#science #sociology #wokistan #baizuo
I'd say one thing : AH AH AH AH AH AH
The transition from quantity to quality: A neglected causal mechanism in accounting for social evolution — https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.240462397
I was thinking of floods, pollution, emigration, unemployment and so on.
#nature #anthropology #sociology #philosophy #pnas
Not really surprising, but worth bearing in mind all the same. You know you know, but don't know who you don't know.
Analysis of the data found that, even though participants were prepared to seek out as much—and often more—information about someone they disagreed with, their predictions were consistently incorrect, even after receiving further information about them.
Participants demonstrated a high degree of confidence in their answers, suggesting that participants thought they had a good understanding of the people in their out-group, despite this not being the case. In comparison, participants could consistently make accurate predictions about those in their in-group with less information.
"Our study shows that people have a good understanding of people who are similar to themselves and their confidence in their understanding is well-placed. However, our understanding of people with different views to our own is demonstrably poor. The more confident we are that we can understand them, the more likely it is that we are wrong. People have poor awareness of their inability to understand people that differ from themselves," says Dr. Bryony Payne.
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-people-confidently-wrong-opposing-views.html
"The Techno-Humanist Manifesto: A new philosophy of progress for the 21st century" by Jason Crawford.
"We live in an age of wonders. To our ancient ancestors, our mundane routines would seem like wizardry: soaring through the air at hundreds of miles an hour; making night bright as day with the flick of a finger; commanding giant metal servants to weave our clothes or forge our tools; mixing chemicals in vast cauldrons to make a fertilizing elixir that grants vigor to crops; viewing events or even holding conversations from thousands of miles away; warding off the diseases that once sent half of children to an early grave. We build our homes in towers that rise above the hills; we build our ships larger and stronger than the ocean waves; we build our bridges with skeletons of steel, to withstand wind and storm. Our sages gaze deep into the universe, viewing colors the eye cannot see, and they have discovered other worlds circling other Suns."
And yet, we live in a time of greater depression and anxiety disorders than ever before in human history. Which he doesn't mention but he does say...
"But not everyone agrees that the advancement of science, technology, and industry has been such a good thing. 'Is 'Progress' Good for Humanity?' asks a 2014 Atlantic article, saying that 'the Industrial Revolution has jeopardized humankind's ability to live happily and sustainably upon the Earth.' In Guns, Germs, and Steel, a grand narrative of civilizational advancement, author Jared Diamond disclaims the assumption 'that the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for iron-based statehood represents 'progress,' or that it has led to an increase in human happiness.' Diamond also called agriculture 'the worst mistake in the history of the human race' and 'a catastrophe from which we have never recovered,' adding that this perspective demolishes a 'sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress.' Historian Christopher Lasch is even less charitable, asking: 'How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?' Economic growth is called an 'addiction,' a 'fetish,' a 'Ponzi scheme,' a 'fairy tale.' There is even a 'degrowth' movement advocating economic regress as an ideal."
"With so little awareness of progress, and so much despair for the future, our society is unable to imagine what to build or to dream of where to go. As late as the 1960s, Americans envisioned flying cars, Moon bases, and making the desert bloom using cheap, abundant energy from nuclear power." "Today we hope, at best, to avoid disaster: to stop climate change, to prevent pandemics, to stave off the collapse of democracy."
"This is not merely academic. If society believes that scientific, technological and industrial progress is harmful or dangerous, people will work to slow it down or stop it."
"Even where the technical challenges have long been solved, we seem unable to build or to operate. The costs of healthcare, education, and housing continue to rise.30 Energy projects, even 'clean' ones, are held up for years by permitting delays and lack of grid connections.31 California's high-speed rail, now decades in the making, has already cost billions of dollars and is still years away from completing even an initial operating segment, which will not provide service to either LA or San Francisco."
This is an interesting point. Technological advancement should make everything cheaper and faster while still being just as good or better in terms of quality. But since that's not happening, at least in certain sectors, it would appear the weight of human bureaucracy can slow or prevent technological progress.
