There are enormous issues with who decides what makes it through the filter, how to handle things that are of unknown truth (say ongoing research), and the hazards of training consumers of information to assume everything that makes it to them is completely factual (the whole point of said fake news filter). If you'd argue that people on the far side of the filter can still be skeptical, then just train that and avoid censorship via filter.
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He's talking about wanting some system to filter out Tweets that "elicit emotion" or "nudge views", comparing them to malware. I looked him up and see he's a computer scientist, which explains the comparison to malware. I assume when he's designing AI he tries to filter what inputs the model gets so as to achieve the desired results. AI acts on algorithms and prompts regardless of value/ethics and bad input = bad output, but I think human minds have much more capability to cope and assess value than modern AI. As such I still don't like the idea of sanitizing intake because I believe in resilience and processing unpleasantness as opposed to stringent filters. What am I missing?
Immediately made me think of this small Vietnamese restaurant near me with the most incredible Pho. It's so good I'm willing to stop at just hoping it's made ethically.
I'm putting this in it's own response because it's a less important addendum to my main points above and I don't want to put everyone off with a single huge brick of text.
If just knowing bad news exists makes life difficult for someone, even if they don't click the link, then I'd (respectfully, not as an insult) recommend learning coping techniques like meditation, diaphragmatic breathing, or cognitive behavior therapy that can add resilience. I am NOT suggesting someone feeling like that is innately weak or flawed, but there are techniques to move the impact of knowing there's bad things happening towards manageable. If it's still immediately extremely distressing, there may be related past trauma that needs sorting out.
Physical analogy for social media breaks - I work out regularly. Even though it's a healthy habit, I don't work out every day because it's tiring and that would make it unhealthy. When I do work out though I want it to be difficult because that's how gains are made. So I'm not saying you or I need to batter ourselves with torturous news every day - breaks aren't just ok they're how you stay healthy. When I read the news though, I want the whole truth even if that truth has parts that are uncomfortable or challenge my worldview, and I also want to be experienced/trained enough to handle those emotions and thoughts.
I don't think there's anything wrong with taking a break from social media or news. There are days I don't visit sites like Lemmy or when I do I only click non-news links because I'm not in the mood or already having a bad day. That's different than filtering (as per Karpathy's example) Tweets so that when you do engage it's consistently a very curated, inoffensive, "safe" experience. Again, I only have the one post to go off of, but he specifically talks about wishing to avoid Tweets that "elicit emotions" or "nudge views" and compares those provocative messages to malware. As far as your point regarding blatantly sensationalist news, when I recognize it's that kind of story I just stop reading/watching and that's that.
I WANT to have my emotions elicited because I seek to be educated and don't want to be complacent about things that should make me react. "Don't know, don't care" is how people go unrepresented or abused - e.g. almost no one reads about what Boko Haram is doing in Nigeria (thus it's already "filtered out" by media), and so very little has been done in the 22 years they've been affecting millions of lives. I WANT to have my "views nudged" because I'm regularly checking my worldview to make sure it stays centered around my core ethics, and being challenged has prompted me to change bad stances before. Being exposed to objectionable content before and reassessing is also how I've learned to spot BS attempts to manipulate. It doesn't matter how many times MAGA Tweets tell me that God is upset at drag queens and only Donald Trump can save the world because now I recognize ragebait when I see it. Having dealt with it before, no amount of exposure is going to make me believe their trash and knowing what is being said is useful for exposing and opposing harmful governmental policies/bad candidates (sometimes even helping deprogram others).
Yes, I've noticed a lot of No True Scotsman fallacy as well, where dissenting voices are determined to be "not true Jews" or "antisemitic, self-hating Jews". In December the US Congress passed a law that explicitly states anti-Zionism = antisemitism, even over the objections of many members (mostly Democrats) including Jewish member Jerry Nadler. Here's a short video of Nadler calling the bill "either intellectually disingenuous or factually wrong" and explaining how Jews he has represented oppose Israeli policy without being antisemitic. Netanyahu has stated multiple times that anti-Zionism (in context = opposition to his policies) is the exact same thing as antisemitism.
