Category Archives: Disconnection.

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WHY IS THE TRUTH UNDER ATTACK AS NEVER BEFORE?

14 Friday Feb 2020

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2020: The year we need to change., Algorithms., Communication., Dehumanization., Disconnection., Fake News., Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Political Trust, Post - truth politics., Social Media, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Truthfulness., Twitter, Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Thirty-minute read)

 

It is widely assumed by the general public that humanity is “progressing” and that we are better both physically and mentally than our predecessors were. Of course, this is true for some of us but for 6 billion of us on 2$ a day I doubt they would agree.

A person’s conception of truth is deeply intertwined with their conception of reality and truth isn’t actually divorced from reality. Science is dependent on truthfulness.

Few of us these day’s has the time or resources to check all of the news we confront on a daily basis. Instead, we rely on other methods of assessing truth, but can we or should we trust the source?

As the saying goes, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

In a world where facts are under siege, credentialed sources are proving more important than ever.

We are getting our news from platforms, run by Facebook, Google, Twitter, Messanger,  etc including other social media sites and search engines, but can we place our trust in those platforms.

The profession of undermining truth has been in existence for decades. For much of recorded history, the truth was rooted in scholasticism now it’s rooted in a capitalist haze where political correctness and social justice including warfare have descended from the ivory tower of the rich infiltrating tech, business, healthcare, and governments.

The quest for facts these days is now governed by disinterested Google algorithms that trade us, accuracy for efficiency, creating a “spiral of silence,” in which everyone believes that everyone else believes something but no one actually believes it.

It seems that we accept truthiness instead of requiring truth.

As a result, humankind is losing mental capacity to know the truth and we are living in an era of rationality inequality.

For example, voters act on issues that don’t affect them personally and are under no pressure to inform themselves or defend their positions.

People vote as if rooting for sports teams, encouraged by the media, which treat politics as a horse race, encouraging zero-sum competition rather than a clarification of character and policy.

So what is happening?

History is littered with the bending or inverting of truth by people in power has long been consequential, so the recent prominence of “fake news.”  is not a new development. The belief that fake news is displacing the truth itself needs to be examined for its truth.

The implication is that we may as well give up on reason and truth and just fight the bad guys’ lies and intimidation with lies and intimidation of our own.

“Social media.”

Not long ago many intellectuals deplored the lack of democratic access to mass media.

Now a few media corporations, in cahoots with the government, “manufactured consent” with their oligopoly over the means of production and dissemination of ideas.

We used to say, freedom of the press belongs to those who own, one no longer true.

Social Media with it’s like algorithms are now fueling, accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia that can be weaponized: since everyone reviles these bigotries, they can be used to demonize adversaries, which in turn spreads a terror of being demonized. It has become the place where one can express heterodox opinions without fear of being silenced or fired.

A network of pluralistic ignorance enforced by denunciation mobs.

So when it comes to intolerant repression of non-leftist ideas, don’t blame the Millennials or the iGens because unregulated Social Media is now blazing out of control abetted in part by government subsidies and lack of will to regulate.

People gravitating to people who are like them.

Social media held out the promise of giving a voice to the people, unfortunately, is making us dumber.

It is true to say that the network dynamics of social media are still poorly understood, but they do not yet host the mechanisms of vetting and reviewing that are necessary for true beliefs to bubble up to prominence from the turbid pools of self-presentation, group solidarity, and pluralistic ignorance.

We project the best sides of our lives through social media but revile real vulnerability.

So we are living in a post-truth world” true?

If your answer is “yes” then the answer is “no” because you’ve just evaluated the statement in an evidentiary manner, so evidence still matters and facts still matter.

But humans are fundamentally irrational – No.

If humans were truly irrational, who specified the benchmark of rationality against which humans don’t measure up? How did they conduct the comparison? Why should we believe them? Indeed, how could we understand them?

We did not evolve with the truth-augmenting technologies that have been invented in recent millennia and centuries, such as writing, quantitative datasets, scientific methodology, and specialized expertise. We evolved with the reality of the thought of what is true.

We don’t believe in reason; we use reason but as soon as you try to argue that we should believe things by any route other than reason, you’ve lost the argument, because you’ve appealed to reason.

That is why a defence of reason is unnecessary, perhaps even impossible. The very fact that one is examining the validity of reason shows that one is committed to reason.

This is the point where it gets somewhat complicated.

We build mental models of the world around us that allow us to explain, predict, and control things to our advantage.

