Really GOOD INTERNET #001
Really GOOD INTERNET #001
Why AI should be afraid of us; Crypto-Club in the Church goes sideways; Dickpic NFTs; Cancel Culture does not exist or does it?
Why A.I. Should Be Afraid of Us
Our lack of reciprocity toward A.I. is commonly assumed to reflect a lack of trust. It’s hyper-rational and unfeeling, after all, surely just out for itself, unlikely to cooperate, so why should we? Dr. Deroy and her colleagues reached a different and perhaps less comforting conclusion. Their study found that people were less likely to cooperate with a bot even when the bot was keen to cooperate. It’s not that we don’t trust the bot, it’s that we do: The bot is guaranteed benevolent, a capital-S sucker, so we exploit it. That conclusion was borne out by reports afterward from the study’s participants. “Not only did they tend to not reciprocate the cooperative intentions of the artificial agents,” Dr. Deroy said, “but when they basically betrayed the trust of the bot, they didn’t report guilt, whereas with humans they did.” She added, “You can just ignore the bot and there is no feeling that you have broken any mutual obligation.”
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2021/06/why-a-i-should-be-afraid-of-us.html
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My [40F] daughter's [15F] cryptocurrency club is creating problems at our church
Kids these days. 15 yr olds running crypto investment ponzi schemes in the church trying to pay their debts with a job as tiktokinfluencer. Bring death & fire. 💲💰🤑💣💥
https://www.rareddit.com/r/relationships/comments/ntn7ym
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Bitcoin (BTC) Vs. Ethereum (ETH) And Defi: There's A Big Difference - Bloomberg
"Digital gold is probably one of the best memes out there". One of the best up-to-date crypto-explainers. I remain sceptical.
https://archive.is/IGprI#selection-3319.195-3319.252
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Anthony Weiner may sell his infamous crotch shot as an NFT
All of a sudden Crypto makes sense 🍆
Anthony Weiner is considering a new career in “political collectibles” — starting with the infamous crotch shot that cost him his seat in Congress. The several-times disgraced ex-pol said that he’s stepping down as CEO of a Brooklyn countertop company — a job first revealed by The Post — and may instead start selling nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, of various lowlights from his serial-sexting addiction.
https://nypost.com/2021/06/07/anthony-weiner-may-sell-his-infamous-crotch-shot-as-an-nft/
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How to Respond to Tiananmen Trolls | Doublethink Lab
On June 4th every year, the world comes together to mourn the Tiananmen Square Massacre, grieve the pro-democracy protesters who were killed, and condemn the totalitarian rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However, a propaganda drive to whitewash the Tiananmen massacre also kicks in at the same time on social media and private messenger groups, to speak up for the CCP and to attack the students in the pro-democracy movement. Doublethink Lab has collated messages intended to whitewash the CCP’s atrocities, and were able to categorize them into three groups, each with their own motives and narrative strategies.
https://tiananmen-trolls.doublethinklab.org/en/
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Chair Simulator
The most comprehensive Chair Simulator ever made.
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Owls in Berlin, DE
https://www.owlsnearme.com/?place=12872
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Caught in the Study Web
In the highly-pressurized pursuit of the academic goals they’ve been told will help them succeed, students venture into Study Web to feel less alone; assuaging anxiety with inspiration, pursuing perfect grades through para-social productivity, and quelling fears about the future with cyber friends. As Zoom school has left young people even more desperate for connection and support, they’re turning to Study Web—post-to-post, DM-to-DM, and webcam-to-webcam—to find it.
https://every.to/cybernaut/caught-in-the-study-web
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Philosophie des Zuschauens - Das Stadion als Arena der Intensität
Die Gemeinsamkeit sportlicher, religiöser und kultureller Großereignisse liege in der „Entstehung eines mystischen Körpers über Intensität“ – eine Intensität, die man noch eine Weile nach dem Spiel oder dem religiösen Ereignis mit sich trage, „die aber dann langsam verbleicht“.
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Kommentar zum Umgang mit Kevin Spacey - Der Gerichtshof der öffentlichen Meinung
Digitale Selbstjustiz, Edition F.
