottle of brandy down my throat and put a cigarette in my mouth."
“I caught the little sergeant who had helped carry me watching me with his eyes full of tears. I assured him that it took a lot to kill me, and that I should be back again in about ten days”.
It took Sandes not ten days but six months to recover sufficiently to rejoin the ranks and to return to the front line. By the end of the war, Sandes would be awarded Serbia’s highest military honour, the Order of the Karadjordje Star.
Sandes is a celebrated national hero in Serbia to this day. That’s all the more remarkable for two reasons. First, Sandes was not Serbian but British - born and raised in Yorkshire. And second, Private Sandes’s first name was Flora. She was the only British woman to serve in uniform, in combat, as an enlisted soldier in World War One.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/A_forgotten_soldier
Saturday, 29 September 2018
The narrative of fascim : playing the victim
Despite the extremely stupid "LOL"s, this is an excellent narrative on the development and psychology of fascism. Best read in its entirety.
I have some strong reservations about the connection to capitalism, and it never really addresses why fascists initially think they're being victimised, but that's beside the point.
Fascists never think they are fascists. A fascist never thinks of himself or herself as a “fascist”, anything at all carrying a negative or malicious connotation. They think of themselves, first, as victims. Victims of great and grand conspiracies — the Jews, the Muslims, the Mexicans. Those behind these conspiracies are not regular people — they are especially cunning and vicious especially greedy and unscrupulous, especially seditious and slothful, especially bad. They are especially powerful, in other words. They have the power to completely destroy the way of the life, the whole existence, of the person being victimized.
Now. See what has really gone on here. Victimhood is a kind of paranoid delusion. Of a very specific kind — a histrionic persecution fantasy. That is one which carries a special note of alarm, a kind of cry for help. A little Mexican child, or a nerdy Jewish teenager, doesn’t have the power to destroy anyone, really. Victimhood is imagined.
The truth is that nobody cares about him very much at all. He is a “loser”, just another nobody, with very much money or status or power — a point I’ll return to. But precisely because nobody cares about him very much, the truth must be denied against in more and more histrionic ways — ways designed specifically to be noticed, so somebody does care. And now the psychology of the fascist goes from unreal to warped... The fascist isn’t the fascist — everyone else is the real fascist. Nobody is his victim — because he [in his own mind] is history’s greatest victim.
In a predatory world, you cannot tell yourself that you are flawed and that it is OK to be flawed. Instead, you must tell yourself that you are a victim. You are the righteous one, the good one, the one who deserved to be superior — but found himself bitterly unfairly treated. That is what you must you do, mentally, to survive, as a functioning being, all too often. Now you must make the world just again — and that means that, because you are not a flawed human being, but the superior one who deserved to be on top, making a world that cherishes and prizes you as the flawless being you are. Hence, the moral crusade against the monsters — who are the truly inferior ones.
The fascist lives in that world because it is the world that capitalism has created, unfortunately. Capitalism has taught him that weakness is unforgivable, a crime to be punished with abandonment, exile, and death. Because, of course, under capitalism, weakness is worse than useless — it is a liability, a burden, a cost — and so, as in America today, capitalist societies are prone to fascist collapses, as the world becomes a hostile place, which destabilizes people mentally, until all that is left is self-preservation through extreme, savage, and total destruction. Of others, of norms, of values, of democracy itself.
[It is not so much that the world is capitalist or predatory, but that it it is perceived as being meritocratic. The fascist is conflicted : torn between believing that the world reward's talent but unable to accept that his own low standing is due to his own inadequacies. See also the very similar "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" theory. Still, the main question remains unanswered : why do some people feel this way, while others do not ?]
https://eand.co/the-psychology-of-american-fascism-eff731c53f61
I have some strong reservations about the connection to capitalism, and it never really addresses why fascists initially think they're being victimised, but that's beside the point.
Fascists never think they are fascists. A fascist never thinks of himself or herself as a “fascist”, anything at all carrying a negative or malicious connotation. They think of themselves, first, as victims. Victims of great and grand conspiracies — the Jews, the Muslims, the Mexicans. Those behind these conspiracies are not regular people — they are especially cunning and vicious especially greedy and unscrupulous, especially seditious and slothful, especially bad. They are especially powerful, in other words. They have the power to completely destroy the way of the life, the whole existence, of the person being victimized.
Now. See what has really gone on here. Victimhood is a kind of paranoid delusion. Of a very specific kind — a histrionic persecution fantasy. That is one which carries a special note of alarm, a kind of cry for help. A little Mexican child, or a nerdy Jewish teenager, doesn’t have the power to destroy anyone, really. Victimhood is imagined.
The truth is that nobody cares about him very much at all. He is a “loser”, just another nobody, with very much money or status or power — a point I’ll return to. But precisely because nobody cares about him very much, the truth must be denied against in more and more histrionic ways — ways designed specifically to be noticed, so somebody does care. And now the psychology of the fascist goes from unreal to warped... The fascist isn’t the fascist — everyone else is the real fascist. Nobody is his victim — because he [in his own mind] is history’s greatest victim.
In a predatory world, you cannot tell yourself that you are flawed and that it is OK to be flawed. Instead, you must tell yourself that you are a victim. You are the righteous one, the good one, the one who deserved to be superior — but found himself bitterly unfairly treated. That is what you must you do, mentally, to survive, as a functioning being, all too often. Now you must make the world just again — and that means that, because you are not a flawed human being, but the superior one who deserved to be on top, making a world that cherishes and prizes you as the flawless being you are. Hence, the moral crusade against the monsters — who are the truly inferior ones.
The fascist lives in that world because it is the world that capitalism has created, unfortunately. Capitalism has taught him that weakness is unforgivable, a crime to be punished with abandonment, exile, and death. Because, of course, under capitalism, weakness is worse than useless — it is a liability, a burden, a cost — and so, as in America today, capitalist societies are prone to fascist collapses, as the world becomes a hostile place, which destabilizes people mentally, until all that is left is self-preservation through extreme, savage, and total destruction. Of others, of norms, of values, of democracy itself.
[It is not so much that the world is capitalist or predatory, but that it it is perceived as being meritocratic. The fascist is conflicted : torn between believing that the world reward's talent but unable to accept that his own low standing is due to his own inadequacies. See also the very similar "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" theory. Still, the main question remains unanswered : why do some people feel this way, while others do not ?]
https://eand.co/the-psychology-of-american-fascism-eff731c53f61
Unsung female heroes of science
It takes a truly inspirational woman for Margaret Thatcher to seek advice about scientific issues from, especially from one who is vocal supporter of socialism, but Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, former teacher to the Iron Lady, commanded such respect. Known for her advances in the field of X-ray crystallography, Hodgkin was able to determine the atomic structure of cholesterol, penicillin and vitamin B12, the last of which won her the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964 making her the only British female to win the prize.
It was only in 1969, after decades of improving X-ray crystallography techniques that she was finally able to conclude her longest-lasting challenge, mapping the structure of insulin after 35 years of work, which would improve treatment for diabetics. And all of her great work was done despite suffering from rheumatoid arthritis for most of her long and active life.
http://bit.ly/2NasVxQ
It was only in 1969, after decades of improving X-ray crystallography techniques that she was finally able to conclude her longest-lasting challenge, mapping the structure of insulin after 35 years of work, which would improve treatment for diabetics. And all of her great work was done despite suffering from rheumatoid arthritis for most of her long and active life.
http://bit.ly/2NasVxQ
Wednesday, 26 September 2018
Who are you, really ?
These organisms together make up what’s known as a holobiont: a combination of a host, plus all of the resident microbes that live in it and on it. Some of the microorganisms kill each other with toxins, while others leak or release enzymes and nutrients to the benefit of their neighbours. As they compete for space and food, cohabiting microbes have been found to affect the nutrition, development, immune system and behaviour of their hosts. The hosts, for their part, can often manipulate their resident microbiota in many ways, usually via the immune system.
You yourself are swarming with bacteria, archaea, protists and viruses, and might even be carrying larger organisms such as worms and fungi as well. So are you a holobiont, or are you just part of one? Are you a multispecies entity, made up of some human bits and some microbial bits – or are you just the human bits, with an admittedly fuzzy boundary between yourself and your tiny companions?
https://aeon.co/ideas/i-holobiont-are-you-and-your-microbes-a-community-or-a-single-entity?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=atom-feed
You yourself are swarming with bacteria, archaea, protists and viruses, and might even be carrying larger organisms such as worms and fungi as well. So are you a holobiont, or are you just part of one? Are you a multispecies entity, made up of some human bits and some microbial bits – or are you just the human bits, with an admittedly fuzzy boundary between yourself and your tiny companions?
https://aeon.co/ideas/i-holobiont-are-you-and-your-microbes-a-community-or-a-single-entity?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=atom-feed
How do plants think ?
Plants are weird.
Originally shared by Joe Carter
Plant Neurobiology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPql1VHbYl4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPql1VHbYl4
Originally shared by Joe Carter
Plant Neurobiology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPql1VHbYl4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPql1VHbYl4
Tuesday, 25 September 2018
The Russians may indeed be responsible for electing Trump - but with a major caveat
This is a long and detailed read. I may try to add some quotes tomorrow, time permitting, but not right now.
I will slightly shift my stance on this. While I remain absolutely unable to comprehend how millions of people can think of Trump as presidential material, the fact is, they do. Given that the political and ideological divide is so sharp even when a talking racist orange mass of indeterminate substance is one of the candidates, a landslide victory is not really possible. So, knowing that, it wouldn't take much to tip the balance. In that sense the Russian influence could be decisive in effect despite being small in magnitude, and they could thereby be legitimately seen as responsible. The fact that millions of people are apparently unable to realise basic things like, "fire is hot" and "Donald Trump is a bad person" is another, quite separate issue.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for-trump?mbid=social_twitter
I will slightly shift my stance on this. While I remain absolutely unable to comprehend how millions of people can think of Trump as presidential material, the fact is, they do. Given that the political and ideological divide is so sharp even when a talking racist orange mass of indeterminate substance is one of the candidates, a landslide victory is not really possible. So, knowing that, it wouldn't take much to tip the balance. In that sense the Russian influence could be decisive in effect despite being small in magnitude, and they could thereby be legitimately seen as responsible. The fact that millions of people are apparently unable to realise basic things like, "fire is hot" and "Donald Trump is a bad person" is another, quite separate issue.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for-trump?mbid=social_twitter
Mainstream religion helps regulate emotions
Mainstream religion reduces anxiety, stress and depression. It provides existential meaning and hope. It focuses aggression and fear against enemies. It domesticates lust, and it strengthens filial connections. Through story, it trains feelings of empathy and compassion for others. And it provides consolation for suffering.
Emotional therapy is the animating heart of religion. Social bonding happens not only when we agree to worship the same totems, but when we feel affection for each other. An affective community of mutual care emerges when groups share rituals, liturgy, song, dance, eating, grieving, comforting, tales of saints and heroes, hardships such as fasting and sacrifice. Theological beliefs are bloodless abstractions by comparison.
When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.
Because religious actions are often accompanied by magical thinking or supernatural beliefs, Christopher Hitchens argued in God Is not Great (2007) that religion is ‘false consolation’. Many critics of religion echo his condemnation. But there is no such thing as false consolation. Consolation or comfort is a feeling, and it can be weak or strong, but it can’t be false or true. You can be false in your judgement of why you’re feeling better, but feeling better is neither true nor false. True and false applies only if we’re evaluating whether our propositions correspond with reality. And no doubt many factual claims of religion are false in that way – the world was not created in six days.
Well on that point about false consolation, I'm no fan of Hitchens, but he might have a point : false emotions are perfectly possible. Self-knowledge always comes with a failure rate. Plato went on at length about how false pleasure is possible, an argument I have neither the time nor inclination to explain, but here's a much more recent example :
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171012-how-emotions-can-trick-your-mind-and-body?ocid=twfut
If you can believe yourself to be in love but actually aren't, then I see no reason why you can't believe yourself to be consoled but are actually aren't. I suppose it would be a deep form of denial, where you're genuinely unable to recognise what your own emotion actually is. However, this is not to say that religion doesn't provide genuine consolation, just to state that the argument is more complicated than that.
It's interesting how people make such strongly opposing arguments on such a well-studied topic. For some, religion is self-evidently necessary for moral actions. For others nothing could be further than the truth. I would say that by and large, religion is sufficient for the things described above, but not necessary. Sources of comfort and bonding are perfectly possible in an atheistic world view. My guess is that (from a purely sociological perspective) the tendency to explain things with supernatural elements is linked to the shared group identity that results.
https://aeon.co/ideas/religion-is-about-emotion-regulation-and-its-very-good-at-it
Emotional therapy is the animating heart of religion. Social bonding happens not only when we agree to worship the same totems, but when we feel affection for each other. An affective community of mutual care emerges when groups share rituals, liturgy, song, dance, eating, grieving, comforting, tales of saints and heroes, hardships such as fasting and sacrifice. Theological beliefs are bloodless abstractions by comparison.
When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.
Because religious actions are often accompanied by magical thinking or supernatural beliefs, Christopher Hitchens argued in God Is not Great (2007) that religion is ‘false consolation’. Many critics of religion echo his condemnation. But there is no such thing as false consolation. Consolation or comfort is a feeling, and it can be weak or strong, but it can’t be false or true. You can be false in your judgement of why you’re feeling better, but feeling better is neither true nor false. True and false applies only if we’re evaluating whether our propositions correspond with reality. And no doubt many factual claims of religion are false in that way – the world was not created in six days.
Well on that point about false consolation, I'm no fan of Hitchens, but he might have a point : false emotions are perfectly possible. Self-knowledge always comes with a failure rate. Plato went on at length about how false pleasure is possible, an argument I have neither the time nor inclination to explain, but here's a much more recent example :
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171012-how-emotions-can-trick-your-mind-and-body?ocid=twfut
If you can believe yourself to be in love but actually aren't, then I see no reason why you can't believe yourself to be consoled but are actually aren't. I suppose it would be a deep form of denial, where you're genuinely unable to recognise what your own emotion actually is. However, this is not to say that religion doesn't provide genuine consolation, just to state that the argument is more complicated than that.
