Humanities & Cultures

Our new research, published in the journal Communication Research, suggests that’s the case. In two studies, we found that people generally trust journalists when they confirm claims to be true but are more distrusting when journalists correct false claims.

Some linguistics and social science theories suggest that people intuitively understand social expectations not to be negative. Being disagreeable, like when pointing out someone else’s lie or error, carries with it a risk of backlash.

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To bolster its claims of rampant Russophobia in the West, the Kremlin not only cites sanctions imposed for the war against Ukraine, but also perceived attacks on Russian culture and identity.

Canceling everything Russian because it could potentially be weaponized is anathema to the liberal traditions of Western countries. Russian propagandists and the special services take full advantage of this. Since the annexation of Crimea in Ukraine, investigations have revealed that Russian cultural centers across the world have been used to spread disinformation not to mention their use as “umbrellas” for spy agencies SVR and GRU operations.

On September 11, 2001, Genelle Guzman-McMillan made it from the 64th floor to the 13th floor of the North Tower when "everything went black." Over 27 hours later, she was miraculously pulled out of the wreckage.

Though I hate the overuse of the word 'miraculous', this is an interesting story for sure.

Does economic education spoil students’ morality? Economists and the Trolley problem

https://www.economics-sociology.eu/?1030,en_does-economic-education-spoil-students’-morality-economists-and-the-trolley-problem

@humanities

The Problem of Collective Harm: A Threshold Solution

https://ejpe.org/journal/article/view/798

"Many harms are collective: they are due to several individual actions that are as such harmless. At least in some cases, it seems impermissible to contribute to such harms, even if individual agents do not make a difference. The Problem of Collective Harm is the challenge of explaining why. I argue that, if the action is to be [moral], the probability of making a difference to harm must be small enough."

@humanities

Utility, social utility, democracy, and altruistic and moral behavior from unexploitability, Darwinian evolution, and tribes

https://www.rangevoting.org/OmoUtil.html

"S.M.Omohundro in 2007, by building on and/or simplifying ideas by a large number of economists, demonstrated that the philosophy of utilitarianism is forced upon an organism if that organism wishes to be "unexploitable." Exploitable organisms presumably tend to get exploited, suffer a competitive disadvantage."

@humanities

Right away, the data clearly showed that cash helped people spend more on their basic needs. Those who received $1,000 monthly spent $67 more per month than the lower-paid group on food, $52 more on rent and $50 more on transportation. They also spent about 26 percent more financially supporting others, typically family members or children, suggesting that the beneficiaries of guaranteed income programs extend beyond the actual participants.

Some of the volunteers told the researchers that the money allowed them to stop living paycheck to paycheck and start imagining what they could do if they had more financial breathing room. Karina Dotson, OpenResearch’s research and insights manager, often heard participants talk about the cash giving them a “sense of self.” She said it “gave them head space to dream, to believe, to hope, to imagine a future they couldn’t imagine before.” Other research has found similar outcomes.

Those who received $1,000 monthly were 5 percent more likely to report having a budget, spending an average of 20 minutes more a month on finances than the group that received $50 monthly. The money also affected how much medical care people sought, how much they considered entrepreneurship or additional schooling and even the kinds of jobs they took. Those choices varied widely from person to person.

Does classical liberalism imply democracy?

https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Reprint-EGP-Classical-Liberalism-Democracy.pdf

"There is a fault line running through classical liberalism as to whether or not democratic self-governance is a necessary part of a liberal social order. The democratic and non-democratic strains of classical liberalism are both present today particularly in the United States. Many contemporary libertarians ... represent the non-democratic strain in their promotion of non-democratic sovereign city-states."

@humanities

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/558792

Archived link

By Greta Uehling, teaching professor at the University of Michigan in the U.S., who studies war and migration. Her major projects have examined the experiences of refugees, asylum-seekers, and the internally displaced.

The estimated number of children sent unlawfully from Ukraine to Russia since the full-scale invasion varies widely, from 20,000 to 750,000. Child removal is a way for Russia to claim the Ukrainian children it has not killed with missile or drone strikes. Through a vast network of shelters and camps, Russians and their supporters provide kids with Russian identity documents, indoctrinate them into pro-Russian beliefs, and, in many cases, send them to foster and adoptive families.

Through this insidious method of genocide, Russia is furthering its goal of annihilating modern Ukraine. One child at a time.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/459808

Archived link

“What [authoritarian] regimes have in common is their fear of a well-informed public,” Christoph Jumpelt, the head of the international relations unit at Germany’s public broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, said this week in Taiwan.

International media groups like AP, Reuters and PA Media Group cooperate with China's state-controlled agency Xinhua for being able to operate within the country. It should be obvious that such a conditionality has no place in what they say is a “purely commercial” arrangement, not in the least as this does a huge injustice to the thousands of journalists who struggle each day to report the facts.

