The US of A banning TikTok (which is NOT owned by China) while embracing M E T A (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram), plus Microsoft & Google as private data-enrichment cartels!
A hard-to-believe display of stupidity:
Or is it just political faintness?
The story is that the Internet Archive bought books, scanned them, and then made them available to people digitally. However, they only allowed as many borrowings as they had physical copies of the book.
Then, when Covid went into hot mode, they lifted the restriction. So the publishers were keen to turn the Internet Archive into a parking lot, but theyâd rather not have Covid and little kids on lockdown as a context, so now theyâve challenged the whole practice of digital lending of physical books in court.
The court has agreed with them.
Now unfortunately this was not just some district court of Hintertupfingen but a circuit court of New York, but there is still legal recourse and the Internet Archive wants to fight that.
It is remarkable, however, that they not only want to destroy the Internet Archive, but also all the regular bibliophiles who have done the same. So there is the threat of an immense cultural clear-cut.
This is not necessarily something that people can march along with, but the Internet Archive also accepts donations. They are not tax deductible. But publishing the problem is the least that all archive.org users can do.
Interesting, how each top program was a unique live event, dominated by the NFL.
2022 TV RECAP: ITâS THE NFLâS WORLD; THE REST OF US JUST LIVE IN IT
Sportico is out with its annual list of the "Top 100 Most-Watched TV Broadcasts" of the previous year, reporting that - by far - National Football League games dominate the list with 82 of the top 100 programs. There were just five college football games on the list, four political programs, three World Cup games, and two college basketball games.
Good discussion on the history and current state of media. Is media a public service, or just another company selling a commodity to maximize profit? Media's role as the "fourth estate" is increasingly compromised as they shift to the latter goal.
Wasnt sure where to put this...story deals mostly with the dissolving financial trust, but also how the role of media (social) has contributed:
Finance, the media and a catastrophic breakdown in trust John Authers had a ringside seat to some of the most important financial stories of our time. Hereâs what he learnt
Finance is all about trust. JP Morgan, patriarch of the banking dynasty, told Congress in the 1912 hearings that led to the foundation of the US Federal Reserve, that the first thing in credit was âcharacter, before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it.
âA man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom,â he added. âI think that is the fundamental basis of business.â He was right. More than a century later, it is ever clearer that, without trust, finance collapses. That is no less true now, when quadrillions change hands in electronic transactions across the globe, than it was when men such as Morgan dominated markets trading face to face.
And that is a problem. Trust has broken down throughout society. From angry lynch mobs on social media to the fracturing of the western worldâs political establishment, this is an accepted fact of life, and it is not merely true of politics. Over the past three decades, trust in markets has evaporated.
I'm not talking about a change (biologically or otherwise) to the human species, and I don't think we see the problem the same way at all.
What you see as our ability to delude ourselves I see as a fundamental characteristic of our species, neither good nor bad. We don't have a way to discern the truth, we have only the evidence of our senses. What we do with that evidence is ultimately up to us, aided by a built-in facility that has served us well for eons: pattern recognition.
It helps us see the difference in tracks between wounded and healthy animald when that difference is very subtle. We may not even be able to describe it, but we know it when we see it. Even though the tracks lead uphill the animal is worth following. We use it to reject some evidence in favor of an induction from other evidence, and it helped us get where we are today.
But that facility can be used against us. We see patterns—we want to see patterns, it's how we understand the world—where there is just noise. When you see someone rejecting evidence in favor of a cherished belief he's not acting completely irrationally, he's comparing the evidence to the pattern he's seen and rejecting it as disinformation, camouflage, an attempt to throw him off the track of that wounded beast. It takes a lot to overcome that built-in bias toward how we think the world works because there is noise, disinformation, camouflage. A magician's slight-of-hand might get you to believe that he has conquered gravity, but our experience—the patterns we've recognized from it—tells us to distrust anything we see a magician do, and to trust that gravity is constant.
What looks to you like self-deception is really data filtering. The conscious (and inquisitive) mind can overcome that with time and practice, but we won't abandon pattern recognition, the old pattern will be rejected or modified in favor of a new one. The underlying mechanism doesn't change, and I doubt it will. We need it. At least...that's the pattern so far.
The tool we need is skepticism, to test our assumptions—the patterns we think we see—against the evidence we can assemble. Skepticism is a skill we can learn, and we need to build a culture that values it.
Skepticism is damned inconvenient. It slows things down. It makes you prove that the building is on fire before you get out of your cozy bed to stand on the icy street, but it also gets us to the next level of societal evolution. It helps us get closer to the truth.
The tools that aid a skeptic are more accessible than at any time in history. It will take time to learn to use them, but the incentives are there. Most of us have been living with this access for fewer than 20 years. Give it a bit. Way too early to reject the long-term pattern of human social development just because there are idiots on Twitter.