It's interesting how people make such strongly opposing arguments on such a well-studied topic. For some, religion is self-evidently necessary for moral actions. For others nothing could be further than the truth. I would say that by and large, religion is sufficient for the things described above, but not necessary. Sources of comfort and bonding are perfectly possible in an atheistic world view. My guess is that (from a purely sociological perspective) the tendency to explain things with supernatural elements is linked to the shared group identity that results.
https://aeon.co/ideas/religion-is-about-emotion-regulation-and-its-very-good-at-it
Parthenogenesis in termites
GIRL POWER !
“[Much like] gender-equal societies in humans, termite colonies commonly have equal numbers of males and females,” explains Yashiro, a biologist at the University of Sydney. “Both males and females work equally to make the society function.”
During fieldwork on the coast of Japan, Yashiro and his colleagues were surprised to stumble across several populations of Glyptotermes nakajimai termites that appeared to be exclusively female. The only way for these colonies to sustain themselves would be through asexual reproduction, but Yashiro’s burden of proof was enormous. To test this theory, he would have to painstakingly rule out the presence of males in colonies of thousands of insects.
Which, suffice to say, he did. A single gender can have advantages, besides the obvious ability to reproduce from a single individual...
With their relatively unarmored bodies, termites aren’t built for the offensive. Instead, when the colony is under attack, the insect’s main mode of defense often involves plugging the entrances to their nests with their own heads. A variety of head sizes could actually be a burden rather than a boon, meaning the loss of males may have actually empowered these female fighters to survive an assault.
But in the long run this is generally bad.
The fact that most termites haven’t yet transitioned to chastity may be due to an evolutionary advantage of sexual reproduction. As it turns out, sex is useful for maintaining the health of a colony. Mixing the genes of both parents generates diversity in a population, which comes in handy when extreme circumstances strike, such as disease or a shift in environment.
Because diversity provides a critical safeguard in the face of microbial infections, Rosengaus says it will be important for future work to look at how susceptible these different groups are to disease. It’s possible that asexual, all-female colonies have survived only in Shikoku and Kyushu because these regions aren’t as rife with termite pathogens — but this theory has yet to be tested.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/all-female-termite-colonies-reproduce-without-male-input-180970393/
“[Much like] gender-equal societies in humans, termite colonies commonly have equal numbers of males and females,” explains Yashiro, a biologist at the University of Sydney. “Both males and females work equally to make the society function.”
During fieldwork on the coast of Japan, Yashiro and his colleagues were surprised to stumble across several populations of Glyptotermes nakajimai termites that appeared to be exclusively female. The only way for these colonies to sustain themselves would be through asexual reproduction, but Yashiro’s burden of proof was enormous. To test this theory, he would have to painstakingly rule out the presence of males in colonies of thousands of insects.
Which, suffice to say, he did. A single gender can have advantages, besides the obvious ability to reproduce from a single individual...
With their relatively unarmored bodies, termites aren’t built for the offensive. Instead, when the colony is under attack, the insect’s main mode of defense often involves plugging the entrances to their nests with their own heads. A variety of head sizes could actually be a burden rather than a boon, meaning the loss of males may have actually empowered these female fighters to survive an assault.
But in the long run this is generally bad.
The fact that most termites haven’t yet transitioned to chastity may be due to an evolutionary advantage of sexual reproduction. As it turns out, sex is useful for maintaining the health of a colony. Mixing the genes of both parents generates diversity in a population, which comes in handy when extreme circumstances strike, such as disease or a shift in environment.
Because diversity provides a critical safeguard in the face of microbial infections, Rosengaus says it will be important for future work to look at how susceptible these different groups are to disease. It’s possible that asexual, all-female colonies have survived only in Shikoku and Kyushu because these regions aren’t as rife with termite pathogens — but this theory has yet to be tested.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/all-female-termite-colonies-reproduce-without-male-input-180970393/
Even wee little bugs need a good snooze
I heard recently that it's better to think of sleep as a state of repair, not rest. It makes sense that the brain would have to reorder itself somewhat to account for new information. But even tiny little bugs need to do this, or else they get cranky.
And just as in people, interrupting insects’ sleep can harm brain performance and change behaviour, Klein and others have found. Honeybees perform intricate dances to tell each other where to find flowers. But after being kept awake with an evil lab contraption called the “insominator,” honeybees’ dances grew sloppy, Klein and colleagues reported in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
http://nautil.us/blog/insects-and-the-meaning-of-sleep
And just as in people, interrupting insects’ sleep can harm brain performance and change behaviour, Klein and others have found. Honeybees perform intricate dances to tell each other where to find flowers. But after being kept awake with an evil lab contraption called the “insominator,” honeybees’ dances grew sloppy, Klein and colleagues reported in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
http://nautil.us/blog/insects-and-the-meaning-of-sleep
You can be addicted to things you supposedly hate, including social media
Most of my thoughts on social media can be found here :
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/MdXV8W38bFM
I agree with Lanier's view that a particular business model of social media is to blame. G+ doesn't have the same sort of drown-you-with-recommendations and adverts system, and that's a darn good thing.
The problem, for Lanier, is not technology, per se. The problem is the business model based on the manipulation of individual behaviour. Social-media platforms know what you’re seeing, and they know how you acted in the immediate aftermath of seeing it, and they can decide what you will see next in order to further determine how you act—a feedback loop that gets progressively tighter until it becomes a binding force on an individual’s free will.... Negative emotions like outrage and contempt and anxiety tend to drive significantly more engagement than positive ones. This toxic miasma of bad vibes—of masochistic pleasures—is not, in Lanier’s view, an epiphenomenon of social media, but rather the fuel on which it has been engineered to run.
He goes so far as to suggest that even Drumpf would be a “nicer, better person” if Twitter suddenly ceased to exist. “As a lefty,” he writes, “I don’t think a BUMMER [Behaviours of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent]-style lefty leader would be any better than Drumpf. Debasement is debasement, whatever direction it comes from.” I would, I suppose, prefer a lefty leader who didn’t tweet from a West Wing en suite at 5 a.m. to a lefty leader who did, but I would take either over a right-wing President who pursues tax cuts for the super-rich, dismantles environmental regulations, and implements border-protection policies specifically designed to victimize immigrants and their children. Stephen Miller does not appear to tweet much; it’s hard to imagine him being a worse person if he did.
Well, here I would add that the social media is neither necessary nor necessarily sufficient for this kind of behaviour - it's just one contributing factor. I thought Lanier's comment that being addicted to the negative effects of social media could make someone worse was very interesting, but it's hardly going to be the only social influence in (almost) anyone's life. For most people it's going to be just one stream of information among many, so the degree of influence it has will vary strongly. And of course you can be an awful person anyway, that should go without saying.
Which is why I'd doubt I'd agree with this Bridle chap that social media is bringing up some kind of apocalypse, because I for one like discussing stuff with people I like. That's all it needs to be. The stuff about global warming making it impossible to think is just so much hot air (hah hah hah). Nevertheless :
Here’s how Bridle puts it : "We find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world."
A lot of knowledge is a dangerous thing. But are people really connected to vast repositories of knowledge or just cat pictures ? If you want to change people, are you better off trying to giving them more and more facts, teaching them new methodologies, or a combination of both ? I don't think we really know the answer to this.
The internet is not the "cause of all of our deepest problems". It is an enabler of communication on an unprecedented scale, but like all media it isn't good or bad in itself. It depends entirely on how it's used. The relevant factors are that it is cheap and instantaneously reproducible, which is difficult to replicate with other media. This gives it unique characteristics, but were it properly utilised there would be no need to see it as inherently dangerous. That's where all those societal network models come in. I would concede that it is "both the manifestation and cause" but I certainly wouldn't label it as the root cause of anything.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-deliberate-awfulness-of-social-media
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/MdXV8W38bFM
I agree with Lanier's view that a particular business model of social media is to blame. G+ doesn't have the same sort of drown-you-with-recommendations and adverts system, and that's a darn good thing.
The problem, for Lanier, is not technology, per se. The problem is the business model based on the manipulation of individual behaviour. Social-media platforms know what you’re seeing, and they know how you acted in the immediate aftermath of seeing it, and they can decide what you will see next in order to further determine how you act—a feedback loop that gets progressively tighter until it becomes a binding force on an individual’s free will.... Negative emotions like outrage and contempt and anxiety tend to drive significantly more engagement than positive ones. This toxic miasma of bad vibes—of masochistic pleasures—is not, in Lanier’s view, an epiphenomenon of social media, but rather the fuel on which it has been engineered to run.
He goes so far as to suggest that even Drumpf would be a “nicer, better person” if Twitter suddenly ceased to exist. “As a lefty,” he writes, “I don’t think a BUMMER [Behaviours of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent]-style lefty leader would be any better than Drumpf. Debasement is debasement, whatever direction it comes from.” I would, I suppose, prefer a lefty leader who didn’t tweet from a West Wing en suite at 5 a.m. to a lefty leader who did, but I would take either over a right-wing President who pursues tax cuts for the super-rich, dismantles environmental regulations, and implements border-protection policies specifically designed to victimize immigrants and their children. Stephen Miller does not appear to tweet much; it’s hard to imagine him being a worse person if he did.
Well, here I would add that the social media is neither necessary nor necessarily sufficient for this kind of behaviour - it's just one contributing factor. I thought Lanier's comment that being addicted to the negative effects of social media could make someone worse was very interesting, but it's hardly going to be the only social influence in (almost) anyone's life. For most people it's going to be just one stream of information among many, so the degree of influence it has will vary strongly. And of course you can be an awful person anyway, that should go without saying.
Which is why I'd doubt I'd agree with this Bridle chap that social media is bringing up some kind of apocalypse, because I for one like discussing stuff with people I like. That's all it needs to be. The stuff about global warming making it impossible to think is just so much hot air (hah hah hah). Nevertheless :
Here’s how Bridle puts it : "We find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world."
A lot of knowledge is a dangerous thing. But are people really connected to vast repositories of knowledge or just cat pictures ? If you want to change people, are you better off trying to giving them more and more facts, teaching them new methodologies, or a combination of both ? I don't think we really know the answer to this.
The internet is not the "cause of all of our deepest problems". It is an enabler of communication on an unprecedented scale, but like all media it isn't good or bad in itself. It depends entirely on how it's used. The relevant factors are that it is cheap and instantaneously reproducible, which is difficult to replicate with other media. This gives it unique characteristics, but were it properly utilised there would be no need to see it as inherently dangerous. That's where all those societal network models come in. I would concede that it is "both the manifestation and cause" but I certainly wouldn't label it as the root cause of anything.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-deliberate-awfulness-of-social-media
Monday, 24 September 2018
Labour is now just a bunch of Communists
Satirical website reports facts again. Labour is dead to me. It's now little more than a party of incompetent bullies and personality cultists. Keeps calling literally everything the 'People's' this that and the other, as though the people had some bizarre and unprecedented unity which, strangely, only Party members were able to properly discern... might as well wave a hammer and sickle flag at this point.
Originally shared by NewsThump
Bolstering their supply and demand coalition with the Torys and DUP, the Labour party leadership have today announced that any People's Vote should omit the option to remain, and only allow the people a choice between two potentially catastrophic outcomes.
http://newsthump.com/2018/09/24/labour-insists-peoples-vote-should-be-between-catastrophic-no-deal-brexit-and-catastrophic-brexit-deal/
Originally shared by NewsThump
Bolstering their supply and demand coalition with the Torys and DUP, the Labour party leadership have today announced that any People's Vote should omit the option to remain, and only allow the people a choice between two potentially catastrophic outcomes.
http://newsthump.com/2018/09/24/labour-insists-peoples-vote-should-be-between-catastrophic-no-deal-brexit-and-catastrophic-brexit-deal/
Can philosophy help you have better intuition ?
Ignore the headline. But it really would be interesting to see a study attempting to measure whether taking philosophy classes actually does cause people to become less biased. This would have to involve people who don't want to take a philosophy class, otherwise it runs the risk of a strong selection effect.
The study found that the computer-mediated counterargument had no effect on people with no or a low level of confirmation bias. On the other hand, for those who had a high degree of confirmation bias, the counterargument was very effective in reducing their confidence in their beliefs.
There are a couple of takeaways here. The first is that some people may just be less biased than others (as Yagoda himself implies when, after correctly completing the Wason Selection Task, he says he may just be an “unbiased guy”). The second is that expert counterargument was effective in reducing the confirmation bias in some people.
Nisbett’s advice—that is, trying to prove oneself wrong—may not lead someone to expert counterargument. One of my Facebook friends, for example, recently posted about her attempt to follow the advice of her friends and listen to the other side. (She’s a political progressive.) How did she do this? She talked to some redneck who was spouting conservative views at a coffee shop. According to her post, she came away from the incident believing that she had attempted to prove herself wrong, consequently making her even more certain of her own worldview as a result of the weak arguments presented by the conservative coffee shop patron.
I suppose my concern there is what to do when you reach an impasse with well-intentioned, rational, intelligent, informed individuals (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/iKcQTYKfim4; I still haven't read all the links in the comments). I'm not sure anyone has a definitive answer to this. However, I would hazard that such events tend to be rare, and that most such situations, at least, do result when one side isn't as rational/intelligent/well-intentioned/informed as they claim to be.
Kahneman adheres to a dual process model of mind, according to which we think in two different ways: fast and slow. Fast thinking refers to immediate processing of information, such as noticing that two structures are basically the same height. Slow thinking refers to more deliberative processing, like counting the number of raised hands in a senate meeting to determine a vote. Kahneman calls fast thinking System 1 and slow thinking System 2.
Kahneman says: "My position is that none of these things [bias-reduction techniques] have any effect on System 1. You can’t improve intuition. Perhaps, with very long-term training, lots of talk, and exposure to behavioral economics, what you can do is cue reasoning, so you can engage System 2 to follow rules. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t provide cues. And, for most people, in the heat of argument the rules go out the window."
https://areomagazine.com/2018/09/18/how-philosophy-can-reduce-your-confirmation-bias/
The study found that the computer-mediated counterargument had no effect on people with no or a low level of confirmation bias. On the other hand, for those who had a high degree of confirmation bias, the counterargument was very effective in reducing their confidence in their beliefs.
There are a couple of takeaways here. The first is that some people may just be less biased than others (as Yagoda himself implies when, after correctly completing the Wason Selection Task, he says he may just be an “unbiased guy”). The second is that expert counterargument was effective in reducing the confirmation bias in some people.
