best finds 2023

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. Here are the highlights of 2023.

January

“ChatGPT gets treated like technological magic, but that ignores the humans behind the curtain that make it function. OpenAI paid Sama to hire Kenyan workers at $1.32 to $2 an hour to review ‘child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest’ content. Their work made the tool less toxic, but left them mentally scarred. The company ended the contract when they found out TIME was digging into their practices”. —Paris Marx

February

“Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior ‘identity-protective cognition’ (IPC).

By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, ‘a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.’” —Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

March

“I’m not worried about the AI apocalypse. I’m worried about the ‘VCs subsidize AI tech and sell it at a loss just long enough to make everyone rely on them (AKA ‘disrupting the knowledge worker industry’) before bumping the price up and quality down just like Uber and Amazon and the rest’ apocalypse.” —Alex Chaffee

April

The opposite of “return to office” advocates isn’t “work from home” advocates. It’s a rich tapestry of “open offices are distracting” people and “I’ve never gone this long without being sick” people and “commutes are a waste of time I don’t get paid for” people and “I’m an introvert and playing house with coworkers sucks the life out of me” people and “I have a family and appreciate the flexibility” people and “I primarily communicated with coworkers through Slack anyway” people … —Mac in Philly

May

Edmund Burke also paraphrased nicely, “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.” — Social Media is not the universe of true comment. —@AndrewTrickett

June

“Quiet quitting is so idiotic. It’s based around the idea that doing the amount of work as contractually obligated is somehow ‘quitting’, as if there is an unspoken obligation to go above and beyond that. For free, of course. Well there isn’t. And only working the amount of time you’re paid for is not disloyal or lazy, it’s simply holding up your end of the bargain. ‘Quiet quitting’ should be the norm, not the exception. Everyone should do it. But stop calling it quitting.” —@Rene

July

“The problem is that electric cars are popular with politicians precisely because they provide an excuse to avoid doing harder things, like rebuilding our cities, or changing the habits of lifetimes. Persuading people to switch from their old gasoline car to a shiny Tesla is much easier than persuading them that they can live without a car. Hence governments are pushing electric cars, often with incentives that make no sense.” –Daniel Knowles, author of Carmageddon, via @BreadAndCircuses

August

“Fez asked where we were going, and I said I didn’t know. We were pedaling along at a pretty good clip, and he had inferred some sense of urgency, a need to get somewhere, so he was slightly puzzled by my answer … Here’s what I said to him, more or less: Fez, what are we out here for? To ride bikes? Why? Well, because at some point we’ll stop thinking about whatever we were thinking about before, and we’ll even stop thinking about riding, and we’ll just be riding. That’s the ride. It’s calm and peaceful, and it’s entirely sufficient unto itself. That’s what we’re out here for. So right now, we’re riding until we get to that place. I don’t know where it is or how to get there, except that we have to pedal and move and hope we find it.” —Riding There via @gredaco

September

“The phrase ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ was invented by a police psychiatrist to discredit a female hostage in a 1973 bank heist who criticized the police … The psychiatrist who invented it, Nils Bejerot, never spoke to the woman he based it on, never bothered to ask her why she trusted her captors more than the authorities. More to the point, during the Swedish bank heist that inspired the syndrome, Bejerot was the psychiatrist leading the police response. He was the authority that Kristin Enmark – the first woman diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome – distrusted.” —‘Stockholm Syndrome’ — via Andreu Casablanca

October

“Although the official number of deaths caused by covid-19 is now 7m, our single best estimate is that the actual toll is 27.2m people. We find that there is a 95% chance that the true value lies between 18m and 33m additional deaths.” —The Economist: The pandemic’s true death toll

November

“The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.” —Eric Hoffer (1955) The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms

December

“Fake Intelligence is where we try to simulate intelligence by feeding huge amounts of dubious information to algorithms we don’t fully understand to create approximations of human behaviour where the safeguards that moderate the real thing provided by family, community, culture, personal responsibility, reputation, and ethics are replaced by norms that satisfy the profit motive of corporate entities.

What the Fake Intelligence folks do not understand is that we are more than just the sum of our neurons.
We are social animals.
Our intelligence is social intelligence.
And our behaviour isn’t separate to our ephemeral biological reality but inextricably intertwined with it; shaped and tempered by it.
A mere summary of the sum total of human output cannot emulate the human condition. We are defined as much by the information we internalise as by that which we reject.”—Aral Balkin

Astronomy Picture of the Day — 2023-12-25