Algorithms know this by monitoring our lives and consultancy firms that specialize in defending products from tobacco to industrial chemicals that harm the public (that have and are with us since the dawn of Capitalism) are manipulating the market place for profit while ensuring that the truth stays buried.

So our reasoning is contaminated by false news.

Social media is a major source of these falsehoods coupled with peculiarities in human behaviour on social media, make it easy for fake news to spread. Twitter, Facebook you name them.

“Political” fake news spread three times faster than other kinds, and the top 1 per cent of retweeted fake news regularly diffused to at least 1,000 people and sometimes as many as 100,000.

Out of all of the news you see reported, how much of it do you believe is made up or fake news?

Around 40% with 70% per cent more likely than true news to receive a retweet.

While the political repercussions of fake news are quite obvious, the phenomenon it depends on how the information is presented and how rationality is defined.

The powers of inference for example.

Rational inference, scepticism, and debate are in our nature but set against false news that is normalizing the production of alternative facts are a project long in the making.

Politicians—two in particular—lies a lot. But politicians have always lied. They say that in war, truth is the first casualty, and that can be true of political war as well.

THERE’S A TON OF MISINFORMATION OUT THERE, AND WE’RE NOT OKAY LETTING IT GO UNCHECKED.

Why is the truth important?

We all need to know the truth if we want to be able to behave rationally.

Spreading disinformation here, hiding evidence of harm there, undermining authorities evidence can change people’s minds. Internet discussion groups, in which these ideas harden and grow more extreme in the absence of critical engagement.

Group loyalty is an underestimated source of irrationality in the public sphere, especially when it comes to politicized scientific issues like evolution and climate change.

Forecasting is no longer the dark art of pundits, gurus, it is big data and everyday fact-checking with Google has and is been revolutionized.

When people are confronted with their own ignorance of the facts, they become more epistemically humble about their opinions.

Unwelcome news is automatically rebranded fake news.

In the end, we are mere mortals but has the day of rationality-promoting norms and institutions passed?

The causes are complex, but it’s exhausting to live in a society where asking for help equals failure.

“Life before Google.”

Nothing can reverse the damage that has been done during our own generation, and some of this regression in truthfulness in the last 50 years is a paradoxical byproduct of the fantastic progress, we have made inequality.

From climate breakdown to air and water pollution, Co2 emissions, natural disasters,  the spread of the coronavirus virus, ongoing wars, our media watchdogs that don’t know what they are watching only using them to boost their viewing ratings.

Something important about the way we conceive of truth in our daily lives is needed if we are to tackle the difficulty assessing the reliability of the information that we find on the internet.

To achieve this these platforms with profit-seeking algorithms need to put their money where their mouths are.

Considering the technological boom are humans becoming smarter or more stupid?

The art of creating scientific disinformation is now at a new level of the tricks reanalysing results to reach different conclusions and hiring people prepared to rig methodologies to produce funders’ desired result.

The truth of history constitutes its whole value.

Enriching a favoured few at the expense of the great majority of mankind will be the last lie. The inconvenient truths will inevitably come to light.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

The films served to both promote products and a vision of America undergirded by chemicals and synthetic materials. We learn the industry was proud to produce insecticides, PCBs, vinyl and other materials and toxins later identified as environmental toxins.

THE BEADY EYE LOOK’S AT POPULISM. WHAT EXACTLY IS IT?

08 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Communication., Democracy, Digital age., Disconnection., Human values., Humanity., Inequality, Modern Day Democracy., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Political Trust, Politics., Populism., Post - truth politics., Reality., Robot citizenship., Social Media, Technology, The common good., The far-right., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What needs to change in European Union., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Politics

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(Eighteen-minute read)

The word came from the “prairie populists”, a 1890s movement of US farmers who supported more robust regulation of capitalism.

“But no one is clear what it is.”

We can’t really talk about populism without talking about our conflicting conceptions of democracy – and the question of what it truly means for citizens to be sovereign.

So is it an ideologically portable way of looking at politics as a forum for opposition between “people” and “elites”?

Or is it simply part of what it means to do politics?

Or is it a lens for looking at our politics?

Or a mode of talking about politics, rather than a set of beliefs?

Or is it an emerging political movement driven by technology, spread by social media, the smartphone and ruled by algorithms.

There is one thing for certain populism is inherent to democracy.

So it would be in the first place a massive mistake, considering the hollow, undemocratic mess we are in, with algorithms making decisions about our collective fate – outside the reach of politics, to ignore its power.

