rain drops,” as part of a mob, a rabble, all of which are ways of constituting them as an undifferentiated mob
Dehumanization tactic. People become less human if you group them together as one entity. Like the difference of dogs vs a dog called pepper. People care more about the dog they know. In modern society that could be the jews or the blacks or any number of discriminated groups.
Once the humanity of a people is problematized, they are called into question perennially. T
An extreme form of jumping to conclusions. Categorizing a population size with too small of a sample. Bad statistics and human practice aswell.
. I refer to the struggle for decency and dignity, the struggle for freedom and democracy.
What does he mean by preserving this struggle? Is it a necessity to democracy to have a pus and pull and conflict?
t was a genuine video, but an agent of disinformation slowed down the video and then posted that clip to make it seem that Pelosi was slurring her words
Sounds so conspiracy. "an agent", as if they work for some shadowy corporation or governmental branch. Also, slowed videos are pretty easy to detect. Was that the only edit done?
effective disinformation has always been that which has a kernel of truth to it,
Exaggeration or sensationalism? Or would they be the same thing? Take a small truth, add some lies and hyperbole and you got a crazy story.
all of which sparked researchers to systematically investigate the ways in which information was being used as a weapo
Information has always been used as a weapon. Even pre-internet. Propaganda during the cold war used information, the twisting of facts, and misinformation as a weapon.
Meanwhile those stranded on the tops of the towers would be livestreaming their final moments.
Trying to stay remembered.
driving wedges between communities and sowing chaos.
Used as a medium to sow thoughts into actions. Who would profit from doing so?
Hate-filled posts aimed at the Muslim community would proliferate,
One could argue these thoughts were always there, the internet merely provided a medium for all those thoughts to collect and be viewed in the open.
communication at speed had been forced to run a 9/11 scenario with their technologies before they deployed them commercially.
Should all technology be run through a worst case scenario. Should that tech be destroyed or forgotten because of the possible evil it can be used for, even if the good is equally as impressive?
made it easier for agents of disinformation to weaponize regular users of the social web to spread harmful messages.
World sounds so dystopian sometimes. Why I dont trust the media, I always have a bit of skepticism towards it no, which didnt use to be the case.
spread disinformation
Easier now than ever. Conspiracies and rumors create much more chaos than ever before.
But all that may be beside the point — you don’t always have to be right to land a punch.
Real problem ignored still might be effective
. Facebook will again be held liable for the worst things people post on it — at least in the court of public opinion
Not even thier fault. Cant control everyone, people like platform for its freedom probably too.
it, while saving some money in the process, is perhaps less a profile in courage than it has sometimes been presented as over the past few days.
Still all about money Advertiseres really dont care.
less pricing power than they have over other media buys
How Facebook stays sorta independent! Why other mass media can be bought.
amid the global pandemic, advertisers have been reducing their advertising spending anyway.
An excuse to save money?
Facebook is too big to effectively moderate its own platform — well, that seems like a harder issue for Facebook to argue. It’s just difficult to imagine the company taking it too seriously unless one of the boycotting brands actually says it out loud.
No one really cares enough Facebook is too big. Cant hire enough staff to moderate 1.7 billion people.
would take out an ad next to a story about police brutality. I doubt even one would.
Playing both sides. All for publicity.
ll have more than 90 percent of its revenue. And that’s assuming the brand advertisers won’t eventually come back to Facebook — an assumption that, at least for the moment, no one is making. There’s a reason Facebook has more than 7 million advertisers, and the reason is that the ads work.
Big enough mass media to actually exert control over advertisers
or about 6% of the platform’s ad revenue.
Six percent. A loss of 6 percent, a few millions, when making billions literally doesnt matter
It seems unlikely that this will happen to Facebook,
Facebook has so many adveritisers, the affect of a few thousand, even if big companies, is negligible
when what it’s really about, it seems to me, is size. II.
Too big MAIN ARGUEMENT
t’s not possible to let 1.73 billion people a day post freely on your services and have them all comply with your rules.