You're right, I was conflating our desire to see patterns and causality where it doesn't exist with choosing loyalty to a group over what our objective mind should see as the truth. They're separate phenomena. I didn't actually name skepticism in my discussion of tools found in our brain, but it is definitely one I was alluding to. As I said, I am afraid that we have the potential to wreck our social order within the course of a single human life span, so the "give it time" platitude doesn't console me all that much. Wish I could be as optimistic as you. EDIT: I am apparently not the only pessimist on this topic (hat tip to Xeric).
I get the sense that the main thing we don’t agree on is the direction in which the arrow is pointing with respect to our ability to delude ourselves, and the ability to reject nonsense and irrationality. It seems you think that since the human brain is evolving and ultimately improving due to evolution (which I accept wholeheartedly), that on a microscopic, short term scale, we can also view the ability of humans to be less subject to self-delusion, less likely to buy into BS, as inexorably improving. On the long term scale of biological evolution, perhaps this is true. I tend to be more pessimistic than you, apparently, over the short term. You can cherry pick examples where we have “crawled out of the darkness”, as you put it, during the brief period covering human’s rise that we can call the “era of civilization”. One can offer comparable examples of the endless capacity for self-deception in humans. Take the increased popularity of the anti-vaccine movement, which is now spreading to pets. The continuing (for centuries) popularity of belief in “faith healing” (the Quackwatch site points out that a “1996 poll of 1000 adults found that 79% believed that spiritual faith can help people recover from disease”). The continued gullibility of people who lose significant sums of money in an increasingly diverse variety of scams. The unwillingness of significant numbers people to change their false beliefs when presented with indisputable evidence of its falseness. I think it is instructive to think of the “evolution” of human capacity for being duped, for self-deception, not as an adaptation that deals with a static or slowly changing circumstance (such as gravity or climate), but as a battle between two constantly evolving and competing agencies. Sort of like our immune system (and our use of antibiotics) battling the evolution of diseases and microbes. In a sense, it’s somewhat of a battle against our own nature. Along with an improvement in peoples’ ability to recognize and resist old scams, new ones are created in the fertile mind of scam artists, pseudoscientists, etc. And the same tools (computers, internet, etc.) that facilitate arming one’s self against being scammed/taken in by nonsense, fake news, pseudoscience, quackery, etc. enable those who are so inclined to develop new, cleverer ways to dupe people that elude the defenses erected against existing scams, and to foist them on a much broader cross section of potential victims.
I'm not talking about a change (biologically or otherwise) to the human species, and I don't think we see the problem the same way at all.
What you see as our ability to delude ourselves I see as a fundamental characteristic of our species, neither good nor bad. We don't have a way to discern the truth, we have only the evidence of our senses. What we do with that evidence is ultimately up to us, aided by a built-in facility that has served us well for eons: pattern recognition.
It helps us see the difference in tracks between wounded and healthy animald when that difference is very subtle. We may not even be able to describe it, but we know it when we see it. Even though the tracks lead uphill the animal is worth following. We use it to reject some evidence in favor of an induction from other evidence, and it helped us get where we are today.
But that facility can be used against us. We see patterns—we want to see patterns, it's how we understand the world—where there is just noise. When you see someone rejecting evidence in favor of a cherished belief he's not acting completely irrationally, he's comparing the evidence to the pattern he's seen and rejecting it as disinformation, camouflage, an attempt to throw him off the track of that wounded beast. It takes a lot to overcome that built-in bias toward how we think the world works because there is noise, disinformation, camouflage. A magician's slight-of-hand might get you to believe that he has conquered gravity, but our experience—the patterns we've recognized from it—tells us to distrust anything we see a magician do, and to trust that gravity is constant.
What looks to you like self-deception is really data filtering. The conscious (and inquisitive) mind can overcome that with time and practice, but we won't abandon pattern recognition, the old pattern will be rejected or modified in favor of a new one. The underlying mechanism doesn't change, and I doubt it will. We need it. At least...that's the pattern so far.
The tool we need is skepticism, to test our assumptions—the patterns we think we see—against the evidence we can assemble. Skepticism is a skill we can learn, and we need to build a culture that values it.
Skepticism is damned inconvenient. It slows things down. It makes you prove that the building is on fire before you get out of your cozy bed to stand on the icy street, but it also gets us to the next level of societal evolution. It helps us get closer to the truth.
The tools that aid a skeptic are more accessible than at any time in history. It will take time to learn to use them, but the incentives are there. Most of us have been living with this access for fewer than 20 years. Give it a bit. Way too early to reject the long-term pattern of human social development just because there are idiots on Twitter.
