I’m nearly certain that I just saw a fox run across the street from my neighbor’s yard. It made my night; I hadn’t seen a fox in Asheville in maybe a decade. I start a new job on Monday, so I’m having fun imagining it to be an omen, and thinking about what foxes can signify…

Huh. Maybe?

Look at county-level maps of almost any closely contested presidential race in our history, and you see much the same fault lines: the swaths of the country first colonized by the early Puritans and their descendants — Yankeedom — tend to vote as one, and against the party in favor in the sections first colonized by the culture laid down by the Barbados slave lords who founded Charleston, S.C., or the Scots-Irish frontiersmen who swept down the Appalachian highlands and on into the Hill Country of Texas, Oklahoma and the southern tiers of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri.

The Quaker-founded Midlands, the swing region of American politics that makes up a great swath of the heartland, has often been the physical and political buffer between rival regional coalitions, its pluralistic, community-oriented culture at peace neither with the Yankee’s utopian drive to engineer social improvements nor Southern culture’s emphasis on individual freedom above all else. It played the kingmaker’s role again in 2016.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/opinion/urban-rural-united-states-regions-midterms.html

Given social psychology’s poor track record on statistical techniques and research methods, I’m pretty skeptical. But this is an interesting idea:

The field of social psychology has recently embraced a psychophysical technique called “reverse correlation” that aims to do just that: To provide visual proxies of the content of mental representations. The reverse correlation method (or the “classification image technique”, as it has also been called) is a data-driven method that originated in the field of psychophysics and has its roots in signal detection theory and auditory perceptionp In signal detection paradigms, participants see stimuli that sometimes contain signal, and always contain noise. They respond to the presence of signal and their accuracy is computed based on their hits (correctly detecting the signal) and false alarms (mistakenly responding that signal was present). False alarms are particularly interesting cases, because participants might see signal in noise. The noise just happens to match the expected signal to some degree. Reverse correlation was invented to identify those features of the noise that trigger false alarms. Contemporary reverse correlation paradigms are essentially signal detection paradigms, but consist of stimuli for which the intended signal is not specified by the experimenter. The stimulus set is random and it is the participant who decides whether signal is present in a stimulus or not. This is why the technique is called “reverse correlation”: Tthe standard procedure where an experimenter specifies signal in stimuli for participants to identify is reversed.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10463283.2017.1381469

http://www.poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/dwell/

We exist in a feedback loop with our devices. The upbringing of conversational agents invariably turns into the upbringing of users. It’s impossible to predict what AI might do to our feelings. However, if we regard emotional intelligence as a set of specific skills – recognising emotions, discerning between different feelings and labelling them, using emotional information to guide thinking and behaviour – then it’s worth reflecting on what could happen once we offload these skills on to our gadgets.

Interacting with and via machines has already changed the way that humans relate to one another. For one, our written communication is increasingly mimicking oral communication. Twenty years ago, emails still existed within the boundaries of the epistolary genre; they were essentially letters typed on a computer. The Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) could write one of those. Today’s emails, however, seem more and more like Twitter posts: abrupt, often incomplete sentences, thumbed out or dictated to a mobile device.

‘All these systems are likely to limit the diversity of how we think and how we interact with people,’ says José Hernández-Orallo, a philosopher and computer scientist at the Technical University of Valencia in Spain. Because we adapt our own language to the language and intelligence of our peers, Hernández-Orallo says, our conversations with AI might indeed change the way we talk to each other. Might our language of feelings become more standardised and less personal after years of discussing our private affairs with Siri? After all, the more predictable our behaviour, the more easily it is monetised.

https://aeon.co/essays/can-emotion-regulating-tech-translate-across-cultures

Goop knew what readers were clicking on, and it was nimble enough to meet those needs by actually manufacturing the things its readers wanted. When a story about beauty products that didn’t have endocrine disrupters and formaldehyde got a lot of traffic in 2015, the company started Goop by Juice Beauty, a collection of “clean” face creams and oils and cleansers that it promised lacked those things. When a story about “postnatal depletion,” a syndrome coined by one of the Goop doctors, did even-better-than-average business in 2017, it introduced Goop Wellness, a series of four vitamin “protocols” for women with different concerns — weight, energy, focus, etc. Goop says it sold $100,000 of them on their first day.

The weirder Goop went, the more its readers rejoiced. And then, of course, the more Goop was criticized: by mainstream doctors with accusations of pseudoscience, by websites like Slate and Jezebel saying it was no longer ludicrous — no, now it was dangerous. And elsewhere people would wonder how Gwyneth Paltrow could try to solve our problems when her life seemed almost comically problem-free. But every time there was a negative story about her or her company, all that did was bring more people to the site — among them those who had similar kinds of questions and couldn’t find help in mainstream medicine.