Nisbett’s advice—that is, trying to prove oneself wrong—may not lead someone to expert counterargument. One of my Facebook friends, for example, recently posted about her attempt to follow the advice of her friends and listen to the other side. (She’s a political progressive.) How did she do this? She talked to some redneck who was spouting conservative views at a coffee shop. According to her post, she came away from the incident believing that she had attempted to prove herself wrong, consequently making her even more certain of her own worldview as a result of the weak arguments presented by the conservative coffee shop patron.
I suppose my concern there is what to do when you reach an impasse with well-intentioned, rational, intelligent, informed individuals (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/iKcQTYKfim4; I still haven't read all the links in the comments). I'm not sure anyone has a definitive answer to this. However, I would hazard that such events tend to be rare, and that most such situations, at least, do result when one side isn't as rational/intelligent/well-intentioned/informed as they claim to be.
Kahneman adheres to a dual process model of mind, according to which we think in two different ways: fast and slow. Fast thinking refers to immediate processing of information, such as noticing that two structures are basically the same height. Slow thinking refers to more deliberative processing, like counting the number of raised hands in a senate meeting to determine a vote. Kahneman calls fast thinking System 1 and slow thinking System 2.
Kahneman says: "My position is that none of these things [bias-reduction techniques] have any effect on System 1. You can’t improve intuition. Perhaps, with very long-term training, lots of talk, and exposure to behavioral economics, what you can do is cue reasoning, so you can engage System 2 to follow rules. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t provide cues. And, for most people, in the heat of argument the rules go out the window."
https://areomagazine.com/2018/09/18/how-philosophy-can-reduce-your-confirmation-bias/
Error checking in machine vision
Human vision is hardly perfect - it can be fooled by certain situations very easily indeed. It can event be influenced by prior expectation. But it still basically works nearly all of the time, with the brain/eye system able to make sense out of even unfamiliar scenarios most of the time. If it wasn't able to do that, we'd all be dead. Optical illusions are fascinating, but I bet most of those particular triggers - at least not ones that are potentially dangerous - don't crop up all that much outside their very carefully contrived scenarios. Bias about what we're expecting to see is probably largely advantageous - we can go back and check, and re-evaluate our interpretations because our bias flags up unexpected things which are mostly actually wrong.
Then the researchers introduced something incongruous into the scene: an image of an elephant in semiprofile. The neural network started getting its pixels crossed. In some trials, the elephant led the neural network to misidentify the chair as a couch. In others, the system overlooked objects, like a row of books, that it had correctly detected in earlier trials. These errors occurred even when the elephant was far from the mistaken objects.
And as for the elephant itself, the neural network was all over the place: Sometimes the system identified it correctly, sometimes it called the elephant a sheep, and sometimes it overlooked the elephant completely.
Today’s best neural networks for object detection work in a “feed forward” manner. This means that information flows through them in only one direction. They start with an input of fine-grained pixels, then move to curves, shapes, and scenes, with the network making its best guess about what it’s seeing at each step along the way. As a consequence, errant observations early in the process end up contaminating the end of the process, when the neural network pools together everything it thinks it knows in order to make a guess about what it’s looking at.
“The human visual system says, ‘I don’t have right answer yet, so I have to go backwards to see where I might have made an error,’” explained Tsotsos, who has been developing a theory called selective tuning that explains this feature of visual cognition.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/machine-learning-confronts-the-elephant-in-the-room-20180920/
Then the researchers introduced something incongruous into the scene: an image of an elephant in semiprofile. The neural network started getting its pixels crossed. In some trials, the elephant led the neural network to misidentify the chair as a couch. In others, the system overlooked objects, like a row of books, that it had correctly detected in earlier trials. These errors occurred even when the elephant was far from the mistaken objects.
And as for the elephant itself, the neural network was all over the place: Sometimes the system identified it correctly, sometimes it called the elephant a sheep, and sometimes it overlooked the elephant completely.
Today’s best neural networks for object detection work in a “feed forward” manner. This means that information flows through them in only one direction. They start with an input of fine-grained pixels, then move to curves, shapes, and scenes, with the network making its best guess about what it’s seeing at each step along the way. As a consequence, errant observations early in the process end up contaminating the end of the process, when the neural network pools together everything it thinks it knows in order to make a guess about what it’s looking at.
“The human visual system says, ‘I don’t have right answer yet, so I have to go backwards to see where I might have made an error,’” explained Tsotsos, who has been developing a theory called selective tuning that explains this feature of visual cognition.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/machine-learning-confronts-the-elephant-in-the-room-20180920/
Russian attempts to meddle in net neutrality
When is a public comment not a public comment ? When it's not what the FCC wants you to hear, apparently, and possibly because it came from a Russian spambot.
The FCC denied the request, telling the Times on July 21, 2017 that the information may be withheld in full under the FoIA exemption for data containing personally identifiable information.The Times argued that the exemption doesn't apply to public comments and that, even if it did, "the FCC is obligated to redact or segregate exempt materials rather than withhold the records in full."
The FCC then raised new objections, saying "that the requested records would reveal sensitive information about the security measures in place to protect the FCC's notice-and-comment processes [and] that the request was overly burdensome," according to the Times' lawsuit.
In September 2017, the Times says it "agreed to narrow its request and eliminate certain header information in an effort to ensure that the security measures introduced by the agency would not be revealed."
In December, the FCC told the Times that this would not satisfy its security concerns, so the Times narrowed its request again. The new request "sought only the comment, the originating IP address, the date and time stamp, and the User-Agent header for comments submitted within the specified time frame," the Times said.
After another FCC refusal, the Times in May of this year "proposed that the agency produce across separate logs: (1) the originating IP addresses and timestamps, so that the agency's security measures would not be revealed; (2) User-Agent headers (which reveal information such as what Internet browser the individual was using) and timestamps; and (3) the comments, names, and timestamps submitted between the specified dates."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/09/did-russia-meddle-with-net-neutrality-comments-nyt-sues-fcc-to-find-out/
The FCC denied the request, telling the Times on July 21, 2017 that the information may be withheld in full under the FoIA exemption for data containing personally identifiable information.The Times argued that the exemption doesn't apply to public comments and that, even if it did, "the FCC is obligated to redact or segregate exempt materials rather than withhold the records in full."
The FCC then raised new objections, saying "that the requested records would reveal sensitive information about the security measures in place to protect the FCC's notice-and-comment processes [and] that the request was overly burdensome," according to the Times' lawsuit.
In September 2017, the Times says it "agreed to narrow its request and eliminate certain header information in an effort to ensure that the security measures introduced by the agency would not be revealed."
In December, the FCC told the Times that this would not satisfy its security concerns, so the Times narrowed its request again. The new request "sought only the comment, the originating IP address, the date and time stamp, and the User-Agent header for comments submitted within the specified time frame," the Times said.
After another FCC refusal, the Times in May of this year "proposed that the agency produce across separate logs: (1) the originating IP addresses and timestamps, so that the agency's security measures would not be revealed; (2) User-Agent headers (which reveal information such as what Internet browser the individual was using) and timestamps; and (3) the comments, names, and timestamps submitted between the specified dates."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/09/did-russia-meddle-with-net-neutrality-comments-nyt-sues-fcc-to-find-out/
Solar Roadways have been tested and they don't work
Solar Freakin' Frickin' Roadways are, as it was vigorously pointed out, a terrible idea.
While the road is supposed to generate 800 kilowatt hours per day (kWh/day), some recently released data indicates a yield closer to 409 kWh/day, or 150,000 kWh/yr. For an idea of how much this is, the average UK home uses around 10 kWh/day. The road’s capacity factor—which measures the efficiency of the technology by dividing its average power output by its potential maximum power output—is just 4 percent.
By contrast, the Cestas solar plant near Bordeaux, which features rows of solar panels carefully angled towards the sun, has a maximum power output of 300,000 kWs and a capacity factor of 14 percent. And at a cost of €360 million ($423 million), or €1,200 ($1,400) per installed kW, one-tenth the cost of our solar roadway, it generates three times more power.
Via Oliver Hamilton.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/solar-panels-replaced-tarmac-on-a-motorway-here-are-the-results/
While the road is supposed to generate 800 kilowatt hours per day (kWh/day), some recently released data indicates a yield closer to 409 kWh/day, or 150,000 kWh/yr. For an idea of how much this is, the average UK home uses around 10 kWh/day. The road’s capacity factor—which measures the efficiency of the technology by dividing its average power output by its potential maximum power output—is just 4 percent.
By contrast, the Cestas solar plant near Bordeaux, which features rows of solar panels carefully angled towards the sun, has a maximum power output of 300,000 kWs and a capacity factor of 14 percent. And at a cost of €360 million ($423 million), or €1,200 ($1,400) per installed kW, one-tenth the cost of our solar roadway, it generates three times more power.
Via Oliver Hamilton.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/solar-panels-replaced-tarmac-on-a-motorway-here-are-the-results/
VR in the military
I saw recently that Magic Leap is great but severely limited by its narrow field of view, so combat training seems like a surprising use. I'd assume that the military are hoping for improvements, were it not that the thing seems to have been in development with crazy funding levels for ages already.
Originally shared by Eli Fennell
Magic Leap's Next Frontier: Combat Enhancement Gear?
Magic Leap's mixed reality headset products, while not without their fans and admirers, are as yet just one entry in a product category that remains promising but not mainstream. A frontrunner, perhaps, but one with little to show.
They may, however, have finally found a customer with a need for their product and an endless wallet to finance its purchase: the United States Army. The startup is considered the prohibitive favorite to win a contract for military headsets to “increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide and engage before the enemy". These headsets would be used for both training and real combat purposes by soldiers.
In fact, there's every reason to think the contract was basically designed for Magic Leap, and the solicitation of other entries is more-or-less perfunctory, since rivals will have little time to develop a system suspiciously similar to the very system Magic Leap has been working on for a while, and the company has established connections within the military to bolster the theory.
Given the current climate surrounding military contracts in the world of technology startups, this is sure to rankle some feathers within and outside the company, and thus this project may face many hurdles to overcome. The risk may be worth it, though, given its potential to lead to over 100,000 headset sales worth upwards of over half a billion dollars.
#AR #MagicLeap #MixedReality
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-21/magic-leap-is-bidding-on-an-army-combat-contract
Originally shared by Eli Fennell
Magic Leap's Next Frontier: Combat Enhancement Gear?
Magic Leap's mixed reality headset products, while not without their fans and admirers, are as yet just one entry in a product category that remains promising but not mainstream. A frontrunner, perhaps, but one with little to show.
They may, however, have finally found a customer with a need for their product and an endless wallet to finance its purchase: the United States Army. The startup is considered the prohibitive favorite to win a contract for military headsets to “increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide and engage before the enemy". These headsets would be used for both training and real combat purposes by soldiers.
In fact, there's every reason to think the contract was basically designed for Magic Leap, and the solicitation of other entries is more-or-less perfunctory, since rivals will have little time to develop a system suspiciously similar to the very system Magic Leap has been working on for a while, and the company has established connections within the military to bolster the theory.
Given the current climate surrounding military contracts in the world of technology startups, this is sure to rankle some feathers within and outside the company, and thus this project may face many hurdles to overcome. The risk may be worth it, though, given its potential to lead to over 100,000 headset sales worth upwards of over half a billion dollars.
#AR #MagicLeap #MixedReality
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-21/magic-leap-is-bidding-on-an-army-combat-contract
Simulating the evolution of trust
Another excellent set of interactive simulations. I like how it shows very different results from seemingly minor changes in the rules.
What the game is, defines what the players do. Our problem today isn't just that people are losing trust, it's that our environment acts against the evolution of trust.
[coughs loudly about having pointed this out for bloody ages]
That may seem cynical or naive -- that we're "merely" products of our environment -- but as game theory reminds us, we are each others' environment. In the short run, the game defines the players. But in the long run, it's us players who define the game.
Spoilers : cheating is a sensible evolutionary strategy for dealing with short-term interactions. And if all your interactions are short-term, it makes sense to always cheat.
https://ncase.me/trust/
What the game is, defines what the players do. Our problem today isn't just that people are losing trust, it's that our environment acts against the evolution of trust.
[coughs loudly about having pointed this out for bloody ages]
That may seem cynical or naive -- that we're "merely" products of our environment -- but as game theory reminds us, we are each others' environment. In the short run, the game defines the players. But in the long run, it's us players who define the game.
Spoilers : cheating is a sensible evolutionary strategy for dealing with short-term interactions. And if all your interactions are short-term, it makes sense to always cheat.
https://ncase.me/trust/
Sunday, 23 September 2018
Review : The Good Place
Binge watched the entire two seasons of this because it's such a superb little masterpiece. I imagine the sales pitch must have been something like, "We want to make a happy show in which everyone is dead and we teach people the basics of moral philosophy. All of the characters will be misanthropes with fundamental character flaws and it's also a comedy with magical unicorns and a robot (not a robot) with a cactus fixation." It's seriously good stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfBgT5djaQw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfBgT5djaQw
An awesome reality show about becoming a WWII spy
I hope Netflix trailers are publically visible...
This is the best reality show I've seen in years. Unlike Victorian Turnip Inspectors or whatever boring farming crap they typically churn out, this one has participants doing interesting stuff with exploding rats and guns and exploding poop and stuff. But even more importantly, the show is primarily about the skills the SOE agents had and whether these modern participants are up to the challenge. That is, what it isn't about - and this is important - is people slagging each other off or petty bickering or the instructors yelling at people for no reason. Nope, in this show the instructors are actually supportive. Even when people leave or are removed, there's no sense of hard feelings. This is a reality show done right.
What's also really interesting to see is how apparently ordinary people have hidden depths. In particular, watch for the research scientist with the cold dead eyes of a killer who aces the physical tests. And the grandmother drama teacher who becomes a highly competent field agent. It's impressive stuff, well worth a watch.
https://www.netflix.com/cz/title/80195811
This is the best reality show I've seen in years. Unlike Victorian Turnip Inspectors or whatever boring farming crap they typically churn out, this one has participants doing interesting stuff with exploding rats and guns and exploding poop and stuff. But even more importantly, the show is primarily about the skills the SOE agents had and whether these modern participants are up to the challenge. That is, what it isn't about - and this is important - is people slagging each other off or petty bickering or the instructors yelling at people for no reason. Nope, in this show the instructors are actually supportive. Even when people leave or are removed, there's no sense of hard feelings. This is a reality show done right.
