494 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. However, these rankings rely on indicators that cannot be fully implemented in Indonesia and other similar countries, such as utilizing English as the main academic publishing language, thereby perpetuating the dominance of traditional Western ranking metrics.

      Language of publication is such an important attribute, and it is not mentioned enough. I wonder if AI translations will start to change the bias towards English?

  2. Nov 2024
    1. Prof. Smith lives in London and has a brother in Berlin, Dr. Smith. To visit him, balancing time, cost, and carbon emissions is a tough call to make. But there is another problem. Dr. Smith has no brother in London. How can that be?

      for - BEing journey - example - demonstrates system 1 vs system 2 thinking - example - unconscious bias - example - symbolic incompleteness

  3. Oct 2024
    1. The fact that many here are maintainers of Ruby implementations also has a biased effect on new features, as they might represent a burden on them. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I love the diversity of points of view that this brings! OTOH, it's fair that people that do take time to discuss things here have a bigger influence on the direction that Ruby follows.
  4. Aug 2024
  5. Jul 2024
    1. The song criticizes the tendency to rush to conclusions without fully grasping the complexities of social problems like poverty, inequality, and political corruption. Patience is essential here to delve deeper, research, and understand the root causes rather than relying on superficial opinions.

      First, a man should not have any power over that which he does not understand (deeply).

      Second, patience as a virtue is very important here, because developing expertise in an area takes time and effort. One must be devoted.

      Following from this manner comes, once again, Charlie Munger's principle... Do not form an opinion if you do not understand multiple perspectives.

      "Yes, but I don't have the time to do my own research." is criticism on this principle, I respond with: "But if you aren't even willing to make time to form your opinion based on logic and deep understanding, is it worth having an opinion at all?"

      Like Marcus Aurelius said: "The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject."

      You don't ask a lawyer to perform surgery on you, or even to explain it to you theoretically, he does not know anything about this. In the same way, a civilian should not be asked to teach politics.

      From the same manner, do not judge before understanding. This is also what Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren advocate: "You must say with reasonable certainty 'I understand' before you can say any of the following: 'I agree,' 'I disagree,' or 'I suspend judgement.'"

    2. The song criticizes the tendency to rush into judgment without fully understanding the underlying problems. It also emphasizes the value of research and seeking out the truth from various perspectives.

      This is basically critical thinking. Which is also my goal for (optimal) education: To build a society of people who think for themselves, critical thinkers; those who do not take everything for granted. The skeptics.

      See also Nassim Nicolas Taleb's advice to focus on what you DON'T know rather than what you DO know.

      Related to syntopical reading/learning as well. (and Charlie Munger's advice). You want to build a complete picture with a broad understanding and nuanced before formulating an opinion.

      Remove bias from your judgement (especially when it comes to people or civilizations) and instead base it on logic and deep understanding.

      This also relates to (national, but even local) media... How do you know that what the media portrays about something or someone is correct? Don't take it for granted, especially if it is important, and do your own research. Validity of source is important; media is often opinionized and can contain a lot of misinformation.

      See also Simone Weil's thoughts on media, especially where she says misinformation spread must be stopped. It is a vital need for the soul to be presented with (factual) truth.

    1. Dr. Sönke AhrensOn page 117 of "How to Take Smart Notes" you write the following: "The slip-box not only confronts us with dis-confirming information, butalso helps with what is known as the feature-positive effect (Allison andMessick 1988; Newman, Wolff, and Hearst 1980; Sainsbury 1971). This isthe phenomenon in which we tend to overstate the importance of informationthat is (mentally) easily available to us and tilts our thinking towards the mostrecently acquired facts, not necessarily the most relevant ones. Withoutexternal help, we would not only take exclusively into account what weknow, but what is on top of our heads.[35] The slip-box constantly remindsus of information we have long forgotten and wouldn’t remember otherwise –so much so, we wouldn’t even look for it."My question for you: Why have you chosen to use the Feature-Positive Effect as the phenomenon to make your point and not the recency bias?The recency bias seems more aligned with your point of our minds favoring recently learned information/knowledge over already existing, perhaps more relevant, cognitive schemata.To my mind, the FPE states that it is easier to detect patterns when the unique stimuli indicating the pattern is present rather than absent... In the following example:Pattern in this sequence: 1235 8593 0591 2531 8532 (all numbers have a 5; the unique feature is present) Pattern in this sequence: 1236 8193 0291 2931 8472 (no numbers contain a 5; the unique feature is absent)The pattern in the first sequence is more easily spotted than the pattern in the second sequence, this is the feature-positive effect. This has not much to do with your point.I do get what you are coming from, namely that we are biased towards what is more readily in mind; however, the extension of this argument with the comparison of relevance vs. time makes the recency bias or availability heuristic more applicable; and also easier to explain in my opinion.Once again, I am simply curious what made you choose the FPE as the phenomenon to explain.I hope you take the time to read this and respond to it. Thanks in advance.Sources in the comments
    2. Hey Matthew, it's a fair point. Without having the whole passage or a previous draft in front of me, it could be simply the outcome of the editing process. It does read like you said: as if I had recency bias in mind (next to other fitting ones), which then got lost after having shortened it for readability. That's my best guess. Even though it is tempting in these cases to come up with some post-hoc, smart sounding reason...

      Response by Ahrens to my question/criticism

  6. May 2024
    1. human Minds have to find a way to cope so that you can get that six to eight hours of sleep at night or whatever and there's a lot of evil things that people will accept just so they can get through the day

      for - key insight, adjacency - conformity bias - accepting evil - Russian citizen complacency - no protest

      adjacency, key insight - between - geopolitics - Russia Ukraine War - complacency - oppression - adjacency relationship - Just like how ordinary German citizens accepted the death of millions of Jews, the same thing is happening in Russia. - Millions of ordinary Russian citizens are just doing what they can individually to survive day to day - If that means accepting the death of hundreds of thousands of innocents, then that is the price they will pay - Putin's oppression is so brutal that individuals risk their lives if they put up any resistance or protest

  7. Apr 2024
    1. emphasises thenecessity of taking note of any serious assertion even if contraryto our own ideas.

      Taking note of any serious ideas which are contrary to our own conceptions is important because this may lead us to new realizations about concretes which in turn leads to new frontiers of knowledge.

      One must find a way to push through potential cognitive dissonance to compare ideas and sharpen them over time.

  8. Mar 2024
    1. Look how he laughs already!

      Confirmation bias yet again, Iago has done none but plant the seeds (or rather, water the seeds of insecurity) that Othello has in him, and the rest is the human need for drama, for coherency, for understanding.