"On the horizon, powerful new technologies are emerging, intensifying the debate over technology and progress. Robotaxis are doing business on city streets; mRNA can create vaccines and maybe soon cure cancers; there's a renaissance in both supersonic flight and nuclear energy.34 SpaceX is landing reusable rockets, promising to enable the space economy, and testing an enormous Starship, promising to colonize Mars. A new generation of founders have ambitions in atoms, not just bits: manufacturing facilities in space, net-zero hydrocarbons synthesized with solar or nuclear power, robots that carve sculptures in marble.35 Most significantly, LLMs have created a general kind of artificial intelligence -- which, depending on who you ask, is either the next big thing in the software industry, the next general-purpose technology to rival the steam engine or the electric generator, the next age of humanity after agriculture and industrialization, or the next dominant species that will replace humanity altogether."
"The world needs a moral defense of progress based in humanism and agency -- that is, one that holds human life as its standard of value, and emphasizes our ability to shape the future. This is what I am calling 'techno-humanism': the idea that science, technology and industry are good -- because they promote human life, well-being, and agency."
Ok, so, if I understand this guy's premise correctly, the fact that depression and anxiety are at an all-time high, and this appears to be a reaction to previous generations of technology, is not something we should worry about because, while technology always creates new problems, yet more technology always solves them. So it is just a matter of time before solutions to the current depression and anxiety problems will be found, and maybe they will involve new technologies like AI.
Those of you who have been following me for a while know a lot of what I predict is based on my experience of disillusionment brought about by the internet. In the mid-to-late 90s, I was one of those people who thought the internet would be a "democratizing" force, empowering the little people, and bringing mutual understanding between people from different walks of life. Instead, it has proven to be a "centralizing" force, with a small handful of giant tech companies dominating the landscape, with economic power concentrated in those same tech companies, and the "little people" being worse off as inequality becomes vaster and vaster, and the vast increase in communications bandwidth hasn't brought people from different walks of life to any mutual understanding -- people are getting along worse, not better, and our society is more polarized than it ever was. As the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. So I always feel distrustful of any utopian claims for future technology. The rule I tend to follow is: If we're talking about technological capabilities, I'm an extreme "optimist" -- I think technological capabilities will continue, even past the point where technology is capable of everything humans are capable of -- but if we're talking about social outcomes, I'm an extreme "pessimist" -- I think technology never solves problems rooted in human nature. Give humans infinite communication bandwidth, and you don't get mutual understanding and harmony. If people don't get along, people don't get along, and that's all there is to it. People have to solve "people" problems. Technology doesn't solve "people" problems.
The first 5 installments have been written and they're all pretty interesting. I'm just responding here to "The Present Crisis" introduction. I may or may not comment on later installments (not promising anything). I encourage you all to read it for yourself.
Announcing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto | The Roots of Progress
#solidstatelife #ai #environment #sociology #philosophy #futurology
15-year study says increase in vegetarianism is women-only.
"Over 15 years, students at an American university (N = 12,704) described their dietary habits. Multilevel modeling analyses (participants nested within semesters) found that overall, the percentage of vegetarians increased over time, whereas the percentage of omnivores decreased over time; however, these changes occurred only for women. The dietary habits of men did not change over time. In a second study, in a sample of 363 adult vegetarians from the US, we found that women were more likely than men to become vegetarians due to concerns about the ethics of raising animals for food and eating them, suggesting that increased societal concern about animal rights may be responsible in part for the gender differences over time in vegetarianism."
Ah, good ol' MSNBC (journalists), taking it in stride....
First time maybe ever, Sir #DonOld #TrumpVirus allowed a real, live Q & A - and unleashed his remaining marbles on live TV (today)
Some NABJ members were outraged after the organization's late-night announcement that Trump would speak at its convention.
