Month: October 2017

Facebook treats its ethical failures like software bugs, and that’s why they keep happening — Quartz

Source: Facebook treats its ethical failures like software bugs, and that’s why they keep happening — Quartz

For years, tech has chased growth at all costs—and those costs have been paid by all of us.

every failure gets treated like an isolated incident, rather than part of a systemic pattern that needs systemic action. As a result, Facebook keeps making the same kinds of blunders, over and over again.

Facebook may not have intended to surface traumatic content, just like it didn’t intend to let advertisers post hateful or nefarious ads. But it did intend to prioritize rapid growth and user engagement over all else.
… These priorities have consequences—and those consequences are now more far-reaching than ever, spilling over from affecting our emotional state to manipulating our social and political infrastructure, too.

Preliminary Steps Toward a Universal Economic Dynamics for Monetary and Fiscal Policy | NECSI

Source: Preliminary Steps Toward a Universal Economic Dynamics for Monetary and Fiscal Policy | NECSI
Cite as:
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Jean Langlois-Meurinne, Mari Kawakatsu, Rodolfo Garcia, Preliminary steps toward a universal economic dynamics for monetary and fiscal policy, arXiv:1710.06285 (October 10, 2017).

We find that the current approach, which considers the overall supply of money to the economy, is insufficient to effectively regulate economic growth. While it can achieve some degree of control, optimizing growth also requires a fiscal policy balancing monetary injection between two dominant loop flows, the consumption and wages loop, and investment and returns loop. … We further show that empirical evidence is consistent with a transition in 1980 between two regimes—from an oversupply to the consumption and wages loop, to an oversupply of the investment and returns loop. … Our analysis supports advocates of greater income and / or government support for the poor who use a larger fraction of income for consumption. This promotes investment due to the growth in expenditures. Otherwise, investment has limited opportunities to gain returns above inflation so capital remains uninvested, and does not contribute to the growth of economic activity.

Since 1980 consumers have accumulated trillions of dollars of debt, and the wealthy have accumulated trillions of dollars of savings that is not invested because there is nothing to invest in that will give returns. … No matter how much money investors have, these so-called “job creators” do not create jobs when consumers don’t have money to buy products. Increased economic activity requires both investment and purchase power to pay for the things the investment will produce. … Reaganomics moved things too far toward the wealthy, so shifting the flow in the other direction has to be done in the right measure.

Anatomy of a Moral Panic | Idle Words

Source: Anatomy of a Moral Panic | Idle Words

There is no conceivable world in which enough bomb-making equipment is being sold on Amazon to train an algorithm to make this recommendation.
…
So Channel 4 has discovered that fireworks enthusiasts and chemistry teachers shop on Amazon.

But by blending these innocent observations into an explosive tale of terrorism, they’ve guaranteed that their coverage will attract the maximum amount of attention.

The ‘Amazon teaches bomb-making’ story has predictably spread all over the Internet

When I contacted the author of one of these pieces to express my concerns, they explained that the piece had been written on short deadline that morning, and they were already working on an unrelated article. The author cited coverage in other mainstream outlets (including the New York Times) as justification for republishing and not correcting the assertions made in the original Channel 4 report.

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.

The very machine learning systems that Channel 4’s article purports to expose are eroding online journalism’s ability to do its job.

Moral panics like this one are not just harmful to musket owners and model rocket builders. They distract and discredit journalists, making it harder to perform the essential function of serving as a check on the powerful.

The real story of machine learning is not how it promotes home bomb-making, but that it’s being deployed at scale with minimal ethical oversight, in the service of a business model that relies entirely on psychological manipulation and mass surveillance. The capacity to manipulate people at scale is being sold to the highest bidder, and has infected every aspect of civic life, including democratic elections and journalism.

Together with climate change, this algorithmic takeover of the public sphere is the biggest news story of the early 21st century. We desperately need journalists to cover it. But as they grow more dependent on online publishing for their professional survival, their capacity to do this kind of reporting will disappear, if it has not disappeared already.

The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia | American Scientist

Source: The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia | American Scientist

A century after Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein cast doubt on absolute space, we still don’t know how a gyroscope stays pointed in a fixed direction.

As physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote, however, in a striking 1925 article on Mach’s Principle, “…every naïve person has to ask: With respect to what, according to the theory, does the orbital ellipse perform this precession, which according to experience takes place with respect to the average system of the fixed stars?” In calculating the effects of curved space around the Sun, Einstein needed to assume that at large distances from the Sun, spacetime becomes flat—and absolute. In other words, he had to impose by fiat “boundary conditions” at infinity to complete his solution. General relativity, in and of itself, did not entirely determine the precession of Mercury’s orbit.

Why does a gyroscope point in a direction fixed relative to distant quasars?

You are what you read — Quartz

Source: You are what you read — Quartz

What you read has never been more important. The quality of your mind depends on it.

Input shapes your output

In the last 10 years, the number of books published per year has doubled. Ten times more data will be produced in 2020 than was produced in 2013. We live in age of information overload, and the ability to distinguish value from noise is going to become an increasingly critical quality.