Ankläger und Richterinnen dieses Gerichtshofes sind an kein Gesetz und an keine Präzedenz gebunden. Sie urteilen impulsiv, oft uninformiert, und nicht immer aus gänzlich uneigennützigen Motiven. Eine kontrollierte Beweisaufnahme gibt es nicht. Das Urteil steht häufig schon fest, bevor die Angeklagten sich äußern können. Berufung ist nicht vorgesehen, denn es gibt keine höhere Instanz. Und die Strafzumessung ergeht häufig ohne Prüfung der Verhältnismäßigkeit, vor allem aber: Ohne eine Perspektive, wann und unter welchen Bedingungen die Schuld als gesühnt anzusehen sei und der Verurteilte das Recht auf eine zweite Chance geltend machen darf. Geschähe dergleichen vor einem realen Gericht, wäre dies eine eklatante Verletzung der Menschenwürde des Angeklagten.
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Is the Rise of Q-anon Conspiracies the ‘End Times’ for US Democracy?
Voltaire wrote, “[W]hoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” That was just the first part of the quote; he was speaking specifically of the many absurdities embraced by our various religions. Which now includes Qanon, a pseudo-religion apparently started by an American pig farmer who lives in The Philippines. It’s burrowed so deeply into the bloodstream of conventional American religion that the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention worried out loud on CNN that it’s replacing churches as parishioner’s primary religion. “[P]astors only have access to people maybe an hour or three hours a day, that’s nothing compares to 24 hours a day from Facebook,” he told Erin Burnett.
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Ölmultis sind unter Druck. Gut für die Ölstaaten. Und fürs Klima?
Weitergehende Konsequenzen aus den Urteilen gegen die Ölkonzerne: Staatliche Ölkonzerne in Saudi Arabien könnten das Geschäft übernehmen, ohne die Pflichten der privaten Unternehmen.
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Shell-Klage: «Das Urteil verändert die Welt fundamental»
Sie sagen: Die Macht des einzelnen Konsumenten ist zu klein, als dass deswegen der Wandel schnell genug gelingen könnte. Genau. Das ist eine Transformation eines ganzen Systems. Aber das ist eine Abkehr von diesem Gedanken, dass wir bei uns selber anfangen müssen, Verzicht zu üben. Wir als Individuen haben trotzdem eine moralische Verpflichtung, aber keine rechtliche. Die rechtliche tragen diejenigen, die 50% oder mehr des gesamten Problems überhaupt erst geschaffen haben. Das macht rechtlich gesehen einen Unterschied.
https://www.nzz.ch/wirtschaft/shell-klage-das-urteil-veraendert-die-welt-fundamental-ld.1629072
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How the ‘Culture War’ Could Break Democracy
The great democratic revolutions of Western Europe and North America were rooted in the intellectual and cultural revolution of Enlightenment; the Enlightenment underwrote those political transformations. If America’s hybrid Enlightenment underwrote the birth of liberal democracy in the United States, what underwrites it now? What is going to underwrite liberal democracy in the 21st century? To me, it’s not obvious.
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Virtual YouTuber Kiryu Coco is graduating. Here’s what that means.
A dive into the wild world of VTubers—from talking otters to sharkpeople from Atlantis.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/06/kiryu-coco-graduating-vtube-hololive.html?via=rss
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The Psychology of Collective Memory
Short writeup about the research of collective memory. Much of the Culture War happening on Social Media is, after reading this and Jan Assmans (excellent) book of the same name (twice), about writing access to the collective memory: Which groups should be remembered, which fights, what history, which events, and so forth. Identity Politics are politics to organize the formation of collective memory.
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2018/04/the-psychology-of-collective-memory.html
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Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats
A digital marketing firm closely linked to the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA was responsible for a series of deceptive Facebook ads promoting Green party candidates during the 2018 US midterm elections, the Guardian can reveal. In an apparent attempt to split the Democratic vote in a number of close races, the ads purported to come from an organization called America Progress Now (APN) and used socialist memes and rhetoric to urge leftwing voters to support Green party candidates. Facebook was aware of the true identity of the advertiser – the conservative marketing firm Rally Forge – and the deceptive nature of the ads, documents seen by the Guardian show, but the company determined that they did not violate its policies. Rally Forge would go on to set up a pro-Trump domestic “troll farm” for Turning Point Action, a “sister” organization of Turning Point USA, in 2020, earning a permanent ban from Facebook. “There were no policies at Facebook against pretending to be a group that did not exist, an abuse vector that has also been used by the governments of Honduras and Azerbaijan,” said Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower who played a small role in the investigation of the Green party ads.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/11/facebook-ads-turning-point-usa-rally-forge
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"Cui Bono: WTF happened to Ken Jebsen?": Des Schwurblers Kern | ZEIT ONLINE
Umso deutlicher aber zeigt sich, was die Umtriebe von Verschwörungsschwurblern anrichten können: Ihr destruktiver Einsatz befördert einen pauschalen Argwohn gegen eine Kultur der Fiktionen.
