Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment -
computational ecology -
may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence.
To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.
‘There are times, ‘when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’
“I'm not failing - I'm Learning"
Quellcrist Falconer - Altered Carbon
Content
Quotes:
Vaccine Efficacy, Statistical Power and Mental Models
Articles:
Inflation Is the Only Signal That the Post-Covid Boom Will Heed
Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens
Why it’s easier to move country than switch social media
Time to regulate AI that interprets human emotions
But while the acknowledgment of the problem of Big Tech is most welcome, I am worried that the diagnosis is wrong.
The problem is that we’re confusing automated persuasion with automated targeting. Laughable lies about Brexit, Mexican rapists, and creeping Sharia law didn’t convince otherwise sensible people that up was down and the sky was green.
Rather, the sophisticated targeting systems available through Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Big Tech ad platforms made it easy to find the racist, xenophobic, fearful, angry people who wanted to believe that foreigners were destroying their country while being bankrolled by George Soros.
Remember that elections are generally knife-edge affairs, even for politicians who’ve held their seats for decades with slim margins: 60% of the vote is an excellent win. Remember, too, that the winner in most races is “none of the above,” with huge numbers of voters sitting out the election. If even a small number of these non-voters can be motivated to show up at the polls, safe seats can be made contestable. In a tight race, having a cheap way to reach all the latent Klansmen in a district and quietly inform them that Donald J. Trump is their man is a game-changer.
Cambridge Analytica are like stage mentalists: they’re doing something labor-intensive and pretending that it’s something supernatural. A stage mentalist will train for years to learn to quickly memorize a deck of cards and then claim that they can name your card thanks to their psychic powers. You never see the unglamorous, unimpressive memorization practice. Cambridge Analytica uses Facebook to find racist jerks and tell them to vote for Trump and then they claim that they’ve discovered a mystical way to get otherwise sensible people to vote for maniacs.
This isn’t to say that persuasion is impossible. Automated disinformation campaigns can flood the channel with contradictory, seemingly plausible accounts for the current state of affairs, making it hard for a casual observer to make sense of events. Long-term repetition of a consistent narrative, even a manifestly unhinged one, can create doubt and find adherents – think of climate change denial, or George Soros conspiracies, or the anti-vaccine movement.
Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags
“The problem with traditional social networks 1.0 is all the relationships are flat,” said Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group, which researches Web technologies and advises companies on how to use them. “Everyone is the same level, whether I’m married to you or you’re someone I went to high school with or somebody I met at a conference.”
That online reality does not reflect human nature, said Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who studies the social impacts of technology.
“Your mom and your boyfriend are rarely in the same room,” she said, “and that’s why Christmas and Thanksgiving are such a stressful time for people, because their worlds collapse. On Facebook you’re in a long extended Thanksgiving dinner with everyone you ever knew, and people find that difficult to deal with.”
After a decade or more of this kind of flattening, it may seem like an obvious thing. But apparently it wasn’t obvious then to many, including to Facebook’s CEO. Back then, Mark Zuckerberg would give interviews claiming the social flatness of his platform was not only natural, that it was a sign of integrity:
“You have one identity,” he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
Of course we’re not exactly the same to our friends, our co-workers, our parents and to strangers. That’s called having social roles, and it’s not lack of integrity to treat your close friends in a different manner—and reveal different kinds of information—than you would treat your workplace acquaintances. Zuckerberg's mental model of human relationships was wrong, misguided and dangerous. The platform he designed reflected this mental model, which, in turn, was a shock to my normal students.
Vaccine Efficacy, Statistical Power and Mental Models
The real question is not how many friends a person can have, but how many people with unknown ideas can be put together and manage themselves in creating a common purpose, bolstered by social rules or cultures of practice (such as the need to live or work together). Once considered this way, anyone can understand why certain small elite groups devoted to creative thinking are sized so similarly.