Like real life criminlas. Hard to get so many people to be law abiding, not enough enforcement for all that people
allowed but what is enforced.
Arguemtn of article=enforcement is the real problem
“Racist, discriminatory, and hateful online content have no place in our brand or in society.” And here is Facebook’s policy on hate speech: “We do not allow hate speech on Facebook because it creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion and in some cases may promote real-world violence.”
Bascially the same statement.
he brands have spoken as if Facebook doesn’t ban hate speech at all.
Weird polarization, people ignoring the already present policies. Wastes time in the start of the boycott which is potentially the most valuable part of an event like this.
The remainder is a mix of requests for things Facebook already does or has a policy against (“stop recommending or otherwise amplifying groups or content from groups associated with hate”; “removing misinformation related to voting”); sort of already has a policy against
More evidence that they are fighting the wrong source.
a “C-suite level executive with civil rights expertise to evaluate products and policies for discrimination, bias, and hate.” (My sense is that Facebook’s chief diversity officer does at least some of this already, if somewhat informally.) It also asked Facebook to “submit to regular, third party, independent audits of identity-based hate and misinformation.” (Like this one?)
Article is arguing that they [The civil rights group and advertisers] are fighting the wrong source of the issue. Facebook according to Casey Newton already does some of what the boycotters want.
are among those who have pulled their ads. (Microsoft did so quietly in May.) Some pulled their ads for a month; some put their ads on an indefinite “pause.” Some pulled their ads from Facebook only; others pulled them from Twitter and YouTube as well.
A month is a small amount of time to cause any damage. Those companies didn't really do anything. Bigger ones did it over publicity. Make more money if they seem like a good company, dont wanna associate w the problem and lose consumers
ven after we have measured the lines and found them to be equal, and have had the neurological basis of the illusion explained to us, we still perceive one line to be shorter than the other.
Maybe im doing this wrong, but I only see one line as shorter for a few seconds, than they are the same. Anyone else having issue with this?
be confirmation bias.
Have to watch out for that one when doing research.
by plane is more dangerous than traveling by car. (Images of plane crashes are more vivid and dramatic in our memory and imagination, and hence more available to our consciousness.
Turbulence is pretty freaky though. Cars are way smoother, gives a false impression of safety.
membered better than completed ones
Must be anxiety over what needs to be done. Pretty relatable right now since im a student again.
tendency people have, when considering a trade-off between two future moments, to more heavily weight the one closer to the present
Almost as if people have a hard time thinking about the future. I always have, im probably pretty susceptible to this bias.
1,000. The students who had looked their older self in the eye said they would put an average of $172 into a retirement account. That’s more than double the amount that would have been invested by members of the control group, who were willing to sock away an average of only $80.
I think when confronted with the fact that their future selves are very real, that they decided to save money for them.
a company that will kick in additional funds to retirement plans when they contribute.
Maybe its because they are planning for unforeseen emergencies that happen in the present. Could be very short term future planning.
Asked whether they would take $150 a year from now or $180 in 13 months, people are overwhelmingly willing to wait an extra month for the extra $30.
If im gonna wait anyways, might as well take the extra month. People take the money "today" because they may very well need it that day, and cant afford to wait. Maybe money isnt a great measure as financial situations can greatly affect decisions.
Pry is the opposite of a shallow work; its whole play is between the surface and the depths of the human mind. Reading it is exhilarating.
Its engaging, much more than any other book. It forces readers to become a part of the text, almost forcing more analysis.
to the stories we can’t put down.
Stories that make us "Feel" more and more deeply are often better.
Situation models guide reading comprehension and memory; without them, we get lost, which explains, in neuropsychological terms, why the scrambled sentences were harder to remembe
Like imagining what is actually happening?
ncreased understanding, the way puzzling over a difficult poem yields more than reading quickly through an easy one.
Repetition and investigation
r tree-like structure, sometimes in webs or cats’-cradles or other tangled forms. (Technically, the Web is a hypertext, but the word often refers to single works with an internally linked structure.)
