John L. Taylor @johnnylogic@qoto.org

I've seen a lot of white folks suggest new Black users change instances if they have a bad experience on their first Mastodon server.

Why should that be the default expectation? I understand that bad actors will always be there to create accounts and instances to harass folks.

It is incumbent on us, as anti-racist white folks, to find ways to prevent these bad actors from making our spaces unwelcoming to new Black users. It's a failure of imagination otherwise.

#BlackMastodon

Eugenics- a cautionary tale of how science can be misused- and in some ways is still influencing thought today. Gripping and urgent account from Adam Rutherford on this BBC radio4 program:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001fd36

@NicoleCRust @DrYohanJohn @dlevenstein I was rereading Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier (2011) on heuristics (https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2099042/component/file_2099041/content) and there is this interesting claim that, in this case, the idealizations of classical decision theory actually impede our understanding of the operative causal processes; occluding what is going on, instead of clarifying or enhancing the fundamental processes.

The many branches of the #fediverse (#Mastodon instances are but one) ~ via https://axbom.com/fediverse/ ~ #SocialMedia #community

The hardest problem in computer science is to make a social network without nazis

Disturbed by reports of Black Mastodon users—Black women in particular—having negative experiences on this app, including being randomly banned for discussions of racism. Some of these users will not come back. All will share their experiences. The answer is not to condescendingly lecture them on “how the fediverse works,” as if their experiences are inevitable, nor to swear to do better next time. (There may not be one.) It’s to do better now lest the reputation of this app be cemented.

This is what Earth looks like from 1.5 billion kilometers away. A pale blue dot beneath the rings of Saturn captured by the Cassini spacecraft.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
#earth #space #saturn #planets #nasa

The first black child ever allowed to attend a white school is only 68 years old now.
White parents pulled their children from school. White teachers refused to teach her.
Ruby Bridges now works as an activist & public speaker
This wasn’t a million years ago. /1

The Comiclopedia: An Online Archive of 14,000 Comic Artists, From Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, to Mœbius and Hergé

https://www.openculture.com/2022/11/the-comiclopedia.html

Today's #APOD #picture is NOT from #JWST, but from the #Hubble #space #telescope (#HST / #NASA / #ESA). This #photography of the planetary #nebula NGC6302 looks like a #butterfly. This is actually why it is called the Butterfly nebula. Although it looks like the young protostar L1527 recently observed by #JWST, NGC6302 is dead #star. The central white dwarf is actually one of the hottest known: 200,000 K !

read more: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap221121.html

Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble
Processing: William Ostling

Using a large language model as a search engine was a bad idea when it was proposed by a search company. It's still a bad idea now that it's being proposed by a social media company. Fortunately, Chirag Shah and I already wrote the paper laying out all the ways in which this is a bad idea.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3498366.3505816

#AL #ML #MathyMath #Bullshit #NLP #NLProc #AIhype

One of my favorite scientific myths is the idea that medical error is the "third leading cause of death"

The idea comes from a truly atrocious paper that made numerous basic errors, and therefore it's a good marker for whether people apply even the most basic critique to evidence that supports their opinions

I reviewed the paper on my blog https://gidmk.medium.com/medical-error-is-not-the-third-leading-cause-of-deaths-ff13c71851b