What's also really interesting to see is how apparently ordinary people have hidden depths. In particular, watch for the research scientist with the cold dead eyes of a killer who aces the physical tests. And the grandmother drama teacher who becomes a highly competent field agent. It's impressive stuff, well worth a watch.
https://www.netflix.com/cz/title/80195811
Friday, 21 September 2018
Giving ecstasy to octopuses for some reason
"I have to admit that it was totally trial and error. Honestly, I just didn't think this was going to work, so we started out at super high doses," she said.
Oh yes, very sensible.
"But the animals went through this hyper-vigilance where they were perched at the top of the tank like a hawk trying to watch a mouse or something." Surprised by the octopuses' sensitivity to the drug, the researchers scaled back the dose. "When we gave them the dose that you'd give a human, but adjusted for body weight, they started acting just like you'd expect a human to," Dr Dolen said.
Without ecstasy, test octopuses spent significantly more time in the chamber with the object. But with ecstasy, they became more social, preferring the chamber with the other octopus in it.
And the nature of the interactions between octopuses changed too. Before a dose of ecstasy, social interactions were "limited, usually to one extended arm", the scientists wrote in the paper. "After MDMA treatment, social interactions were characterised by extensive ventral surface contact, which appeared to be exploratory rather than aggressive in nature," they said.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-09-21/octopus-ecstasy-mdma-social-behaviour/10280706
Oh yes, very sensible.
"But the animals went through this hyper-vigilance where they were perched at the top of the tank like a hawk trying to watch a mouse or something." Surprised by the octopuses' sensitivity to the drug, the researchers scaled back the dose. "When we gave them the dose that you'd give a human, but adjusted for body weight, they started acting just like you'd expect a human to," Dr Dolen said.
Without ecstasy, test octopuses spent significantly more time in the chamber with the object. But with ecstasy, they became more social, preferring the chamber with the other octopus in it.
And the nature of the interactions between octopuses changed too. Before a dose of ecstasy, social interactions were "limited, usually to one extended arm", the scientists wrote in the paper. "After MDMA treatment, social interactions were characterised by extensive ventral surface contact, which appeared to be exploratory rather than aggressive in nature," they said.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-09-21/octopus-ecstasy-mdma-social-behaviour/10280706
You are disgusting
The interconnectedness of all things is icky.
They constructed an air-monitoring device so that it could be attached to a single person all day. The device took in puffs of air and was equipped with a tiny filter that could trap microscopic bacteria and aerosol particles as small as 25 micrometers across. Every few days, the device was emptied out, allowing their lab to analyze the chemicals and living things collected in a sample.
Over the course of two years, the team recruited 15 volunteers to wear the device, including Snyder himself. Some wore it for a week, others for a month, and in Snyder’s case, for the entire two years.
And along with the countless chemicals they found in these samples, the team documented and sequenced the genetics of more than 40,000 different bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals. All of these airborne passengers found in our personal space make up our “exposome,” a term coined by Snyder and his team.
https://gizmodo.com/scientists-peer-inside-the-disgusting-cloud-of-living-t-1829201369
They constructed an air-monitoring device so that it could be attached to a single person all day. The device took in puffs of air and was equipped with a tiny filter that could trap microscopic bacteria and aerosol particles as small as 25 micrometers across. Every few days, the device was emptied out, allowing their lab to analyze the chemicals and living things collected in a sample.
Over the course of two years, the team recruited 15 volunteers to wear the device, including Snyder himself. Some wore it for a week, others for a month, and in Snyder’s case, for the entire two years.
And along with the countless chemicals they found in these samples, the team documented and sequenced the genetics of more than 40,000 different bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals. All of these airborne passengers found in our personal space make up our “exposome,” a term coined by Snyder and his team.
https://gizmodo.com/scientists-peer-inside-the-disgusting-cloud-of-living-t-1829201369
Talent-luck : subtle statistical anomalies
More investigations on talent-versus luck. Still trying to figure out why my faster method gives different results.
The standard, original method treats events and agents as objects. The events move around the world randomly. If they overlap with the position of an agent, who are fixed, then the agent experiences that event. The event's type (good or bad) is a fixed property of the event object itself, however tests showed that it made no difference if the event type was reassigned randomly at each timestep.
For the fast method, I measured how many events of all types typically occur during each timestep (running 10 simulations by the random walk method to get a large number of values). This appears to be a good approximation to a Gaussian so I measured the mean and standard deviation. Then at each timestep, a random number (call it X) is drawn from this distribution. Agent numbers are then picked at random X times, so that the same number of events should happen and there's a chance of individual agents experiencing multiple events at the same timestep, just as in the original model.
In practise this seems to only nearly work. You can see below that the overall wealth distribution is in rough agreement, but the wealth fraction of the top 20% is significantly less than with the random walk method (the variation in the top 20% most talented can be ignored as that does tend to vary by chance anyway). This difference is large and consistent across multiple simulations. Also, here I'm using the original parameters where the only effect talent has is to determine the chance that an agent will be able to exploit a lucky event. If I have it affect other things (such as whether the event will be lucky at all), then the overall shape of the wealth distribution becomes much more visibly different using that fast method compared to the standard method.
I wondered if maybe these method was just slightly wrong. Maybe the random walk doesn't quite give a true Gaussian event frequency distribution to the agents. Altering the event movement speed certainly makes a big difference, so that seems plausible. Perhaps just slightly more agents experience more events each timestep by the random walk method than by chance alone.
And indeed, my first check seemed to indicate this was plausible. I measured the fraction of timesteps in which the maximum number of events (to individual agents) occuring was 1, 2 or 3 for both methods. The mean fraction of timesteps with a maximum of only 1 event per agent was 33 for the slow method and 40 for the fast method (average of 4 simulations for each method). It seems that the fast method gives slightly fewer cases of multiple events per agent than the random walk approach.
So what I tried for the histograms was to measure the number of agents experiencing different numbers of events (0, 1, 2 or 3) at different timesteps. Tests showed that there were never more than 3 events occuring to any agent, and the number of agents experiencing 3 events is already so small (about 5) that there's not enough data to plot. These distributions (red for the standard method, blue for the fast method) were both obtained from sets of 5 simulations. And they look near as dammit identical to me.
Which means I'm somewhat stumped. There clearly is a difference between the two, but it's damn subtle. Next I'll try measuring the number of lucky and unlucky events rather than events of all kinds.
One thing that did go according to plan was to increase the speed of the random walk check : instead of evaluating the precise distance to each agent, it now only does so if the linear offset in both x and y is less than a specified threshold. This increases the speed by about a factor 3, from 6 minutes to run the simulation to just under 2. Great, but that's still nowhere near the factor 100 difference that the fast method gives...
Code, as always, is here : https://repl.it/@RhysTaylor1/TalentVersusLuck
The standard, original method treats events and agents as objects. The events move around the world randomly. If they overlap with the position of an agent, who are fixed, then the agent experiences that event. The event's type (good or bad) is a fixed property of the event object itself, however tests showed that it made no difference if the event type was reassigned randomly at each timestep.
For the fast method, I measured how many events of all types typically occur during each timestep (running 10 simulations by the random walk method to get a large number of values). This appears to be a good approximation to a Gaussian so I measured the mean and standard deviation. Then at each timestep, a random number (call it X) is drawn from this distribution. Agent numbers are then picked at random X times, so that the same number of events should happen and there's a chance of individual agents experiencing multiple events at the same timestep, just as in the original model.
In practise this seems to only nearly work. You can see below that the overall wealth distribution is in rough agreement, but the wealth fraction of the top 20% is significantly less than with the random walk method (the variation in the top 20% most talented can be ignored as that does tend to vary by chance anyway). This difference is large and consistent across multiple simulations. Also, here I'm using the original parameters where the only effect talent has is to determine the chance that an agent will be able to exploit a lucky event. If I have it affect other things (such as whether the event will be lucky at all), then the overall shape of the wealth distribution becomes much more visibly different using that fast method compared to the standard method.
I wondered if maybe these method was just slightly wrong. Maybe the random walk doesn't quite give a true Gaussian event frequency distribution to the agents. Altering the event movement speed certainly makes a big difference, so that seems plausible. Perhaps just slightly more agents experience more events each timestep by the random walk method than by chance alone.
And indeed, my first check seemed to indicate this was plausible. I measured the fraction of timesteps in which the maximum number of events (to individual agents) occuring was 1, 2 or 3 for both methods. The mean fraction of timesteps with a maximum of only 1 event per agent was 33 for the slow method and 40 for the fast method (average of 4 simulations for each method). It seems that the fast method gives slightly fewer cases of multiple events per agent than the random walk approach.
So what I tried for the histograms was to measure the number of agents experiencing different numbers of events (0, 1, 2 or 3) at different timesteps. Tests showed that there were never more than 3 events occuring to any agent, and the number of agents experiencing 3 events is already so small (about 5) that there's not enough data to plot. These distributions (red for the standard method, blue for the fast method) were both obtained from sets of 5 simulations. And they look near as dammit identical to me.
Which means I'm somewhat stumped. There clearly is a difference between the two, but it's damn subtle. Next I'll try measuring the number of lucky and unlucky events rather than events of all kinds.
One thing that did go according to plan was to increase the speed of the random walk check : instead of evaluating the precise distance to each agent, it now only does so if the linear offset in both x and y is less than a specified threshold. This increases the speed by about a factor 3, from 6 minutes to run the simulation to just under 2. Great, but that's still nowhere near the factor 100 difference that the fast method gives...
Code, as always, is here : https://repl.it/@RhysTaylor1/TalentVersusLuck
Thursday, 20 September 2018
The Fermi paradox : we just haven't searched enough of the sky
Saving to read later. Sounds interesting.
Many articulations of the Fermi Paradox have as a premise, implicitly or explicitly, that humanity has searched for signs of extraterrestrial radio transmissions and concluded that there are few or no obvious ones to be found. Tarter et al. (2010) and others have argued strongly to the contrary: bright and obvious radio beacons might be quite common in the sky, but we would not know it yet because our search completeness to date is so low, akin to having searched a drinking glass's worth of seawater for evidence of fish in all of Earth's oceans. Here, we develop the metaphor of the multidimensional "Cosmic Haystack" through which SETI hunts for alien "needles" into a quantitative, eight-dimensional model and perform an analytic integral to compute the fraction of this haystack that several large radio SETI programs have collectively examined. Although this model haystack has many qualitative differences from the Tarter et al. (2010) haystack, we conclude that the fraction of it searched to date is also very small: similar to the ratio of the volume of a large hot tub or small swimming pool to that of the Earth's oceans. With this article we provide a Python script to calculate haystack volumes for future searches and for similar haystacks with different boundaries. We hope this formalism will aid in the development of a common parameter space for the computation of upper limits and completeness fractions of search programs for radio and other technosignatures.
Without having read it yet I'd say that it makes intuitive sense that we can't place any meaningful limits on the number of alien intelligences in general. But we can confidentially say that there are no Galactic Empires, and I for one still find that worrying. It ought to be easy to colonise the Galaxy on astronomical timescales but it hasn't happened. I don't find any of the proposed solutions to this convincing, not even combinations of solutions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.07252
Many articulations of the Fermi Paradox have as a premise, implicitly or explicitly, that humanity has searched for signs of extraterrestrial radio transmissions and concluded that there are few or no obvious ones to be found. Tarter et al. (2010) and others have argued strongly to the contrary: bright and obvious radio beacons might be quite common in the sky, but we would not know it yet because our search completeness to date is so low, akin to having searched a drinking glass's worth of seawater for evidence of fish in all of Earth's oceans. Here, we develop the metaphor of the multidimensional "Cosmic Haystack" through which SETI hunts for alien "needles" into a quantitative, eight-dimensional model and perform an analytic integral to compute the fraction of this haystack that several large radio SETI programs have collectively examined. Although this model haystack has many qualitative differences from the Tarter et al. (2010) haystack, we conclude that the fraction of it searched to date is also very small: similar to the ratio of the volume of a large hot tub or small swimming pool to that of the Earth's oceans. With this article we provide a Python script to calculate haystack volumes for future searches and for similar haystacks with different boundaries. We hope this formalism will aid in the development of a common parameter space for the computation of upper limits and completeness fractions of search programs for radio and other technosignatures.
Without having read it yet I'd say that it makes intuitive sense that we can't place any meaningful limits on the number of alien intelligences in general. But we can confidentially say that there are no Galactic Empires, and I for one still find that worrying. It ought to be easy to colonise the Galaxy on astronomical timescales but it hasn't happened. I don't find any of the proposed solutions to this convincing, not even combinations of solutions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.07252
Wednesday, 19 September 2018
A ridiculously large cobweb
"The spiders will have their party and will soon die."
Enough said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45572331
Enough said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45572331
Is sugar all that bad for you ?
Nutrition, it turns out, is bloody complicated.
And not everyone agrees that high fructose corn syrup is the driving factor in the obesity crisis. Some experts point out that consumption of the sugar has been declining for the past 10 years in countries including the US, even while obesity levels have been rising. There also are epidemics of obesity and diabetes in areas where there is little or no high fructose corn syrup available, such as Australia and Europe.
One 15-year study... found that people who consumed 25% or more of their daily calories as added sugar were more than twice as likely to die from heart disease than those who consumed less than 10%. Type 2 diabetes also is attributed to added sugar intake. Two large studies in the 1990s found that women who consumed more than one soft drink or fruit juice per day were twice as likely to develop diabetes as those who rarely did so.
But again, it’s unclear if that means sugar actually causes heart disease or diabetes. “More energy intake than energy expenditure will, in the long term, lead to fat deposition, insulin resistance and a fatty liver, whatever the diet composition,” says Luc Tappy, professor of physiology at the University of Lausanne. “In people with a high energy output and a matched energy intake, even a high fructose/sugar diet will be well tolerated.”
Sugar also has been associated with addiction… but this finding, too, may not be what it seems. A review published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2017 cited findings that mice can experience sugar withdrawal and argued that sugar produces similar effects to cocaine, such as craving. But the paper was widely accused of misinterpreting the evidence. One key criticism was that the animals were restricted to having sugar for two hours a day: if you allow them to have it whenever they want it, which reflects how we consume it, they don’t show addiction-like behaviours.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180918-is-sugar-really-bad-for-you
And not everyone agrees that high fructose corn syrup is the driving factor in the obesity crisis. Some experts point out that consumption of the sugar has been declining for the past 10 years in countries including the US, even while obesity levels have been rising. There also are epidemics of obesity and diabetes in areas where there is little or no high fructose corn syrup available, such as Australia and Europe.