For me it's just a case study, right from the textbooks of #psychopathology, #sociology, #psychology, and #psychiatry (esp #DSM)
Ahh, the continuing moral decline of society, a cliché that's been ubiquitous pretty much forever. If you believe any random newspaper report written more than twenty years ago, then it's a miracle we haven't descended into a continuous state of drug-fuelled cannibalistic orgies by now. Let alone complaints about how much better our ancestors were according to classical Romans...
(Though, there's a nice bit in Plato speculating that actually maybe the famous sculptures of the past were actually rubbish by their then-modern standards, and were only famous because they were innovative at the time. I could never tell if this was intended to be ironic.)
Anyway, do people actually believe things are getting worse or is this just a thing they say as a rhetorical point ? Could it perhaps just be fakelore - people believing other people believe it, but almost nobody actually does ? Apparently not. People think it's really a thing.
The results original study and our replication both found that participants rated people as:
- Less moral today than 20 years after the participant’s birth.
- Less moral 20 years after the participant's birth than when the participant was born.
- Equivalently moral when the participant was born and 20 years before.
Speaking for myself I'd say things just vary. Behaviour changes, sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse, sometimes it's unforeseeable. But it isn't linear, which seems to be the popular rhetoric : polarisation may be rising now, but it's been worse in the past. And then there are differences in perception of actual known individuals versus the more ephemeral society at large. On the former, I haven't seen any sort of changes whatsoever. In fact the biggest bunch of douchebags I ever encountered were, by far, in school, not in adult life. I'm fairly sure that one's a selection effect, not at all indicative of any changes in society.
The original study found a statistically significant effect of political ideology such that more conservative participants perceived more moral decline. Our replication found the same result.
This is ironic : I would define conservative beliefs as inherently less moral than liberal ones, so any rise in conservatism is exactly what makes things worse !
The results above indicate that people (on average) believe that individual morality is in decline; that people are less kind, honest, nice, and good to each other than they used to be. The authors of the original paper called this “the illusion of moral decline”, but this is only an illusion if that belief is false. So, is it?
Our replication study did not look into this, but the authors of the original paper give some reasons for thinking so. First, they point out that historical records of extremely immoral behaviours (such as murder, sexual assault, slavery, conquest, and so on) indicate that those behaviours have declined significantly.
Well, sure, but that might be painting things with too broad a brush. Industrialised, state-sponsored chattel slavery is hardly likely to make a comeback, but people's attitudes might be declining relative to where they were, say, 30 years ago. But :
The questions asked included things like:
- “How would you rate the overall state of moral values in this country today?”
- “Do you feel safe walking alone at night in the city or area where you live?”
- “[In the last month, have you] helped a stranger or someone you didn't know who needed help?”
- “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful, or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?”
- “During the past 12 months, have you let a stranger go ahead of you in line?”After some statistical analysis, the results were clear: people's views on current morality appear to have remained stable over time. The year the question was asked of someone explained less than 0.3% of the differences in responses on average, and almost always less than 1%.
Right, yes : I doubt very much people's actual experiences of everyday interactions with individuals has changed substantially in the last few decades. More interesting might be to examine more anonymised experiences... people are by and large only armchair heroes and villains, willing to vote for absolute cunts but only much more rarely do they themselves actually act like their abhorrent heroes, as a rule.
We keep running into people who assert that if human civilization doesn’t keep expanding forever we will go extinct.
The truth is, if humans keep believing we can expand forever, we will go extinct.
There is no Planet B.
Let’s settle down and fit in for the long term.
#sustainability #economics #politics #biodiversity #Nature #ClimateChange #Justice #science #sociology
My definitive, all-answering take on how people work. Obviously answers everything perfectly and won't upset anyone at all. /snark, in case you couldn't tell.
#Psychology
#Sociology
#History
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2024/05/a-theory-of-human-nature.html
A nice, broad-ranging history-summary, with some passing comments about how we decide what's scientific and what's not.
