Month: June 2017

Advice on how to talk to the white working class.

“I think when you insult people, they get insulted.”
— Joan C. Williams

Source: Advice on how to talk to the white working class.

one of the things that a number of sociologists have pointed out is that often elite whites displace blame for racism onto less elite whites.

Do you really think Donald Trump could’ve ever gotten the kind of support he got from the white working class if he had not shown himself to be a bigot?

I don’t know. I’m kind of a data girl, and I just don’t know. He definitely approached a whole group of voters and brought out their worst selves. That’s for sure. The question is if Democrats had addressed the economic concerns and spoken to them with dignity, and attempted to bring out their best selves. I think we would’ve seen, not among everybody, but among a lot of these voters we would’ve seen something very different.

No politics please, we’re hackers, too busy to improve the world · Jacques Mattheij

Source: No politics please, we’re hackers, too busy to improve the world · Jacques Mattheij

If there is one thing that never ceases to amaze me it is that the hacker community tends to place itself outside and by their own perception above politics.

What bugs me about this is that anything you make or do has a political dimension, and that hackers, more than any other profession, create the tools and the means with which vast changes in the political landscape are effected. It’s as if arms dealers and manufacturers refuse to talk about war, the ultimate consequence of the tools they create in the environment where they will be used.

Both from an ethical viewpoint as well as from one related to personal responsibility this is simply wrong. The ability to influence with disproportional effect on the outcome of all kinds of political affairs compared to someone not active in IT, the ability to reach large numbers of people, the ability to pull on very long levers, far longer than you’d normally be able to achieve comes with some obligations.

Hackers, computer programmers and associated groups can not afford this Ostrich mentality

As soon as you and your software hit the real world politics will rear its ugly head. … everything has a political dimension and sometimes that political dimension can overshadow all other aspects of the project. This translates into an obligation to engage the political angle of whatever it is that we collectively produce in order to minimize feelings of regret later on and to really help to make the world a better place, rather than just to pay lipservice to that concept.

The Myth of the Kindly General Lee – The Atlantic

The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.

Source: The Myth of the Kindly General Lee – The Atlantic

The white supremacists who have protested on Lee’s behalf are not betraying his legacy. In fact, they have every reason to admire him. Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can embrace Lee in good conscience.

The question is why anyone else would.

What Intelligent Machines Need to Learn From the Neocortex – IEEE Spectrum

Machines won’t become intelligent unless they incorporate certain features of the human brain. Here are three of them

Source: What Intelligent Machines Need to Learn From the Neocortex – IEEE Spectrum

The only example of intelligence, of the ability to learn from the world, to plan and to execute, is the brain. Therefore, we must understand the principles underlying human intelligence and use them to guide us in the development of truly intelligent machines.

These three fundamental attributes of the neocortex—learning by rewiring, sparse distributed representations, and sensorimotor integration—will be cornerstones of machine intelligence. Future thinking machines can ignore many aspects of biology, but not these three. Undoubtedly, there will be other discoveries about neurobiology that reveal other aspects of cognition that will need to be incorporated into such machines in the future, but we can get started with what we know today.

From the earliest days of AI, critics dismissed the idea of trying to emulate human brains, often with the refrain that “airplanes don’t flap their wings.” In reality, Wilbur and Orville Wright studied birds in detail. … the Wright brothers studied birds and then chose which elements of bird flight were essential for human flight and which could be ignored. That’s what we’ll do to build thinking machines.

Is the U.S. Education System Producing a Society of “Smart Fools”? – Scientific American

One distinguished psychologist explains why he believes this is so and how to reverse course

Source: Is the U.S. Education System Producing a Society of “Smart Fools”? – Scientific American

We may not just be selecting the wrong people, we may be developing an incomplete set of skills—and we need to look at things that will make the world a better place.

Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values.
…
ethical reasoning involves eight steps: seeing that there’s a problem to deal with (say, you see your roommate cheat on an assignment); identifying it as an ethical problem; seeing it as a large enough problem to be worth your attention (it’s not like he’s just one mile over the speed limit); seeing it as personally relevant; thinking about what ethical rules apply; thinking about how to apply them; thinking what are the consequences of acting ethically—because people who act ethically usually don’t get rewarded; and, finally, acting.

If we start testing for these broader kinds of skills, schools will start to teach to them, because they teach to the test.

Rainbow Project at Yale

Kaleidoscope at Tufts

Panorama at Oklahoma State