If one looks at the state of liberal democracy today it is becoming more and more a sham.  A nice-sounding set of universal principles that, in practice, end up functioning as smokescreens to normalise the exploitations and inequities of our capitalist system.

Nothing can stay depoliticised forever. The questions of populism would have little urgency were it not for the widespread agreement about the shortcomings of the political status quo: About the abyss between the shining ideals of equality and responsive government implied by our talk about democracy and the tarnished reality of life on the ground.

Populism is supposed to explain: Brexit, Trump, Viktor Orbán’s takeover of Hungary, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, even Putin.

However, neither Trump nor Brexit should be regarded primarily as populist phenomena.

His election and Brexit shows that every status quo – however sturdy – is only temporary, and can always be challenged by a movement that seeks to replace it with something new.

Populists consider themselves as victims of economic exploitation, anti-austerity movements – such as Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and Occupy these movements are obviously animated by a sense of opposition.

From this perspective, populism is just another word for real politics.

On the other hand, what most people knew about these parties, at first, was that they were openly nativist and racist. They talked about “real” citizens of their countries, and fixated on the issue of national and ethnic “purity,” demonising immigrants and minorities.

But I say that there are no real populists in politics – just people, attitudes and movements that the political centre misunderstands and fears.

The question of populism, then, is always the question of what kind of democracy we want.

The only inherent connection between rightwing and leftwing populist movements is that both embrace the same fundamental truth about democracy: that it is an ever-shifting contest over how the default “we” of politics is defined and redefined, of which no one definition can be guaranteed to last.

When populism appears in the media, which it does more and more often now, it is typically presented without explanation, as if everyone can already define it.

It sounded less alarming than “extreme right” or “radical right”.

It will always live in the shadow of the muddled media and political discourse and there can no longer be any doubt that we are going through a populist moment, so which type of populist you want to be.

A liberal democracy populism that is forced by rightwing populism to make good on its promises of equality. That needs to reacquaint with the need to construct a democratic “we” – a people – around their demand to protect liberal institutions and procedures, in opposition to radical rightwing parties who are happy to see them discarded.

Liberal democracy, in this context, has almost nothing to do with contemporary distinctions between left and right. It refers, instead, to the idea that government should facilitate pluralistic coexistence by balancing the never fully attainable ideal of popular sovereignty with institutions that enshrine the rule of law and civil rights, which cannot easily be overturned by a political majority.

or

A populism that can never be disentangled from the concept’s pejorative baggage.  An ideology runs the risk of making effective and worthwhile political strategies seem irresponsible, even dangerously promoting nativisms and short term gains.

Obviously, there are leftwing and rightwing populisms both are motivated not by passion for populism’s core ideas, but by other ideological factors best described as a fuzzy blanket to camouflage nastier nativism.

We are now living through a time when familiar webs connecting citizens, ideologies and political parties are, if not falling apart, at least beginning to loosen and shift and old theories of populism that defined it specifically as rightwing, racist or anti-immigrant is insufficiently wide to describe these new developments in populist politics.

It seems to me that Populists deal in “simplicity,” in “glib, facile solutions” while liberal leaders have been “oblivious” to the sufferings of their people.

So why are the traditional parties of the left in the western world being defeated?

Because the other side doesn’t play fair any more with conflict an inescapable and defining feature of political life.

The juvenile incapacity of both to bring their preferences to the political arena and engage in the complex give-and-take of rational compromise is with Social Media now fraught with a political examination and association accusation and assassination.

With the impersonal forces, of “globalisation” and “technological change voters are deciding that mainstream political parties have done nothing for their static incomes or disappearing jobs or sense of national decline these past two decades.

The “many, not the few.”

Populism is a new, consensus-smashing thing that is now secondary to nativism. Ultimately, they are disputes about which types of politics make us suspicious, and why.

To conclude that the two camps are simply talking past each other would be to miss the extent to which they are in agreement –and what, taken together, they tell us about the current political moment.

We can never know exactly where democracy is going to take us – not this time, nor the next, nor the time after that, but political parties must come to terms that the elephant in the room is that we no longer vote once every five years we vote on Social media ever five minutes.

Unless politics is not achievable, or rewarding, it obviously is sowing the long-term seeds for discontent.

It’s great to see politicians with Twitter accounts but there’s only so much you can do with that. Online participation in local decision-making is possible.

Failing to practice what you preach has ethical and political costs. E-voting is the next step.

Here below is what they are voting on and its not Fifty Shades of Grey Popularism.