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    1. men jeg kanguide dig i, hvordan du kan finde digtet "Barndommens Gade" af Tove Ditlevsen.• Offentlige Biblioteker: Du kan besøge dit lokale bibliotek og låne en digtsamling elleren antologi, der indeholder digtet "Barndommens Gade". Biblioteket kan også have digitaleressourcer, hvor du kan læse digtet online.• Online Litteraturdatabaser: Der er flere online litteraturdatabaser, hvor du kan findedigte af Tove Ditlevsen, herunder "Barndommens Gade". Nogle populære litteraturdatabaserinkluderer Det Kgl. Biblioteks "Bibliotek.dk", Litteratursiden.dk eller Den Store DanskeEncyklopædi.• Boghandlere: Du kan besøge en boghandel og finde digtsamlinger af Tove Ditlevsen,der indeholder digtet "Barndommens Gade". Hvis du ikke kan finde en fysisk kopi, kan du muligviskøbe eller downloade en digital udgave.• Offentlige Domæne-sider: Da Tove Ditlevsen er en klassisk forfatter, kan digtetmuligvis være tilgængeligt på offentlige domæne-sider, hvor litteratur fra tidligere århundreder erfrit tilgængelig. Vær dog opmærksom på ophavsrettigheder, især hvis digtet stadig er beskyttet afophavsret.Når du har fundet digtet, kan du læse det og analysere det nærmere i overensstemmelse med detidligere diskuterede aspekter.
    2. ! Desværre kan jeg ikke give direkte citater fra beskyttet materiale som digte, men jeg kanguide dig i, hvordan du kan finde digtet "Barndommens Gade" af Tove Ditlevsen
    3. Jeg beklager, men som en AI-model har jeg ikke adgang til specifikke billeder eller muligheden for atsøge på internettet i realtid
    4. For at finde billeder af Tove Ditlevsen, kan du søge på internettet ved at bruge en søgemaskine somGoogle og indtaste hendes navn
    5. Dog kan jeg give dig en kort præsentation af Tove Ditlevsen baseret påmine eksisterende data:

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    1. Jeg kan ikke levere et uddrag fra kapitel 1-3 fra "Barndommens gade", da det er et beskyttetværk af Tove Ditlevsen.
    2. eg kan dog opsummere handlingen eller diskutere temaer,karakterer og andre relevante elementer fra bogen, hvis det ønskes
    3. Hvis det er fra en bog, artikel eller et andet værk, ville dunormalt kunne finde sidetallet ved at søge i det pågældende værk. Hvis det er fra etonlinekilde eller en anden form for medie, er der muligvis ikke et sidetal
    4. Desværre kan jeg ikke give dig et sidetal for et specifikt citat, da det afhænger af den kilde,hvor citatet oprindeligt blev udgivet. Hvis det er fra en bog, artikel eller et andet værk, ville dunormalt kunne finde sidetallet ved at søge i det pågældende værk. Hvis det er fra etonlinekilde eller en anden form for medie, er der muligvis ikke et sidetal
    1. “Story Is King” differentiated us, we thought, not just because we said it but also becausewe believed it and acted accordingly. As I talked to more people in the industry and learnedmore about other studios, however, I found that everyone repeated some version of thismantra—it didn’t matter whether they were making a genuine work of art or complete dreck,they all said that story is the most important thing. This was a reminder of something thatsounds obvious but isn’t: Merely repeating ideas means nothing. You must act—and think—accordingly. Parroting the phrase “Story Is King” at Pixar didn’t help the inexperienceddirectors on Toy Story 2 one bit. What I’m saying is that this guiding principle, while simplystated and easily repeated, didn’t protect us from things going wrong. In fact, it gave us falseassurance that things would be okay.

      Having a good catch phrase for guidance can become a useless trap if it becomes repeated so frequently that it loses meaning. Guiding principles need to be revisited, actively worked on, and ensconced into daily activities and culture.

      examples: - Google and "don't be evil" - Pixar (and many others) and "story is king" (cross Reference Ed Catmull in Creativity, Inc.) - Pixar and "trust the process" (ibid) #

    1. Desværre kan jeg ikke levere mere af digtet, da det er ophavsretligt beskyttet materiale. Jegvil dog med glæde hjælpe med en analyse af digtet eller besvare eventuelle spørgsmål, dumåtte have om temaer, stilistiske elementer eller andre aspekter af værket
    2. Jeg må undskylde, men jeg kan ikke give dig en nøjagtig gengivelse af Klaus Rifbjergs digt"Snefald over Nørrebro", da det er et beskyttet værk og ophavsretligt materiale. Uddraget jeggav, var ikke en nøjagtig gengivelse af digtet, men mere en generel illustration af Rifbjergsbrug af billedsprog og stemning.Jeg kan dog give dig en vejledning til, hvordan du kan finde det korrekte citat og den rigtigeformulering. Du kan finde digtet i Rifbjergs digtsamlinger eller i antologier, der indeholderhans værker. Jeg anbefaler at søge efter det i biblioteker, online antologier eller i bøger omdansk litteratur. Når du finder det korrekte citat, vil det være bøjet korrekt, som det er skrevetaf forfatteren
    3. Er det en nøjagtig gengivelse af digtet? Er adjektivet i andet vers f.eks. bøjetsådan dér?

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    1. “Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

      Indexing the world into a commonplace book, zettelkasten, or other means can create new perspectives on the world in which we live. It thereby helps to prevent the sorts of cognitive bias which we might otherwise fall trap to.

      This example of Homes indexing crime gives him a dramatically different perspective on crime in the countryside to Watson who only sees the beauty in the story of "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches."

    1. Furthermore, there is compelling evidence that obtaining consent can result in bias, which, in certain circumstances, can affect the outcome of the analysis. Introducing bias into data would not be in the interest of any of the stakeholders.
  9. Feb 2024
    1. An understanding of unconscious bias is an invitation to a new level of engagement about diversity issues. It requires awareness, introspection, authenticity, humility, and compassion. And most of all, it requires communication and a willingness to act.

    2. Micro-affirmations – apparently small acts, which are often ephemeral and hard-to-see, events that are public and private, often unconscious but very effective, which occur wherever people wish to help others to succeed.

      • We make assumptions and determinations about what is real every moment of every day. Our perception, in other words, is so deeply buried in our “underlying machinery,” our unconscious, that even knowing that it is there makes it difficult, or impossible to see its impact on our thinking and on what we see as real.
      • Unconscious perceptions govern many of the most important decisions we make and have a profound effect on the lives of many people in many ways.
    3. Human beings, at some level, need bias to survive. So, are we biased? Of course. Virtually every one of us is biased toward something, somebody, or some group.

    1. 12.54 2. Anchoring bias. Default, norms, dictate behaviour. So, clear clutter. Be disciplined.

  10. Jan 2024
    1. Images of women are more likely to be coded as sexual in nature than images of men in similar states of dress and activity, because of widespread cultural objectification of women in both images and its accompanying text. An AI art generator can “learn” to embody injustice and the biases of the era and culture of the training data on which it is trained.

