31 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
  2. Jan 2024
  3. Dec 2023
    1. in terms of amplification and acceleration you can this waveform diagram is sort of a nice metaphor graphical metaphor for the increasing severity of crises and the increasing 00:13:44 frequency of crises within our world
      • for: waveform diagram - amplification and acceleration of crisis

      • comment

        • nice picture to illustrate increasing frequency and amplitude of the graphical wave representation of a crisis
  4. Oct 2023
    1. Befides, asthe vileft Writer has his Readers, fothe greateft Liarbas his Believers ; and it often happens, that if aLie be believ'd only for an Hour, it has done itsWork, and there is no farther occafion for it. Falfhcod flies, and Truth comes limping after it ; fo thatwhen Men come to be undeceiv'd, it is too late, theJeft is over, and the Tale has had its Effect : Like aMan who has thought of a good Repay per ed . Oh,Repartee, when thelike a Phyfician who has found out an infallible Medicine, after the Patient is dead

      Falsehood flies, and Truth comes limping after it;<br /> —Jonathan Swift, “The Examiner, From Thursday Nov 2 to Thursday Nov 9, 1710.” In The Examiner [Afterw.] The Whig Examiner, edited by Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift, Vol. 15. London: John Morphew, near Stationers Hall, 1710.


      found via https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

      with variations on "A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes." attributed variously to Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Francklin, Fisher Ames, Thomas Jefferson, John Randolph, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Winston Churchill, Terry Pratchett?

  5. Sep 2023
    1. According to YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan, 70 percent of views on YouTube are from recommendations—so the site’s algorithms are largely responsible for amplifying RT’s propaganda hundreds of millions of times.
    2. It would be good to remind them that free speech does not mean free reach. There is no right to algorithmic amplification.
  6. Jun 2023
    1. Das Verschwinden des arktischen meereises hat – in Verbindung mit den Spannungen in anderen Regionen – gravierende geopolitische Konsequenzen. Russland ist dabei, die Arktis massiv zu militarisieren. Dabei kooperiert ist mit China. Es will andererseits von den Schiffsrouten durch das eisfreie Nordpolarmeer profitieren. Wissenschaftliche Kooperation in der Arktis findet seit der Invasion der ganzen Ukraine im Februar 2022 nicht mehr statt. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/13/arctic-russia-nato-putin-climate

  7. May 2023
  8. Apr 2023
  9. Oct 2022
    1. However there are follow (and boost and like) notifications there if you want them, which contains the seeds of the twitter engagement spiral.

      I don't think they run risk of spiraling. Fav's are not shared back to the fav'rs audience, only visible as action by the OP, and in aggregate under the original message. So it doesn't serve as signal to a fav'rs own audience. Boosts don't allow remarks, just straight boosts (no 'quote-tweeting') limiting it to sharing only the original message, sharing it back to the booster's audience only. Otherwise there's only replies, which are always to the person replied to, favouring interaction. Most of all: no algo watching over what gains traction and pushing those higher up in all timelines: the timeline is strictly chronological. Meaning most of the time I do not see what people I follow boost or fav. Only in the moments I dip my toe in the river of messages do I see things pass by.

  10. Sep 2022
  11. Aug 2022
    1. The technology is guilty of amplifying. And after all, that’s what we’re talking about is amplifying human capabilities. Well, it turns out that there are human capabilities and human motivations that are evil or misguided. And those are amplified way beyond what they were before.

      What can one do complexity-style stimulating desired capabilities, attenuating the undesirable ones? More like this, less like that stuff. At a personal level that may be clear (if one pays attention to it personally, see above), at group level, society level? Btw esp adtech platforms are not symmetrical in their amplification. They lift the mentioned pirate boats, but not the hospital boats. By design. Control over parameters for amplification in ones own info may be one.

  12. Jul 2022
    1. I dislike the separation of Trending and Newest. This is one of the main reasons for false negatives as new articles don’t receive many (if any) views. I’m thinking about randomly interspersing new articles in the trending feed to give them the potential of getting their first few votes. This (as ever) has an effect on quality, so has to be done with care.

      Introducing some randomness for new unranked articles is an interesting and likely useful tactic.

    2. Once a post goes viral on Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit, or anywhere else off-platform, it has the potential to form a “Katamari ball” where it gets upvotes because it has upvotes (which means it gets more upvotes, because it has more upvotes, which means…well…you get it). This is also known as "the network effect", but I feel a Katamari ball better illustrates it.

      Network effects can describe a broad variety of phenomenon. Is Katamari ball a better descriptor of this specific phenomenon?

