The thing about Universal Basic Income is that it goes against what we’ve believed, and been told, about helping the poor pretty much since modern philanthropy started.
We need to recalibrate our intuitions if UBI is to become a widespread reality – and I’m increasingly convinced that that would be a good thing.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
What We’re Learning From a Big Universal Basic Income Experiment
I don’t work long hours. I don’t find it productive.
Apparently I’m not alone in this.
Originally shared by Guy Kawasaki
” If some of history’s greatest figures didn’t put in immensely long hours, maybe the key to unlocking the secret of their creativity lies in understanding not just how they labored but how they rested, and how the two relate.” http://bit.ly/2nZ63bI
This sign actually says “No fire hydrants in stairwell.” But from the right angle, it’s a lot more exciting.
It… actually looks like conspiracy theories are being spread by a conspiracy.
So much for using that as a wild story idea.
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
The dynamics of disinformation, propaganda, “fake news,” and conspiracy theories can be studied by watching how they spread. This is a summary of a scientific study (by one of its authors, who links the full paper) into this, and it’s chock-full of fascinating results. They focused on responses to mass shootings in particular, as these are a favorite target of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy stories, it turns out, spread with a very different pattern than other types of story – and botnets, quasi-replication of stories between sites, and similar patterns of signal manipulation are key to them. This (as well as other interesting commonalities between the sites which propagate these) suggests that there is something systematic and intentional behind these theories: they aren’t emerging organically, they’re being curated.
Via a private share. This is an encouraging outcome.
This is worthy of a lot of pondering.
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
This is a very well-distilled explanation of an important point: the culture of a company (or of a group of friends, or of a city, or of a country) isn’t captured by asking people what the culture is, but by asking “what do you need to know to get ahead.”
That’s not meant as a motivational statement: it’s meant as a tool for understanding your group. The things which actually get someone ahead or hold them back, things which can be very ugly to look at sometimes, are the things which the society rewards and punishes. And as anyone who’s ever run a team knows, you get what you incentivize; your incentives are your culture, and when they don’t align with your high-flown statements, that just means that your statements are wrong.
The exercise the author presents at the end is quite a valuable one.
Well, this is a concern.
Originally shared by Maya Davis
“It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)…
“On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”…
“Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s Facebook profiles…
“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous…
“Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it’s SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs…
“One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information…
“We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality….”
I am not naive enough to believe that only one side is doing this. Knowledge is power, and there are a lot of people with money who crave power. The responsibility is on us to be awake, to understand what is happening, and ask ourselves if we are as free as we think we are. I have seen so many people recently who have contradicted things they said even just a year ago–who they support and why, what causes are important to them. I was already worried/fascinated about the change, but now I wonder even more: who is driving this narrative. Can you honestly look at who you are right now, hold yourself up the mirror of your core values (whatever they may be), and ask yourself if you are acting or supporting those who act in a way that support those core values? If not, why not? If so, how so? And, in the end it always comes back to this: follow the money. The money trail always stinks.
Via Ronda Reed. A good set of self-reflective exercises and cognitive techniques to fight bias.
Originally shared by Rick Wayne (Author)
“Education does little to prevent polarised thinking…” Same for facts.
People think vigorous “resistance” is effective. Not true. It only tends to further polarize and entrench. All creatures defend themselves when attacked. The more violent the attack, the more vigorous the defense, which means vigorous “resistance” will actually have the opposite effect of what it intends.
(But then, people don’t do it because it’s right. They do it because it feels good.)
Rather than shaking our fists at faraway things, or agitating to change the whole kaboodle, we should be motivating for change in our own spheres of influence — starting with ourselves.
This article is hardly an exhaustive resource — in fact, it’s very brief, which is why I think it’s handy. No one wants tl;dr. And the value isn’t so much the summary as the links under each section, which can lead you (or whoever you share it with) to reflect more. The last, in particular, on practical tips for overcoming confirmation bias, is worth considering.
But it’s not enough to share. We need to engage others and to listen, which means starting from the standpoint that we could be wrong. I used this approach in a discussion with my folks yesterday, where I focused more on myself than them, and in so doing discovered an incongruity in my thinking.
I spent some time on the fringes of the self-help industry. There’s a good deal of fakery involved.
Originally shared by Guy Kawasaki
As an author and speaker, let me tell you that this is GREAT. As a reader and listener, you need to read this.
Conditional optimism – that’s me. Not “everything will be fine,” but “if we work together and make good choices, there’s a decent chance that everything will be fine.”
Originally shared by David Brin
Steven Pinker – the rascal who uses facts to defeat the addicts of defeatism – points out that 2016 was not as bad as it seemed:
“War deaths have risen since 2011 because of the Syrian civil war, but are a fraction of the levels of the 1950s through the early 1990s, when megadeath wars and genocides raged all over the world. Colombia’s peace deal marks the end of the last war in the Western Hemisphere, and the last remnant of the Cold War. Homicide rates in the world are falling, and the rate in United States is lower than at any time between 1966 and 2009. Outside of war zones, terrorist deaths are far lower than they were in the heyday of the Weathermen, IRA, and Red Brigades.”
He admits that: “Several awful things happened in the world’s democracies in 2016, and the election of a mercurial and ignorant president injects a troubling degree of uncertainty into international relations. But it’s vital to keep cool and identify specific dangers rather than being overcome by a vague apocalyptic gloom.”
He adds: “More generally, the worldwide, decades-long current toward racial tolerance is too strong to be undone by one man. Public opinion polls in almost every country show steady declines in racial and religious prejudice — and more importantly for the future, that younger cohorts are less prejudiced than older ones. As my own cohort of baby boomers (who helped elect Trump) dies off and is replaced by millennials (who rejected him in droves), the world will become more tolerant.”
He reiterates a distinction: “between complacent optimism, the feeling of a child waiting for presents, and conditional optimism, the feeling of a child who wants a treehouse and realizes that if he gets some wood and nails and persuades other kids to help him, he can build one. I am not complacently optimistic about the future; I am conditionally optimistic.”