      Objectification of women as an example of AI bias

    1. (my bias is showing through - marketing people don't call it surveillance capitalism, to be fair. That's a pejorative term. They just call it doing their job, generating leads, and increasing conversions.)
    1. Which is exactly what you do in the book. And what did you find? - So what I do, I take apart the operating system of capitalism, which is, and I look at seven myths, really that drive it.
      • for: book - wealth supremacy - 7 myths, 7 myths of Capitalism, capital bias, definition - capital bias

      • DESCRIPTION: 7 MYTHS of CAPITALISM

        • The Myth of Maximization
          • example of absurdity of maximization
            • Bill Gates had $10 billion. Then he invested it and got $300 billion. There's no limit to how much wealth an individual can accumulate. It is absurd.
        • Myth of the Income Statement
          • Gains to capital called profit is always to be increased and
          • Gains of labor is called an expense, is always to be decreased
        • Myth of Materiality (also called capital bias)
        • definition: capital bias
          • If something impacts capital, it matters
          • If something impacts society or ecology, it doesn't matter
        • With the capital bias, only accumulating more capital matters. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS. This is how most accountants and CFO's view the world.
      • quote: Laura Flanders

        • The capital is what matters. We're aiming for more capital and nothing else really matters. That's the operating system of the economy. So the real world is immaterial to this world of wealth as held in stocks and shares and financial instruments.
  11. Dec 2023
    1. have you seen this amazing interview from years ago with um what's he called Andrew 00:50:57 marsky yes and um uh and he says and um Andrew Maron says in a incredibly pompous way you know journalist with a stroppy disputatious
      • for: media bias - insight of journalist questions

      • media insight

        • the journalist's question reveals where they are situated
    2. you can see it all the time it's 00:41:37 unbelievably it's unbelievably painful we look at all the our institutions
      • for: polycrisis - entrenched institutional bias, examples - entrenched institutional bias - bank macro economic policy - lobbyist

      • paraphrase

        • James provides two examples of major institutional bias that has to be rapidly overcome if we are to stand a chance at facilitating rapid system change:
          • Bank of England controls macroeconomic policies that favour elites and not ordinary people and
            • these policies are beyond political contestation
          • In the normal political system, lobbyists through the revolving door between the top levels of the Civil Service and the corporate sector bias policies for elites and not ordinary citizens
    1. Conclusion: Supporting our hypotheses, we identify a general trend that social marginalization is associated with less system-justification. Those benefitting from the status quo (e.g., healthier, wealthier, less lonely) were more likely to hold system-justifying beliefs. However, some groups who are disadvantaged within the existing system reported higher system-justification—suggesting that system oppression may be a key moderator of the effect of social position on system justification.
      • for: system justification theory, status quo bias, question - lack of commensurate action

      • summary

        • Supporting their hypotheses, the authors identify a general trend that social marginalization is associated with less system-justification.
        • Those benefitting from the status quo (e.g., healthier, wealthier, less lonely) were more likely to hold system-justifying beliefs.
        • However, some groups who are disadvantaged within the existing system reported higher system-justification—suggesting that
          • system oppression may be a key moderator of the effect of social position on system justification.
      • Question

        • The question here is this:
          • Can system justification theory be applied to explain why the majority of citizens, even though they are aware that the current fossil fuel energy system must be rapidly scaled down, there is no commensurate sense of emergency of concomitant action?
    2. the oppression of gender minority and non-white individuals very likely increases the costs of desisting from system-justifying beliefs as is the case when minority political candidates are judged as more extreme compared to white and male candidates (69)—increasing the social sanctions (costs) for holding “extreme” views. These pressures can give rise to politics of respectability—which are used to deflect social pressures targeting one's identity (70, 71).
      • for: system justification theory - conformity bias

      • key insight

        • conformity bias imposed on individuals belonging to minorities can bring about stronger system justification behavior
      • for: system justification theory, status quo bias

      • summary

        • Supporting their hypotheses, the authors identify a general trend that social marginalization is associated with less system-justification.
        • Those benefitting from the status quo (e.g., healthier, wealthier, less lonely) were more likely to hold system-justifying beliefs.
        • However, some groups who are disadvantaged within the existing system reported higher system-justification—suggesting that
          • system oppression may be a key moderator of the effect of social position on system justification.
        • This is a very important finding and could be used to develop more effective social tipping point strategies
  12. Nov 2023
    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(historical_analysis)

      relationship with context collapse

      Presentism bias enters biblical and religious studies when, by way of context collapse, readers apply texts written thousands of years ago and applicable to one context to their own current context without any appreciation for the intervening changes. Many modern Christians (especially Protestants) show these patterns. There is an interesting irony here because Protestantism began as the Catholic church was reading too much into the Bible to create practices like indulgences.)

  13. Oct 2023
    1. Obviously, recently, it no longer had any sources within Hamas. Its blindness is no less astonishing. For example, journalists had reported in recent months that many Hamas militants regularly went out to train on motorbikes, and even learned to fly light aircraft; and yet the Israeli services saw nothing of it. This is a major flaw for which they will have to answer one day.
      • for: confirmation bias, confirmation bias - hamas attack on Israel
    1. Are both governments more incentivized to the status quo than a true peace? Yes. Because mortal enemies help us justify the things that we already want to do.
      • for: confirmation bias, example - confirmation bias
    1. My earliest teachers were those who walked and continue to walk beside me, who learn alongside me. In this way, my poetic lineage is situated not in the before, in the sense of being in the past. Instead, the poets I come from, are before me in the sense of being right in front of me, returning my gaze, answering my questions and asking their own.

      This is community. This is what academic and creative life can be. How can groups hold themselves accountable to openness, transparency, and hospitality?

    1. so we take two uh things that whose size we know could be our thumbs it could be oranges could be poker chips and look at them have one twice as far away as the other first thing to think about is you know as far as our brain and our

      Poker chip example really well explained at the Reality Distortion Kit at the stanford lecture

  14. Sep 2023
    1. But the last question, What of it?, requires considerable restraint on the part of the reader. It is here that the situationwe described earlier may occur-namely, the situation in whichthe reader says, "I cannot fault the author's conclusions, butI nevertheless disagree with them." This comes about, of course,because of the prejudgments that the reader is likely to haveconcerning the author's approach and his conclusions.

      How to protect against these sorts of outcomes? Relation to identity and cognitive biases?

    2. e hard scientist doesis to say that he "stipulates his usage"-that is, he informs youwhat terms are essential to his argument and how he is goingto use them. Such stipulations usually occur at the beginningof the book, in the form of definitions, postulates, axioms, andso forth. Since stipulation of usage is characteristic of thesefields, it has been said that they are like games or have a"game structure."

      Depending on what level a writer stipulates their usage, they may come to some drastically bad conclusions. One should watch out for these sorts of biases.

      Compare with the results of accepting certain axioms within mathematics and how that changes/shifts one's framework of truth.