One 15-year study... found that people who consumed 25% or more of their daily calories as added sugar were more than twice as likely to die from heart disease than those who consumed less than 10%. Type 2 diabetes also is attributed to added sugar intake. Two large studies in the 1990s found that women who consumed more than one soft drink or fruit juice per day were twice as likely to develop diabetes as those who rarely did so.
But again, it’s unclear if that means sugar actually causes heart disease or diabetes. “More energy intake than energy expenditure will, in the long term, lead to fat deposition, insulin resistance and a fatty liver, whatever the diet composition,” says Luc Tappy, professor of physiology at the University of Lausanne. “In people with a high energy output and a matched energy intake, even a high fructose/sugar diet will be well tolerated.”
Sugar also has been associated with addiction… but this finding, too, may not be what it seems. A review published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2017 cited findings that mice can experience sugar withdrawal and argued that sugar produces similar effects to cocaine, such as craving. But the paper was widely accused of misinterpreting the evidence. One key criticism was that the animals were restricted to having sugar for two hours a day: if you allow them to have it whenever they want it, which reflects how we consume it, they don’t show addiction-like behaviours.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180918-is-sugar-really-bad-for-you
My ideal sociological space mission
Leaving aside any doubts about the feasibility of the project for the moment, this is indeed an awesome project. The car was cooler, but in terms of outreach potential, sending up highly culturally influential people is an obvious (yet masterful - no governmental space agency would ever do this) way to win sustained support.
Were there to be another such publicity stunt, as it will inevitably viewed by the cynics and diehard scientist types who insist that research is the only goal, and were someone somewhere to make a horrible mistake and give me control of the invitees, I'd conduct a psychological experiment. I'd take :
- One Flat Earther, just to see how stupid they are.
- One absolute total cunt of a politician, to see if they can be redeemed.
- One person selected entirely at random from the entire global population, subject to health and age restrictions.
- One person with absolutely no interest in space research whatsoever.
- One person who ticks all of the minority boxes, e.g. a black disabled transgender lesbian divorcee army veteran.
- One person who ticks all the privilege boxes, e.g. a white male caucasion billionaire.
- A complete sci-fi nut.
- Someone's racist grandmother.
I haven't yet decided if they should be kept separate or allowed to interact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mbMAvDu-3g
Were there to be another such publicity stunt, as it will inevitably viewed by the cynics and diehard scientist types who insist that research is the only goal, and were someone somewhere to make a horrible mistake and give me control of the invitees, I'd conduct a psychological experiment. I'd take :
- One Flat Earther, just to see how stupid they are.
- One absolute total cunt of a politician, to see if they can be redeemed.
- One person selected entirely at random from the entire global population, subject to health and age restrictions.
- One person with absolutely no interest in space research whatsoever.
- One person who ticks all of the minority boxes, e.g. a black disabled transgender lesbian divorcee army veteran.
- One person who ticks all the privilege boxes, e.g. a white male caucasion billionaire.
- A complete sci-fi nut.
- Someone's racist grandmother.
I haven't yet decided if they should be kept separate or allowed to interact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mbMAvDu-3g
Tuesday, 18 September 2018
Equal opportunity for murderers
#Feminism, I guess...
With the full name Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday it comes as no surprise that Mademoiselle Corday was an aristocrat. What’s more surprising is that when she became embroiled in the French Revolution, she was essentially on the same side as the man she decided to murder.
She was a Girondin – a moderate branch of the revolutionaries, who were in favour of disbanding the monarchy but against the violent direction the revolution was starting to go in. Her victim, Jean-Paul Marat, was a senior figure in the Jacobin group that she opposed; these were more extreme revolutionaries who later brought about the bloody period known as the Reign of Terror during which over 16,500 people were executed.
In July 1793, she wangled an audience with Marat by claiming to have the names of some traitors, and in an assassination worthy of an Alfred Hitchcock film, she stabbed him while he was in the bath. How did she get in? Apparently, he suffered from a skin condition so it wasn’t unusual for Marat to receive visitors during a wash.
Arrested there and then, at her trial she said she ‘killed one man to save a hundred thousand’, but was executed for the crime four days later, at the age of 24, by guillotine.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/e1c459d3-8c1e-4ad2-8e40-73c354bd4dcb
With the full name Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday it comes as no surprise that Mademoiselle Corday was an aristocrat. What’s more surprising is that when she became embroiled in the French Revolution, she was essentially on the same side as the man she decided to murder.
She was a Girondin – a moderate branch of the revolutionaries, who were in favour of disbanding the monarchy but against the violent direction the revolution was starting to go in. Her victim, Jean-Paul Marat, was a senior figure in the Jacobin group that she opposed; these were more extreme revolutionaries who later brought about the bloody period known as the Reign of Terror during which over 16,500 people were executed.
In July 1793, she wangled an audience with Marat by claiming to have the names of some traitors, and in an assassination worthy of an Alfred Hitchcock film, she stabbed him while he was in the bath. How did she get in? Apparently, he suffered from a skin condition so it wasn’t unusual for Marat to receive visitors during a wash.
Arrested there and then, at her trial she said she ‘killed one man to save a hundred thousand’, but was executed for the crime four days later, at the age of 24, by guillotine.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/e1c459d3-8c1e-4ad2-8e40-73c354bd4dcb
Psychedelic drugs that feel like dying
“My body just didn’t seem relevant anymore," says Iona. "And I felt like I arrived in some consciousness soup which seemed like a different realm to the one I ordinarily inhabit – even in dreams. It just seemed like everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling. It didn’t seem like there were normal space-time proportions going on.”
Iona struggles to put into words exactly what she experienced. But towards the end of the test, she remembers an overwhelming feeling of gratitude that she had survived and a strange sense of reassurance. “I felt a sense that perhaps death isn’t the end – not that I’m religious,” she says.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/dd52796e-5935-414e-af0c-de9686d02afa
Iona struggles to put into words exactly what she experienced. But towards the end of the test, she remembers an overwhelming feeling of gratitude that she had survived and a strange sense of reassurance. “I felt a sense that perhaps death isn’t the end – not that I’m religious,” she says.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/dd52796e-5935-414e-af0c-de9686d02afa
The end of the kilogram
It has but a few more months left of its distinguished life. In November it will be declared no longer the world’s unit of mass. In May – providing there are no objections from the nations that make up the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) – it will be officially stood down. It will go the way of the thumb and the foot and the angelic wings. Instead the kilogram is to be determined – and one has to take a deep breath before launching into this monstrosity of a definition – “by taking the fixed numerical value of the Planck constant h to be 6.62607015×10−34 when expressed in the unit J⋅s, which is equal to kg⋅m2⋅s−1, where the metre and the second are defined in terms of c and ΔνCs.” Whatever this may possibly signify.
There are reasons for all of this, of course. The demands of a world now so dominated by extreme precision are such that metres and kilograms and seconds and units of electricity and light intensity and so on have now to be measured and calibrated in concert, and measured to tolerances that were barely imaginable when the London metal smelters first cast their ingots of platinum, back in the stygian gloom of Victorian times.
I accept all these reasons for change as sensible and meet and proper and right. But in truth I do still feel a small pang of sympathy for the little platinum cylinder. It is a thing of great beauty, and once so lovingly made, yet is now to be tossed away, consigned to a glass case in some unvisited museum, unwanted and unloved for the rest of time. There is something truly pitiful about it, and all that its loss of status suggests. And so yes, I can imagine the feeling of unspeakable melancholy, deep in its little metal soul.
http://bit.ly/2xsJiQD
There are reasons for all of this, of course. The demands of a world now so dominated by extreme precision are such that metres and kilograms and seconds and units of electricity and light intensity and so on have now to be measured and calibrated in concert, and measured to tolerances that were barely imaginable when the London metal smelters first cast their ingots of platinum, back in the stygian gloom of Victorian times.
I accept all these reasons for change as sensible and meet and proper and right. But in truth I do still feel a small pang of sympathy for the little platinum cylinder. It is a thing of great beauty, and once so lovingly made, yet is now to be tossed away, consigned to a glass case in some unvisited museum, unwanted and unloved for the rest of time. There is something truly pitiful about it, and all that its loss of status suggests. And so yes, I can imagine the feeling of unspeakable melancholy, deep in its little metal soul.
http://bit.ly/2xsJiQD
BFR will send artists into space because why the hell not
Get Musk off Twitter and keep him working on cool stuff like this. To hell with robotic probes. To hell with the scientific returns. I want living people doing the exploring, dammit.
Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese entrepreneur, purchased an entire BFR rocket with plans to ask a handful of artists to join him on his journey – artists who can then create works to inspire others to dream.
Arguably, the part no one expected came when Maezawa said that he didn’t want to experience the flight alone. “I want to share this.” Maezawa will invite six to eight artists of different professional and personal backgrounds – artists who represent the whole of humanity – to join him on the lunar flyby mission… with the only stipulation to their involvement being that they create works thereafter that “inspire the dreamer in all of us.”
At the BFR announcement this evening, Mr. Musk and Maezawa confirmed that the primary reason the mission switched to BFR was to increase the number of artists who could join Maezawa on the flight.
(And I bet there'd still be room to take along a robotic lander if anyone really wants one)
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/09/spacex-announces-bfr-lunar-passenger-earths-artists/
Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese entrepreneur, purchased an entire BFR rocket with plans to ask a handful of artists to join him on his journey – artists who can then create works to inspire others to dream.
Arguably, the part no one expected came when Maezawa said that he didn’t want to experience the flight alone. “I want to share this.” Maezawa will invite six to eight artists of different professional and personal backgrounds – artists who represent the whole of humanity – to join him on the lunar flyby mission… with the only stipulation to their involvement being that they create works thereafter that “inspire the dreamer in all of us.”
At the BFR announcement this evening, Mr. Musk and Maezawa confirmed that the primary reason the mission switched to BFR was to increase the number of artists who could join Maezawa on the flight.
(And I bet there'd still be room to take along a robotic lander if anyone really wants one)
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/09/spacex-announces-bfr-lunar-passenger-earths-artists/
Social media isn't the problem with society : its business model is
Well worth a watch. Scroll down for quotes if you don't have a spare 20 minutes.
Google Plus is my only[1] experience of social media[2] and I have to say I've found it to be overwhelmingly positive. What I've found is that while there's practically no-one I agree with completely, there's equally few people I disagree with completely - even those with whom I have profound moral disagreements with on certain issues. If people say something I think is really stupid, I default to just ignoring them[3], because they usually have something intelligent to say on other matters. My blocklist stands at a grand total of 25, which considering I've been here almost since the start, moderate an extremely large community, and aren't shy about posting my political inclinations, isn't all that large (a good fraction of those are spam accounts as well). My policy is to block only in really extreme cases of moral disagreements (e.g. racists), personal insults (towards me - I will disable comments if a flamewar between others starts, but I'll treat the participants as grown-ups who can settle the dispute between themselves elsewhere).
This is not to say it's a utopia, because no large collection of people is going to be utterly wonderful - and I'm not sure that's even possible or desirable. It's good to have experiences of profound disagreement for a variety of reasons : each side might be wrong and learn something from the other; it's at least worth knowing what crazy arguments the other side are coming up with; it's useful to be prepared to deal with "robust conversations" in general. So there are a few people I keep around solely to hear what the other side are thinking, even if I know full well I will never, ever agree with them. But these are rare. Most people having something intelligent to say on something, at least. Generally speaking, if we're able to have a protracted civil conversation about something on which we disagree, then even if I come away still convinced I'm right (but even more especially if I come away realising I was wrong) then I generally follow people as a matter of course.
That said, I'm not going out of my way to latch on to opposing viewpoints for the sake of diversity. I think the best way to do that is to let it happen naturally, finding people with some common interests and by default following them rather than their individual Collections (though these are still very useful for un following purposes, if someone posts a lot of stuff I just don't care about, e.g. pictures of food, or know there's no chance of anything but an argument resulting if we discuss it). I don't feel as if I'm in a filter bubble or echo chamber, or at least, certainly no more strongly than prior to Google Plus. The kind of discussions we have here are the kind I have in the real world, more or less, albeit the Google variety are usually more erudite. What's the point in perpetually preaching to the choir ? None. I expect to convince some people and be convinced by others in turn. That's what conversations are for. Finally, I don't follow any news outlets directly, but only individual people.
[1] Let's not even pretend Google Buzz was a thing, because it wasn't.
[2] OK, and random internet forums and the like, back in the day. I really don't bother much with them any more unless I need to consult specialists. They're not really "social" in the sense that they tend to be highly focused.
[3] There are plenty of other reasons : I might just not have the time or inclination to respond or whatever, so If I ignore you, treat this as an absence of evidence, not evidence that I think you're an idiot.
Anyway, all that rant is by way of preamble. This video is excellent, but the above thoughts were running through my head until near the end. See, it's important to note that it isn't "social media" per se that Lanier is criticising here, it's the particular industry-standard model of social media : basically Facebook. I've never used it, but it sounds like nothing more than a glorified, for-profit combined news and advertising service. Which sounds dreadful.
The reason I never joined Facebook was because all my friends were doing it and they seemed to be doing nothing but constantly checking what everyone else was doing, as though you couldn't just ask them. That didn't appeal to me because I had no spare time to get addicted to anything else (Blender and Medieval II Total War are harsh mistresses). I have absolutely no clue if that's how it still is or if it's really the manipulation engine often described.
Without further ado, some quotes from the transcript, lightly edited for punctuation and whatnot :
Google and Facebook are not doing the manipulating : they're doing the addicting. But the manipulating, which rides on the back of the addicting, is the paying customer of such a company so and and many of those customers are not at all bad influences - they might simply be trying to promote their cars or their perfumes or whatever...
Is it different to just television advertising or billboard advertising or anything else ?
The difference is the constant feedback loop. So when you watch the television the television isn't watching you, when you see the billboard the billboard isn't seeing you, and vast numbers of people see the same thing on television and see the same billboard. When you use these new designs... you're being observed constantly and algorithms are taking that information and changing what you see next, and they're searching and searching and searching and they're just blind robots. There's no evil genius here until they find those patterns, those those little tricks that get you and make you change your behaviour.
Facebook's fundamental design is one that is... it's the business model is to addict you and then offer a channel to you to third parties to take advantage of that to change you in some way without you realising it's happening. That's that's what it does. So I don't think any amount of tweaking can fully heal it. I think it needs a different business plan.