Take small North American colleges. Increasingly, they vie with big-name universities such as Harvard and Stanford not only because they’re considered safer environments by worried parents, but because their smaller size facilitates growing trust among strangers, making for better educational experiences. Their smaller size matters. Plus, it’s no accident that the best of these colleges on average have about 150 teaching staff (Dunbar’s number) and that (as any teacher will know) a seminar in which you expect everyone to talk tops out at around 18 people.
But what do we learn from these facts? Well, we can learn quite a bit. While charismatic speakers can wow a crowd, even the most gifted seminar leader will tell you that his or her ability to involve everyone starts to come undone as you approach 20 people. And if any of those people require special attention (or can’t tolerate ideological uncertainty) that number will quickly shrink.
In the end, therefore, what matters much more than group size is social integration and social trust.
The point here is that thinking of the immune system only as a defensive fortress-builder seriously misses what it’s actually doing. Because the immune system is also, and quite literally, your biological intelligence.
There’s an important conclusion here: equality is only a first step towards alleviating human suffering and promoting feeling well within a moral economy. The bigger part concerns how people learn to hope about more than getting through the day. To put it another way, being hopeful requires a belief in the future, a long-term view.
But being hopeful also requires more than that. It requires a sense of deep time and an enduring willingness – a desire – to engage. For hope to proliferate, we need much more than endurance in the heroic, Darwinian sense. We need a willingness to accept the natural place of everyday uncertainty, and we need diversity – even redundancy – to make that possible.
Safety is fatal
Locating consciousness in the brain’s EM field might seem bizarre, but is it any more bizarre than believing that awareness resides in matter? Remember Albert Einstein’s equation, E = mc2. All it involves is moving from the matter-based right-hand side of the equation to energy located on the left-hand side. Both are physical, but whereas matter encodes information as discrete particles separated in space, energy information is encoded as overlapping fields in which information is bound up into single unified wholes. Locating the seat of consciousness in the brain’s EM field thereby solves the binding problem of understanding how information encoded in billions of distributed neurons is unified in our (EM field-based) conscious mind. It is a form of dualism, but a scientific dualism based on the difference between matter and energy, rather than matter and spirit. Awareness is then what this joined-up EM field information feels like from the inside. So, for example, the experience of hearing a door slam is what an EM field perturbation in the brain that correlates with a door slamming, and all of its memory neuron-encoded associations, feels like, from the inside.
Brain wifi
This may be a very good signal of how governments in the west begin to make the digital playing field more level.
Alibaba antitrust investigation: Beijing slaps e-commerce giant with record US$2.8 billion fine in landmark case
The fine surpassed the previous record imposed on Qualcomm in 2015
Regulators stressed that the fine imposed is for the healthy development of China’s internet economy
China’s antitrust regulators slapped a record fine on one of the country’s largest technology conglomerates, closing a months-long investigation that began last Christmas Eve and setting the precedent for the government to use anti-monopoly rules to regulate the country’s Big Tech.
Alibaba Group Holding, the world’s largest e-commerce company and owner of this newspaper, was fined 18.2 billion yuan (US$2.8 billion) by the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR).
The Hangzhou-based company “abused its dominant market position in China’s online retail platform service market since 2015 by forcing online merchants to open stores or take part in promotions on its platforms,” compelling the market to “pick one from two” in a breach of the country’s anti-monopoly law, the regulator said on Saturday.
Alibaba was ordered to correct its misconduct, and pay a fine equivalent to 4 per cent of its total 2019 revenue. The fine was nearly three times the 6.1 billion yuan penalty paid by Qualcomm, the world’s largest supplier of mobile chips, in 2015.
A small signal of a new emerging economic paradigm - but all without mentioning Modern Monetary Theory?
Meanwhile -- as part of a profound shift in economic thinking that’s gathered pace in the past year -- a whole range of other indicators once relied on to flag trouble ahead are falling out of favor.