      How does one prioritize the richer quality Lindy library material that may be even more beneficial than things which are simply new?

  13. Jun 2022
    1. Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently,” Gentzkow argued. “I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it’s all primarily driven by social media, especially when you’re looking at different countries, and across different groups.”
  14. May 2022
    1. “It was 2017, I would say, when Twitter started really cracking down on bots in a way that they hadn’t before — taking down a lot of bad bots, but also taking down a lot of good bots too. There was an appeals process [but] it was very laborious, and it just became very difficult to maintain stuff. And then they also changed all their API’s, which are the programmatic interface for how a bot talks to Twitter. So they changed those without really any warning, and everything broke.

      Just like chilling action by political actors, social media corporations can use changes in policy and APIs to stifle and chill speech online.

      This doesn't mean that there aren't bad actors building bots to actively cause harm, but there is a class of potentially helpful and useful bots (tools) that can make a social space better or more interesting.

      How does one regulate this sort of speech? Perhaps the answer is simply not to algorithmically amplify these bots and their speech over that of humans.

      More and more I think that the answer is to make online social interactions more like in person interactions. Too much social media is giving an even bigger bullhorn to the crazy preacher on the corner of Main Street who was shouting at the crowds that simply ignored them. Social media has made it easier for us to shout them back down, and in doing so, we're only making them heard by more. We need a negative feedback mechanism to dampen these effects the same way they would have happened online.

  15. Mar 2022
    1. First is that it actually lowers paid acquisition costs. It lowers them because the Facebook Ads algorithm rewards engaging advertisements with lower CPMs and lots of distribution. Facebook does this because engaging advertisements are just like engaging posts: they keep people on Facebook. 

      Engaging advertisements on Facebook benefit from lower acquisition costs because the Facebook algorithm rewards more interesting advertisements with lower CPMs and wider distribution. This is done, as all things surveillance capitalism driven, to keep eyeballs on Facebook.

      This isn't too dissimilar to large cable networks that provide free high quality advertising to mass manufacturers in late night slots. The network generally can't sell all of their advertising inventory, particularly in low viewing hours, so they'll offer free or incredibly cheap commercial rates to their bigger buyers (like Coca-Cola or McDonalds, for example) to fill space and have more professional looking advertisements between the low quality advertisements from local mom and pop stores and the "as seen on TV" spots. These higher quality commercials help keep the audience engaged and prevents viewers from changing the channel.

  16. Oct 2021
  17. Aug 2021
    1. Fukuyama's answer is no. Middleware providers will not see privately shared content from a user's friends. This is a good answer if our priority is privacy. It lets my cousin decide which companies to trust with her sensitive personal information. But it hobbles middleware as a tool for responding to her claims about vaccines. And it makes middleware providers far less competitive, since they will not be able to see much of the content we want them to curate.

      Is it alright to let this sort of thing go on the smaller scale personal shared level? I would suggest that the issue is not this small scale conversation which can happen linearly, but we need to focus on the larger scale amplification of misinformation by sources. Get rid of the algorithmic amplification of the fringe bits which is polarizing and toxic. Only allow the amplification of the more broadly accepted, fact-based, edited, and curated information.

  18. Feb 2021
    1. The filthy casuals write positive reviews on steam and it's clear that true gamers won't even try to review such a shallow game.

      reviews/ratings because only those already inclined to like it (or who have been swayed by the already positive reviews) will bother buying it and (therefore) bother reviewing it, hence amplifying the positive ratings

  19. Jan 2021
    1. Unfortunately, this probably means a death knoll for this gem, at least I predict it will contribute to its slow trajectory towards insignificance/unknownness/lack-of-users.

      Why? Because it is already the less popular option in this comparison: https://ruby.libhunt.com/compare-premailer-rails-vs-roadie-rails

      and being actively maintained is an important factor in evaluating competing options.

      So of course people will see that the premailer option is the option that is still actively maintained, is still continuing to be improved, and they'll see that this one has been relegated to dormancy/stagnancy/neglect/staleness, which will only amplify the degree/sense of abandonment it already has from its maintainer (only now it will be its users that start to abandon it, as I now have).

    1. This is a by-product of the success of Ubuntu. Whether people like it or not, most software available for Linux will target Ubuntu first. There may be packages available later for other distros / systems, but on the whole, you can be sure a software developer will target Ubuntu if they target Linux.
  20. Sep 2020
    1. I’m re-assessing how often I help out well-established men suddenly interested in my insights and contact book. It’s ridiculous how many ‘and I truly mean them well’s I cut out of this piece, but I really do, while also realizing I help them because they ask, or because other people ask for them. And that coffee, those introductions, that talk I gave and so much more of my attention and care—it needs to go instead to activists I know and care about but who would never presume to ask. Sometimes the prodigal daughter has her regrets, too.