I have never known Trump, but I have met him a few times over a fairly long period - over thirty years actually - through different circumstances, and I will say that while I never would have voted for him as president, and I always thought he was, um, somewhat untrustworthy and a bit of a showman and a bit of a scammer, he never lost himself and became so strangely insecure and so weirdly... irritable until he had his own addiction - in this case to Twitter. And it's it's really damaged him. I mean I I view Trump, in a way, as a victim.
His character has been really damaged by his Twitter addiction because of the reaction he gets from each tweet. What happens in addiction is the addict becomes hooked not just on the good part of the addiction experience, but on the whole cycle. So a gambler is not just addicted to winning but to this whole process, where they mostly lose. And in the same way the Twitter addict or the social media addict becomes addicted to this engagement which is often unpleasant where they're engaged in these really abusive exchanges with other human beings.
Do you think it's possible to create a do-gooding social network ?
Yes I'm absolutely positive. And the way to do it is to have a different business model... so right now we've created this bizarre society that's unprecedented, where if any two people wish to communicate over the Internet the only way that can happen ,the only way it's financed, is through a you're a third party who believes that those two can be manipulated in a sneaky way. It's it's a it's an insane way to structure civilisation.
We can keep all the good stuff - and there is good stuff on social media of course - we can keep all that and just throw away the manipulation business model, and substitute in a different business model. And and there are many alternatives that would be better, they just have to be honest. It could be a paid service like a Netflix, where you're paying for it, you're the genuine customer, it has to keep your interest... it could be like a public library, it could become a public thing that is that isn't commercial at all. That's an option.
But what we did in Silicon Valley is we wanted it both ways. We wanted everything open and free but we wanted hero entrepreneurs and hackers. And so the only way to get that was this advertising thing that that gradually turned into the manipulation engine as the computers got faster. And this this weird business plan... once you can see that there are alternatives you realise how strange it is, and how unsustainable it is, this is the thing we must get rid
of.
We don't have to get rid of the smartphone. We don't have to get rid of the idea of social media. We just have to get rid of the manipulation machine that's in the background.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc_Jq42Og7Q
Google Plus is my only[1] experience of social media[2] and I have to say I've found it to be overwhelmingly positive. What I've found is that while there's practically no-one I agree with completely, there's equally few people I disagree with completely - even those with whom I have profound moral disagreements with on certain issues. If people say something I think is really stupid, I default to just ignoring them[3], because they usually have something intelligent to say on other matters. My blocklist stands at a grand total of 25, which considering I've been here almost since the start, moderate an extremely large community, and aren't shy about posting my political inclinations, isn't all that large (a good fraction of those are spam accounts as well). My policy is to block only in really extreme cases of moral disagreements (e.g. racists), personal insults (towards me - I will disable comments if a flamewar between others starts, but I'll treat the participants as grown-ups who can settle the dispute between themselves elsewhere).
This is not to say it's a utopia, because no large collection of people is going to be utterly wonderful - and I'm not sure that's even possible or desirable. It's good to have experiences of profound disagreement for a variety of reasons : each side might be wrong and learn something from the other; it's at least worth knowing what crazy arguments the other side are coming up with; it's useful to be prepared to deal with "robust conversations" in general. So there are a few people I keep around solely to hear what the other side are thinking, even if I know full well I will never, ever agree with them. But these are rare. Most people having something intelligent to say on something, at least. Generally speaking, if we're able to have a protracted civil conversation about something on which we disagree, then even if I come away still convinced I'm right (but even more especially if I come away realising I was wrong) then I generally follow people as a matter of course.
That said, I'm not going out of my way to latch on to opposing viewpoints for the sake of diversity. I think the best way to do that is to let it happen naturally, finding people with some common interests and by default following them rather than their individual Collections (though these are still very useful for un following purposes, if someone posts a lot of stuff I just don't care about, e.g. pictures of food, or know there's no chance of anything but an argument resulting if we discuss it). I don't feel as if I'm in a filter bubble or echo chamber, or at least, certainly no more strongly than prior to Google Plus. The kind of discussions we have here are the kind I have in the real world, more or less, albeit the Google variety are usually more erudite. What's the point in perpetually preaching to the choir ? None. I expect to convince some people and be convinced by others in turn. That's what conversations are for. Finally, I don't follow any news outlets directly, but only individual people.
[1] Let's not even pretend Google Buzz was a thing, because it wasn't.
[2] OK, and random internet forums and the like, back in the day. I really don't bother much with them any more unless I need to consult specialists. They're not really "social" in the sense that they tend to be highly focused.
[3] There are plenty of other reasons : I might just not have the time or inclination to respond or whatever, so If I ignore you, treat this as an absence of evidence, not evidence that I think you're an idiot.
Anyway, all that rant is by way of preamble. This video is excellent, but the above thoughts were running through my head until near the end. See, it's important to note that it isn't "social media" per se that Lanier is criticising here, it's the particular industry-standard model of social media : basically Facebook. I've never used it, but it sounds like nothing more than a glorified, for-profit combined news and advertising service. Which sounds dreadful.
The reason I never joined Facebook was because all my friends were doing it and they seemed to be doing nothing but constantly checking what everyone else was doing, as though you couldn't just ask them. That didn't appeal to me because I had no spare time to get addicted to anything else (Blender and Medieval II Total War are harsh mistresses). I have absolutely no clue if that's how it still is or if it's really the manipulation engine often described.
Without further ado, some quotes from the transcript, lightly edited for punctuation and whatnot :
Google and Facebook are not doing the manipulating : they're doing the addicting. But the manipulating, which rides on the back of the addicting, is the paying customer of such a company so and and many of those customers are not at all bad influences - they might simply be trying to promote their cars or their perfumes or whatever...
Is it different to just television advertising or billboard advertising or anything else ?
The difference is the constant feedback loop. So when you watch the television the television isn't watching you, when you see the billboard the billboard isn't seeing you, and vast numbers of people see the same thing on television and see the same billboard. When you use these new designs... you're being observed constantly and algorithms are taking that information and changing what you see next, and they're searching and searching and searching and they're just blind robots. There's no evil genius here until they find those patterns, those those little tricks that get you and make you change your behaviour.
Facebook's fundamental design is one that is... it's the business model is to addict you and then offer a channel to you to third parties to take advantage of that to change you in some way without you realising it's happening. That's that's what it does. So I don't think any amount of tweaking can fully heal it. I think it needs a different business plan.
I have never known Trump, but I have met him a few times over a fairly long period - over thirty years actually - through different circumstances, and I will say that while I never would have voted for him as president, and I always thought he was, um, somewhat untrustworthy and a bit of a showman and a bit of a scammer, he never lost himself and became so strangely insecure and so weirdly... irritable until he had his own addiction - in this case to Twitter. And it's it's really damaged him. I mean I I view Trump, in a way, as a victim.
His character has been really damaged by his Twitter addiction because of the reaction he gets from each tweet. What happens in addiction is the addict becomes hooked not just on the good part of the addiction experience, but on the whole cycle. So a gambler is not just addicted to winning but to this whole process, where they mostly lose. And in the same way the Twitter addict or the social media addict becomes addicted to this engagement which is often unpleasant where they're engaged in these really abusive exchanges with other human beings.
Do you think it's possible to create a do-gooding social network ?
Yes I'm absolutely positive. And the way to do it is to have a different business model... so right now we've created this bizarre society that's unprecedented, where if any two people wish to communicate over the Internet the only way that can happen ,the only way it's financed, is through a you're a third party who believes that those two can be manipulated in a sneaky way. It's it's a it's an insane way to structure civilisation.
We can keep all the good stuff - and there is good stuff on social media of course - we can keep all that and just throw away the manipulation business model, and substitute in a different business model. And and there are many alternatives that would be better, they just have to be honest. It could be a paid service like a Netflix, where you're paying for it, you're the genuine customer, it has to keep your interest... it could be like a public library, it could become a public thing that is that isn't commercial at all. That's an option.
But what we did in Silicon Valley is we wanted it both ways. We wanted everything open and free but we wanted hero entrepreneurs and hackers. And so the only way to get that was this advertising thing that that gradually turned into the manipulation engine as the computers got faster. And this this weird business plan... once you can see that there are alternatives you realise how strange it is, and how unsustainable it is, this is the thing we must get rid
of.
We don't have to get rid of the smartphone. We don't have to get rid of the idea of social media. We just have to get rid of the manipulation machine that's in the background.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc_Jq42Og7Q
Could Proxima b be habitable ?
Of course these are just simulations. The next challenge is surely to establish if any of these scenarios are likely to actually occur : they could conceivably all be highly improbable.
However, as they indicate in their study, there are many possible scenarios in which Proxima b could still support life. What's more, there is a range of uncertainty when it comes to the things that are hostile to life that could provide Proxima b with some wiggle-room. According to Del Genio, these include the possibility that Proxima b formed farther away from its star and gradually migrated inward, which would mean it was not subject to early harsh conditions.
Second, it might have formed with ten times the water that Earth did; so even if Proxima Centauri's harsh radiation stripped away 90% of its water, it would still have enough water to have an ocean. It also could have formed with a thick hydrogen envelop which could have been stripped away, leaving behind a "habitable core" of an atmosphere.
They also found that in the case of a tidally-locked planet, heat transport between the sun-facing side and dark side could also allow the whole planet to be habitable.
https://phys.org/news/2018-09-closest-planet-solar-habitable-dayside.html
However, as they indicate in their study, there are many possible scenarios in which Proxima b could still support life. What's more, there is a range of uncertainty when it comes to the things that are hostile to life that could provide Proxima b with some wiggle-room. According to Del Genio, these include the possibility that Proxima b formed farther away from its star and gradually migrated inward, which would mean it was not subject to early harsh conditions.
Second, it might have formed with ten times the water that Earth did; so even if Proxima Centauri's harsh radiation stripped away 90% of its water, it would still have enough water to have an ocean. It also could have formed with a thick hydrogen envelop which could have been stripped away, leaving behind a "habitable core" of an atmosphere.
They also found that in the case of a tidally-locked planet, heat transport between the sun-facing side and dark side could also allow the whole planet to be habitable.
https://phys.org/news/2018-09-closest-planet-solar-habitable-dayside.html
The glaciers of Ceres
Dear Phys.org
I've installed a "copy as plain text" extension for Chrome to prevent your truly staggeringly stupid "feature" of automatically including "read more at phys.org." when copying text from your otherwise decent website. I can only imagine that this oddity must have occurred due to an unfortunate drunken escaped that resulted in hiring a particularly unskilled donkey as a web designer, or something, because it makes literally no sense at all. You ought to fire that donkey at once.
Sincerely,
Me.
Anywho...
Because Ceres is made of both rock and ice, Sori pursued the theory that formations on the dwarf planet flow and move under their own weight, similar to how glaciers move on Earth. The formations' composition and temperature would affect how quickly they relax into the surrounding landscape. The more ice in a formation, the faster it flows; the lower the temperature, the slower it flows.
"Ceres' poles are cold enough that if you start with a mountain of ice, it doesn't relax," Sori said. "But the equator is warm enough that a mountain of ice might relax over geological timescales."
To prove the computer simulations had played out in reality, Sori scoured topographic observations from the Dawn spacecraft, which has been orbiting Ceres since 2015, to find landforms that matched the models. Across the 1 million square miles of Cerean surface, Sori and his team found 22 mountains including Ahuna Mons that looked exactly like the simulation's predictions. "The really exciting part that made us think this might be real is that we found only one mountain at the pole," Sori said. Though it is old and battered by impacts, the polar mountain, dubbed Yamor Mons, has the same overall shape as Ahuna Mons. It is five times wider than it is tall, giving it an aspect ratio of 0.2. Mountains found elsewhere on Ceres have lower aspect ratios, just as the models predicted: they are much wider than they are tall.
https://phys.org/news/2018-09-ceres-life-ice-volcano.html
I've installed a "copy as plain text" extension for Chrome to prevent your truly staggeringly stupid "feature" of automatically including "read more at phys.org." when copying text from your otherwise decent website. I can only imagine that this oddity must have occurred due to an unfortunate drunken escaped that resulted in hiring a particularly unskilled donkey as a web designer, or something, because it makes literally no sense at all. You ought to fire that donkey at once.
Sincerely,
Me.
Anywho...
Because Ceres is made of both rock and ice, Sori pursued the theory that formations on the dwarf planet flow and move under their own weight, similar to how glaciers move on Earth. The formations' composition and temperature would affect how quickly they relax into the surrounding landscape. The more ice in a formation, the faster it flows; the lower the temperature, the slower it flows.
"Ceres' poles are cold enough that if you start with a mountain of ice, it doesn't relax," Sori said. "But the equator is warm enough that a mountain of ice might relax over geological timescales."
To prove the computer simulations had played out in reality, Sori scoured topographic observations from the Dawn spacecraft, which has been orbiting Ceres since 2015, to find landforms that matched the models. Across the 1 million square miles of Cerean surface, Sori and his team found 22 mountains including Ahuna Mons that looked exactly like the simulation's predictions. "The really exciting part that made us think this might be real is that we found only one mountain at the pole," Sori said. Though it is old and battered by impacts, the polar mountain, dubbed Yamor Mons, has the same overall shape as Ahuna Mons. It is five times wider than it is tall, giving it an aspect ratio of 0.2. Mountains found elsewhere on Ceres have lower aspect ratios, just as the models predicted: they are much wider than they are tall.
https://phys.org/news/2018-09-ceres-life-ice-volcano.html
SpaceX's first paying passenger
Elon Musk's company SpaceX has unveiled the first private passenger it plans to fly around the Moon.Japanese billionaire, entrepreneur and online fashion tycoon Yusaku Maezawa, 42, announced: "I choose to go to the Moon".
He is expected to lift-off on the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), a launch system unveiled by Mr Musk in 2016. The mission will mark the first visit to the Moon by humans since Nasa's Apollo 17 landing in 1972. However, the timeline for this launch remains unclear, and it relies on a rocket that hasn't been built yet.
