Matches well with a piece I saw the other day about how US rail safety was being improved by an anonymized reporting mechanism through NASA (which is used to handling transport safety reports). Because the railway workers face no sanctions for reporting incidents, they don’t hesitate to do so.
In this case, the undesired behaviour is being sanctioned in a way that doesn’t activate people’s defensiveness at being accused, so they’re more likely to stop.
Originally shared by ****
This little article about how MIT admins used to handle trolls, harassment, and other issues has been making the rounds on Mastodon today and I thought it was interesting.
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The third stopit mechanism is a carefully-structured standard note to alleged perpetrators of harassment, improper use, or other uncivil behavior. “Someone using your account,” the note begins, “did [whatever the offense is].” The u.y.a. note (as this mechanism is known, for its introductory words) then explains why this behavior or action is offensive, or violates MIT harassment policy, or Rules of Use, or whatever. “Account holders are responsible for the use of their accounts. If you were unaware that your account was being used in this way,” the note continues, “it may have been compromised. User Accounts can help you change your password and re-secure your account.” Detailed directions to User Accounts follow. The note concludes with a short sentence: “If you were aware that your account was being used to [whatever it was], then we trust you will take steps to ensure that this does not happen again.”
Two interesting outcomes ensue.
First, many recipients of u.y.a. notes go to User Accounts, say their accounts have been compromised, and change their passwords – even when it’s clear, from eyewitnesses or other evidence, that they personally were the offenders.
Second, and most important, u.y.a. recipients virtually never repeat the offending behavior.
This is important: even though recipients concede no guilt, and receive no punishment, they stop.
As things tend towards being free, consumption tends to increase. So will we need to regulate energy consumption so that it’s only free as long as you’re not wasting it?
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
If Energy Becomes Free in the Future, How Will That Affect Our Lives? http://suhub.co/2tBp4Wi
This is why Bill Gates and others have proposed a “robot tax,” and why I think it’s a good idea.
Originally shared by Cyndi S. Jameson
“The authors find some good news: automation doesn’t reduce the number of jobs available—if anything, it creates them. Although some industries have lost jobs due to automation, the productivity spillovers accruing to customer and supplier industries (what the authors call “the Costco effect”) and to overall consumer spending (what they call the “Walmart effect”) more than offset the direct losses to specific industries. The net effect is a slight increase in employment, cumulating to some 6 percent over the 1970-2007 period.
But here’s the catch: While automation has created jobs, enhanced the size of the economic pie, and increased total worker earnings, it has not raised the share of national income allocated to wages as rapidly as it has raised productivity. In short, the part of the economic pie that belongs to worker earnings has shrunk. This finding holds whether automation is measured by productivity gains, by industry-level patenting flows, or by adoption of industrial robotics. In net, the effect of automation on the share of national income allocated to wages is negative because industry-level loses are not fully offset by either “Costco” or “Walmart” effects.”
It’s a good thing, I think, that there are people whose job is to figure out how we move forward into a sustainable and resilient future for humanity from the place we’re in now.
I hope they’re good at that job, and good at convincing other people to join them.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
How ‘Cultural Evolution’ Can Give Us the Tools to Build Global-Scale Resilience http://suhub.co/2Fmo0rw
You may or may not remember my post the other day about fixing the structure of social media. That was more or less an intellectual exercise; there’s nothing, really, that you or I can do to achieve the large-scale changes I was speculating about there.
What we can do, though, is examine our own social media behaviour with a view to improving the overall environment. So that’s what this post is about; a commitment to a wiser, kinder, more thoughtful and more hopeful social media practice, that I hope will spread beyond me and my immediate circles.
(That’s an invitation to share this as widely as you like.)
Of course, some of these things are still available to the people they’re available to because other people are poor. But it’s also the case that with greater connectivity comes a rise in average prosperity.
Originally shared by Todd William
Why You’re Richer than a King
There exists a trend in the Western World to focus on the negative. The more we have, it seems, the more we have to take for granted. Yet much of this pessimism is grossly unwarranted.
Perhaps no one expresses this better than Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist. With a keen sense of perspective, he provides the following anecdote that will leave even the most cynical of mindsets second guessing themselves.
_____________________
THE KING
“The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services.”
“He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.”
But what about today?
“Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was.”
“Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach.”
And yet consider this.
“The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavored with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary.”
“You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.”
“You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia.”
“You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamoring to bring you clean central heating.”
“You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell.”
“You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.”
“My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference?”
“That is the magic that exchange and specialization have wrought for the human species.”
You can’t think about your biases all the time; you’d end up unable to decide on anything. But there are times when it’s important to think about them, like when you’re hiring someone.
This team has exposed their fake news detector (which is actually a real news detector, because that’s easier) on a website, so if you’re dubious about an article, you can have their machine check it.
