Articles 1.
1.1
The Antidote to Fake News is to Nourish Our Epistemic Wellbeing - Kenneth Boyd
“ Epistemic wellbeing is your reasonably based sense that you’ll be able to know what you want and need to know about the world in order for your life to go well. This could involve knowledge in general – you want to feel like you can find answers to questions that you think are important to satiate your curiosity – as well as knowing more specific things – there will be some things you need to know in order to accomplish your life’s projects. If you have access to lots of good sources of information and can get your questions answered when you need them, then you have a high degree of epistemic wellbeing. If, on the other hand, you’re surrounded by liars, or just have no way of finding out what you need to know, you’re not doing nearly as well.
There are three components of epistemic wellbeing: access to truths; access to trustworthy sources of information; and opportunities to participate in productive dialogue. Let’s think about these each in turn.
When you’re presented with information or looking for answers to questions, you want to be confident that what you’re getting is the truth. Access to truth, the first component, is the basis of epistemic wellbeing. Access might be thwarted in many ways: you might be unable to go online, books might be banned, important information could be redacted. Or, in less extreme cases, you might be presented with different media outlets presenting conflicting information about an event. In this case, you might feel that you’re being prevented from accessing truths insofar as you’re unable to determine which information being presented is correct. “
1.2
Rethinking Our Vision of Success - Robert Pollack
“In fact, given how much of our DNA is uniquely human because it associates with changes in embryology that give us a big, slow developing brain so that our consciousness is social from birth, any idea that says "I want my kid to have a greater utility, so I will play with his or her DNA" destroys the possibility of being accepted for whoever you are. It is as eugenically dangerous as any judgment by race, religion, color, or any other thing you see at distance of ten feet. No, I'm not interested in transhuman models. I'm not interested in saving us. I'm not interested in freezing brains. I'm interested in the same old boring thing inside a mortal universe of mortal people—how best to care for each other and to care for each other's futures. And I do not think the purpose of science and technology is to give one in a billion of us a chance to get away from that.
I have to clarify the essence of what I'm trying to say. I am not making a political statement. I do not have a mechanism to value the future over the present in time to give us a future. The current redistribution plans for fairness, for taxation, for whatever political opinion you may have are all for the present or the immediate future. They will not save the planet from this species. To save the planet from the species requires a species-wide response.“
1.3
On “White Fragility” - Matt Taibbi
“DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.
If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”
DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.
DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier. “
1.4
Stories and Data - Coleman Hughes
“ On the other hand, the basic premise of Black Lives Matter—that racist cops are killing unarmed black people—is false. There was a time when I believed it. I was one year younger than Trayvon Martin when he was killed in 2012, and like many black men, I felt like he could have been me. I was the same age as Michael Brown when he was killed in 2014, and like so many others, I shared the BLM hashtag on social media to express solidarity. By 2015, when the now-familiar list had grown to include Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott, I began wearing a shirt with all their names on it. It became my favorite shirt. It seemed plain to me that these were not just tragedies, but racist tragedies. Any suggestion to the contrary struck me as at best, ignorant, and at worst, bigoted.
My opinion has slowly changed. I still believe that racism exists and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms; I still believe that, on average, police officers are quicker to rough up a black or Hispanic suspect; and I still believe that police misconduct happens far too often and routinely goes unpunished. But I no longer believe that the cops disproportionately kill unarmed black Americans.
Two things changed my mind: stories and data. “
1.5
A Blueprint For a Better Digital Society - Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl
“ A coherent marketplace is a true market economy coupled with a diverse, open society online. People will be paid for their data and will pay for services that require data from others. Individuals’ attention will be guided by their self-defined interests rather than by manipulative platforms beholden to advertisers or other third parties. Platforms will receive higher-quality data with which to train their machine learning systems and thus will be able to earn greater revenue selling higher quality services to businesses and individuals to boost their productivity. The quality of services will be judged and valued by users in a marketplace instead of by third parties who wish to influence users. An open market will become more aligned with an open society when the customer and the user are the same person. “
…
“For instance, automated language translation services have challenged the employment prospects of professional human translators, yet these services require a vast amount of fresh data every day from the people being put out of work (to keep up with current events, pop culture, and so on). Translators might think that they’re voluntarily subtitling foreign films for online friends; they have no idea of the extent of the value they are providing. Once the people providing this data are honestly informed that they are needed, they will earn compensation for their service, take pride in providing better data, and help the automated services to function better.”
…
“For data dignity to work, we need an additional layer of organizations of intermediate size to bridge the gap. We call these organizations “mediators of individual data,” or MIDs. A MID is a group of volunteers with its own rules that represents its members in a wide range of ways. It will negotiate data royalties or wages, to bring the power of collective bargaining to the people who are the sources of valuable data. It will also promote standards and build a brand based on the unique quality and identity of the data producers they represent. MIDs will often perform routine accounting, legal, and payment duties but might also engage in training and coaching. They will help focus the scarce attention of their members in the interest of those members rather than for an ulterior motive, such as targeted advertising.”
…
“Linking data privacy rights to commercial rights, though, creates an incentive for accountants and lawyers to track how data is used, and to negotiate over its use. Accountants and civil litigators can be annoying, but we should remember why those professions were invented. In a non-market society, there are only police to enforce rules, while in a market society, there is also civil litigation. Without contracts, every intervention is from above. Enforcement of privacy rights is a form of centralized power; distributed power is less likely to be corrupted
Ultimately, what people need in their digital lives is not maximized privacy per se, any more than what they need in their work lives is maximized leisure. In both cases, people need, in essence, the right to be left alone: a reasonable ability to construct what is seen and known about themselves by others, reasonable limitations on what eorts are demanded of them, an accessible means of selfdetermination, fair compensation for what they do give up, and an armative environment in society for seeking meaning and happiness.”
…
“Decentralization through technical architecture is an appealing idea where possible, but it is often an inadequate idea in the face of network effects and cognitive load, forces that create centralization in the first place. It doesn’t always work: Open-source software and the ideal of “free” media was supposed to lead to a radical decentralization of power. Unfortunately, while they encouraged labor to be free, they were not able to achieve the same for capital or control of platforms. The result was a unilateral disarmament of labor to the benefit of the seductive monolithic corporations that manipulate us to extract our data.”
1.6
Politics and The English Language - George Orwell
“Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.”
“The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.”