Inflation Is the Only Signal That the Post-Covid Boom Will Heed
Economics used to offer lots of metrics that claimed to show when growing economies were approaching some kind of speed limit. But increasingly, inflation is the only one that’s taken seriously.
A lasting surge in prices would likely convince policy makers that it’s time to tap the brakes on expansionary measures adopted in the pandemic, like high public spending or low borrowing costs. That’s why Tuesday’s consumer-price data in the U.S. will be so closely watched -- though it’ll take more than a single month’s numbers to change minds.
Yesterday's Problem -- Or Tomorrow's?
It's been decades since inflation was a pressing issue in the rich world
Budget deficits and public debt were thought to flash a warning sign at certain levels -- until plenty of countries exceeded those limits, especially in the last year, without crashing. Estimates for full employment, or the most jobs an economy could create without overheating, turned out to be wrong.
Abandoning or downplaying all of these yardsticks means officials are less likely to take the kind of pre-emptive action that’s choked off expansions in the past.
The shift also amounts to a pivot toward humility, in a profession not famous for it. Economists used to be comfortable with offering their predictions as a basis for policy. They’re having to acknowledge that the future is full of things they simply do not know.
“The influence of long-term projections has evaporated, and that’s a very good thing,” says James Galbraith, a professor of economics at the University of Texas. “You design policies to deal with the problems you have. If they have consequences later, you address them later.”
It has been over a decade since I stopped subscribing to Cable used the internet for all my media consumption (occasionally still watch a DVD) - these days I hardly even watch Netflix. In the last five years my access to international media seems to be getting ever easier. With AI evolving at an accelerating pace - who knows how soon getting international media dubbed in a language of choice will be an additional click.
Netflix’s big bet on foreign content and international viewers could upend the global mediascape – and change how people see the world
As a kid growing up in Italy, I remember watching the American TV series “Happy Days,” which chronicled the 1950s-era Midwestern adventures of the Fonz, Richie Cunningham and other local teenagers.
Today, I call the U.S. home, and I have developed my own understanding of its complexities. I am able to see “Happy Days” as a nostalgic revival of an ideal, conflict-free American small town.
“Happy Days” was a product of Hollywood, which is arguably still the epicenter of the global entertainment industry. So recent news that the streaming service Netflix is opening an Italian office and will begin massively funding original local content with the intent of distributing it globally on its platform – following a strategy already launched in other European countries – struck me.
This could be a potentially game-changing move in global entertainment. And it might even change how the world perceives, well, the world.
I deleted my Facebook account in 2010 - and left-behind - lost great connection with less than 100 real friends (why we need adversarial interoperability). Facebook could have become a foundation - like Wikimedia - but it decided to enclose a commons to hold hostage its users for rent-seeking.
“There is a lot of harm being done on Facebook that is not being responded to because it is not considered enough of a PR risk to Facebook,” said Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook who worked within the company’s “integrity” organization to combat inauthentic behavior. “The cost isn’t borne by Facebook. It’s borne by the broader world as a whole.”
Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens
A Guardian investigation exposes the breadth of state-backed manipulation of the platform
Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing.
The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff.
The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries. The company acted quickly to address political manipulation affecting countries such as the US, Taiwan, South Korea and Poland, while moving slowly or not at all on cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico, and much of Latin America.
A great signaling by Cory Doctorow -
Why it’s easier to move country than switch social media
When we talk about social media monopolies, we focus too much on network effects, and not enough on switching costs. It's time to tear down the walls
When we talk about social media monopolies, we focus too much on network effects, and not enough on switching costs. Yes, it's true that all your friends are already stuck in a Big Tech silo that doesn't talk to any of the other Big Tech silos. It needn't be that way: interoperable platforms have existed since the first two Arpanet nodes came online. You can phone anyone with a phone number and email anyone with an email address.
