Classic example of a negative view on LinkedIn: "Unlike many others, I don’t think any reinforcement learning or reward algorithm is at play... appears to be a generic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) process that breaks tasks into several steps... Subsequent steps ... generated based on context... subsequent interactions concatenated into the context.…

Good piece on how "the free speech warriors... [behind] Truth Social and the ... decay of Twitter ... the “Festung” cities of unrestricted expression... still not happy... shouting into an echo chamber isn’t nearly as satisfying as they thought it would be... What they’re really after ... is our attention... The thrill of provocation quickly…

Interesting ideas but innocent of how they could create as much harm as good."The internet caters to our baser interests... like wanting to be healthy, but finding yourself in a food court where the only options are burgers and milkshakes. What option do we have but to be our baser selves?... But what if we created an arena of virtue ... wou…

One of my favourite writers/thinkers on all things digital future is "finally, definitely, fully leaving X, and probably all social media..."

A YANSS interview with Adam Grant, author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What you Don’t Know. Generally an "extensive exploration of how to rethink your own thinking", including his WorkLife podcast interview of Margaret Atwood on procrastination.(When annotating a podcast I really like a transcript, but there was none for this epi…

The Identity Stack ... Traditional online bank accounts represent balances as numbers stored in a centralized database... requires placing trust in a banking institution. Blockchain protocols plus private key cryptography ...introduce ... full possession of digital assets, without having to trust a third party. Hence the terms “self-custodial” or …

"5 interesting things ... distilled from a helicopter view of trust from various branches of psychology, sociology, behavioural science and Responsible Research and Innovation."focus on others: "perhaps similar to love and happiness, the more doggedly trust is pursued for its own sake, the more elusive it may become", so turn y…

"social and psychological forces that make people prone to sharing and believing misinformation ... are on the rise" - not so much created by bad actors, but exploited by them. Why?“cognitive and memory limitations, directional motivations to defend or support some group identity or existing belief, and messages from other people and pol…

Covid-19 case numbers are now spiking in many counties across West Texas ... [but] resolve of ... skeptics appears to be stiffening... the denial of facts is often rooted in identity and belonging, not in ignorance ...people who deny science ... trying to uphold membership in ... a political or religious affiliation or some other group ... a commu…

marginalization of those with radical critiques... poisoning both the right and the left ...resentment and victimhood spread across the American right — an intellectual inferiority complex combined with a moral superiority complex ... Thinking was no longer for understanding. Thinking was for belonging ... Sarah Palin and Donald Trump reintroduc…

For the 6th episode of his Futurized podcast, Trond Undheim asked me why surveillance capitalism inevitably leads to polarised, undemocratic and dysfunctional societies, and what we must do about it...If we don’t change course, in the future we will be less will informed, more polarised, massively manipulated, living in more corrupt and less democ…

Many of our political forebears pined for more polarization... fretted about the incoherence of their identities ... There were liberal Republicans ... opponents of civil rights and big government in the Democratic Party... 1976 ... Richard Nixon... proposed a universal health care ... created the Environmental Protection Agency... tighter i…

when climate skeptics in government and media control the message and the channels, it becomes fact for people like councilor Allen that Australia’s fires... have “nothing” to do with climate change... Climate skepticism runs deep in Australia, origin of ... Murdoch’s media empire... long history of climate science denial and diversion... in the w…

68 percent of Democrats are worried that someone in their family could catch the virus, while just 40 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of independents share that concern.... Nearly 80 percent of Democrats believe the worst is yet to come, but just 40 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of independents believe that...The partisan disconnect …

a social dynamic in which it becomes more beneficial to hold those views than not. It’s the feedback mechanism by which people are punished for expressing any kind of nuance, doubt or divergence... moral outbidding, unchecked, that corrodes a group from within...the vanity of small differences, and the punishing of people for the most minor transg…

For those who have grown up with social media... childhood, an era that was fruitfully mysterious for the rest of us, is surprisingly accessible. ... this is certain to have some kind of profound effect on the development of identity... children and teen-agers have gained a level of control that they didn’t have before... Humans have always tried …

The systems in the brain that light up when we access our beliefs are the same systems that help us understand stories... the same brain systems involved when people think about who they are and about the beliefs that are most important to them... the default mode network, a set of interconnected areas of the brain associated with identity and sel…

political scientist Lilliana Mason ... new book, Uncivil Agreement ... we actually agree about most things... “our conflicts are over who we think we are, rather than reasoned differences of opinion... Our opinions can be very fluid... if we wanted to come to a compromise we could, if there were not these pesky identities in the way... we disagree…

The most powerful engine of elitism is the European Union... Founding Fathers of Europe deliberately removed a great deal of decision-making from the hands of the (nation-bounded and short-sighted) public... Confronted with popular revolts against the rule of experts they have simply dug in their heels... For the EU, technocratic decision-making …

it just felt like the conversations that we were having subsequently were actually pretty shallow and actually pretty useless, because we were talking over each other because everybody meant different things... we can only really start talking about interventions if we understand what we’re talking about... I say, “Please don’t use the term.” “Yea…

When it comes to how Europeans identify themselves, there are actually six different “political tribes,”... the current polarized debate of “pro-EU” versus “anti-EU” fails to capture the complexity ... 36 percent were the “hesitant Europeans”... proud to belong to the EU but also concerned about issues like immigration.... “contented Europeans.…

Every day the web is becoming more personal... ... brands ... need to understand more than theoretical profiles or carefully honed audience segments.... master the fundamentals of identity...  In this report you’ll learn:  - What it takes to create a persistent individualized identity that crosses platforms and screens  - How brands and agencie…

Mom did a very brave thing, considering where and when she lived... She watched a TV documentary about transgender identity... She let it change her thinking. .. turned to me during a commercial break and said, “I think maybe sometimes God makes mistakes.”... never spoke an unkind word about gay, lesbian, or transgender people after that day. For …

‘Vote Leave Take Control’ and ‘Make America Great Again’... future-focused, inspirational and told a sufficiently broad story for enough people to see a reflected image of themselves and their country that they could feel good about... get out of rebuttal mode, ditch the anaemic, snore-inducing, negative messages ... and go all in with a muscular…

How ideologues, opportunists, growth hackers, and internet marketers built a massive new universe of partisan news on the web and on Facebook... publishers are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue, with small operations easily earning five figures thanks to one website and at least one associated Facebook page... since T…

The “inclusiveness” of Kekistan and groups like Patriot Prayer... lures people who might not have been traditionally part of the GOP ... into the welcoming bosom of far-right causes. ... mainstreaming the more extreme versions of white nationalism and overt racism by making them appear more friendly and just about “free speech”... the “free speech…

to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth ... to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump... isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care... he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him …

Pariser’s work has led him to believe that blaming fake news for fractured discourse is a red herring... The filter bubble explains a lot about how liberals didn’t see Trump coming, but not very much about how he won the election... my guess is that talk-radio, local news, and Fox are a much more important piece of that story than random conservat…

In the United States... the chances that two people visiting the same news site have different political views is about 45 percent... the internet is far closer to perfect desegregation than perfect segregation... you are more likely to come across someone with opposing views online than you are offline... a surprising amount of the information …

I’ve been meaning to blog about the ‘backfire effect’ cognitive bias since first coming across it last December. It went to the top of my ToBlog list thanks to a little serendipity...