Makes it easy to "wiki walk" or go from one reading to another to another to another because one keeps clicking on interesting embedded links.
an of the expectations that readers bring to them.
Psychological issues, fixable.
. Afterward, Europeans read all kinds of material—novels, periodicals, newspapers—and they read each item only once before racing on to the next. Contemporary critics were doubtless appalled, but on the other hand, from that flood of printed matter, we got the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the American and French revolutions.
Now people read anything and everything. It can be overwhelming.
table of contents had been around since roughly the first century B.C.); from text to marginal gloss, and, later, to footn
Made to let us wander
. We may not keep the Iliad in our heads any longer, but we’re exquisitely capable of reflecting on it, comparing it to other stories we know, and forming conclusions about human beings ancient and modern
I wonder if writing has existed for long enough, that these skills become an implicit skill developed from evolution.
t writing would weaken human memory, and stifle judgment
Technology always scares someone. Gotta reasonably push past those nay sayers.
the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed; but done well, it has the potential to expand and augment the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read without moving our lips.
Every great invention has the equal capacity for good and evil. For numbing an enrichment and the internet is no exception.
hreaten to overwhelm the interior space of reading, stranding us in what the journalist Nicholas Carr has c
I disagree. If anything its increased it. I dont need to physically go to a library in order to access the knowledge there. Now I can sit at home, comfortably in my own desk, bed, or on a couch and read in an environment that is deeply personal to me. Increasing the relationship of text to reader.
.. the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure,
Helps the imagination to function when it doesnt have to allocate resources to speaking. The brain can instead imagine and internalize better.
he advent of silent reading. Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but in antiquity, the normal thing was to read aloud.
Strange, that seems to be the opposite case once you hit about 4th grade. Before this point everyone reads aloud to you. Also, in a public setting its bad manners to read aloud, if its loud enough to disturb other readers.
businessman who sells food and clothing to Martin Luther King, Jr., is making a genuine contribution to civic virtue, even though he makes it indirectly. This doesn’t seem persuasive, in part because it dilutes the meaning of civic virtue too much, and in part because it implies that a businessman who sells a cheeseburger to J. Edgar Hoover is committing civic evil.
Too much grey area in order for this to really work like how Brennan is explaining.
be less eager to go to war, less punitive about crime, more tolerant on social issues, less accepting of government control of the economy, and more willing to accept taxes in order to reduce the federal deficit
This all makes a lot of sense. No one really wants a war, unless you want to be involved in war profiteering. No one wants more crime, and people tend to be more chill about social issues when they fully understand its scope.
n “The Ethics of Voting” as “ripe for abuse and institutional capture.” There’s no mention in his new book of any measures that he would put in place to prevent such dangers.
Potential for corruption in every political process, even our current one. I wonder how much corruption there is.
Social Security no more strongly than the young do
The young may realize that social security will benefit them, when they are old. I dont know if this is a good measure for selfless voting.
will always feel more unjust than giving those in the majority power over those in the minority. As defenses of democracy go, these are even less rousing than Churchill’s shruggie.
Choosing a "lesser evil"?
e.” It’s an idea that “advocates of democracy, and other enemies of despotism, will want to resist,” he wrote, and he counted himself among the resisters. As a purely philosophical matter, however, he saw only three valid objections.
Yea but if you wanted to oppress a certain people, one could slowly start uneducating them.
“if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more,”
Reminiscent of when slaves were first freed in the US and because they couldn't read, they were easily tricked into deals and contracts that economically kept them a slave.
at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance.
It is a fine line between staying democratic and moving into more authoritarian forms of government.
the ignorance of the many has long galled the few,
Can relate to this. My biggest issue with today's world is the current elections. The 2016 and 2020 elections seem to be big jokes filled with even bigger jokes for presidential candidates, and for some reason no one seems particularly peeved of the fact that all the candidates are garbage. Why do accept such garbage candidates in the first place?
Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state has two of them.
I'd wager, the same amount struggles with finding all 50 states