There is an official, governmental, international battle to standardize what Jews are allowed to think. It completely disregards the fact that Jews are like any other ethnicity in that they represent a huge spectrum of beliefs and moralities, from saints to villains and everything in between. It's been proven time and again that judging people based on genetics or birthplace/residence only leads to injustice and suffering.
Kudos to the brave dissenting Israelis speaking and acting according to their conscience. I hope they are protected in some way from reprisals because Israel does not take criticism lightly, especially from within it's own borders.
Without wanting to be too aggressive, with only that quote to go on it sounds like that person wants to live in a safe zone where they're never challenged, angered, made afraid, or have to reconsider their world view. That's the very definition of an echo chamber. I don't think you're meant to live life experiencing only "approved" moments, even if you're the one in charge of approving them. Frankly I don't know how that would be possible without an insane amount of external control. You'd have to have someone/something else as a "wall" of sorts controlling your every experience or else how would things get reliably filtered?
I'd much prefer to teach people how to be resilient so they don't have to be afraid of being exposed to the "wrong" ideas. I'd recommend things like learning what emotions mean and how to deal with them, coping/processing bad moments, introspection, how to get help, and how to check new ideas against your own ethics. E.g. if you read something and it makes you angry, what idea/experience is the anger telling you to protect yourself from and how does it match your morality? How do you express that anger in a reasonable and productive way? If it's serious who do you call? And so on.
There's this really entertaining forensic psychiatrist named Eric Bender who does multiple analyses videos of pop culture "insane" characters using real scientific/medical knowledge.
- Here he talks about Ledger's Joker in Dark Knight. Summary = the Joker is psychopathic (violent, doesn't care about others, others are pawns for his "game"), but not psychotic (experiencing a break from reality, hearing voices, etc). Ledger's Joker would not qualify for an insanity defense because he knows what he's doing is "wrong" and experiences the real world as opposed to hallucinations. He's not mentally healthy or normal though and possibly doesn't understand how to interact with the world.
- Here he talks about Phoenix's Joker from "Joker". Summary = much the same as Ledger, but still interesting to watch. He discusses risk factors (abuse, neglect, genetics) that can be an extremely rare "Pathway to Violence" that could apply to the Joker in this movie.
- Here he talks about various Arkham Asylum inmates, including (briefly) various versions of the Joker. Summary = much the same, but also talks about Anti-Social Personality Disorder. Also, the fact Joker avoids capture means he knows what he's doing is "wrong" or at least illegal.
So the movie versions of Joker aren't insane in the sense that they're lost in hallucinations and unable to discern reality from make-believe. The Joker likely wouldn't be sent to an asylum in the real world. The Jokers of the movies are psychopathic, evil, uncaring, manipulative, etc. For the most part, to them the world is a game and it's all about the Joker being the main character with everyone else being pawns to be used for evil amusement.
Yeah, and then there's the guy who fired a nail gun at pro-Palestine protesters at one of the events. "Hate was a factor in alleged nail gun assault on pro-Palestinian protesters in Vaughan: police"
That's a very understandable thought for many really awful reasons. For what it's worth though, there are some folks who judge based on actions - not ethnicity or where a person was born/resides. I have a lot of admiration for Jews who are willing to speak up in support of human rights and ethical treatment. Especially since I have a Jewish friend who was shunned by their family in a cruel way for daring to speak and act with their conscience instead of according to pressure.
Here's a 2-minute video Rich Seigel, a brave Jewish man from New Jersey. In that video he protested what he called the illegal property sale (perhaps one of the ones mentioned in the article) of Western Bank homes in a racially-restricted event. He also succinctly describes how the March 10th event broke both US and international law and why he refuses to let ethnicity = justification. "As Jews, we don't get to fly under the radar and break the law and hide it in a synagogue."
- Iranian officials have said they consider the attack "concluded".
