FailForward @FailForward@qoto.org
Exploring, failing, backtracking, just to identify the only viable path forward. And then scarred, stumbling forward into the future. Learning.
Boring and steady. Knowing little and questioning a lot. Mostly harmless.
***
This is an experimental scrapbook space. A collection of stuff I want to keep in a form somewhere on the spectrum between a blog and a shoe-box full of scraps, cut-outs, quotes, links and reading notes and sometimes my own silly thoughts about them.
Perhaps it might be of marginal interest to others too, but I don't care that much.
Joined Jan 2021
Hooverphonic - Mad About You
> I can't fake,
> For God's sake why am I driving in the wrong lane
"LP - Lost On You"
> When you get older, plainer, saner
> Will you remember all the danger
> We came from?
"Kovacs - My Love"
> Come what may,
> I won't give away.
Soundtrack for today. Goodies from The Netherlands.
[Cartoon thread](https://twitter.com/harmonylion1/status/1257353800001695744) by Mike Elias:
https://twitter.com/harmonylion1/status/1257353800001695744
Thread contents:
- Psychology
- Philosophy
- Politics
- Crypto
- Satire/Misc
Intriguing, entertaining and food for thought.
FailForward
boosted
This is mesmerizing beautiful and I will definitely buy this music. If you are wondering, one of the singers is Maria Franz who is also in the bands "Heilung" and "Euzen". She is an absolute fantastic artist. All of her projects are just right up my alley.
[Edited to promote their Bandcamp releases]
Songleikr on Bandcamp
https://songleikr.bandcamp.com/releases
[Sympathy vs. Empathy vs. Compassion](https://twitter.com/harmonylion1/status/1317481282109145088/photo/1)
Useful thread.
FailForward
boosted
# Scientists identify a psychological phenomenon that could be reinforcing political echo chambers
- [PopSci Source](https://www.psypost.org/2021/01/scientists-identify-a-psychological-phenomenon-that-could-be-reinforcing-political-echo-chambers-59142)
- Underlying journal paper: [Ekstrom PD, Lai CK. The Selective Communication of Political Information. _Social Psychological and Personality Science_. August 2020. doi:[10.1177/1948550620942365](https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620942365)]
- Credibility: Seems to be solid [Journal self-report](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&venue=nIxswjDoFIwJ.2020&vq=med_socialpsychology) [Google Scholar rank](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&venue=nIxswjDoFIwJ.2020&vq=med_socialpsychology)
## Summary
Interesting reading about how how ideological echo chambers get formed. The main conclusion is this:
> People are less willing to share information that contradicts their pre-existing political beliefs and attitudes, even if they believe the information to be true
## Speculative dissection
> When ideology, partisanship, or a strong political opinion is at stake, it is difficult to persuade people to believe unappealing political facts.
> ...
> [People] were also consistently more willing to pass on findings that supported their political ideology.
This is either expected or at least not surprising.
> Even if and when you succeed in persuading someone that something is true, they may be relatively unwilling to pass that information along if it undermines their ideological, partisan, or other political commitments,
This is interesting, but understandable in hindsight. Well, nobody is willing to "lose their face" in their ideological ingroup by suddenly changing sides. We often seem to value social cohesion more than (objective) truth.
Then they present how does bias influence those information-sharing patterns. First, let's take a deeper look at what was that bias about.
> [People] could perceive reality very clearly and _still_ present distorted or inaccurate versions of reality to the people around them.
Right. So it's like overblowing, or misrepresenting some idea to others.
And then comes something quite intriguiging (perhaps too US-centric?) in the article. The information-sharing patterns differ depending on whether a person is more liberal, or more conservative leaning (whatever that means in today's messy world).