• Last month Fu Hua, President of China’s official Xinhua News Agency, which sits directly under the country’s State Council, made a whirlwind tour from New York to London, meeting with top executives from AP, Reuters, and PA Media Group, to foster long-standing business relationships.

• Such deals with Xinhua should invite tougher questions about how international media companies with a stated commitment to professional standards should deal with Chinese media giants whose sole commitment — crystal clear in the country’s domestic political discourse— is to strengthen the global impact of Party-state propaganda.

• Xinhua's Fu is not a champion of independent media values, or a partner in tackling the information challenges of the future. Prior to his role at Xinhua, Fu served as a deputy minister of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department. His agenda is that of China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party, the CCP. Plain and simple.

• The partnerships with Western media are part of a broader effort by Xinhua to deepen its global media influence, curtailing criticism of the Chinese government and shaping international discourse that portrays the CCP in a positive light. And yet, year in and year out, Western media executives insist, even against the substance of their own statements, that this type of cooperation is just normal business.

• If it is true, for example, that AP “publishes none of the stories" by Xinhua as it claims, what then is the point of such empty formalities? “Like most major news agencies,” said a former agency head, “AP has an agreement with state-run media in China that allows AP to operate inside the country.”

• And there we have the crux. AP’s relationship with Xinhua, in place since 1972, forms the political foundation on which AP and other major news agencies, including Reuters, are able to operate in China.

• It should be obvious such conditionality has no place in any “purely commercial” arrangement. And as they obscure the true nature of the arrangement, news outlets do a huge injustice to the thousands of journalists who struggle each day to report the facts.

• Western outlets that claim to uphold professional values need to decide where they stand while insisting on the charade of standing with Xinhua, shaking hands and signing on the dotted line.

Basically asking: who is the Wikimedia Community? Readers? Developers? Contributors?

And how can we serve them if we can't define who they are?

We are already making change, but to make more we need to reaffirm the foundations of the web: that the web is for people. We need to go out and shout from the rooftops that the web can be different. To do so effectively, we all need to be the change we want to see in the web. I do this by being myself on my personal website, and by sharing my writing on my site actively.

Archived version

Since the release of automated “generative-AI” services—like ChatGPT, Gemini, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney—the information superhighway has flooded under a deluge of machine-produced debris. Photos feature humans and animals with impossible anatomy, disjointed words reminiscent of text, illogical architecture. Stochastic parrots peck at whatever word or pixel is most likely to come next.

[...]

Google searches, such that they now are, turn up chaotic and irrational answers, pleasantly presented as if for our edification. Famously, a search for “African country starting with K” brought this unintelligible response (drawing from Google’s ingestion of an AI-summarizing website, Emergent Mind, itself relying on user posts at Hacker News): “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter ‘K.’ The closest is Kenya, which starts with a ‘K’ sound, but is actually spelled with a ‘K’ sound."

[...]

Upon ingesting satirical clips from The Onion, McSweeney’s, and Reddit, Google search exhorted people to thicken tomato sauce with glue and eat their daily serving of rocks. The company that made its fortune helping us wade our way through the internet is now drowning in its own generated nonsense.

[...]

Large Language Models (LLMs) have invaded scientific papers, too. Succumbing to the need to “publish or perish,” authors and editors are doing us the favor of showing just how much of their papers are generated by ChatGPT, sometimes through their simple neglect to proofread before publication. A few even make up scientific images and figures. Meanwhile, AI-generated books are flooding Amazon. If you happen to buy a book on mushroom hunting written by machine, you’ll only know the statistical likeliness for the words in the description, not whether what you’re munching will actually kill you.

[...]

Instead of being organized around information, then, the contemporary internet is organized around content: exchangeable packets, unweighted by the truthfulness of their substance. Unlike knowledge, all content is flat. None is more or less justified in ascertaining true belief. None of it, at its core, is information.

As a result, our lives are consumed with the consumption of content, but we no longer know the truth when we see it. And when we don’t know how to weigh different truths, or to coordinate among different real-world experiences to look behind the veil, there is either cacophony or a single victor: a loudest voice that wins.

[...]

In the midst of global wars and propaganda campaigns—when it is more important than ever to be informed—the systems that bring us our “information” can’t measure or optimize what is true. They only care what we click on.

The nail in the coffin is what is currently sold to us as “Artificial Intelligence.” [...] both [artificial and intelligence] are reduced to equally weighted packets of content, merely seeking an optimization function in a free marketplace of ideas. And both are equally ingested into a great statistical machinery [...]

[...]

The result is a great torrent of tales “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” The role of humans in this turbulence is not to attend with wisdom, but merely to contribute, and to consume.

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