On Monday, Mr Musk unveiled new artist impressions of the BFR and the spaceship which will carry passengers around the Moon. It appeared to confirm some design changes to the spaceship, including three large fins near the back and a black heat-shield on the craft's underside. Eventually, the BFR should be able to lift a whopping 150 tonnes into low-Earth orbit - that is more than the US Saturn V rockets that lofted the Apollo spacecraft.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45550755
He is expected to lift-off on the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), a launch system unveiled by Mr Musk in 2016. The mission will mark the first visit to the Moon by humans since Nasa's Apollo 17 landing in 1972. However, the timeline for this launch remains unclear, and it relies on a rocket that hasn't been built yet.
On Monday, Mr Musk unveiled new artist impressions of the BFR and the spaceship which will carry passengers around the Moon. It appeared to confirm some design changes to the spaceship, including three large fins near the back and a black heat-shield on the craft's underside. Eventually, the BFR should be able to lift a whopping 150 tonnes into low-Earth orbit - that is more than the US Saturn V rockets that lofted the Apollo spacecraft.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45550755
If AI is so amazing, why does this keep happening ?
AI is easily defeated by birds on bikes and account names that start with SEX SEX SEX, for crying out loud.
Originally shared by Sakari Maaranen
Hey Google, I have many times heard how you consider yourselves some kind of science fiction superstars or similar. Here's a #ScienceTip for you: When a Google+ comment starts with the word "sex" repeated three times in capital letters, it is porn spam. If you do not know how to deal with it, allow me offer you another scientifically awesome tip: Delete it. I hope your science wonder system has a fantastic filter for that. Or maybe you like porn spam and I am just missing something?
Originally shared by Sakari Maaranen
Hey Google, I have many times heard how you consider yourselves some kind of science fiction superstars or similar. Here's a #ScienceTip for you: When a Google+ comment starts with the word "sex" repeated three times in capital letters, it is porn spam. If you do not know how to deal with it, allow me offer you another scientifically awesome tip: Delete it. I hope your science wonder system has a fantastic filter for that. Or maybe you like porn spam and I am just missing something?
Monday, 17 September 2018
AI can be stopped by pictures of birds riding bicycles
So much for the robot uprising.
Google wants pictures of bicycles and birds that can defeat image-recognition algorithms, as part of a contest launched to improve the technology. While it is easy for humans to tell the difference between birds and bikes, computer systems can struggle to do so. Prize money will be awarded for pictures that can fool image-recognition algorithms, or for new code that cannot be easily fooled. But pictures of birds riding bicycles will not be allowed in the contest.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45547805
Google wants pictures of bicycles and birds that can defeat image-recognition algorithms, as part of a contest launched to improve the technology. While it is easy for humans to tell the difference between birds and bikes, computer systems can struggle to do so. Prize money will be awarded for pictures that can fool image-recognition algorithms, or for new code that cannot be easily fooled. But pictures of birds riding bicycles will not be allowed in the contest.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45547805
The heroism of the foreign pilots fighting in the Battle of Britain
He was "remarkable - some thought a little crazy", wrote the historians Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud. A Czech "who flew with a fury none of the others could match". Josef Frantisek has been credited with shooting down 17 enemy aircraft in one month at the height of the Battle of Britain - September 1940 - as Hitler sought to achieve the air superiority he needed to invade the UK. The Imperial War Museum calls Frantisek the "top scorer" of the Battle of Britain, and he is generally considered to be one of the top scorers of the entire war, despite his death in its very early stages.
His courage, says Devitt, like that of the Polish pilots around him, may have come from a sense of having "nothing to lose" given what had happened to his home country. But Devitt also points out that 303 Squadron lost fewer pilots during the Battle of Britain than most RAF units.
What marked Frantisek out was his habit of breaking away from strict squadron formation to chase enemy planes on his own, often pursuing stragglers back across the Channel towards France... there came about what Devitt calls a "remarkable compromise". Frantisek was given permission to take off with 303 Squadron as a kind of "guest" who could head off on his own. "The Czech ace was permitted to fight what was in effect a private war against the Germans," Devitt says.
The squadron's impressive record did not go unnoticed. "Had it not been for the magnificent material contributed by the Polish squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry," wrote Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, head of RAF Fighter Command, "I hesitate to say that the outcome of the Battle (of Britain) would have been the same."
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-45516556
His courage, says Devitt, like that of the Polish pilots around him, may have come from a sense of having "nothing to lose" given what had happened to his home country. But Devitt also points out that 303 Squadron lost fewer pilots during the Battle of Britain than most RAF units.
What marked Frantisek out was his habit of breaking away from strict squadron formation to chase enemy planes on his own, often pursuing stragglers back across the Channel towards France... there came about what Devitt calls a "remarkable compromise". Frantisek was given permission to take off with 303 Squadron as a kind of "guest" who could head off on his own. "The Czech ace was permitted to fight what was in effect a private war against the Germans," Devitt says.
The squadron's impressive record did not go unnoticed. "Had it not been for the magnificent material contributed by the Polish squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry," wrote Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, head of RAF Fighter Command, "I hesitate to say that the outcome of the Battle (of Britain) would have been the same."
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-45516556
On Ethics
Originally shared by Event Horizon
On Ethics
A few days ago I had an interesting conversation with someone about the relationship between religion-as-moral-compass and secular ethics. The relativity of all collective ethical and personal moral systems seems to imply that even if we were able to agree on baselines and universal standards of behaviour across all cultures, ideologies or religions that there would still exist problematic behaviours, and for a variety of reasons.
In regards to the notion of either religious or secular ethical frameworks, rules-based systems are always already prone to the diverse vicissitudes of self-interested interpretations and axiomatic-interpretive drift over time. Lawyers as much as theologians are masters of reinterpreting logical frameworks for their own self-interested purposes and beyond the overall historical and semantic changes which are inevitable as a matter of any dynamic and complex organic, social or (otherwise) communications system, there always exist loopholes and wiggle-room for miscreants to retrospectively justify their actions.
Further issues include that over the longer (although perhaps also actively shrinking) historical time scales, the referenced axiomatic-interpretive drift can cause activities once considered abhorrent to become quite de rigueur. Nietzschean proclamations of a "death of God" are very often entirely misinterpreted: the inaccessibility of a metaphysical world or reality does not become genuinely problematic until that historical inflection point at which it becomes clear through rationality and science that metaphysical explanations are not only logically implausible, science has rendered them as entirely unnecessary. Needless to say that this represents a cultural and ideological incision that has never since found sufficient sutures or remedy and from which the divisive consequences are yet to find sufficient detente.
The schism brought about by this critical difference and distance between ethical frameworks derived (or derivable) from religion and scientific rationality is one that worried Nietzsche because he saw quite clearly that the casting aside of this particular kind of metaphysical anchor would leave us collectively beyond any single, perhaps simple, unifying moral code - and then all that this entails. It is difficult to determine whether or not the chaos expected to befall us has indeed occurred. Religion itself has been, for all of its moral posturing and when in the wrong hands, a source of much that is clearly wicked. This is not my target here though; I have a specific question:
Can a secular system of ethics provide a sufficient moral code in itself, as an emergent property or logically well-formulated rules-set, when we have achieved sufficient logical sophistication to now know that any such formally-defined (and non-trivially complex) system of thought must always contain unprovable statements ?
The implicit inconsistency of sufficiently complex logical systems implies that ethical systems, abandoned by the metaphysical anchor of immanent divinity, must seek their own internal anchors and logical certainty. This is clearly not only a problem for ethical systems but as a most-obviously life-experience-relevant consequence of formally-coded behavioural parameters, the (other) questions derivable from this consideration may be profound.
If, for instance, some legal wit with theorem-proving software can determine some peculiar legal exception in a secular (ok, yes - it doesn't strictly-speaking need to be secular) system which makes something notionally outrageous perfectly admissible, does that make it a legally-binding precedent or a situation in which systemic axioms finds themselves under question and in need of a good wax and polish ? Some semi-random silly examples: if it becomes perfectly permissible to club baby seals (but only) on Sunday afternoons; to cause offensive hate crimes to become legal if the offender is wearing a yellow-feathered chicken suit while spouting spite; or, for a President to pardon themselves for treason; due to the procedural decompression and logical unpacking of legal theorems, do we accept these unforeseen consequences as inevitable and permissible under ethics or law ?
The endpoint of this particular algorithmic narrative is that, having discarded the logically problematic Wild Card of metaphysical foundation (and Divinity, however one interprets that Concept) we find ourselves with no "out", no simple sense in which we can introduce immanent externalities and radical reorientations or remediative claims to our systems of thought. We find ourselves abandoned (albeit by Something that may never have been) and left to find clever ways to restructure the ethical (and by extension - legal) conundrums of a pure rationality. The cost of discarding metaphysics for rationality is that, much like that of attaining personal and social maturity, we are very much (for better or for worse) left to our own devices. Being left both with and to our own inventions, it seems to me that as a pathological conservative adherence to strict ethical standards is (among other things) an unacknowledged reflexive response to the existential crisis imbued by the erasure of metaphysical anchors for ethical frameworks and their attributed moral compasses, this should also represent an opportunity and aperture of access or leverage for clever analysis and effective tactical, philosophical assertion.
Wally Funk and the sexist space race
Wally Funk was one of the Mercury 13 but she has [still] not given up. The youngest of the group, she had been a flight instructor at Fort Sill military base in Oklahoma when she discovered that a privately funded programme wanted to see if women also had the right stuff for space. It was led by Dr Randolph Lovelace, chairman of NASA’s Life Sciences Committee for Project Mercury and the man who had helped devise America’s first astronaut tests.
The tests ranged from exercising until the point of collapse, swallowing a one metre long piece of rubber tubing to measure the stomach’s gastric juices, and having ice water dripped into their ears – a process so unpleasant it often made people lose control of their body. During the isolation test, which could mess with people’s minds, she performed better than all the potential astronauts – male and female. She remained in a dark soundproof room, floating in water, for 10 hours and 35 minutes. They ended the test. Not her.
When you get to the stage of demolishing all objective tests and they still don't take you seriously, there really isn't any explanation but endemic sexism.
Tereshkova also faced significant distrust within the space industry with rumours undermining her achievements circulating for several decades. Many were from Soviet scientists who reported that Tereshkova had had last-minute nerves and vomited in space. This implication was that nausea, a common side effect of space travel, was a sign of weakness.
Even Chris Kraft, NASA’s first flight director for human spaceflight, judged Tereshkova harshly. “Their first woman was an absolute basket case when she was in orbit and they were damned lucky to get her back,” Kraft told me in 1997, after I had asked why NASA didn’t select female astronauts in the 1960s. The US space agency didn’t admit women into its astronaut corps until 1978. “She was nothing but hysterical while she flew,” Kraft replied. “How do you know we wouldn’t have gotten into that situation as well?”
The reality, of course, was somewhat different. In 2004 the (now) professor of engineering revealed that during her flight she had noticed that her spacecraft, Vostok 6, was pointing in the wrong direction on entering orbit. There had been an error in the automatic orientation system. This meant that, if she was instructed to fire the retrorockets on returning to Earth, the spacecraft would have been propelled into a higher orbit and Tereshkova would have died in space from starvation.
Instead Tereshkova informed ground control and, once confirmed, they sent commands to correct the problem. I heard Tereshkova speak in London’s Science Museum in 2015, when her spacecraft was being exhibited. She had kept this potentially fatal problem a secret for over thirty years so that the engineer responsible was not punished.
Once commercial spaceflight is underway, the number of female astronauts will increase even further. Funk hopes to be one of them. In 2010 she bought a $200,000 ticket from Virgin Galactic to fly on board their spaceplane SpaceShipTwo. Their first passenger flight is expected within the next year. Funk hopes to be on board. An astronaut at last.
http://bit.ly/2D5o29P
The tests ranged from exercising until the point of collapse, swallowing a one metre long piece of rubber tubing to measure the stomach’s gastric juices, and having ice water dripped into their ears – a process so unpleasant it often made people lose control of their body. During the isolation test, which could mess with people’s minds, she performed better than all the potential astronauts – male and female. She remained in a dark soundproof room, floating in water, for 10 hours and 35 minutes. They ended the test. Not her.
When you get to the stage of demolishing all objective tests and they still don't take you seriously, there really isn't any explanation but endemic sexism.
Tereshkova also faced significant distrust within the space industry with rumours undermining her achievements circulating for several decades. Many were from Soviet scientists who reported that Tereshkova had had last-minute nerves and vomited in space. This implication was that nausea, a common side effect of space travel, was a sign of weakness.
Even Chris Kraft, NASA’s first flight director for human spaceflight, judged Tereshkova harshly. “Their first woman was an absolute basket case when she was in orbit and they were damned lucky to get her back,” Kraft told me in 1997, after I had asked why NASA didn’t select female astronauts in the 1960s. The US space agency didn’t admit women into its astronaut corps until 1978. “She was nothing but hysterical while she flew,” Kraft replied. “How do you know we wouldn’t have gotten into that situation as well?”
The reality, of course, was somewhat different. In 2004 the (now) professor of engineering revealed that during her flight she had noticed that her spacecraft, Vostok 6, was pointing in the wrong direction on entering orbit. There had been an error in the automatic orientation system. This meant that, if she was instructed to fire the retrorockets on returning to Earth, the spacecraft would have been propelled into a higher orbit and Tereshkova would have died in space from starvation.
Instead Tereshkova informed ground control and, once confirmed, they sent commands to correct the problem. I heard Tereshkova speak in London’s Science Museum in 2015, when her spacecraft was being exhibited. She had kept this potentially fatal problem a secret for over thirty years so that the engineer responsible was not punished.
Once commercial spaceflight is underway, the number of female astronauts will increase even further. Funk hopes to be one of them. In 2010 she bought a $200,000 ticket from Virgin Galactic to fly on board their spaceplane SpaceShipTwo. Their first passenger flight is expected within the next year. Funk hopes to be on board. An astronaut at last.
http://bit.ly/2D5o29P
The inner self and the language of thought
See via lots of people. Another case of anti-clickbait, where the headline suggests something dull and plodding but it actually turns out to be really interesting.
The fact that thoughts often emerge in complete sentences is something I've wondered about for a long time. But they don't always do this, there's a definite phase - especially with complex problems - when things make sense but they're hard to articulate linguistically. Language is just a description of reality, not reality itself (I remain highly uncertain as to if and how, and how much, this applies to mathematics). Therefore the power of language is, I think, only partly in enabling different ideas in the first place. That is, linguistic descriptions may somewhat indirectly evoke different mental processes at a much deeper, non-linguistic level, as can direct observation and thinking. Our mental selves are multidimensional constructs of which our inner voices and consciousness are just one aspect, albeit a very important one. Thoughts flow between each other and throughout the external world; they shape and are shaped by our actions. In magnitude if not in influence, our conscious mental self is like the crest of a wave atop a deep ocean.