Skepticism is just another pattern to follow...no more truth down that alley than throwing darts. (Am i a skeptic?)
I get the sense that the main thing we don’t agree on is the direction in which the arrow is pointing with respect to our ability to delude ourselves, and the ability to reject nonsense and irrationality. It seems you think that since the human brain is evolving and ultimately improving due to evolution (which I accept wholeheartedly), that on a microscopic, short term scale, we can also view the ability of humans to be less subject to self-delusion, less likely to buy into BS, as inexorably improving. On the long term scale of biological evolution, perhaps this is true. I tend to be more pessimistic than you, apparently, over the short term. You can cherry pick examples where we have “crawled out of the darkness”, as you put it, during the brief period covering human’s rise that we can call the “era of civilization”. One can offer comparable examples of the endless capacity for self-deception in humans. Take the increased popularity of the anti-vaccine movement, which is now spreading to pets. The continuing (for centuries) popularity of belief in “faith healing” (the Quackwatch site points out that a “1996 poll of 1000 adults found that 79% believed that spiritual faith can help people recover from disease”). The continued gullibility of people who lose significant sums of money in an increasingly diverse variety of scams. The unwillingness of significant numbers people to change their false beliefs when presented with indisputable evidence of its falseness. I think it is instructive to think of the “evolution” of human capacity for being duped, for self-deception, not as an adaptation that deals with a static or slowly changing circumstance (such as gravity or climate), but as a battle between two constantly evolving and competing agencies. Sort of like our immune system (and our use of antibiotics) battling the evolution of diseases and microbes. In a sense, it’s somewhat of a battle against our own nature. Along with an improvement in peoples’ ability to recognize and resist old scams, new ones are created in the fertile mind of scam artists, pseudoscientists, etc. And the same tools (computers, internet, etc.) that facilitate arming one’s self against being scammed/taken in by nonsense, fake news, pseudoscience, quackery, etc. enable those who are so inclined to develop new, cleverer ways to dupe people that elude the defenses erected against existing scams, and to foist them on a much broader cross section of potential victims.
I'm not talking about a change (biologically or otherwise) to the human species, and I don't think we see the problem the same way at all.
What you see as our ability to delude ourselves I see as a fundamental characteristic of our species, neither good nor bad. We don't have a way to discern the truth, we have only the evidence of our senses. What we do with that evidence is ultimately up to us, aided by a built-in facility that has served us well for eons: pattern recognition.
It helps us see the difference in tracks between wounded and healthy animald when that difference is very subtle. We may not even be able to describe it, but we know it when we see it. Even though the tracks lead uphill the animal is worth following. We use it to reject some evidence in favor of an induction from other evidence, and it helped us get where we are today.
But that facility can be used against us. We see patterns—we want to see patterns, it's how we understand the world—where there is just noise. When you see someone rejecting evidence in favor of a cherished belief he's not acting completely irrationally, he's comparing the evidence to the pattern he's seen and rejecting it as disinformation, camouflage, an attempt to throw him off the track of that wounded beast. It takes a lot to overcome that built-in bias toward how we think the world works because there is noise, disinformation, camouflage. A magician's slight-of-hand might get you to believe that he has conquered gravity, but our experience—the patterns we've recognized from it—tells us to distrust anything we see a magician do, and to trust that gravity is constant.
What looks to you like self-deception is really data filtering. The conscious (and inquisitive) mind can overcome that with time and practice, but we won't abandon pattern recognition, the old pattern will be rejected or modified in favor of a new one. The underlying mechanism doesn't change, and I doubt it will. We need it. At least...that's the pattern so far.
The tool we need is skepticism, to test our assumptions—the patterns we think we see—against the evidence we can assemble. Skepticism is a skill we can learn, and we need to build a culture that values it.
Skepticism is damned inconvenient. It slows things down. It makes you prove that the building is on fire before you get out of your cozy bed to stand on the icy street, but it also gets us to the next level of societal evolution. It helps us get closer to the truth.
The tools that aid a skeptic are more accessible than at any time in history. It will take time to learn to use them, but the incentives are there. Most of us have been living with this access for fewer than 20 years. Give it a bit. Way too early to reject the long-term pattern of human social development just because there are idiots on Twitter.
I don't know where fawning is on the evolutionary scale of things. Just wanted to say I think the discussions you two have are great and although you seem continually at odds, I find myself agreeing with both of you really often, which is kind of confusing, but hell, have at it.
Thanks, we probably both agree on a lot of stuff, but we do sometimes manage to make a lot of fuss over areas where we differ in opinion.
I don't know where fawning is on the evolutionary scale of things. Just wanted to say I think the discussions you two have are great and although you seem continually at odds, I find myself agreeing with both of you really often, which is kind of confusing, but hell, have at it.
