Friday’s Finds

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@StuartMcMillan: “The only thing you need to feel extremely smart is a lack of curiosity. The perpetually curious will always think they’re dumb.”

“Every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the artist to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.” —Walter Brueggemann, via @CurtisOgden

@SimonTerry: “A Twitter thread is a perfect vehicle for conspiracy theories: Bite-sized information; social validation; sources people rarely check; pace & format that allows skipping details, critique or connections; & degree of difficulty to read that makes reflection & criticism a challenge.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@white_owly — “Symptoms love dressing up as causes. And causes love hiding behind them.”

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —Victor E. Frankl, via @euan

The Digital Maginot Line by @noUpside

“In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory. If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics … What made democracies strong in the past — a strong commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas — makes them profoundly vulnerable in the era of democratized propaganda and rampant misinformation … The solution to this problem requires collective responsibility among military, intelligence, law enforcement, researchers, educators, and platforms. Creating a new and functional defensive framework requires cooperation.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” —Carl Sagan, via @LucLalande

@suitpossum — “The conflict is not ‘AI vs. Humans’. The conflict is ‘Humans who control AI infrastructures vs. Humans who don’t”

@MazzucatoM — “David Ricardo was in 1821 talking about effect of mechanization on jobs and wages. But as long as profits were reinvested in economy, new jobs appeared. That stopped with maximisation of shareholder value. Blame financialization & bad governance, not robots! “

@gideonro — “Without changes, we will eventually have algorithms to keep us perfectly perched just at the edge of financial ruin, but not over it.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@haymarketbooks — “No human being is illegal.”

Prof. Jason Stanley — Three Essential Facets of Fascism

1. Conjuring a “mythic past” that has supposedly been destroyed (“by liberals, feminists, and immigrants”)
2. Fascist leaders sow division; they succeed by “turning groups against each other,” inflaming historical antagonisms and ancient hatreds for their own advantage.
3. Fascists “attack the truth” with propaganda, in particular “a kind of anti-intellectualism” that “creates a petri dish for conspiracy theories.”

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Every fortnight (or so) I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@white_owly — “If you’re looking for obscene wealth it can usually be found right beside obscene poverty.”

The Most Important Survival Skill for the Next 50 Years Isn’t What You Think — via @titiabruning

“Basically: technological innovation and artificial intelligence are going to accelerate at a pace we’ve yet to really comprehend. (Fifteen years ago, Facebook wasn’t even around. Now it’s so efficient at micro-targeting that it helped sway a democratic election. Imagine what it might be capable of in another fifteen years.) That means automation will likely disrupt your current job (and your next one, and the one after that), and you’ll be the target of attention-grabbing, behavior-modifying algorithms so exponentially effective you won’t even realize you’re being targeted.

The best defense against that? An emotional flexibility that allows for constant reinvention, and knowing yourself well enough that you don’t get drawn into the deep Internet traps set for you.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“I should have followed Ni Kuang’s process for doing work. Get paid first, deliver on time but absolutely no rewrites. That’s your business. Genius.” —@ActivateLearn

“Freelancing is a tightrope act of sharing and protecting your wares.” —@White_Owly

“The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition. Nature is miraculous enough.” —Christopher Hitchens via @Hitch_Slapping

“Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so. Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment! If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it’s wrong!” —Richard Feynman via @ProfFeynmam

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds

“I’m convinced that people think freelancers have their lives funded by some kind of freelancing fairy, and that invoices are therefore an exercise in comedy.” —WhiteOwl

“AI makes us more powerful. It doesn’t make us wiser.” —@joi

“The impact of technology on our lives — and on the future of meaningful work — is the result of research, investment, regulatory, and business model choices that are made by people.” —Byrone Auguste

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” —Søren Kierkegaard, via @EskoKilpi

Howard Rheingold: What Technophiles Need To Know: Part One

“Although our present crisis is so threatening precisely because it plays out on the physical plane, where our bodies and other creatures live, it is a crisis of knowledge. We lack a crucial mental skill. I contend that our position today regarding the way we make decisions about technologies is similar to the dilemma that pre-Enlightenment scientists faced in the sixteenth century. We simply don’t have a good method for thinking and making decisions about how to apply (and not apply) the powerful tools of rationality, the scientific method, reductionism, the combination of logic and efficiency embodied by technology.”

Roger Schank: To know AI is to understand it

All the talk about AI these days relates in no way to self refection, to knowing what you need to know, or to anticipating the future. We talk about “AI” but we are not talking about the “I”. We have intelligent entities already. (They are called humans.) When they are confused they ask for explanations. When today’s so-called “AI’s” start doing that, please let me know. In the meantime, it would be nice if there weren’t an article a day in major publications about AI when what they mean is number crunching and pattern matching, not wondering and trying to find out.

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The journey to knowledge is as important as the moment of realization, learning design has collapsed the journey into the moment, lessening the experience by depriving us of the collateral learning along the way.” —@RalphMercer

A Thousand Rivers

“Collecting data on human learning based on children’s behavior in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behavior at Sea World. … when you push a child to do something she simply developmentally can not do, you create a profound belief that (a) I hate this; (b) I can’t do this; (c) I will never be able to do this, and (d) There’s something wrong with me … Talk to gifted scientists, writers, artists, entrepreneurs. You will find they learned like a Yanomami child learns, through keen observation, experimentation, immersion, freedom, participation, through real play and real work, through the kind of free activity where the distinction between work and play disappears. Talk to a really good auto mechanic, carpenter, farmer, fiddle player, web designer, film editor, songwriter, photographer, chef, and you will find they learned the same way.”

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@ProfFeynman: “FEYNMAN learning strategy in THREE points:
1. Continually ask “Why?”
2. When you learn something, learn it to where you can explain it to a child.
3. Instead of arbitrarily memorizing things, look for the explanation that makes it obvious.”

“Learning is the ability to acquire new ideas from experience and retain them as memories.” —Eric Kandel (2000 Nobel Laureate), via @charlesjennings

“It is certain in any case that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” —James Baldwin, via @UNESCO

@AralBalkan: “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.” – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. “I wonder if @jk_rowling realised while writing this that it is the perfect warning about Silicon Valley, ‘the cloud’ and surveillance capitalism.”

@ChaosPrime: “remember, kids, if you absolutely bust your ass integrating yourself psychologically so you’re aware of what you’re doing and why and can actually act ethically, you then get to enjoy getting outcompeted by everybody whose neocortex is tasked solely with post hoc justification”

@white_owly: “Cognitive diversity makes for awkward conversation when you first meet. You’re essentially speaking different languages. Food for thought when designing a recruitment process.”

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