If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
Albert Einstein

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@miscmatters
If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
Albert Einstein
Morning Commute
I don’t know that there is a worse rivalry in the morning commute as there is between pedestrian commuters and vehicles. All I know is, as a pedestrian in Boston, if I am playing chicken in a crosswalk with a vehicle, just know I ain’t stopping. Go ahead, hit me. See if I care about a hospital trip detour on my way to work....
One evolutionary biologist believes its an evolutionary remnant of fish gills.
I am so glad I stumbled upon this article as I have been wondering why I have this tiny hole by my ear for so long. Also I am apparently part fish!!!
Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, then you probably aren't.
Margaret Thatcher
And I realized that part of my problem was I visibly resembled an adult. But never became one.
“Rontel” by Sam Pink
Nature vs. Nurture
I read an interesting article the other day by Jane Wakefield titled “Are You Scared Yet? Meet Norman, the psychopathic AI” (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44040008).
Per the article, “The psychopathic algorithm was created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as part of an experiment to see what training AI on data from ‘the dark corners of the net’ would do to its world view.”
They trained Norman using “images of people dying in gruesome circumstances” and then showed the AI a series of inkblot pictures to see how it would compare again AI software trained with images of animals and nature.
Norman’s outlook was overwhelmingly dark. (My personal favorite is the one in which regular AI saw “a person holding an umbrella in the air” whereas Norman saw “a man is shot dead in front of his screaming wife.” Gives you the warm and fuzzies, amirite!?)
One of the professors involved in the project commented that one of the conclusions they can assert is that “[d]ata matters more than the algorithm.” There have already been instances of racist and sexist AI, which would make sense given who is programming them (dem white boys over in Silicon Valley - git yo values straight!). As Dr. Joanna Bryson noted "When we train machines by choosing our culture, we necessarily transfer our own biases."
Of course this brings to mind a ton of red flags for me regarding AI advancements, but also makes me wonder what this might teach us about ourselves as humans, our behavior and our psychology. If “[d]ata matters more than the algorithm” in an AI program, does this shed any light on the Nature vs. Nuture debate for human behavior, and that “nurture” really is the deciding factor over “nature”?
Obviously a machine and a human are made two separate ways, but aren’t humans responsible for making both? They’re putting their genetics into the human they make, but do humans put a bit of themselves into their mechanical creations? Clearly they are subconsciously putting themselves into their software, so would it not make sense some essence of them goes into other handmade creations, including robots?
And if we can conclude that AI is only as good as the data it has, and that it might only be as “unbiased” (or biased) as the data whoever is building it decides to feed it, does this not mean that the AI is ultimately only as effective or intuitive as its builder? Would this not also extend to robotics? Because humans are not perfect, are we capable of making anything perfect? Or would it only ever be at least as flawed as the human(s) who created it?
This line of questioning (also mentioned in the article) also highlights an important cause to keep the studies of humanities alive, applying them to AI (they refer to it as the new field of “AI Psychology”). Of course it makes sense to bring Humanities studies into these fields if only to reinforce that we remain human, but aside from what these types of hybrid Humanities fields could teach us about the minds of machines, what, if anything, could we learn from machines and machine-learning that might teach us about our own minds?
“A Safe Space”
I used to post here and there on Tumblr from an old blog I tried to keep up (I admit I sucked at posting constantly and eventually dropped off all together), but Facebook for me was a social site I used consistently for a long time. Facebook has been a nice and easy way to share things, which is clearly the reason so many people from so many different backgrounds choose to use it.
Despite using Facebook as my primary social media outlet, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with it, and over the past year with continuing data privacy concerns, it turned more and more to a hate relationship… with little to no love. A few months ago, I deactivated my account. Zuckerberg has always freaked me out (just as a person in general), but the data breach with Cambridge Analytics and Russia and the US election sealed the deal for me. Especially since this isn’t the first time Facebook has questionably handled users’ information or permitted posts of countless false news articles with sensationalist headlines (and yes, this happened before Trump ever said the words “fake news”).
Plus, with all the algorithms and crappy ads, I wasn’t seeing things that made me smile anymore. In fact, when I selected my reason for deactivating Facebook as “Other” and was forced to elaborate in a comment, I wrote: “Facebook no longer brings me any joy.”