> “Liberals were most biased in communication with ideological opponents, revealing greater willingness to discuss ideology-inconsistent information with fellow liberals than with conservatives. Conservatives, in contrast, were most biased in communication with ideological allies—and showed no significant evidence of bias in what they were willing to communicate to liberals"
So I interpret it as follows (in probabilistic terms):
1. when a liberal meets a conservative, the liberal would show as radically standing their ground and overshooting/misrepresenting their differences with the conservative. From this, I would guess, the liberal would probably attempt persuasion (my ideas are better!), maybe shaming (your ideas are bad!). At the same time, the conservative would happily discuss their differences with the liberal without misrepresenting either opinion, but would probably remain unconvinced.
2. when a liberal meets a liberal, they would happily and freely discuss the opposing ideas, maybe (probably?) even without bias and misrepresenting them and would be able to consider them rationally.
3. when a conservative meets a conservative, they would misrepresent ideas of their political opponents (even if they don't agree with the overblown position). At the same time they would probably also show radical fandom for their own overblown ideas.
Now from this analysis we have (as I understand the paper summary) that liberals are more rational when they speak to their own group and combative when interacting with the outgroup, while conservatives are combative (about the outgroup) when speaking to their fellows, but present as quite reasonable when they speak to their opponents (I actually recognise this around myself, but that is just anecdotal evidence).
In other words:
1. a liberal meets a conservative: "how horrible _you_ are!"
2. conservative counters back to the liberal: "that sounds interesting. maybe you should consider..."
3. the liberal going home to their liberal partner: "maybe these conservatives are not that horrible people in the end..." - partner (possibly) agrees, but _both are happy that they are not conservative_;
4. the conservative coming home to their conservative spouse: "how horrible people _they_ are!" - spouse violently agrees and _both are happy that they are conservative_.
> _Here we go_
> _On this roller coaster life we know_
> -- [Danny Vera - Roller Coaster](https://youtu.be/h-hrL06V994)
Bookmark for [Boilerplate Advice by Venkatesh Rao](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2021/01/06/boilerplate-advice/).
Witty, yet serious, Rambling and half-baked theory-of-everything advice for life.
FailForward
boosted
+bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
use technical solutions to social problems at your own peril
> _They fuck you up, your mum and dad._
> _They may not mean to, but they do._
> -- [This Be The Verse By Philip Larkin](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse)
> _Everyone is just waiting._
> -- [THE WAITING PLACE by Dr. Seuss](https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/the-waiting-place-by-dr-seuss/)
> When something remains the only viable option to take, however unpalatable it might be, it will be taken.
"Gauvain Sers - Comme Si C’était Hier"
To cheer up the day. From France with joy.
Discovered (as so often) via [Deutschlandfunk Kultur](https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/).
# Rodney Brooks' predictions for AI, robotics and tech: scorecard 2020
[2020 predictions score-card for self-driving cars, AI, ML and robotics predictions](https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2021-january-01/) by Rodney Brooks.
## Background context
In 2017 [Rodney Broooks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Brooks) of [behavioural robotic fame](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior-based_robotics) made a [series of dated predictions](https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/) about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, Self-driving cars and Space Travel. He went out on a limb to put dates on various advances he sees realistic over until 2050 and comitted to (as far as he'll be alive) to check them every year. As many others (including myself), he argues that there is a hype around Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning - but hey, maybe we are all just cowards scared of another AI winter coming if it doesn't work once again? Yet, note, few top notch academic scientists in AI, ML and robotics participate in those rhetoric battles of how robotics will take our jobs, etc. (perhaps except for a few who capitalise on it either by advancing their careers, or building startups and thus advancing ther careers).
Either way, Rodney Brooks tried to take a dose of reality and instead of being just an ordinary sceptic, in 2017 he made a series of interesting and careful predictions and put dates events and now we wait what will happen. One could say, he made a series of bets with the world.
I am a great fan of [long-term thinking](https://longnow.org/), so this interests me.
## Takeaway points
> 1. it is fair to say that predictions for autonomous vehicles in 2017 were wildly overoptimistic.