With assaults coming from all sides, Goop began to dig its heels into the dirt, not only because dirt is a natural exfoliant and also contains selenium, which is a mineral many of us are lacking and helps with thyroid function. Now Goop was growing only more successful. Now Goop was a cause, and G.P. was its martyr.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/magazine/big-business-gwyneth-paltrow-wellness.html

…the wooden scraps were produced by his hobby, which was constructing one-in-one-twenty-eighth scale models of ancient sailing ships.

He had drained the swimming pool in his quarters and turned it into a miniature forestry plantation and farm using some of the biomass the Mind and he had been provided with; tiny trees grew there which he cut down and sliced into little planks and turned on lathes to produce all the masts, spars, decks and other wooden parts the sea ships required. Other bonsai plants in the forest provided long fibres which he teased and twisted and coiled into thread- and string-thin ropes to make halyards and sheets. Different plants let him create still thinner fibres which he wove into sails on infinitesimal looms he had also constructed himself. The iron and steel parts were made from material scraped from the iron walls of Pittance itself. He smelted the metal in a miniature furnace to rid it of the last traces of impurities and either flattened it in a tiny hand-turned rolling mill, cast it using wax and talc-like fines, or turned it on microscopic lathes. Another furnace fused sand – taken from the beach which had been part of the swimming pool – to make wafer-thin sheets of glass for portholes and skylights. Yet more of the life-support system’s biomass was used to produce pitch and oils, which caulked the hull and greased the little winches, derricks and other pieces of machinery.

It had taken him ten years to make the tiny machines to make the ships, and then making each ship occupied another twenty years of his time. He had constructed six vessels so far, each slightly larger and better made than the one before. He had almost completed a seventh, with just the sails to finish and sew; the scraps of wood he was burning were the last of its off-cuts and compacted sawdust.

Iain Banks, Excession

I will never stop resisting this harmful shift in our culture. 750,000 years!

We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second.

We read, in the news or on social media, about children who have been kidnapped, raped and killed, about children forgotten for hours in broiling cars. We do not think about the statistical probabilities or compare the likelihood of such events with far more present dangers, like increasing rates of childhood diabetes or depression. Statistically speaking, according to the writer Warwick Cairns, you would have to leave a child alone in a public place for 750,000 years before he would be snatched by a stranger. Statistically speaking, a child is far more likely to be killed in a car on the way to a store than waiting in one that is parked. But we have decided such reasoning is beside the point. We have decided to do whatever we have to do to feel safe from such horrors, no matter how rare they might be.

And so now children do not walk to school or play in a park on their own. They do not wait in cars. They do not take long walks through the woods or ride bikes along paths or build secret forts while we are inside working or cooking or leading our lives.

I was beginning to understand that it didn’t matter if what I’d done was dangerous; it only mattered if other parents felt it was dangerous. When it comes to kids’ safety, feelings are facts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/27/opinion/sunday/motherhood-in-the-age-of-fear.html

Useful tool for understanding people who vote for bad leaders and bad laws:

See, the people who are sure that Surely There Will Be Exceptions are very comfortable with the idea of justice being decided on a case-by-case basis. They’ve always had teachers, bosses, bureaucrats, even traffic cops giving them some slack for reasons of compassion and logic.

I mean, if Officer Smalltown von Cul-De-Sac could give them a warning when they were caught with recreational amounts of pot as kids because it was harmless and they Had Futures, then Surely there must be similar exceptions for everyone?

That post about “I never thought the leopards would eat my face, sobbed woman who voted for Face-Eating Leopards Party” is very true, and it goes farther than personal immunity to a very generalized and broad Just World Fallacy.

Surely, they think, surely the leopards will know to only eat the *right* faces, the faces that need eating, and leave alone all the faces that don’t deserve that.

But if we try to lay out rules to protect faces from being eaten by leopards, people will take advantage. Best to keep it simple and count on decency and reason to rule the day.

So moderate conservatives, what we might call “everyday conservatives”, the ones who don’t wear MAGA hats or tea party costumes and think that Mr. Trump fella should maybe stay off of Twitter, they will vote for candidates and policies that they don’t actually agree with…

…because in their mind the exact law being prescribed is just a tool in the chest, an option on the table, which they expect to be wielded fairly and judiciously. Surely no one would do anything so unreasonable as actually enforcing it as written! Not when that would be bad!

And then they are confused, shocked, and even insulted when people hold them accountable for their support of the monstrous policy.

“I didn’t vote for leopards to eat *your* face! I just thought we needed some face-eating leopards generally. Surely you can’t blame me for that!”

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1004400861865488384.html

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/07/reality-bending-video-by-vladimir-tomin/