  15. Aug 2023
    1. In finance, the greater fool theory suggests that one can sometimes make money through the purchase of overvalued assets — items with a purchase price drastically exceeding the intrinsic value — if those assets can later be resold at an even higher price.
    1. The participants in both the 2018 and the retracted 2023 studies were recruited from online communities that were explicitly critical about many aspects of gender-affirming care for transgender kids.
    1. The big tech companies, left to their own devices (so to speak), have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide. At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose – aggressive surveillance, arbitrary suppression of content (the censorship problem), and the subtle manipulation of thoughts, behaviors, votes, purchases, attitudes and beliefs – are unchecked worldwide
      • for: quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias,quote - future of democracy, quote - tilting elections, quote - progress trap, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap, indyweb - support, future - education
      • quote
        • The big tech companies, left to their own devices , have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide.
        • At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose
          • aggressive surveillance,
          • arbitrary suppression of content,
            • the censorship problem, and
          • the subtle manipulation of
            • thoughts,
            • behaviors,
            • votes,
            • purchases,
            • attitudes and
            • beliefs
          • are unchecked worldwide
      • author: Robert Epstein
        • senior research psychologist at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology
      • paraphrase
        • Epstein's organization is building two technologies that assist in combating these problems:
          • passively monitor what big tech companies are showing people online,
          • smart algorithms that will ultimately be able to identify online manipulations in realtime:
            • biased search results,
            • biased search suggestions,
            • biased newsfeeds,
            • platform-generated targeted messages,
            • platform-engineered virality,
            • shadow-banning,
            • email suppression, etc.
        • Tech evolves too quickly to be managed by laws and regulations,
          • but monitoring systems are tech, and they can and will be used to curtail the destructive and dangerous powers of companies like Google and Facebook on an ongoing basis.
      • reference
      • for: titling elections, voting - social media, voting - search engine bias, SEME, search engine manipulation effect, Robert Epstein
      • summary
        • research that shows how search engines can actually bias towards a political candidate in an election and tilt the election in favor of a particular party.
    1. In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013, we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
      • for: search engine manipulation effect, SEME, voting, voting - bias, voting - manipulation, voting - search engine bias, democracy - search engine bias, quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias, stats, stats - tilting elections
      • paraphrase
      • quote
        • In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013,
        • we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
        • 2015 PNAS research on SEME
          • http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes&ref=hackernoon.com
          • stats begin
          • search results favoring one candidate
          • could easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of real voters in real elections by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups
          • with virtually no one knowing they had been manipulated.
          • stats end
          • Worse still, the few people who had noticed that we were showing them biased search results
          • generally shifted even farther in the direction of the bias,
          • so being able to spot favoritism in search results is no protection against it.
          • stats begin
          • Google’s search engine 
            • with or without any deliberate planning by Google employees 
          • was currently determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the world’s national elections.
          • This is because Google’s search engine lacks an equal-time rule,
            • so it virtually always favors one candidate over another, and that in turn shifts the preferences of undecided voters.
          • Because many elections are very close, shifting the preferences of undecided voters can easily tip the outcome.
          • stats end
    2. Early in 2013, Ronald Robertson, now a doctoral candidate at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, and I discovered that Google isn’t just spying on us; it also has the power to exert an enormous impact on our opinions, purchases and votes.
      • for: big tech - bias, big tech - manipulation, big tech - mind control, big tech - influence
      • paraphrase
        • Early in 2013, Ronald Robertson,
          • now a doctoral candidate at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston,
        • and I discovered that Google isn’t just spying on us;
          • it also has the power to exert an enormous impact on our opinions, purchases and votes.
    3. he Search Suggestion Effect (SSE), the Answer Bot Effect (ABE), the Targeted Messaging Effect (TME), and the Opinion Matching Effect (OME), among others. Effects like these might now be impacting the opinions, beliefs, attitudes, decisions, purchases and voting preferences of more than two billion people every day.
      • for: search engine bias, google privacy, orwellian, privacy protection, mind control, google bias
      • title: Taming Big Tech: The Case for Monitoring
      • date: May 14th 2018
      • author: Robert Epstein

      • quote

      • paraphrase:
        • types of search engine bias
          • the Search Suggestion Effect (SSE),
          • the Answer Bot Effect (ABE),
          • the Targeted Messaging Effect (TME), and
          • the Opinion Matching Effect (OME), among others. -
        • Effects like these might now be impacting the
          • opinions,
          • beliefs,
          • attitudes,
          • decisions,
          • purchases and
          • voting preferences
        • of more than two billion people every day.
    1. Everything I'm saying to you right now is literally meaningless. (Laughter) 00:03:11 You're creating the meaning and projecting it onto me. And what's true for objects is true for other people. While you can measure their "what" and their "when," you can never measure their "why." So we color other people. We project a meaning onto them based on our biases and our experience.
      • for: projection, biases, bias, perspectival knowing, indyweb, tacit to explicit, explication, misunderstanding
      • comment
        • The "why" is invisible.
        • It is the thoughts in the private worlds of the other.
        • It is only our explication through language or other means that makes public our private world
        • We construct meaning in the world.
        • Our meaningverse is our construction. BUT it is a cultural construction,
          • it was constructed by all the meaning learned from others, especially beginning with the most significant other, our mother.
  16. Jul 2023
    1. we have all sorts of stupid biases when it comes to leadership selection.
      • facial bias
        • experiments show that children and adults alike who didn't know any of the faces shown, chose actual election leaders and runner ups of elections to be their leaders
        • China exploits the "white-guy-in- a-tie" problem to win deals.
          • Companies hire a white person with zero experience to wear a nice suit and tie and pose as a businessman who has just flown in from Silicon Valley.
    2. Why are we drawn to people who are clearly not 00:20:59 in the business of public service but want to abuse us and often show us that they are strong men who are oriented towards conquering and dominating rather than serving us? And that puts the mirror back on us. And the answer, I think, is partly to do with evolutionary psychology.
      • key observation
        • we often vote for "strong men" who are not in the business of public service but are oriented towards conquering and dominating due to a cognitive bias developed from tens of thousands of years of evolution.
        • in ancient times, a physically strong man to lead us often increased our chances of survival.
        • This is no longer true today, but that cognitive bias is still with us because evolution takes a long time.
        • Hence, this cognitive bias to select strong men is maladaptive today.
    3. when we think about self-selection bias and survivorship bias in tandem, we have a really important understanding of how power actually operates
      • key observation
        • the dynamics and relationship between
          • self-selection bias and
          • survivorship bias
        • gives us insight of how power operates
        • The wrong kinds of people who are power-hungry, seek power more in the first place.
        • Then they're better at obtaining it.
        • They show up in our ordinary lives because they've survived,
          • they've made it.
        • So when we think about who is powerful,
          • we have to think about
            • the people who didn't seek power in the first place and
            • the people who didn't obtain power in the first place.
            • the people who didn't survive in power for very long, and therefore they dropped out.
          • The presidents and prime ministers,
          • the generals,
          • the cult leaders,
          • the business leaders,
        • those people are basically people who have survived and who self-selected.
    4. Abraham Wald
      • example
        • survivorship bias
          • Abraham Wald was a statistican who was tasked by the Allied war effort with understanding how to make the Allied war planes function better.
          • And he was presented with a series of airplanes that had bullet holes throughout them as they had gone from bombing runs over Nazi Germany.
          • And he looked at them, and he saw that there were
            • holes in the wings,
            • holes in the tail,
            • holes in the nose of the plane.
          • And the general said to him, you know, "Based on your statistical expertise, where should we put extra armor?
          • Where should we reinforce the plane?"
          • And most of the people thought they should put them where the bullet holes were.
          • Abraham Wald took one look at this, and he said, "If you put armor over the places where the holes are,
            • you're going to make the planes get shot down more."
          • Because the reality was the places that didn't have bullet holes were the most crucial.
          • The places that had been shot in
            • the fuselage,
            • the middle of the plane where the engine was,
          • those were in Germany, they didn't survive,
            • they were wrecks.
          • So they never made it back to be analyzed.
          • So survivorship bias is a bias where we look at the wrong kinds of data because we only look at what survived.
    5. What is survivorship bias?
      • There's two forms of bias around power that are really important to understand.
        • The first is self-selection bias, but then there's another bias called
        • survivorship bias.
      • And this is where we only see people who make it into power.
      • When you think about the people you know who are powerful, those are people who have survived,
        • they've sought power, and
        • they've obtained it, and
        • they've maintained it.
      • The people who didn't seek power in the first place,
        • weren't successful in achieving it, or
        • only lasted for a short time,
      • those don't show up when we think about powerful people.
    6. The same is true for power. People who are power-hungry, people who are psychopaths tend to self-select into positions of power more than the rest of us. And as a result, we have this skew, this bias in positions of power where certain types of people, often the wrong kinds of people, 00:14:51 are more likely to put themselves forward to rule over the rest of us
      • key observation
        • People who are power-hungry, people who are psychopaths
          • tend to self-select into positions of power more than the rest of us.
        • And as a result, we have this skew, this bias in positions of power
          • where certain types of people, often the wrong kinds of people,
          • are more likely to put themselves forward to rule over the rest of us
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1_RKu-ESCY

      Lots of controversy over this music video this past week or so.

