My policy is always to be suspicious of dramatic doomsaying.

Originally shared by Jennifer Ouellette

No, We’re Not All Doomed by Earth’s Magnetic Field Flip. A geomagnetic apocalypse may not be on the horizon, but there is some fascinating science behind the doomsday hype. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/earth-magnetic-field-flip-north-south-poles-science/

Not as bad as has been widely reported (which I did kind of suspect).

Still not necessarily great.

“Cassidy and other women in tech who spoke during the one-day event stressed that the watershed came not because women finally broke the silence about sexual harassment, whatever Time’s editors may believe. The change came because the women were finally listened to and the bad actors faced repercussions.”

Via Singularity Hub And in IEEE Spectrum, which is not where I would have expected such a piece to appear.

(Accessibility issue: small, non-resizable font.)

tl;dr: Pointing out that white supremacists have their historical facts wrong (or their Latin or Greek wrong) isn’t enough; it’s necessary to challenge their ideology directly, including by the way you comport yourself within your field – despite the risks this carries.

Originally shared by Deborah Teramis Christian

This may be of interest to classisists, medievalists, and scholars dealing with white supremacy appropriation of bits and bobs from those fields. Apparently this is a current flap in the Classical community, of which I am just now becoming aware, but the author makes some interesting points about addressing supremacist ideology in academic fields.

Laura Gibbs – thought this might be up your alley, too.

The Rebound Effect is why I don’t engage in political arguments on social media.

But… could there be a way to engage that doesn’t just end with everybody more entrenched in their existing opinion?

Originally shared by Rick Wayne (Author)

Yeeeeeesssss

I’m sure you’re all tired of me saying it, but this is why arguing with someone doesn’t change their mind — or, to put it another way, why you never change your mind when arguing with someone. It isn’t just my opinion. There are scads of studies now that demonstrate all creatures defend themselves when attacked, or when they perceive an attack. In fact, there are several foundational studies that show presenting people with evidence contrary to their views actually makes them double-down on their own rectitude.

We all do it. I do, I’m ashamed to say. If your goal is to pursue some mythical perfectly open mind, you’re going to fail. In fact, I’d suggest you will get worse rather than better because you’ll be enamored of your own open mind. (We all know people on G+ like that, I think.)

Instead, the goal is simply to be mindful of your real-time reactions, which is not as easy as it sounds. I fail at this routinely, and I’ve had both training and practice! Our responses are either “me-focused” or “other-focused.” If our point is to win an argument, to show the other person they are wrong, we’re “me-focused,” we’re engaged for the purposes of our own ego.

If our goal is actually to see change in the world, and not simply take out our aggressions, then we will try to remain “other-focused.” From the article:

Today, interrogations still get framed as accusatory moral dramas, and not just on TV. American police officers are trained in the Reid Technique, developed in the 1950s by John Reid, a former Chicago cop. In a pre-interrogation interview, the detective assesses a suspect’s credibility by observing his body language, such as fidgeting or eye movements. (There is no evidence these are reliable cues to deceit.) Once he decides that a suspect is lying, the interrogator moves into confrontational mode, in an effort to break the suspect’s resistance. The technique has been consistently associated with false confessions. It survives, at least in part, because it makes the interrogator feel in control, positioning him as a heroic protagonist.

… Around two decades ago, the practice of addiction counselling was transformed by the application of a simple principle: patients should feel responsible for their choices. …

Miller argued that counsellors were having precisely the wrong kind of conversation with their clients. Addicts were caught between a desire to change and a desire to maintain their habit. As soon as they felt themselves being judged or instructed, they produced all the reasons they did not want to change. That isn’t a pathology, Miller argued, it’s human nature: the more we feel someone trying to persuade us to do something, the more we dwell on the reasons we should not. By insisting on change, the counsellor was making himself feel better, while reinforcing the addict’s determination to carry on.

Miller argued that rather than instigating confrontation, counsellors should focus on building a relationship of trust and mutual understanding, enabling the patient to talk through his experiences without feeling the need to defend himself. Eventually, the part of the patient that wanted to get better would overcome the part that did not, and he would make the arguments for change himself. Having done so, he would be motivated to follow through on them.

Implicit in Miller and Rollnick’s critique of traditional counselling was the uncomfortable suggestion that counsellors should turn their professional gaze upon themselves and question their own instinct to dominate. Instead of thinking of himself as an expert sitting in judgment, the counsellor needed to adopt the more humble position of co-investigator. As Miller put it to me, “The premise is not ‘I have you what you need, let me give it to you.’

… A father who opens the door to his daughter when she comes home late might adopt a confrontational style, implicitly inviting a contrite response. But his daughter, feeling her agency being denied, pushes back, which provokes her father’s anger. A power struggle ensues, until the conversation terminates with one or both stomping off to their bedroom. If the father had emphasised his love for his daughter, a conversation about acceptable norms might have developed. But doing so isn’t easy, partly because children know exactly which buttons to press.

… An interview fails when it becomes a struggle for dominance, in which the interviewee’s way of asserting himself is to tell his interviewer nothing. “In a tug of war, the harder you pull, the harder they pull,” says Laurence. “My suggestion is, let go of the rope.”

Just talking to political adversaries, openly and without judgment, doesn’t feel like fighting for social change. But that’s exactly why we’re at each other’s throats. We think in terms of “fighting” and “adversaries.” You can’t force people to change their minds. You can’t argue them into it with facts either. The best possible scenario is to have a discussion where you remain mindful of your own thoughts and reactions. That’s it. That’s as good as it gets. And anything less than that is a failure.