- The US has said it will not participate in a strike on Iran.
- Israel's war cabinet has ended without a decision on Iran attack response. "The cabinet is determined to respond – but has yet to decide on the timing and scope."
As OP's article notes, it's a dangerous moment and a lot is going to depend on which nations are willing to do what. Hopefully there will be a period of calm reassessment leading to stepping away from an open war that will benefit almost no one at all.
Yeah, when it comes to WWIII I'm more worried about what NATO/EU is going to do if Ukraine starts collapsing than Israel vs. Iran. If Russia takes Ukraine and starts eyeing other Eastern European countries, or strongly anti-Putin EU countries decide they are willing to go to war to stop him then things could get messy FAST. That's why it's so important that the US doesn't stop funding for Ukraine (like a some politicians, especially Republicans, seem to want). Ukraine is legitimately the bulwark against Russian aggression that could bloom into something much worse.
Israel vs. Iran would be bad, but I don't think enough countries would join in on Iran's side to make this a world war. I'd expect more of a new Gulf/Iraq/Afghanistan War than WWIII.
Going to guess you mean John Bolton, the infamous warmonger who loudly started calling for immediate, "far stronger" US response yesterday. He's a draft dodger who has admitted he joined the National Guard and then went to law school just to avoid going to Vietnam. "I wasn't going to waste time on a futile struggle," he has written, adding "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy… I considered the war in Vietnam already lost". Yet the whole time he advocated for keeping other US soldiers fighting in the war. He didn't fight in the war of his time, he won't ever go to war now that he's old, but by damn is he ever sure that the US should send people to fight everywhere from Iran to Cuba.
In 2019, Democrat Seth Moulton, who actually served 4 tours in Iraq, called both Bolton and Trump "chickenhawks" because they're hawkish for war but completely unwilling to fight it themselves. (Trump reportedly "avoided service in the Vietnam War after his father called in a favor with a doctor, who wrote a note saying that Trump had bone spurs on his feet, making him ineligible for the draft.") To use the popular Franklin D. Roosevelt quote - "War is young men dying and old men talking."
Jesus Christ the opening to that video had me guessing for a moment until I calmed down and realized it's obviously a hypothetical. Given that it's reported that Iranian officials consider their attack "concluded", it would be great if all the players stepped away from escalation into open war. The video I linked talks about the pressure on both Iran and Israel to back down, and here's hoping they do. The world really really doesn't need yet another open war in the Middle East, USA-involved or otherwise.
For what it's worth, it's been reported that Iranian officials consider the attack "concluded". They have said if Israel attacks again the next Iranian response will be considerably more severe, and have warned the US to keep out of this conflict. I guess we'll have to see what each country does in the next little while.
It's especially sickening that the IDF not only just let's this happen, but participates/helps it along. If it was just a civilian mob that would be bad enough, but official support makes it functionally official policy. Breaking the Silence, a site that collects testimonials from IDF vets about what really happens in OPT, has one testimony that says, "The mission there is not to maintain order; the mission there is to enforce Jewish supremacy in the city of Hebron. It’s not that we soldiers are between a hammer and an anvil, [but rather] we are the hammer being hurled at the Palestinians by the settlers."
Downvoted not because I defend Hamas (which is indeed awful) but because the premise of your post is a lazy, overused attempt to deflect criticism of Israeli crime. Where is the poster defending Hamas? Hamas isn't even mentioned. He's condemning Zionist propaganda and Israeli refusals to stop killing which is completely factual and an ethical stance. Take your strawman elsewhere.
But the post is explicitly about Tweets that challenge emotions and views and how that's harmful. It's one thing to want to see fewer suspicious offers from Nigerian princes and horny MILFS in my area. It's another to tell an AI that you don't want to see events or conversations that might be upsetting or make you think about ethics, politics, etc.
P.S. I'm replying to you a lot today, just want to say I'm not trying to be abusive or follow you around. You keep making points on this page that I want to engage with, and hopefully it's not coming across as persecution.