https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2021-06/ken-jebsen-podcast-verschwoerung-cui-bono/komplettansicht
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Ostensible Projected Forms - Blood Knife
In his short fiction collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), Wallace includes a brief five-page story entitled “Datum Centurio,” which acts as an etymological entry from the far-flung future of 2096. This excerpt from an overly-wordy fictional dictionary—“Leckie & Webster’s Connotationally Gender-Specific Lexicon of Contemporary Usage”—begins by expounding on the differences between the informal and vulgar uses of the word ‘date.’ The former, we are told, describes the process of “voluntarily submitting one’s nucleotide configurations and other Procreativity Designators to an agency empowered by law to identify an optimal female neurogenetic complement for the purposes of Procreative Genital Interface,” while the latter defines the “creation and/or use of a Virtual Female Sensory Array… for the purposes of Simulated Genital Interface… to which proper names and various sexual and/or personality characteristics are sometimes applied by overwrought male users.” In a contextual note labelled “USAGE/HISTORICAL,” the fictional Leckie & Webster of the text explain that the point of divergence in definition, association, and colloquial usage of ‘date’ occurred in the mid-2000s, with the “A.D. 2006 patent and 2008 commercial introduction of Digitally Manipulable Video” in which “video pornography could be home-edited to allow the simulated introduction of the viewer into filmed images of explicit genital interface.”
The note continues by adding that, subject a 2009 civil action, “the availability to U.S. male consumers of wholly depersonalized simulacra of genital interface could reasonably be expected to palliate the 86.5% semioemotional conflict that attended genuine interpersonal dating,” an example of technology “which has all but forced today’s modificatory split into the bivocal ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ denotations for date.”
While Wallace’s brief foray into sci-fi storytelling functions as an obvious postmodern parody of twentieth-century dating conventions, the prescience and accuracy of this firmly tongue-in-cheek observation from the neoliberal heart of the late-90s and supposed ‘End of History’ is particularly striking. As it turns out, we now live in an age of “Digitally Manipulable Video,” where one of the primary ethical conundrums of the 2020s revolves around the proliferation and potentially nefarious application of Deepfakes.
https://bloodknife.com/ostensible-projected-forms-deepfake-david-foster-wallace/
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How 'Roblox' Became a Playground for Virtual Fascists | WIRED
Thousands of players flocked to a digital world filled with draconian rules, slavery, and anti-Semitism—and tested how far “just a game” can go.
https://www.wired.com/story/roblox-online-games-irl-fascism-roman-empire/
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Beyond the green smart cities, solarpunk can also be dark
https://lidiazuin.medium.com/beyond-the-green-smart-cities-solarpunk-can-also-be-dark-997720267e32
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The Ghostchain. (Or taking things for what they are) | Paletten
No assets. No blocks. No chains. Disconnect the crypto-farms.
https://paletten.net/artiklar/the-ghostchain
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Understanding QAnon’s Connection to American Politics, Religion, and Media Consumption
https://www.prri.org/research/qanon-conspiracy-american-politics-report/
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What the Silicon Valley idealists got wrong - Engelsberg Ideas
The entire edifice of digital media has been constructed on two assumptions. The first conflates information and knowledge: if we give people more information more quickly, they will become smarter, better informed and broader minded. The second conflates communication and community: if we provide people with more ways to share their thoughts, they’ll become more understanding and empathetic, and society will end up more harmonious. Deeply idealistic, the two assumptions have been fundamental to the ideology and business strategy of Silicon Valley – they explain much about the way online experience has evolved – and by a sort of cultural osmosis, they have also come to be broadly held by the general public. The only problem is, both assumptions are false. We are now, as individuals and as societies, paying the price for being seduced by a pair of utopian myths.