But at the same time, I miss the platform that Facebook is. I miss sharing my random blurbs of creative writing with the network there I had established, creating online photo albums easily accessible for friends and family, posting favorite quotes and jokes, reposting what others have shared that I found particularly thought-provoking or poignant, etc.
I am still using Instagram, but as that is part of Facebook aside from the fact it’s only really meant as a photo-sharing platform, I wanted to search for something to hit more of the bases while still offering some degree of data privacy. Google Plus seems to me like the lesser of the two evils when compared to Facebook. They haven’t been called out publicly like Facebook has but there’s something about Google’s ubiquity makes me nervous. Twitter of course you have the character limit which defeats a lot of the purpose of what I’m looking for. Reddit it more of a conversational/commenting site, which I don’t hate, but I am looking for something a bit more conducive to multimedia posting. I’ve looked a bit into Mastodon, but there’s a ton of reasons I don’t think it would be a good fit for me, not to mention they aren’t taking new members on their main page right now. (I should add, if you are reading this and have any suggestions, I am certainly open to them!)
If you are someone who uses anything on the Internet, you’ve probably been getting bombarded with emails and notices regarding updates to privacy policies for sites due to the GDPR in Europe, so I will say my search for finding the privacy policies has been a lot easier than it would have been and they are also (for the most part) a lot easier to understand than they were even just a few months ago at least. In any case, after looking into and thinking about quite a few different alternatives, I landed here.
So here I am. It definitely isn’t perfect (sorry Tumblr, no offense meant), but I think it might be the best platform to create and consume the multimedia type of content I’d like to, at least for the time being. The information Tumblr collects according to its privacy policy, seems to primarily be more generic and less identifying than Facebook (if you haven’t read Tumblr’s privacy policy yet, you can find it here: https://www.tumblr.com/privacy/en), particularly geared towards collecting information for advertising purposes (which I see everywhere anyway, so this isn’t a massive concern for me - definitely a legitimate concern for others I’m sure) and user experience. Then again, I’m sure Facebook claims a lot of their data is used to enhance “user experience”... so much so that I am no longer a user I guess! Essentially for the time being, Tumblr is sufficient for what I’m looking for, but things change fast around here!
Just like with any social media site, their data policy may change, their interface may change - basically there are a ton of reasons why, in the future, Tumblr may no longer be good for me. I think I’ve finally realized that I am searching for what I would call a “safe sharing space” on the internet, and in the end, I’ve realized that what I am searching for doesn’t exist. The GDPR was a huge step forward for data privacy, but as a US citizen, I’m not going to celebrate it too much. Until the law can keep the pace with the technological leaps made not only in terms of information sharing on the World Wide Web, but with in all sorts of other fields (like AI, Robotics, Gene Engineering, just to name a few), then we are in for an interesting future.
The First Kill
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Remember how not too long ago we had decided (after my hesitancy) to…
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Dylan's Big Break
November 25, 2012
As of this Special Sunday, Dylan had now been in the U.S. for a little over a month and a half. In that amount of time, he had moved and settled into the apartment, had bought a car, subsequently insured it, and was hired at a job which…
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Dylan's Big Break
November 25, 2012
As of this Special Sunday, Dylan had now been in the U.S. for a little over a month and a half. In that amount of time, he bad moved and settled into the apartment, had bought a car, subsequently insured it, and was hired at a job which…
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A Change of Heart
Thursday, November 15 [I am just going to start dating these posts as to when they happened because…
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Boys Will Be Boys
Back to the blog now, I know the last post was serious and sentimental, but it had to be done. It feels weird to blog now about something that’s not serious after all that’s happened, but I’m thinking of it more as a distraction for me now. So let this…
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Boston, You're My Home
I know you weren’t to know where we live, but I think a good number of you, if you didn’t know…
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"No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids just look and look and look at all those X's...." "....And?" "No damn cat, no damn cradle." #Vonnegut #catscradle
Can you tell we're excited for the summer tour!?!? #phish #phish2013 #summertour #easteregg #hippieegg
American Politics and the Return of TJ the Mouse
Who knows what the first Tuesday of November in 2012 was? Yea, my title to this post kind of gave…
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I Outdrank an Irish Boy
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