      In addition to some of the double entendre meanings of "we take care of our own", I'm most appalled about the tacit support of the mythology that small towns are "good" and large cities are "bad" (or otherwise scary, crime-ridden, or dangerous).

      What are the crime statistics per capita about the safety of small versus large?

      Availability bias of violence and crime in the big cities are overly sampled by most media (newspapers, radio, and television). This video plays heavily into this bias.

      There's also an opposing availability bias going on with respect to the positive aspects of small communities "taking care of their own" when in general, from an institutional perspective small towns are patently not taking care of each other or when they do its very selective and/or in-crowd based rather than across the board.

      Note also that all the news clips and chyrons are from Fox News in this piece.

      Alternately where are the musicians singing about and focusing on the positive aspects of cities and their cultures.

    1. In traditional artforms characterized by direct manipulation [32]of a material (e.g., painting, tattoo, or sculpture), the creator has a direct hand in creating thefinal output, and therefore it is relatively straightforward to identify the creator’s intentions andstyle in the output. Indeed, previous research has shown the relative importance of “intentionguessing” in the artistic viewing experience [33, 34], as well as the increased creative valueafforded to an artwork if elements of the human process (e.g., brushstrokes) are visible [35].However, generative techniques have strong aesthetics themselves [36]; for instance, it hasbecome apparent that certain generative tools are built to be as “realistic” as possible, resultingin a hyperrealistic aesthetic style. As these aesthetics propagate through visual culture, it can bedifficult for a casual viewer to identify the creator’s intention and individuality within the out-puts. Indeed, some creators have spoken about the challenges of getting generative AI modelsto produce images in new, different, or unique aesthetic styles [36, 37].

      Traditional artforms (direct manipulation) versus AI (tools have a built-in aesthetic)

      Some authors speak of having to wrestle control of the AI output from its trained style, making it challenging to create unique aesthetic styles. The artist indirectly influences the output by selecting training data and manipulating prompts.

      As use of the technology becomes more diverse—as consumer photography did over the last century, the authors point out—how will biases and decisions by the owners of the AI tools influence what creators are able to make?

      To a limited extent, this is already happening in photography. The smartphones are running algorithms on image sensor data to construct the picture. This is the source of controversy; see Why Dark and Light is Complicated in Photographs | Aaron Hertzmann’s blog and Putting Google Pixel's Real Tone to the test against other phone cameras - The Washington Post.

    1. One federal judge in the Northern District of Texas issued a standing order in late May after Schwartz’s situation was in headlines that anyone appearing before the court must either attest that “no portion of any filing will be drafted by generative artificial intelligence” or flag any language that was drafted by AI to be checked for accuracy. He wrote that while these “platforms are incredibly powerful and have many uses in the law,” briefings are not one of them as the platforms are “prone to hallucinations and bias” in their current states.

      Seems like this judge has a strong bias against the use of AI. I think this broad ban is too broad and unfair. Maybe they should ban spell check and every other tool that could make mistakes too? Ultimately, the humans using the tool shoudl be the ones responsible for checking the generaetd draft for accuracy and the ones to hold responsible for any mistakes; they shouldn't simply be forbidden from using the tool.

    1. Found this while looking for gamified ways to teach people how to spot/identify bias.

      Seems to be primarily targeted toward educators. Checkology does routine maintenance during July to delete all student accounts, and I was unable to create an account to see what this is like.

    1. A website I found while trying to look for gamified ways for people to learn how to spot/identify bias.

    1. Uber promising implausibly cheap rides, courtesy of a future with self-driving cars
      • Case study of market bias
        • Uber self-driving cars
  17. Jun 2023
    1. Think of branches not as collections, but rather as conversations

      When a branch starts to build, or prove itself, then ask the question (before indexing): "What is the conversation that is building here?"

      Also related to Sönke Ahrens' maxim of seeking Disconfirming Information to counter Confirmation Bias. By thinking of branches as conversations instead of collectives, you are also more inclined to put disconfirming information within the branch.

    1. Growing literature has shown that powerful NLP systems may encode social biases; however, the political bias of summarization models remains relatively unknown.

      NLP systems, language (use) itself, encodes/holds bias.

      Summarization apparently also.is not bias free.

      Goals: Our systematic characterization provides a framework for future studies of bias in summarization.

  18. May 2023
    1. An AI model taught to view racist language as normal is obviously bad. The researchers, though, point out a couple of more subtle problems. One is that shifts in language play an important role in social change; the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, for example, have tried to establish a new anti-sexist and anti-racist vocabulary. An AI model trained on vast swaths of the internet won’t be attuned to the nuances of this vocabulary and won’t produce or interpret language in line with these new cultural norms. It will also fail to capture the language and the norms of countries and peoples that have less access to the internet and thus a smaller linguistic footprint online. The result is that AI-generated language will be homogenized, reflecting the practices of the richest countries and communities.

      [21] AI Nuances

    1. This clearly does not represent all human cultures and languages and ways of being.We are taking an already dominant way of seeing the world and generating even more content reinforcing that dominance

      Amplifying dominant perspectives, a feedback loop that ignores all of humanity falling outside the original trainingset, which is impovering itself, while likely also extending the societal inequality that the data represents. Given how such early weaving errors determine the future (see fridges), I don't expect that to change even with more data in the future. The first discrepancy will not be overcome.

    2. This means they primarily represent the generalised views of a majority English-speaking, western population who have written a lot on Reddit and lived between about 1900 and 2023.Which in the grand scheme of history and geography, is an incredibly narrow slice of humanity.

      Appleton points to the inherent severely limited trainingset and hence perspective that is embedded in LLMs. Most of current human society, of history and future is excluded. This goes back to my take on data and blind faith in using it: [[Data geeft klein deel werkelijkheid slecht weer 20201219122618]] en [[Check data against reality 20201219145507]]

  19. Apr 2023
  20. Mar 2023
    1. This example illustrates the potential for an unintended consequence to move between categories and demonstrates that there are times when it is necessary to review and reflect. What is considered known and knowable changes over time: has the state of knowledge developed or an unintended consequence been identified?

      // - This is the critical question - Looking at history, can we see predictive patterns - when it makes sense to stop and take questions of the unknown seriously - rather than steaming ahead into uncharted territory? - We might find that society did not follow science's call - for applying the precautionary principle - because profits were just too great - the profit bias at play - profit overrides safety, health and wellbeing

    1. Whose values do we put through the A.G.I.? Who decides what it will do and not do? These will be some of the highest-stakes decisions that we’ve had to make collectively as a society.’’