> 2. _An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in_, with a lede of _After years of hype many people feel that AI has failed to deliver._ Such rationality has not stopped breathless other stories in outlets that should know better, such as the AAAS journal _Science_, and sometimes even in _Nature._ The ongoing amount of hype is depressing. And it is mostly inaccurate.
> 3. We need to figure out the right mechanisms for attention and common sense and build those into our learning systems if we are to build general purpose systems.
> 4. [Will Bridewell](https://paravidya.com) has likened GPT-3 to a ouija board, and I think that is very appropriate. People see in it what they wish, but there is really nothing there.
> 5. AlphaFold ... is a real push forward. But it does not solve the problem of predicting protein folds. It is very good at some cases, and very poor at other cases, and you don’t know which it is unless you know the real answer already. ... While AlphaFold is another interesting “success” for machine learning, it does not advance the fields of either AI or ML at all. And its long term impact is not yet clear.
> 6. SpaceX [is well on track, though a bit late on their own schedule]. If fantastic progress happens in 2021 I will get more confident about 2023, but 2021 will have to be really spectacular.
Well, there are some interesting links and connections in there again (as last year too) and certainly material for further study of why Rodney Brooks thinks what he does in the departments of AI where I lack expertise in (e.g., all that GPT-3 hype).
> Slow down your moving too fast
> It's what you do, it's what you have
> It's all a joke and such a laugh
> The things you do, the thoughts you have
> It's all a joke live in the past
> -- [Smoove & Turrell - Slow Down](https://youtu.be/46DfGQoEpsw)
So [I am reading](https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2021/01/pvv-manifesto-includes-de-islamisation-nexit-and-ban-on-dual-national-voting-rights/) that PVV (a nationalist party in the Netherlands) wants
> to "de-islamise"(?) the Netherlands [... in order to ..] return to a ‘country ... with old school Dutch coziness’.
I was interested in how they want to achieve this (apart from stopping the spread of some ideas in the country - but that alone does not bring back the coziness, right?), so I checked their manifesto to see what is their plan. Well, not much, the only relevant statement is this (translation mine, exclamation mark theirs)
> If you want to live according to Islam and Sharia, leave for a Muslim country!
They also want to establish a _Ministry of Immigration, Remigration and De-islamisation_ with some further undisclosed work agenda.
Now, I get it. I very well understand why many people are upset about immigration, changes of local culture, fear of losing one's identity and all that. Some of the stuff they put a finger on is sometimes a real worry to many people around me too. I get it.
What strikes me, however, is the psychology behind this half-baked proposal. Stopping spread of some ideas is one thing, and it's achievable in principle - let's ignore for a moment constitutionality/legality of that. Deportation of people is another thing and it entails some violence (because they won't go on their own, right? After all, the people PVV speaks about are mostly Dutch citizens, so where should they go?). So for this to work at all, the plan for the society is to perform some (undisclosed) acts of violence (certainly psychological, maybe even physical) and then, when the work is done and finished, feel good about oneself with "old-school Dutch coziness" by a warm family fireplace with a glass of Jenever in the hand.
Such a thing is indeed possible and the history of the last 100 years knows about individuals who had little moral qualms about such situations and felt cozy in the evening after the work was done.
To me, however, it seems that to accept such moral acrobatics in practice would require a lobotomy to a large part of the society.
In other words, this is not a viable path forward. It strikes me that the authors and followers of these ideas don't realize this - you just need to imagine how would that `coziness` feel. Not too cozy after all, I suspect...
Exploring, failing, backtracking, just to identify the only viable path forward. And then scarred, stumbling forward into the future. Learning.
Boring and steady. Knowing little and questioning a lot. Mostly harmless.
***
This is an experimental scrapbook space. A collection of stuff I want to keep in a form somewhere on the spectrum between a blog and a shoe-box full of scraps, cut-outs, quotes, links and reading notes and sometimes my own silly thoughts about them.
Perhaps it might be of marginal interest to others too, but I don't care that much.
Joined Jan 2021