The story in the East Oregonian, a small paper, ran with the words ‘saucer-like aircraft’. But, when the Associated Press picked up the story, the description got even more garbled. What Arnold said he’d seen were flying craft shaped like a crescent with ‘wings’ that swept back in an arc. Somehow the AP wire story misinterpreted Arnold’s description, leading The Chicago Sun to run a story with a spectacular frontpage headline: ‘Supersonic Flying Saucers Sighted By Idaho Pilot.’ The Chicago Sun piece triggered an avalanche. Within six months, the flying saucer story ran in more than 140 newspapers across the US. Even more remarkable, an epidemic of flying-saucer sightings began to sweep the nation. By the end of summer in 1947, ‘flying saucers’ were officially a thing.
A classic case of going viral and nobody bothered to check. An entire psychological phenomenon spawned by a misquote.
One of the most important lessons I learned from the Arnold affair is the power of a story. Arnold saw the first flying saucer, and his sighting begins a critical thread in the public’s willingness to go along on evidence-free rides of thinking about aliens and UFOs. It was where the idea of technologically advanced, interstellar life here on Earth right now enters the public consciousness as a major phenomenon. But almost as quickly as UFOs appear, so does a UFO culture that tilts towards the incredulous and the paranoid, marked by a willingness to take anything as evidence. Of course, one could find many individuals taking an interest in UFOs while keeping their sceptical sensibilities, who just genuinely wanted to know what was going on. But, as a cultural phenomenon, public discussion of UFOs would come to be dominated by questionable evidence, conspiracy theories and outright hoaxes... What’s important about the Roswell story is how loose even the idea of evidence becomes.
For a time, I’d become enamoured of von Däniken’s book Chariots of the Gods (1968) and its claims that many archaeological mysteries could best be explained by ancient aliens who had once come to visit Earth. That time ended when, one evening, I chanced upon a PBS documentary called The Case of the Ancient Astronauts (1977). It presented interviews with scientists who had actually spent their lives studying the subjects of von Däniken’s ancient alien speculations. The simplicity with which hard-won archaeological evidence trumped von Däniken’s claims left me both angry (I felt duped by his book) and exhilarated. The establishment of proper standards for what counts as evidence is what set the archaeologists apart from von Däniken’s wishful fantasies. The experience of that stark difference ended my own interest in UFOs and visiting aliens of any historical epoch.
Yeah, likewise pretty much. I wouldn't discourage any younger readers from the pseudoscience stuff because it's definitely got an interesting, inspirational edge to it... I'd just point them in the direction of the proper science as well.
With the giggle factor receding for the scientific search for life, where does that leave UFOs and UAPs? There, the waters remain muddied. It is a good thing that pilots feel they can report sightings without fear of reprisal as a matter of air safety and national defence. And an open, transparent and agnostic investigation of UAPs could offer a masterclass in how science goes about its business of knowing rather than just believing.
#UFOs
#Space
#Sociology
#Psychology
#Politics
https://aeon.co/essays/how-ufos-almost-killed-the-search-for-life-in-the-universe
Summarising (necessarily at some length) the findings of Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, describing the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 during the Holocaust. It takes racism to formulate an extermination policy, but what's perhaps more disturbing by far is that it doesn't take a raving ideologue to actually pull the trigger.
https://decoherency.blogspot.com/2024/05/review-ordinary-men.html
This is something I've been trying to get around to for several monthsbut just haven't had the time : reviewing Rutger Bregman's truly dire "Human Kind". Bregman claims that human beings are innately lovely and that only civilisation, with its whole notion of "private property" leads us astray. His ideal lifestyle choice appear to be to live in the jungle in the lifestyle of an anarcho-communist-hippie-monkey, preferably ones that happen to be caught in a war zone. Yes, really.
A totally mad twat, this one. My review ended up being overly-long because his previous book was very good. I feel the guy does have some good critical thinking skills (he certainly has some good journalistic ones, digging deep beyond the popular reports to figure out what really happened) but he's completely enthralled to his own ideology.
https://decoherency.blogspot.com/2024/05/review-human-kind.html
Doesn't actually contain anything much relating to the title, but interesting (if a bit on the short side) nonetheless.