https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/what-the-silicon-valley-idealists-got-wrong/
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Progress in Play: Board Games and the Meaning of History – The Public Domain Review
Players moving pieces along a track to be first to reach a goal was the archetypal board game format of the 18th and 19th centuries. Alex Andriesse looks at one popular incarnation in which these pieces progress chronologically through history itself, usually with some not-so-subtle ideological, moral, or national ideal as the object of the game.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/progress-in-play-board-games-and-the-meaning-of-history
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Serotonergic Psychedelics LSD & Psilocybin Increase the Fractal Dimension of Cortical Brain Activity in Spatial and Temporal Domains | bioRxiv
The unique state of consciousness produced by psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin (the active component in magic mushrooms) are potentially useful tools for discovering how specific changes in the brain are related to differences in perception and thought patterns. Past research into the neuroscience of psychedelics has led to the proposal of a general theory of brain function and consciousness: the Entropic Brain Hypothesis proposes that consciousness emerges when the brain is sitting near a critical tipping point between order and chaos and that the mind-expanding elements of the psychedelic experience are caused by the brain moving closer to that critical transition point. Physicists have discovered that near this critical point, many different kinds of systems, from magnets to ecosystems, take on a distinct, fractal structure. Here, we used two measures of fractal-quality of brain activity, as seen in fMRI, to test whether the activity of the brain on psychedelics is more fractal than normal. We found evidence that this is the case and interpret that as supporting the theory that, psychedelic drugs are move the brain towards a more critical state.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/517847v2.full
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Removing The Bedrock Of Liberalism - The Weekly Dish
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/removing-the-bedrock-of-liberalism-826
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The Rashomon Effect: How do you know what's true? - Sheila Marie Orfano - YouTube
Explore the Rashomon effect, where individuals give significantly different but equally believable accounts of the same event.
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William Davies, The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media, NLR 128, March–April 2021
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The Dubrovnik Interviews: Marc Andreessen - Interviewed by a Retard - Fisted by Foucault
https://niccolo.substack.com/p/the-dubrovnik-interviews-marc-andreessen
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Marc Andreessen's Strange Niccolo Soldo Interview Was an 'Experiment'
https://archive.is/3Lnaz#selection-2831.96-2831.104
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Funktioniert das Gendersternchen (und wie)? | Sprachlog
Waren die Fragen im „generischen“ Maskulinum gestellt, wurden im Schnitt 0.67 weibliche Personen genannt (11 Prozent), waren die Fragen geschlechtsneutral gestellt, waren es 1.67 (27.8 Prozent) und enthielt die Frage eine Doppelform, waren es 1.68 (28 Prozent). In allen Bedingungen wurden also hauptsächlich männliche Personen genannt (weil Männer eben, auch, wenn sie nicht darauf hingewiesen werden wollen, der gesellschaftliche „Normalfall“ sind). Beim „generischen Maskulinum“ wurden aber signifikant weniger Frauen genannt als bei den anderen beiden Formen. Diese beiden Formen (neutrale Form und Doppelform) unterschieden sich dabei nicht signifikant voneinander.
Psychologisch funktionieren die Gendersternchen also, das ist schön. Meine Kritik an diesem typografischen Verbrechen bezog sich nie auf die Wirkung und an den Einsatz des Genderns in Amtssprache und öffentlicher Kommunikation, sondern a) auf ihre ästhetische Wirkung in Literatur, wo b) ein Wort ein Zeichen für ein konkretes Objekt darstellt, also die Bäckerin oder der Bäcker, niemals die/der Bäcker*in. Semiologisch ist das Gendersternchen eine Realisierung von Baudrillards Simulacrum, ein Signifikant, das auf sich selbst verweist, nicht mehr auf den Inhalt des Bezeichneten. “Der/die Bäcker*in” meint nicht eine konkrete Bäckerin oder einen konkreten Bäcker, sondern das von einer Person jeglicher Geschlechtlichkeit ausfüllbare Bedeutungs-Gefäß, das Abstraktum selbst. Das Zeichen verliert seinen Bezug zum Bezeichneten.
http://www.sprachlog.de/2021/06/18/funktioniert-das-gendersternchen-und-wie/
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Social media are turbocharging the export of America’s political culture | The Economist
“I tried being a rock star; I failed. I tried to be a fighter, an athlete; I failed. I was simply a frustrated businessman. Then, I saw in YouTube an opportunity to exploit my indignation,” he explains. “I just wanted to stand out, and by accident, it took me to a political career.” Mr do Val’s rise from a nobody to a state deputy by the age of 32 was both unlikely and impressive. But he embodies a new transnational class of political entrepreneurs who communicate in memes, videos and slogans. They draw on a global flow of ideas, adapt them to local conditions and return them to the ether. Many are activists or ordinary people. Social media are their most important means of influence—both over their followers and each other. The result is not only a new class of unorthodox politicians, but also the globalisation of political ideas, many from America.
