- @morepete
Adam Serwer is so fantastic.
In a world in which the United States was not the national equivalent of some guy running naked and screaming across the Brooklyn Bridge, driven out of his gourd by bath salts and PCP
Interesting article. About time one of these pieces found some Trump voters who don’t reflexively defend him.
Good advice if you want to read more books. I deeply question its thesis, however, and especially in the literal translation of the Buffett quote? Which books was Buffett referring to? Which books is Chu reading? Was Buckminster Fuller wasting his time with his habit of reading magazines on the airplane, which he chose based on their location on the newsstand, not on the title of the magazine, in part because he wanted to expand his worldview through exposure to the alien, whether it was Cat Fancy or Guns and Ammo?
Characterizing all of TV as trash also suggests to me that he hasn't read enough books to realize the limits of his own vision.
Not to mention, their versions will never be left enough for the left or right enough for the right.
People do need help knowing when they're clicking on something that is literally invented propaganda or a fictional story. It's a real problem. AI might be able to help with that. They might need help finding an across-the-aisle version that communicates in a way they regard as credible. This just strips out what's good and has it rewritten by an anonymous journalist. The Economist does a fine job of that already.
Non-religious people too often take evangelical support for Trump as within biblical teachings. It's really, REALLY not.
Devastating read. Ian's the most ethical person in games in a lot of ways, and he goes hard into just how easy it was to do what Cambridge Analytica did. They're the most high-profile abuser of these settings. There's no way they're the only ones.
Interesting read from Gopnik. Sharkey's view is somewhat compatible with that of David M. Kennedy's regarding what to do about persistent violence, which is about disrupting social networks (or anti-social networks, I suppose) who perpetrate the vast majority of remaining urban violence, then offering both carrots and sticks to get the shooting to stop.
The bigger picture is that this is the biggest social change in the US in my lifetime. Cities were still scary in the 80s and 90s, and then it all flipped all at once. The answers Sharkey is reaching for still haven't been adequately resolved, but the entire subject is important. There's a strong argument that the revitalization of cities has created a permanent Republican advantage in congressional and electoral college races, for example.
I'll start by noting I am a skeptic of virtually all cryptocurrencies, though I am semi-bullish on crypto-goods, if that makes any sense at all (shorter: Crypto-kitties makes perfect sense to me as a big hit, if not terribly different from rare goods in video games already; ICOs strike me as a great way to take money from inexperienced investors).
The one aspect of this article that the people who are most angry about it seem unable to defuse is that while the blockchain is getting less hackable over time, the irreversibility of its transactions to date (with forkability the only alternative in some cases) is an extreme bug. There's an argument to make that whatever is in the software is the correct judgment, but that's cargo culting. It's making the software the middle man, making software the government, in the absence of a perfect system. That's catastrophic for voting, home ownership, and many other things.
Some might see making the software God as an upgrade over governments of varying corruption levels God. I have my doubts but remain eager to listen.
This headline is making us dumber, though. The story is actually, "selective editing by Neo-Nazi propagandists, amplified by an army of social media activists, convinced a gullible or, who knows, possibly complicit left-wing journalist, that Pinker is a darling of the alt-right." We have no data on how far this spread, who else was fooled, etc. A vastly overstated and under-examined bit of critique about a vitally important question. Social media is an amplifier of social ills, not the thing that's making us dumber.
Now, that's all part of the same dynamic that happens in social -- the headline is optimized as click bait, because click bait is share bait, and the economics of modern journalism dictate that this is how you get readers and therefore impressions and therefore advertising pennies.
But the article and how it summarizes the story, even in the preview on this platform, makes the case that Social Media is making us dumber. It's Exhibit A. Maybe that was the ironic intent of the headline, but, having been a copy editor, I really, really doubt it.
The shallows could have been written at any point since the printing press was involved. There are reasons to be (extremely) concerned about the Internet and especially about smartphones, but so think Carr’s life is too atypical for him to get to the bottom of it.