      We all need to do a better job of amplifying the voices that have been marginalized for too long.

  21. Jul 2020
  22. Jun 2020
  23. Dec 2019
    1. It has been jokingly suggested several times during the course of this study that what we are seeking is an "intelligence amplifier." (The term is attributed originally to W. Ross Ashby[2,3]. At first this term was rejected on the grounds that in our view one's only hope was to make a better match between existing human intelligence and the problems to be tackled, rather than in making man more intelligent. But deriving the concepts brought out in the preceding section has shown us that indeed this term does seem applicable to our objective. 2c2a Accepting the term "intelligence amplification" does not imply any attempt to increase native human intelligence. The term "intelligence amplification" seems applicable to our goal of augmenting the human intellect in that the entity to be produced will exhibit more of what can be called intelligence than an unaided human could; we will have amplified the intelligence of the human by organizing his intellectual capabilities into higher levels of synergistic structuring. What possesses the amplified intelligence is the resulting H-LAM/T system, in which the LAM/T augmentation means represent the amplifier of the human's intelligence.2c2b In amplifying our intelligence, we are applying the principle of synergistic structuring that was followed by natural evolution in developing the basic human capabilities. What we have done in the development of our augmentation means is to construct a superstructure that is a synthetic extension of the natural structure upon which it is built. In a very real sense, as represented by the steady evolution of our augmentation means, the development of "artificial intelligence" has been going on for centuries.
    1. This is not a new idea. It is based on the vision expounded by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 essay “As We May Think,” which conjured up a “memex” machine that would remember and connect information for us mere mortals. The concept was refined in the early 1960s by the Internet pioneer J. C. R. Licklider, who wrote a paper titled “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” and the computer designer Douglas Engelbart, who wrote “Augmenting Human Intellect.” They often found themselves in opposition to their colleagues, like Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, who stressed the goal of pursuing artificial intelligence machines that left humans out of the loop.

      Seymour Papert, had an approach that provides a nice synthesis between these two camps, buy leveraging early childhood development to provide insights on the creation of AI.

    2. Thompson’s point is that “artificial intelligence” — defined as machines that can think on their own just like or better than humans — is not yet (and may never be) as powerful as “intelligence amplification,” the symbiotic smarts that occur when human cognition is augmented by a close interaction with computers.

      Intelligence amplification over artificial intelligence. In reality you can't get to AI until you've mastered IA.

  24. Sep 2018
    1. And its very likely that IA is a much easier road to the achievement of superhumanity than pure AI. In humans, the hardest development problems have already been solved. Building up from within ourselves ought to be easier than figuring out what we really are and then building machines that are all of that.

      The authors of the text are proposing a radically different approach to the inevitable "singularity" event. They propose the research and development IA, or Intelligence Amplification, is developing computers with a symbiosis with humans. Noting that IA could be easier to develop than AI algorithms, since humanity had to probe what their true weaknesses and strengths are. In turn, developing an IA system that could cover humanities' weaknesses. This would summarily prevent an IA algorithm from getting over itself, which could potentially slow a point when we reach singularity.

  25. Nov 2016
    1. Box 5.1, Figure 1 illustrates the polar amplification phenomenon for three different periods of the Earth’s climate history using tem-perature reconstructions from natural archives and climate model simulations for: (i) the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum (EECO, 54 to 48 Ma) characterised by CO2 concentrations of 1000 to 2000 ppm (Section 5.2.2.2) and the absence of continental ice sheets; (ii) the mid-Pliocene Warm Period (MPWP, 3.3 to 3.0 Ma), characterized by CO2 concentrations in the range of 350 to 450 ppm (Section 5.2.2.2) and reduced Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets compared to today (see Section 5.6.1), (iii) the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, 21 to 19 ka), characterized by CO2 concentrations around 200 ppm and large continental ice sheets covering northern Europe and North America.
  26. Sep 2013
    1. The Epideictic speaker is concerned with virtue and vice, praising the one and censuring the other. The forms of virtue. Which are the greatest virtues? Some rhetoric devices used by the epideictic speaker: "amplification," especially. Amplification is particularly appropriate to epideictic oratory; examples, to political; enthymemes, to forensic.

      Examples of Epideictic rhetoric. virtue and vice