Language is much more important not in generating and enabling new concepts, but in transmitting and recording complex ideas. Once the key mental breakthrough has been made, it can be recorded and shared and so becomes exceptionally hard to kill. In contrast, ideas which never emerge from that formless mental void, that are never captured in the crystalline structure of language, are much more vulnerable to destruction by stray photons and random pictures of cuddly kitties.
Or maybe it's all nonsense. Anyway, here are some quotes :
A leader of that era was the American psychologist Laura Berk, professor emeritus at Illinois State University, an expert on childhood play. Berk observed children engage in imaginative, ‘make-believe’ play, and demonstrated that the substitution of objects – say a cup for a hat – requires internal thought (and self-talk) rather than impulse. Her studies show that during imaginative play, children’s self-talk helps them guide their own thoughts and behaviour and exert true self-control. She and many other child psychologists demonstrated the importance of the inner voice, beyond a doubt, elevating Vygotsky and burying Piaget for good.
Descriptive Experience Sampling requires careful skill to capture these kinds of experiences accurately – what Hurlburt terms, ‘high-fidelity, pristine’ inner speech as it naturally occurs. Freed from the mundane confines of a laboratory, the data come from ‘the wild’, as Hurlburt puts it. A participant wears the beeper, which can go off at any moment throughout the day. They go about their daily activities and are likely to forget its presence. When the beeper does go off, the participant makes a careful note of exactly what their inner experience was immediately beforehand. Subsequently, they are questioned by Hurlburt about that experience in a thorough but open-ended interview.
He takes care not to bias the participant in any way. ‘There are a lot of people who believe that you talk to yourself all of the time, so that’s a form of external pressure to say you were inner speaking when maybe you weren’t,’ he notes. For example, noted consciousness researcher Bernard Baars has asserted that ‘overt speech takes up perhaps a tenth of the waking day; but inner speech goes on all the time’. Hurlburt’s research shows this isn’t true; he finds that inner speech consumes about 25 per cent of an average person’s day, and thus, he is careful to not communicate any assumption about what type of inner experience a DES interviewee may have had at the time of the beep.
Hurlburt has found that we typically self-talk in voices we regard as our own and, though silent, we attribute to these voices sonic characteristics such as tone, pitch and pacing. We invest them with emotional qualities similar to external speech. Finally, inner speech mostly occurs in complete sentences and is nearly always actively produced rather than passively experienced.
Much as visual thought is similar to but distinct from actual visual perception, I guess. You can't be deafened by an imaginary sound or blinded by an imaginary light.
The second broad category of inner speech defined by Fernyhough is considerably more mysterious and enigmatic. He calls it ‘condensed’ inner speech, borne out of Vygotsky’s belief that as speech becomes internalised it can undergo profound transformations that set it distinctly apart from the expanded version. Condensed inner speech is defined as a highly abbreviated and ungrammatical version of regular speech. Although possibly linguistic – comprised of words – it is not intended to be communicated or even understood by others.
Hurlburt says inner speech can indeed involve elimination of words entirely, while the linguistic experience remains intact. ‘Sometimes there are words that are missing – “holes” in your inner speech. Sometimes the whole thing [all words] are missing and yet you still experience yourself speaking,’ he states. In this case, the person reports the experience of speaking, including its production, sense of loudness, pace etc, and senses what is being said but does not experience any words in their usual sense.
All this leads to another, confounding question: are verbal thoughts reaching awareness just the tip of a mental iceberg, offering only a glimpse of the unconscious mind?
Yes.
The possibility was posed by Vygotsky, but Fernyhough doesn’t like going there: ‘When we are talking about thinking, we are talking about conscious processes".
Nope.
https://aeon.co/essays/our-inner-narrator-gives-us-continuity-and-a-sense-of-self
The fact that thoughts often emerge in complete sentences is something I've wondered about for a long time. But they don't always do this, there's a definite phase - especially with complex problems - when things make sense but they're hard to articulate linguistically. Language is just a description of reality, not reality itself (I remain highly uncertain as to if and how, and how much, this applies to mathematics). Therefore the power of language is, I think, only partly in enabling different ideas in the first place. That is, linguistic descriptions may somewhat indirectly evoke different mental processes at a much deeper, non-linguistic level, as can direct observation and thinking. Our mental selves are multidimensional constructs of which our inner voices and consciousness are just one aspect, albeit a very important one. Thoughts flow between each other and throughout the external world; they shape and are shaped by our actions. In magnitude if not in influence, our conscious mental self is like the crest of a wave atop a deep ocean.
Language is much more important not in generating and enabling new concepts, but in transmitting and recording complex ideas. Once the key mental breakthrough has been made, it can be recorded and shared and so becomes exceptionally hard to kill. In contrast, ideas which never emerge from that formless mental void, that are never captured in the crystalline structure of language, are much more vulnerable to destruction by stray photons and random pictures of cuddly kitties.
Or maybe it's all nonsense. Anyway, here are some quotes :
A leader of that era was the American psychologist Laura Berk, professor emeritus at Illinois State University, an expert on childhood play. Berk observed children engage in imaginative, ‘make-believe’ play, and demonstrated that the substitution of objects – say a cup for a hat – requires internal thought (and self-talk) rather than impulse. Her studies show that during imaginative play, children’s self-talk helps them guide their own thoughts and behaviour and exert true self-control. She and many other child psychologists demonstrated the importance of the inner voice, beyond a doubt, elevating Vygotsky and burying Piaget for good.
Descriptive Experience Sampling requires careful skill to capture these kinds of experiences accurately – what Hurlburt terms, ‘high-fidelity, pristine’ inner speech as it naturally occurs. Freed from the mundane confines of a laboratory, the data come from ‘the wild’, as Hurlburt puts it. A participant wears the beeper, which can go off at any moment throughout the day. They go about their daily activities and are likely to forget its presence. When the beeper does go off, the participant makes a careful note of exactly what their inner experience was immediately beforehand. Subsequently, they are questioned by Hurlburt about that experience in a thorough but open-ended interview.
He takes care not to bias the participant in any way. ‘There are a lot of people who believe that you talk to yourself all of the time, so that’s a form of external pressure to say you were inner speaking when maybe you weren’t,’ he notes. For example, noted consciousness researcher Bernard Baars has asserted that ‘overt speech takes up perhaps a tenth of the waking day; but inner speech goes on all the time’. Hurlburt’s research shows this isn’t true; he finds that inner speech consumes about 25 per cent of an average person’s day, and thus, he is careful to not communicate any assumption about what type of inner experience a DES interviewee may have had at the time of the beep.
Hurlburt has found that we typically self-talk in voices we regard as our own and, though silent, we attribute to these voices sonic characteristics such as tone, pitch and pacing. We invest them with emotional qualities similar to external speech. Finally, inner speech mostly occurs in complete sentences and is nearly always actively produced rather than passively experienced.
Much as visual thought is similar to but distinct from actual visual perception, I guess. You can't be deafened by an imaginary sound or blinded by an imaginary light.
The second broad category of inner speech defined by Fernyhough is considerably more mysterious and enigmatic. He calls it ‘condensed’ inner speech, borne out of Vygotsky’s belief that as speech becomes internalised it can undergo profound transformations that set it distinctly apart from the expanded version. Condensed inner speech is defined as a highly abbreviated and ungrammatical version of regular speech. Although possibly linguistic – comprised of words – it is not intended to be communicated or even understood by others.
Hurlburt says inner speech can indeed involve elimination of words entirely, while the linguistic experience remains intact. ‘Sometimes there are words that are missing – “holes” in your inner speech. Sometimes the whole thing [all words] are missing and yet you still experience yourself speaking,’ he states. In this case, the person reports the experience of speaking, including its production, sense of loudness, pace etc, and senses what is being said but does not experience any words in their usual sense.
All this leads to another, confounding question: are verbal thoughts reaching awareness just the tip of a mental iceberg, offering only a glimpse of the unconscious mind?
Yes.
The possibility was posed by Vygotsky, but Fernyhough doesn’t like going there: ‘When we are talking about thinking, we are talking about conscious processes".
Nope.
https://aeon.co/essays/our-inner-narrator-gives-us-continuity-and-a-sense-of-self
Humans are not programmable machines, but they might be hackable animals
I disagree with the premise that we don't have free will (one day I'll get around to explaining why, but not today), but it's an interesting read nevertheless.
Liberalism has developed an impressive arsenal of arguments and institutions to defend individual freedoms against external attacks from oppressive governments and bigoted religions, but it is unprepared for a situation when individual freedom is subverted from within, and when the very concepts of “individual” and “freedom” no longer make much sense. In order to survive and prosper in the 21st century, we need to leave behind the naive view of humans as free individuals – a view inherited from Christian theology as much as from the modern Enlightenment – and come to terms with what humans really are: hackable animals. We need to know ourselves better.
How does liberal democracy function in an era when governments and corporations can hack humans? What’s left of the beliefs that “the voter knows best” and “the customer is always right”? How do you live when you realise that you are a hackable animal, that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? These are the most interesting questions humanity now faces.
So what to do? We need to fight on two fronts simultaneously. We should defend liberal democracy, not only because it has proved to be a more benign form of government than any of its alternatives, but also because it places the fewest limitations on debating the future of humanity. At the same time, we need to question the traditional assumptions of liberalism, and develop a new political project that is better in line with the scientific realities and technological powers of the 21st century.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-harari-the-new-threat-to-liberal-democracy
Liberalism has developed an impressive arsenal of arguments and institutions to defend individual freedoms against external attacks from oppressive governments and bigoted religions, but it is unprepared for a situation when individual freedom is subverted from within, and when the very concepts of “individual” and “freedom” no longer make much sense. In order to survive and prosper in the 21st century, we need to leave behind the naive view of humans as free individuals – a view inherited from Christian theology as much as from the modern Enlightenment – and come to terms with what humans really are: hackable animals. We need to know ourselves better.
How does liberal democracy function in an era when governments and corporations can hack humans? What’s left of the beliefs that “the voter knows best” and “the customer is always right”? How do you live when you realise that you are a hackable animal, that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? These are the most interesting questions humanity now faces.
So what to do? We need to fight on two fronts simultaneously. We should defend liberal democracy, not only because it has proved to be a more benign form of government than any of its alternatives, but also because it places the fewest limitations on debating the future of humanity. At the same time, we need to question the traditional assumptions of liberalism, and develop a new political project that is better in line with the scientific realities and technological powers of the 21st century.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-harari-the-new-threat-to-liberal-democracy
The vital differences between emotions and feelings
Emotions and feelings are two different things. Emotions turn out to be programs in our brain that we inherited through evolution that are devoted to the management of our life. Emotions are action programs. When you have fear, your face becomes startled, your body posture changes, your heart races, your gut contracts, your pulse races as well, your respiration changes and on and on. All of that is an action program that exists not just in our brain, but in the brains of many other species.
These programs achieve something very important. For example, fear allows you to take action, even without thinking, so that you can remove yourself from harm’s way. There are emotion programs that are negative on the surface, such as fear or anger, but that nonetheless are very positive in the outcome that they produced for us. Probably fear has saved more lives than any other emotion.
The very important thing to remember is that feelings are not those action programs. Feelings are what you perceive in your mind as a result of being in a state of emotion. Although in everyday language, we confuse one with the other, it’s important — and you have no idea how important this is for research strategy — it’s important to distinguish between an action program that does not even need to be conscious, that animals as have, from feelings. Feelings are conscious and feed this enormously beautiful edifice that we call culture.
Some of the most interesting emotions have to do with social, or so-called moral, emotions. If we are really going to be active in education in a globalized world and promote a state of peaceful coexistence, a state where creativity really can be liberated in a world that is filled with conflict and with difficulties of all sorts — from social difficulties to the difficulties that come with a highly broken financial and industrial world — we’re going to have to do something that goes beyond increasing knowledge, efficiency and skills.
We need to be able to educate citizens that are a tribute to humanity and make humanity better. Can you do that just by knowing a lot? No. Can you do that by just being efficient, or by being a mathematical prodigy? No. Can you do that by being a fantastic and capable engineer who will develop new technological capabilities? No.
In a study that is ongoing in our lab, our group has been able to contrast brain states when you’re having admiration for virtue, when you’re having compassion for social pain, when you’re having compassion for physical pain, and when you have admiration for skill. These things are fundamental in our understanding of what human beings are. They are fundamental in the organization of a culture and the means to improve it. They are the means to have a better life, and are related to different brain states.
https://brainworldmagazine.com/neuroscience-helps-us-understand-human-nature/
These programs achieve something very important. For example, fear allows you to take action, even without thinking, so that you can remove yourself from harm’s way. There are emotion programs that are negative on the surface, such as fear or anger, but that nonetheless are very positive in the outcome that they produced for us. Probably fear has saved more lives than any other emotion.
The very important thing to remember is that feelings are not those action programs. Feelings are what you perceive in your mind as a result of being in a state of emotion. Although in everyday language, we confuse one with the other, it’s important — and you have no idea how important this is for research strategy — it’s important to distinguish between an action program that does not even need to be conscious, that animals as have, from feelings. Feelings are conscious and feed this enormously beautiful edifice that we call culture.
Some of the most interesting emotions have to do with social, or so-called moral, emotions. If we are really going to be active in education in a globalized world and promote a state of peaceful coexistence, a state where creativity really can be liberated in a world that is filled with conflict and with difficulties of all sorts — from social difficulties to the difficulties that come with a highly broken financial and industrial world — we’re going to have to do something that goes beyond increasing knowledge, efficiency and skills.
We need to be able to educate citizens that are a tribute to humanity and make humanity better. Can you do that just by knowing a lot? No. Can you do that by just being efficient, or by being a mathematical prodigy? No. Can you do that by being a fantastic and capable engineer who will develop new technological capabilities? No.
In a study that is ongoing in our lab, our group has been able to contrast brain states when you’re having admiration for virtue, when you’re having compassion for social pain, when you’re having compassion for physical pain, and when you have admiration for skill. These things are fundamental in our understanding of what human beings are. They are fundamental in the organization of a culture and the means to improve it. They are the means to have a better life, and are related to different brain states.
https://brainworldmagazine.com/neuroscience-helps-us-understand-human-nature/
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