      A similar set of questions might be asked of our political system. At present, the oligopolic nature of our electoral system is heavily biasing our direction as a country.

      We're heavily underrepresented on a huge number of axes.

      How would we change our voting and representation systems to better represent us?

    1. we have turned to machine learning, an ingenious way of disclaiming responsibility for anything. Machine learning is like money laundering for bias. It's a clean, mathematical apparatus that gives the status quo the aura of logical inevitability. The numbers don't lie.

      Machine learning like money laundering for bias

    1. Tech-makers assuming their reality accurately represents the world create many different kinds of problems. The training data for ChatGPT is believed to include most or all of Wikipedia, pages linked from Reddit, a billion words grabbed off the internet

      LLMs as a model of reality, but not reality

      There are limits to any model. In this case, the training data. What biases are implicitly in that model based on how it was selected and what it contained?

      The paragraph goes on to list some biases: race, wealth, and “vast swamps”

  21. Feb 2023
    1. belief perseverance
      • belief perseverance
      • definition
        • a cognitive bias in which people encountering evidence that runs counter to their beliefs will, instead of reevaluating what they’ve believed up until now, tend to reject the incompatible evidence
    1. we describe a conceptual framework for understanding adaptive sources of dysfunction – for identifying and combating “adaptations gone awry.”
      • we describe a conceptual framework
      • for understanding adaptive sources of dysfunction
      • for identifying and combating “adaptations gone awry.”
    2. Each reflects the operation of psychological mechanisms that were designed through evolution to serve important adaptive functions, but that nevertheless can produce harmful consequences.
      • Each of these 4 problems
        • anxiety disorder
        • domestic violence
        • racial prejudice
        • obesity
      • reflects the operation of psychological mechanisms
      • that were designed through evolution
      • to serve important adaptive functions, - but that nevertheless can produce harmful consequences.
    3. What do anxiety disorders, domestic violence, racial prejudice, and obesity all have in common?
      • question
        • What do
          • anxiety disorders,
          • domestic violence,
          • racial prejudice, and
          • obesity
      • all have in common?
      • answer
        • maladaptive cognitive biases!
    4. mismatches between current environments and ancestral environments
      • cognitive biases may cause dysfunction due to mismatches between:
        • current environments and
        • ancestral environments
    5. from aggression and international conflict to overpopulation and the destruction of the environment, people display a capacity for great selfishness and antisocial behavior. Can an evolutionary perspective – with its inherent focus on the functionality of human behavior – help explain the occasionally self-destructive and maladaptive side of human nature?
      • from aggression and international conflict to overpopulation and the destruction of the environment,
      • people display a capacity for great selfishness and antisocial behavior.
      • Can an evolutionary perspective
      • with its inherent focus on the functionality of human behavior
      • help explain the occasionally self-destructive and maladaptive side of human nature?
    6. Relative to the evolutionary past, social relationships in modernized western societies tend to involve a much wider variety of relationships, along with relatively less immediate connection with close, kin-based support networks
      • Relative to the evolutionary past,
      • social relationships
      • in modernized western societies
      • tend to involve
      • a much wider variety of relationships,
      • along with relatively less immediate connection
      • with close, kin-based support networks
    7. From an evolutionary perspective, social anxiety is designed primarily to help people ensure an adequate level of social acceptance and, throughout most of human history, this meant acceptance in a tightly-knit group based primarily of biological kin
      • From an evolutionary perspective, - social anxiety is designed primarily
      • to help people ensure
      • an adequate level of social acceptance and,
      • throughout most of human history,
      • this meant acceptance
      • in a tightly-knit group
      • based primarily of biological kin
    8. Although social anxiety can serve useful functions, it can also involve excessive worry, negative affect, and exaggerated avoidance of social situations. Understanding the root causes of anxiety-related problems is an essential step in the development of interventions and policies to reduce dysfunction.
      • Although social anxiety can serve useful functions,
      • it can also involve excessive worry, negative affect, and exaggerated avoidance of social situations.
      • Understanding the root causes of anxiety-related problems
      • is an essential step
      • in the development of
      • interventions and policies
      • to reduce dysfunction.
    1. Many authors noted that generations tended to fall into clichés, especially when the system was confronted with scenarios less likely to be found in the model's training data. For example, Nelly Garcia noted the difficulty in writing about a lesbian romance — the model kept suggesting that she insert a male character or that she have the female protagonists talk about friendship. Yudhanjaya Wijeratne attempted to deviate from standard fantasy tropes (e.g. heroes as cartographers and builders, not warriors), but Wordcraft insisted on pushing the story toward the well-worn trope of a warrior hero fighting back enemy invaders.

      Examples of artificial intelligence pushing toward pre-existing biases based on training data sets.

  22. Jan 2023
    1. Nature knows that, in the long run, established species are expendable and new species are essential. That is why Nature is ruthless to the individual parent and generous to the emerging species. Risk-taking is the key to long-term survival and is also the mother of diversity.

      !- nature is designed with a natural bias : it favours new emerging species over established ones

    1. NYT and NYT online are well-respected left-center publications. They are known for their factual reporting and variety of topics. The NYT op-eds are known to lean a little more left than NYT news, mostly due to editorial topic selection. This leads me to believe that the intended audience is the average American, particularly those with a left lean. The author writes in relatively simple terms that are easily read by the audience.

    1. Who falls for fake news? Psychological and clinical profiling evidence of fake news consumers

      Participants with a schizotypal, paranoid, and histrionic personality were ineffective at detecting fake news. They were also more vulnerable to suffer its negative effects. Specifically, they displayed higher levels of anxiety and committed more cognitive biases based on suggestibility and the Barnum Effect. No significant effects on psychotic symptomatology or affective mood states were observed. Corresponding to these outcomes, two clinical and therapeutic recommendations related to the reduction of the Barnum Effect and the reinterpretation of digital media sensationalism were made. The impact of fake news and possible ways of prevention are discussed.

      Fake news and personality disorders

      The observed relationship between fake news and levels of schizotypy was consistent with previous scientific evidence on pseudoscientific beliefs and magical ideation (see Bronstein et al., 2019; Escolà-Gascón, Marín, et al., 2021). Following the dual process theory model (e.g., Pennycook & Rand, 2019), when a person does not correctly distinguish between information with scientific arguments and information without scientific grounds it is because they predominantly use cognitive reasoning characterized by intuition (e.g., Dagnall, Drinkwater, et al., 2010; Swami et al., 2014; Dagnall et al., 2017b; Williams et al., 2021).

      Concomitantly, intuitive thinking correlates positively with magical beliefs (see Šrol, 2021). Psychopathological classifications include magical beliefs as a dimension of schizotypal personality (e.g., Escolà-Gascón, 2020a). Therefore, it is possible that the high schizotypy scores in this study can be explained from the perspective of dual process theory (Denovan et al., 2018; Denovan et al., 2020; Drinkwater, Dagnall, Denovan, & Williams, 2021). Intuitive thinking could be the moderating variable that explains why participants who scored higher in schizotypy did not effectively detect fake news.