I'm happy to offload navigational skills to my phone, but I hate it when my phone starts auto-suggesting answers to people's messages. I don't really want to offload my social cognition to a computer – I'd rather engage in real communication from my mind to another person's.
The question is, what tasks are so dangerous, dull, demeaning or repetitive that we're delighted to outsource them, and what do we feel are important to be done ourselves or by other humans? If I was going to be judged in a trial, I don't necessarily want an algorithm to pass a verdict on me, even if the algorithm is demonstrably very fair, because there's something about the human solidarity of people in society standing in judgement of other people. At work, I might prefer to have a relationship with human colleagues – to talk to and explain myself to other people – rather than just getting the work done more efficiently.
Well I'd certainly want such an algorithm's output to be at least considered in the trial ! Dunno if I'd want it to be the only deciding factor... probably not, but if such a rational truth engine could be devised (it probably can't), I want the jury to know what it came up with. But the point stands - some things we want to offload, some we don't.
There's a double danger to anthropomorphism. The first is that we treat machines like people, and project personalities, intentions and thoughts onto artificial intelligences. Although these systems are extraordinarily sophisticated, they don't possess anything like the human sense. And it's very dangerous to act as though they do. For a start, they don't have a consistent worldview; they are miraculously brilliant forms of autocomplete, working on pattern recognition, working on prediction. This is very powerful, but they tend to hallucinate and make up details that don't exist, and they will often contain various forms of bias or exclusion based upon a particular training set. But an AI can respond fast and plausibly to anything, and as human beings, we are very predisposed to equate speed and plausibility with truth. And that's a very dangerous thing.
The other danger of anthropomorphising technology is that it can lead us to think of and treat ourselves like we're machines. But we are nothing like large language models: we are emotional creatures with minds and bodies who are deeply influenced by our physical environment, by our bodily health and well-being. Perhaps most importantly, we shouldn’t see [a machine’s] efficiency as a model for human thriving. We don't want to optimise ourselves with perfectible components, within some vast consequentialist system. The idea that humans can have dignity and autonomy and potential is very ill-served by the desire to optimise, maximise and perfect ourselves.
"Generation Z and the transformation of American adolescence: how How Gen Z's formative experiences shape its politics, priorities, and future."
They don't define "Generation Z", but it's generally taken to mean people born between about the late 1990s and the early 2010s. People who would be children of Gen X.
This article has a compendium of statistics on Gen Z and how Gen Z differers from millennials and older generations: religious service attendance, part time jobs, having a boyfriend/girlfriend as a teen, bullying, drug & alcohol use, time with friends and social media, loneliness, video games, parental influence on education, finding a career, political polarization and gender divide, distrust of political leaders, LGBT identification, gender discrimination.
#digitstv today, highlighting two...
https://www.bitchute.com/video/0RQ4puNjoyE4/ < The Greatest Secret - Your Trust Fund [Corporation] - Richard Vobes
https://www.bitchute.com/video/TexbDksQK6Dl/ < ...more than it's title would have you think it's about.
#emancipation #spirituality #goodness #goodgod #sacrafice #nocullnecessary #divideandconquer #trap #trick #reality #plenty #actors #deception #awareness #humanity #lifetrust #executor #solebeneficiary #estate #reclaimyourpower #freeyourmind #thegreatesttrick #thegreatestsecret #cleanfree #notdebtbased #emancipatorytechnology #weareallinthistogether #deepstate #bigbank #bigbaron #dehumanisation #anonymity #pseudonymity #karmicelastic #responsibility #socioeconomics #sociology #economics #nonviolence #collectiveconsciousness #love #peace #agape #namaste #eachandall #freeandfreealike #wecanstillmendthis
Hallo zusammen, ich bin #NeuHier. Ich interessiere mich für #bike, #diaspora, #housemusic, #informatics, #linux, #mathematic, #nextcloud, #sociology und #study.
is arrogance an absence of wisdom?
#digitspolls #wisdom #arrogance #epistemology #psychology #sociology