There’s a great short story by Paolo Bacigalupi called “The Gambler” about this exact phenomenon of “news” being diluted and diverted from stories that actually matter by the economics of clickbaiting.

Originally shared by Jennifer Ouellette

Thought-provoking. We can do better. http://idlewords.com/2017/09/anatomy_of_a_moral_panic.htm

“The real story in this mess is not the threat that algorithms pose to Amazon shoppers, but the threat that algorithms pose to journalism. By forcing reporters to optimize every story for clicks, not giving them time to check or contextualize their reporting, and requiring them to race to publish follow-on articles on every topic, the clickbait economics of online media encourage carelessness and drama. This is particularly true for technical topics outside the reporter’s area of expertise.”

“And reporters have no choice but to chase clicks. Because Google and Facebook have a duopoly on online advertising, the only measure of success in publishing is whether a story goes viral on social media. Authors are evaluated by how individual stories perform online, and face constant pressure to make them more arresting. Highly technical pieces are farmed out to junior freelancers working under strict time limits. Corrections, if they happen at all, are inserted quietly through ‘ninja edits’ after the fact.”

“There is no real penalty for making mistakes, but there is enormous pressure to frame stories in whatever way maximizes page views. Once those stories get picked up by rival news outlets, they become ineradicable. The sheer weight of copycat coverage creates the impression of legitimacy. As the old adage has it, a lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is pulling its boots on.”

What do you think? Is this article overly optimistic?

I’m glad, at least, that South Australia took up Musk’s wager (it would have been tough to refuse). And if anyone can do it, he can. I watched an interview with him recently, and he talks casually about the astonishing as if it’s routine.

For him, it is.

Originally shared by Able Lawrence

Elon Musk has wagered to set up grid scale Lithium ion battery in South Australia within 100 days or give it away free!

This is one reason I dislike the dystopian genre in general – not that people aren’t capable of creating terrible conditions for their fellow human beings; there’s plenty of evidence that they are – but that that’s only part of the story, and not the part I want to focus on or amplify.

(Marvel, also, at the irony of David Brin casting shade at another author for being self-promotional and making loud claims to have come up with key ideas.)

Originally shared by David Brin

Using his WIRED soapbox to promote his new novel, Cory Doctorow takes the occasion also to fight some of the most hoary and destructive instincts of modern, lazy storytelling.

“Here’s how you make a dystopia: Convince people that when disaster strikes, their neighbors are their enemies, not their mutual saviors and responsibilities. The belief that when the lights go out, your neighbors will come over with a shotgun—rather than the contents of their freezer so you can have a barbecue before it all spoils—isn’t just a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s a weaponized narrative. The belief in the barely restrained predatory nature of the people around you is the cause of dystopia, the belief that turns mere crises into catastrophes.”

This paraphrases the core point from my novel The Postman, which I wrote as a rebuttal to the Mad Max genre’s perpetual contempt for the average person. In my novel (and I admit that Kevin Costner did remain faithful to this notion) all hope for a restored civilization rests upon the survivors remembering one core fact: “I was once a mighty and noble being, called a citizen.” And hence, the great accomplishment of the story’s hero is not to defeat the villains, but to remind the people of that central fact.

Rebecca Solnit – one of the finest essayists in America – makes the same point in A Paradise Built in Hell, showing that time and again, our neighbors show pluck and guts, as when 80 average citizens rebelled, aboard flight UA93. And yet, authors and directors relentlessly trot forth the banal dystopia that Cory criticizes.

Doctorow distinguishes this tiresome cliché with his notion of the guardedly upbeat utopia. Not the boring aftermath of an enlightened and better civilization — no drama there! That’s why – in the much better tomorrows of Iain Banks, of Star Trek and my own Kiln People – most of the tales take place at a fringe or frontier. (The Federation is decent and good and fair, which is why we almost never look there.)

Likewise, Doctorow eschews a preachy utopia in favor of portraying its beginning, in danger and ferment. The initial problem may be chaotic and deadly, as in a dystopia, but with a crucial difference.

“Stories of futures in which disaster strikes and we rise to the occasion are a vaccine against the virus of mistrust. Our disaster recovery is always fastest and smoothest when we work together, when every seat on every lifeboat is taken. Stories in which the breakdown of technology means the breakdown of civilization are a vile libel on humanity itself.” He asserts that: “ the best science fiction does some­thing much more interesting than prediction: It inspires. That science fiction tells us better nations are ours to build and lets us dream vividly of what it might be like to live in those nations.”

As is very often the case, Doctorow presents important and thought-provoking notions. Alas, Cory does tend also to wave signs implying “Look here! I invented this idea!” And so, only in the interests of fairness, I do urge you also to have a look at my much-earlier missive on “The Idiot Plot,” and compare.

http://www.davidbrin.com/idiotplot.html

Via Daniel Lemire. It turns out that spinach is not, in fact, unusually rich in iron (and what it has is not bioavailable), but the story of how this truth spread is rich in irony, and illustrates several pitfalls in scientific literature.

I remember when I was blogging regularly on health science following down a reference in an article which made a particular claim, and discovering that the original source (which was vaguely cited) supported exactly the opposite conclusion. That’s an extreme, but this article suggests several ways in which it could have come about.