The reason you can't talk to Facebook users without having a Facebook account isn't that it's technically impossible – it's that Facebook forbids it. What's more, Facebook (and its Big Tech rivals) have the law on their side: the once-common practice of making new products that just work with existing ones (like third-party printer ink, or a Mac program that can read Microsoft Office files, or an emulator that can play old games) has been driven to the brink of extinction by Big Tech. They were fine with this kind of "competitive compatibility" when it benefited them, but now that they dominate the digital world, it's time for it to die.
To restore competitive compatibility, we would need reform to many laws: software copyright and patents, the anti-circumvention laws that protect digital rights management, and the cybersecurity laws that let companies criminalize violations of their terms of service.
New proposals from the UK Competition and Markets Authority, as well as the EU's Digital Services and Digital Markets Act and the US ACCESS Act of 2020, all contemplate some form of interoperability mandate - forcing the dominant platforms to open up the APIs they already use to let various parts of their own business talk to one another. These mandates are a great floor under interoperability, but they can't be the ceiling. That's because they would be easy for big companies to subvert: if a lawmaker forces you to open a specific conduit to your competition, then you can respond by moving all the interesting data away from that conduit. You're still providing a jack that competitors can plug into, but you've moved all the important stuff to another jack.
This is a good signal of a growing realization that the digital environment will require new institutions - for almost a decade I’ve noted the need to create an arms length organization - something like an Auditor General of Algorithms (AGA) - that would function much like Health Canada or the FDA does to approve drug for public consumption. AGA would review algorithms to ensure they do what they claim - before approval for widespread use.
Time to regulate AI that interprets human emotions
The pandemic is being used as a pretext to push unproven artificial-intelligence tools into workplaces and schools.
During the pandemic, technology companies have been pitching their emotion-recognition software for monitoring workers and even children remotely. Take, for example, a system named 4 Little Trees. Developed in Hong Kong, the program claims to assess children’s emotions while they do classwork. It maps facial features to assign each pupil’s emotional state into a category such as happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise and fear. It also gauges ‘motivation’ and forecasts grades. Similar tools have been marketed to provide surveillance for remote workers. By one estimate, the emotion-recognition industry will grow to US$37 billion by 2026.
There is deep scientific disagreement about whether AI can detect emotions. A 2019 review found no reliable evidence for it. “Tech companies may well be asking a question that is fundamentally wrong,” the study concluded
And there is growing scientific concern about the use and misuse of these technologies. Last year, Rosalind Picard, who co-founded an artificial intelligence (AI) start-up called Affectiva in Boston and heads the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, said she supports regulation. Scholars have called for mandatory, rigorous auditing of all AI technologies used in hiring, along with public disclosure of the findings. In March, a citizen’s panel convened by the Ada Lovelace Institute in London said that an independent, legal body should oversee development and implementation of biometric technologies (see go.nature.com/3cejmtk). Such oversight is essential to defend against systems driven by what I call the phrenological impulse: drawing faulty assumptions about internal states and capabilities from external appearances, with the aim of extracting more about a person than they choose to reveal.
#micropoem
So many claims of truth -
are -
Fact-in-experience -
The question of -
objective - subjective -
is won of perspective -
and rests in false dichotomy -
the moment one claims objectivity -
one enacts -
re-cognition of -
self knowing not-self -
enacting I am -
re-cursing the question -
the extended mind -
moral-economicus -
accounting for homeostasis -
the social chemistry -
of our gift-ing flows -
selfing-as-others - in-self -
mhm -
languaging emerges -
a new entangling attractor -
conscious electromagnetic information (cemi) -field -
languaging -
enacts culture -
social-moral-selfing -
strikes me -
why hasn't the placenta -
become a ubiquitous metaphor -
like community is the placenta -
of individual flourishing?
- but I know -if a man had one -
it would be a 'seminal' metaphor -
rather than an 'ovapotent' one -
Metaphors -
frame how we reason -
to create the facts -
supporting our reasoning -