 

 

Capitalist greed has and is poisoning political life.

Unregulated Algorithms will ensure it continues to do so.  Combined with the new realities of the portability of populism’s ideological movements spread by social media it is no wonder that liberal democracy is crumbling around the world.

To keep up with algorithms and their lavishly detailed position papers, their leaders,  Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Mircosoft, and their inc have little personal sympathy any longer with the travails of working people.

We can only hope that the fear of populism on the left will enable the victory of populism of the right.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. IS THE CURRENCY AND THE ART OF THE HANDSHAKE GOING EXTINCT.

28 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Communication., Disconnection., Emotions., Enegery, Face Recognition., Facebook, Human values., Humanity., Life., Our Common Values., Reality., Social Media, The art of a handshake., The power of touch.

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(Ten-minute read)

Remember when people use to initially judge you by your handshake. It formulated a picture of a person we were meeting for the first time.

In the span of a few seconds, it lay the foundation for how others perceive and feel about us — and we about them.

“It was wet,” “It was creepy,” ” It was firm,” It was crushing,” “It a Mormon handshake,” “It a Mason probing handshake”, enthusiastic, vigorous, prolonged, high-fives to fist-bumping.

A handshake was a globally widespread, brief greeting or parting tradition in which two people grasp one of each other like hands making impressions that have a very long shelf-life based on a brief but important meeting.

Your handshake is the business card you leave behind.

Believed by some to have originated as a gesture of peace by demonstrating that the hand holds no weapon.

It is a reassuring tactile touch that we as social animals share is essential for social interaction, social harmony, health, survival, and security, as well as for communicating our true feelings.

It serves as a means of transferring social chemical signals between the shakers.

What is even more startling is how long we remember those bad handshakes — sometimes we remember for decades.

Today we pay for items with the swipe of our phone or by inserting a small plastic card into a reader. The old handshake just doesn’t have its place anymore.

We can also spend thousands of hours clicking a mouse over a small image on a computer screen. Nothing is real, nothing is said – only ones and zeros racing around the globe in small packets of data.

The world of technology continues to tractor us into a world absent of looking at one another in the eyes the Art of the handshake is dead.

With, Social media, Face recognition, Instagram, Facebook, Smartphones, Emails etc our most valuable currency of the handshake is evaporating and being replaced by digital signatures or passwords, that are undermining our trust in each other.

It’s no wonder that so many people get something so simple as a handshake wrong. 

Take the Politician’s Handshake:Corporate-Image-Two-handed-handshake5

Two hands to cover or cup the other person’s hands twisting the other person’s hand so that yours is superior or playing hand jujitsu to let the other person know you are in charge is just rubbish.

In the real world-shaking a person’s hand allows you to establish your friendliness and accessibility. 

For example meeting your future in-laws for the first time, your first job interview.

It might be true that in the future daily and weekly media will be more and more electronic, but physical media will always exist.

Stand in front of the webcam and send a digital emoji and you could be shaking hands with the devil. 

You cannot reproduce a handshake with meaning electronically.

This is a part of the beauty and the freakiness of the internet no handshake required.

Its no wonder there is grooming.

There was a time that a person had to put on nice clothes and go out into the real world to meet a love interest.

Today, you can be “out there” without ever having to go out- online dating.

You can even engage in a virtual relationship by using email or instant messaging. It is possible to get to know a person on a relatively deep level without ever meeting at all.

Customs surrounding handshakes are specific to cultures and can offer some real benefits.  Take Brazilan negotiators they touch each other almost five times each half-hour where there is no physical contact between American negotiators. 

In postmodern society, superstitions don’t have much of a place, for most of history they have a played a huge role in shaping culture and society before the arrival of the handshake.

The internet cares not what you do. You miss out on real contact with people.

It is affecting our ability to connect with others as equals. Not being able to manage the normal tasks of adult living resulting in more and more limper handshakes. Which leads them to problems with society and unable to get along with others.

Although teens are staying in constant contact via the Internet and texting, these friendships do not foster trust and intimacy the same as face-to-face contact.

The century’s old practice to seal a deal may seem quaint but its importance in the future will tell us whether its a robot or not.

As the appreciation of small things disappears; nature loses its brilliance.

Our planet is in a tight spot lets shake hands on that.

As we know there can be no peace no universal action on anything without it. 

All the verbal diarrhoea in the world cannot replace it. 

 

Corporate-Image-handshake2

Corporate-Image-Finger-tip-grab-handshake3    

 

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.