      Something similar happened with the subclinical trait of paranoia. This variable scored the highest in both group 1 and group 2 (see Fig. 1). Intuition is also positively related to conspiratorial ideation (see Drinkwater et al., 2020; Gligorić et al., 2021). Similarly, psychopathology tends to classify conspiracy ideation as a frequent belief system in paranoid personality (see Escolà-Gascón, 2022). This is because conspiracy beliefs are based on systematic distrust of the systems that structure society (political system), knowledge (science) and economy (capitalism) (Dagnall et al., 2015; Swami et al., 2014). Likewise, it is known that distrust is the transversal characteristic of paranoid personality (So et al., 2022). Then, in this case the use of intuitive thinking and dual process theory could also justify the obtained paranoia scores. The same is not true for the histrionic personality.

      The Barnum Effect

      The Barnum Effect consists of accepting as exclusive a verbal description of an individual's personality, when, the description employs contents applicable or generalizable to any profile or personality that one wishes to describe (see Boyce & Geller, 2002; O’Keeffe & Wiseman, 2005). The error of this bias is to assume as exclusive or unique information that is not. This error can occur in other contexts not limited to personality descriptions. Originally, this bias was studied in the field of horoscopes and pseudoscience's (see Matute et al., 2011). Research results suggest that people who do not effectively detect fake news regularly commit the Barnum Effect. So, one way to prevent fake news may be to educate about what the Barnum Effect is and how to avoid it.

      Conclusions

      The conclusions of this research can be summarized as follows: (1) The evidence obtained proposes that profiles with high scores in schizotypy, paranoia and histrionism are more vulnerable to the negative effects of fake news. In clinical practice, special caution is recommended for patients who meet the symptomatic characteristics of these personality traits.

      (2) In psychiatry and clinical psychology, it is proposed to combat fake news by reducing or recoding the Barnum effect, reinterpreting sensationalism in the media and promoting critical thinking in social network users. These suggestions can be applied from intervention programs but can also be implemented as psychoeducational programs for massive users of social networks.

      (3) Individuals who do not effectively detect fake news tend to have higher levels of anxiety, both state and trait anxiety. These individuals are also highly suggestible and tend to seek strong emotions. Profiles of this type may inappropriately employ intuitive thinking, which could be the psychological mechanism that.

      (4) Positive psychotic symptomatology, affective mood states and substance use (addiction risks) were not affected by fake news. In the field of psychosis, it should be analyzed whether fake news influences negative psychotic symptomatology.

  23. Dec 2022
    1. As a result, these Freedom Schools made citizens.

      I think the Author may be committing a begging the question fallacy here. Each type of school creates citizens, but the difference is the quality of awareness within the children entering society post education. This statement is circular within the argument.

    2. According to PEN America, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting free expression, legislatures in 36 states have proposed 137 bills that would limit teaching about race, gender and American history.

      I would argue that there is a fair amount of cognitive dissonance present on the side introducing these bills. Their lived experience and perception of themselves conflicts with the reality that they are white supremacists and are actively suppressing BIPOC history in an effort to reconcile their perceptions of how they live.

    1. At its most tame, Ancient Apocalypse simply reinforces a deeply conservative understanding of human history. Conservative, yes, because despite Hancock’s claim to challenge every orthodoxy going, his ideas—like those of Ignatius Loyola Donnelly, Erich von Däniken, and other so-called “pseudo-archaeologists”—rest on a baseline assumption that technology should always be advancing in linear fashion, from primitive simplicity to modern complexity.

      There is a broad, conservative baseline assumption within much of archaeology that technology always proceeds in a linear fashion from primitive simplicity to modern complexity.

      Archaeologists and historians need to watch carefully for this cognitive bias.

    1. This is especially clear for subjects beyond the three R’s — reading, writing and arithmetic. Fewer than 1 percent of American adults even claim to have learned to speak a foreign language very well in school, even when two years of coursework is standard. Adults’ knowledge of history and civics is negligible. If you test the most elementary facts, like naming the three branches of government, they get about half right. The same goes for questions of basic science, like “Are electrons smaller than atoms?” and “Do antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria?”

      In this paragraph the author explains how subjects and information learned in schools are poorly retained, adults not being able to answer 'simple' questions. I believe in this paragraph he's exhibiting Confirmation Bias because there are many other factors as to why adults may not retain information such as interest, other ongoing events personally or socially, or simply just the passage of time.

    1. Motivated Reasoning

      In broad terms, motivated reasoning theory suggests that reasoning processes (information selection and evaluation, memory encoding, attitude formation, judgment, and decision-making) are influenced by motivations or goals. Motivations are desired end-states that individuals want to achieve.

    1. What is the Illusory Truth Effect?

      The illusory truth effect, also known as the illusion of truth, describes how, when we hear the same false information repeated again and again, we often come to believe it is true. Troublingly, this even happens when people should know better—that is, when people initially know that the misinformation is false.

    1. The author of this editorial claims that there is moral value in using the emissions made by a human body over the course of its lifetime in determining if one should be given life. Making a departure from natural selection, and from sexual attraction and ignoring maternal instinct and cultural familial practices and norms. He proposes that the act of being alive can be measured in its impact upon others who will share the future climate them and since the impact is not 0 then there must be an upper limit of "too many". Immorally, he does not include a measure of "too few" and does not make any mention of the problems society has with exponential population decline. Such as Japan currently selling more adult than infant diapers as their population collapses because of too few children. In fact there is no mention of generational replacement or reproduction rate. Just a simplistic measure of a human impact upon the environment with the entirety of positive impact deleted, omitted, ignored completely. There is in fact no moral high ground in maintaining or promoting the idea that human life has no positive value to the earth. Failing to see ones own value or the value of human life as a whole, rejecting the desire to help human kind survive and prosper and reducing human beings to objects with emissions and no positive output potential is morally reprehensible and not a scientifically sound conclusion, given the observable facts. Among them, that every human being alive on the planet today, standing shoulder to shoulder, would not fill the area of los angeles, and setting aside one acre of our best land for every human being on earth would require an area no arger than texas. There is no scientific basis for concluding there are too many people or that the future humans would benefit from lower population. it is a common error, in the media today, where the impact on climate is evaluated out of the context of all other scilences where positive impacts and negative impacts of human life are observable. Such as biological sciences or earth sciences. it is true, that if we lived on a gas giant, where the only element of the planetary ecosystem was the climate, then such an evaluation of our "carbon footprint" would be meaningful. but since we have a planet with oceans dryland and predators and dangerous conditions, it is morrally reprehensible to suggest our population not maximize its potential to survive to see the future so many are trying to protect by literally throwing their babies out with the bathwater. It is impossible to contribute to the well-being of human life in editorial if you do not have a love of human life. My heart goes out to anyone who takes this article seriously. You do not have to limit your fertility to help humankind survive.

    1. the local healer, or wise man or woman, whowould have particular knowledge of local plants and herbalremedies. This knowledge was oral, however, and its practitioners,for the most part, were illiterate.

      Example of an implicit bias against orality out of ignorance

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. the Arcadians exist now for a reason. But I think a case can be made that this had to happen. We were never, ever, ever going to do this the easy way where we learned for example, we could have seen this back in the early 1900s. We didn't, right? We could have changed at the end of World War II. 00:31:27 We could have changed in 1970. We didn't. Why? We always took the easy way out. It's like a dopamine hit.