https://archive.is/mgeat#selection-733.0-746.0
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Cloned fruit flies star in 'Truman Show' study of how genes play role in social networks
You had me at "Truman Show with Fruit Fly Clones". Wissenschaftler haben 20 Fruchtfliegen jeweils 98 mal geklont und die Gruppen von 20 Klonfliegen in unterschiedlichen Sozialverbänden mit unterschiedlichsten Bedingungen aufwachsen lassen. Sie wollten beobachten, ob sich die sozialen Rollen der Klon-Fruchtfliegen unterschiedlich entwickeln. Tun sie nicht, die geklonten Fliegen nahmen auch unter unterschiedlichsten Bedingungen ähnliche bis gleiche soziale Rollen ein. Soziale Strukturen werden also vererbt. Ich bin unsicher, ob das für linke Fundamentalkonstruktivisten nun eine Bestätigung ("Genau deshalb müssen wir ja das Patriachat abschaffen, um es in den Genen zu überschreiben!") oder ein Rückschlag ist ("OHGODNOES! Das scheiß Patriachat ist in die Gene graviert! Fuck my life!" usw.) Jedenfalls werden soziale Strukturen genetisch vererbt, zumindest bei Brundle-Fly.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-cloned-fruit-flies-star-truman.html
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What Matters: The American West is drying out - CNNPolitics
Later this year, the US government will almost certainly declare the first-ever water shortage along the Colorado River. Maps show more than a quarter of the US is in "exceptional drought," underscoring the scope of a decades-long dry-out.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/19/politics/what-matters-climate-change-western-drought/index.html
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Meet the Censored: Bret Weinstein - TK News by Matt Taibbi
Canceled on campus for speaking his mind, he's now going through a sequel at the hands of Silicon Valley
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-bret-weinstein
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Welche Identität ist die wahre? | Telepolis
Europas Gesellschaften sind gespalten: Zwei unversöhnliche Meinungsblöcke trennt die Frage, wer "zu uns" gehört. Hierzulande sind allerdings beide zusammen in der Minderheit. --> Die Silent Majority wurde bereits vor einigen Jahren empirisch belegt und sie ist immer noch genervt.
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Why our "wandering brains" are wired to love art and nature | Salon.com
Cognitive fluctuations are unpredictable changes in neural activity in the brain. Their causes are presently unknown. Neuroscientists have been aware of these fluctuations since the 1930s, but typically averaged them out as "background noise" from other brain activity correlated to conscious thought. Recently, scientists have come to believe that so-called background noise in the brain may be more crucial to consciousness than previously thought. Recent research found that these fluctuations make up 95% of brain activity; conscious thoughts account for merely 5%. Cognitive fluctuations are like the dark matter or "junk" DNA of the brain, in that they make up the most significant part of what's happening but remain mysterious.
Neuroscientists such as Georg Northoff, Robin Carhart-Harris, and Stanislas Dehaene have been focusing their research on these fluctuations in the last fifteen years. They have concluded that neural fluctuations are not secondary, but fundamental for consciousness. Using technologies that measure the frequency and strength of large groups of neural fluctuations in the brain, scientists have discovered that brain waves tend to nest into one another, like syncopation in music. At the lowest frequencies, the drums lay down a beat, and the bass plays a rhythm. In between the notes of that rhythm, the guitar plays a melody. The song of consciousness builds up from spontaneous neural fluctuations.
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/15/why-our-wandering-brains-are-wired-to-love-art-and-nature/
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Does consciousness come from the brain’s electromagnetic field? | Aeon Essays
Synchrony makes no sense for a consciousness located in neurons – but if we place consciousness in the brain’s EM field, then its association with synchrony becomes inevitable. Toss a handful of pebbles into a still pond and, where the peak of one wave meets the trough of another, they cancel out each other to cause destructive interference. However, when the peaks and troughs line up, then they reinforce each other to make a bigger wave: constructive interference. The same will happen in the brain. When millions of disparate neurons recording or processing features of my glasses fire asynchronously, then their waves will cancel out each other to generate zero EM field. Yet when those same neurons fire synchronously, then their waves will line up to cause constructive interference to project a strong EM signal into my brain’s EM field, what I now call the conscious electromagnetic information (cemi) field.
https://aeon.co/essays/does-consciousness-come-from-the-brains-electromagnetic-field
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Against Meme Activism - Persuasion
Meme activism silences dissent. Take, for example, Black Lives Matter. The slogan itself is (or at least should be) obvious and uncontroversially true. But there’s also a more substantive movement and political program behind BLM, which is rightfully more controversial. Look at the 7 Demands of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the most prominent organization in the BLM movement. The first: Convict and ban Donald Trump from future political office. The fifth: Defund the police. To be sure, not everyone involved in the Black Lives Matter movement supports the agenda of the Global Network. Still, most activists who use the meme “Black Lives Matter” deploy it as a stand-in for a political program—from criminal justice reform to a more expansive vision for economic equality. Whether or not you agree with these goals, Black Lives Matter clearly means more to most activists than “black people’s lives matter.” Some activists manipulate this gap between the literal meaning of a meme and the political program that underpins the use of it. They take a broad and complex political movement, collapse it into a near-irrefutable slogan, and silence nuanced dissent by claiming that anyone who expresses concern about the movement as a whole must oppose the most attractive meaning of its core slogan. To ask these activists for clarification or specifics is to risk public shaming.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/against-meme-activism
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New Paper Argues for Managed Retreat from Flood-Prone Areas - Yale E360
A new paper argues that adapting to climate change over the long term will require managed retreat from areas that are prone to floods or other hazards. While managed retreat has long been viewed as a solution of last resort, authors say that it can be an economically efficient means of coping with climate change.
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/new-paper-argues-for-managed-retreat-from-flood-prone-areas
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Scientists Have Created A New Gene-Editing Tool That Could Outperform CRISPR
A new gene-editing tool has enabled Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering scientists to accomplish a feat that wouldn't be possible to do with CRISPR, according to a press release. The group of researchers created what they call the "Retron Library Recombineering" (RLR) technique, which could allow scientists to run millions of genetic experiments at the same time. This tool, described in a recent paper in PNAS, employs retrons, which are bacterial DNA segments that undergo reverse transcription to generate single-stranded DNA fragments (ssDNA). RLR produces up to millions of mutations concurrently in bacterial cells and "barcodes" mutant cells, enabling the whole pool to be screened at once. This way large quantities of data can be quickly produced and analyzed.
https://interestingengineering.com/new-gene-editing-tool-lets-scientists-do-things-crispr-cant
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One Council to Rule Them All: Can Social Media Become More Democratic? | Digital Society Blog
The accusation that such councils merely shift responsibility is understandable: If inadequately designed, platform councils run the risk of concealing actual power structures without initiating real change. They must therefore not only meet high transparency requirements themselves, but must also be equipped with information rights and linked to data access initiatives, so that different actors can understand the extent to which changes urged by them actually occur.
https://www.hiig.de/en/one-council-to-rule-them-all-can-social-media-become-more-democratic/
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The Books Are Already Burning - Common Sense with Bari Weiss
When victims install a tyranny based on the power they gain through their victimhood status. This is what the beginning of a "feminist"-tyranny, based on the psychological trait of "care", looks like (Fascism, for instance, was based on "order"). It's "only" censorship, for now. "Währet den Anfängen", we say in germany. Nearly all of my lefty (ex)peers forgot that.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-books-are-already-burning
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The Feminist vs. The Cancelers - Cathy Young
https://cathy.arcdigital.media/p/the-feminist-vs-the-cancelers
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The Myth of the Myth of the Lone Genius - Secretum Secretorum
It’s not hard to see why the myth of the lone genius is so popular - it is a very politically correct type of idea, very much going along with the general aversion to recognizing intelligence and genes as meaningful sources of variation in social/intellectual outcomes. It is also kind of a natural extension of the “you can achieve anything you set your mind to!” cliche. The fact that most of the geniuses in question are white men probably plays a not insignificant role in people’s quickness to discredit their contributions. At the end of the day, it’s really tough to admit that there are geniuses in the world and you aren’t one of them.
https://rogersbacon.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-myth-of-the-lone
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Cool heavy stuff, Danke Rene und schön dass du wieder da bist.
Geil, dass du wieder da bist! Nirgendwo gibt es so cooles Zeug wie bei dir :D