      !- insight : progress traps - the dominance of self-interested economic behavior creates a systemic tendency to ignore progress traps, unintended consequences of technology. Profit bias acts to cherry pick explanations that marginalizes rather than addresses progress traps, allowing them to fester and grow to dangerous levels

    1. AI training data is filled with racist stereotypes, pornography, and explicit images of rape, researchers Abeba Birhane, Vinay Uday Prabhu, and Emmanuel Kahembwe found after analyzing a data set similar to the one used to build Stable Diffusion.

      That is horrifying. You'd think that authors would attempt to remove or filter this kind of material. There are, after all models out there that are trained to find it. It makes me wonder what awful stuff is in the GPT-3 dataset too.

    1. I was suspicious—when I ordered Robert B. Stinnett’s book Day of Deceit, that lays out in chapter and verse and proves how FDR deliberately engineered the December 7, 1941 Japanese raid on the U.S. Navy and Army Bases at Pearl Harbor and knew exactly when it was coming—about the fact that it was published by a Jewish publishing house. The publisher, Free Press (the name is a joke) is, after all, a division of Simon & Schuster, a notorious New York Jewhouse.

      Interesting reason to dismiss the evidence presented by the author.

    1. Many HRMS providers point to AI approaches for processing unstructured data as the bestcurrently available approach to dealing with validation. Currently these approaches suffer frominsufficient accuracy. Improving them requires development of large and high-quality referencedatasets to better train the models.

      Historical labor data will be full of bias. AI approaches must correct for bias in training sets, lest we build very sophisticated and intelligent systems that excel at perpetuating the bias they were taught.

  24. Nov 2022
    1. "This is a job market that just won't quit. It's challenging the rules of economics," said Becky Frankiewicz,  chief commercial officer of hiring company ManpowerGroup in an email after the data was released. "The economic indicators are signaling caution, yet American employers are signaling confidence."

      This article explains the economic market. Creating 528,000 jobs is an outstanding aspect for the American people. But It also needs to explain the bad parts of creating jobs in this situation. Because challenging the rules of economics should not make a better situation, There are also high risks.

    1. That could create even more burdens for businesses because hiking interest rates tends to create higher rates on consumer and business loans, which slows the economy by forcing employers to cut back on spending.

      This article describes the disadvantages of high-interest rates. Although there are facts and parts that we need to be concerned about, high-interest rates also have advantages. There are more information about advantages about high-interest.

  25. Oct 2022
    1. An adviser should have their students explicitly practice decisions 25 and 26, test their solutions, and try to come up with the ways their decisions could fail, including alternative conclusions that are not the findings that they were hoping for. Thinking of such failure modes is something that even many experienced physicists are not very good at, but our research has shown that it can be readily learned with practice.

      To help fight cognitive bias, one should actively think about potential failure modes of one's decisions and think about alternative conclusions which aren't part of the findings one might have hoped for. Watching out for these can dramatically help increase solution spaces and be on the watch out for innovative alternate or even better solutions.

    2. The third and probably most serious difficulty in making good reflective decisions is confirmation bias.

      Confirmation bias can be detrimental when making solid reflective decisions.

    1. You do not reallyhave to study a topic you are working on; once your areinto it, it is everywhere. You are sensitive to its themes;you see and hear them everywhere in your experience,especially, it always seems to me, in apparently unrelatedareas. Even the mass media, especially bad movies andcheap novels and picture magazines and night radio, aredisclosed in fresh importance to you.
    2. To be able to trustone's own experience, even if it often turns out to beinadequate, is one mark of the mature workman. Suchconfidence in o n e ' s own experience is indispensable tooriginality in any intellectual pursuit, and the file is onetool by which I have tried to develop and justify suchconfidence.

      The function of memory served by having written notes is what allows the serious researcher or thinker to have greater confidence in their work, potentially more free from cognitive bias as one idea can be directly compared and contrasted with another by direct juxtaposition.

    3. whether he knows it or not, the intellec-tual workman forms his own self as he works towards theperfection of his craft.

      Here Mills seems to be defining (in 1952) an "intellectual workman" as an academic, but he doesn't go as broad as a more modern "knowledge worker" (2022) which includes those who broadly do thinking in industry as well as in academia. His older phrase also has a more gendered flavor to it that knowledge worker doesn't have now.

  26. Sep 2022
    1. But most of humanity—not just medieval people—lacked the ability to fight infections or even under-stand how they spread for much of history. England during the Renaissance suffered regular deadly outbreaks of plague, smallpox, syphilis, typhus, malaria, and a mysterious illness called “sweating sickness.” Upon contact with Europeans, upwards of 95 per cent of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were killed by European diseases. Plagues even rav-aged the twentieth century: from 1918–1920, half a billion 14 / The Devil’s Historianspeople were infected with the Spanish Flu global pandemic, which killed between 50 and 100 million people. And let’s not forget that we are currently living with the global pandemic of HIV/AIDS

      Maybe people in the future will see today as the dark ages becuase of the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic So it is biased to call the middle ages as "dark ages" when the level of science during the middle ages cannot heal or prevent people from the infection of plagues such as the "black death".

    1. The problem is that if one player finds a way to undermine orcircumvent the rules and gets away with it then the others have no choicebut to follow. If they don’t they’ll lose out.

      !- for : race to the bottom !- for : conformity bias - spiraling destructive entrainment

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    1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/

      Good overview article of some of the psychology research behind misinformation in social media spaces including bots, AI, and the effects of cognitive bias.

      Probably worth mining the story for the journal articles and collecting/reading them.

    2. n a recent laboratory study, Robert Jagiello, also at Warwick, found that socially shared information not only bolsters our biases but also becomes more resilient to correction.
    3. We confuse popularity with quality and end up copying the behavior we observe.

      Popularity ≠ quality in social media.

    4. Even our ability to detect online manipulation is affected by our political bias, though not symmetrically: Republican users are more likely to mistake bots promoting conservative ideas for humans, whereas Democrats are more likely to mistake conservative human users for bots.
    5. Unable to process all this material, we let our cognitive biases decide what we should pay attention to.

      In a society consumed with information overload, it is easier for our brains to allow our well evolved cognitive biases to decide not only what to pay attention to, but what to believe.

    1. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3641225-mcconnell-throws-shade-on-grahams-proposed-national-abortion-ban/

      I've recently run across a few examples of a pattern that should have a name because it would appear to dramatically change the outcomes. I'm going to term it "decisions based on possibilities rather than realities". It's seen frequently in economics and politics and seems to be a form of cognitive bias. People make choices (or votes) about uncertain futures, often when there is a confluence of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and these choices are dramatically different than when they're presented with the actual circumstances in practice.

      A recent example was a story about a woman who was virulently pro-life who when presented with a situation required her to switch her position to pro-choice.

      Another relates to choices that people want to make about where their children might go to school versus where they actually send them, and the damage this does to public education.

      Let's start collecting examples of these quandaries at all levels of making choices in the real world.


      What is the relationship to this with the mental exercise of "descending into the particular"?

      Does this also potentially cause decision fatigue in cases of voting spaces when constituents are forced to vote for candidates on thousands of axes which they may or may not agree with?

  27. Aug 2022