mhneu

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181.
by mhneu 9y ago
"Surveillance capitalism" https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/facebook_and_... Bruce Schneier's article on this is well worth reading - he takes a broad view of issues both with
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by mhneu 9y ago
civil servants and the like get to retire with almost their best pay ever That system changed in 1984 . Now the FERS annuity is (for most people) about half of their highest pay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feder
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by mhneu 9y ago
No, that's not right. Less skilled employees often get paid peanuts, and so it's hard for govt to retain people. Title 5 (GS) employees have gotten squeezed over past 15 years, so much so that agencies have tried to push people
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by mhneu 9y ago
False. Government employees are paid poorly. (edit: and that's bad for the country: govt does a lot of important things - FDA, science support, health stuff - and good people are essential.) First, any senior skilled tech employee ta
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by mhneu 9y ago
"This example nicely highlights the importance of isolating individual behaviors to understand the contribution of parts to the overall function. If we had been able to isolate a single function, maybe by having the processor produce t
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by mhneu 9y ago
Agreed that MIT should be careful taking money from big donors with obvious agendas. When the Koches put money into universities, it typically has strings attached - they get some say in hiring faculty that align with their agenda, for exa
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by mhneu 9y ago
Engineering is a problem too. Skin heating and reliability are big problems for supersonic speeds. You might get a prototype done, but building a stable fleet will be hard. The first accident will be crippling.
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by mhneu 9y ago
The US NIH has a $30B budget to do research on cancer and human disease. Most of that is about helping people and has zero connection to the military. --- Edit: also, the movement to close down DoE and cut NASAs budget certainly WAS create
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by mhneu 9y ago
Right. Exactly. And part of the propaganda, even today, is the US right trying to equate that somehow to Obama. They are relying on wan, sad whataboutism: "When Obama used social media it was ok", "If Hillary had done this i
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by mhneu 9y ago
No. The West since 1950 has done FAR MORE scientific research than the USSR did. Soviet scientists did good work and were smart. But the Western Enlightenment model -- open communication, tolerance of dissenting voices, pursuit of truth
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by mhneu 9y ago
Gil Strang's books are probably even better for an adult with little math background. Intro to Linear Algebra: http://math.mit.edu/~gs/linearalgebra/ Strang does a GREAT job explaining the intuition behind li
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by mhneu 9y ago
And not just PACs - there is 'deep spending', on propaganda media: Breitbart, IJR, NY Post, WSJ, and on foundations: Jud Watch (has spent $500M in last decade to attack Bill and Hillary), ALEC, SPN, Cit U (that Supreme Court decis
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by mhneu 9y ago
That will be hard, but we might eventually get there. In the meantime, it's easy and possible today to require that all political spending MUST come with disclosure of funding. No more secret donations to Super PACs or Heritage or Hil
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by mhneu 9y ago
The difference is deception, lies, secrecy, AND the amount of money behind it. Look at the Koch network, Mercer, Adelson, Murdoch, and how much they spend on politics and related disinformation (Heritage, ALEC, SPN, Cato/Koch Fnd, NR
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by mhneu 9y ago
It's very feasible, and even easy. You require disclosure of beneficial ownership of shell corps. That's already being done in some real estate markets to prevent money laundering: http://www.capdale.com/treasu
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by mhneu 9y ago
I'd be happy if we made it easier for gov't to buy stuff like ashtrays.
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by mhneu 9y ago
Yes, I think that's right - Western societies need to think very carefully about the role of data, the power of private corporations, and the tension between profit-seeking and societal goals. Government regulation is the way we align
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by mhneu 9y ago
No, the history of personality typing is a much more interesting story than that, and depends very specifically on data. Myers/Briggs/Jung identified 4-5 personality "axes" on which people vary. How did they do that? T
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by mhneu 9y ago
Which needs fixing. We need to restore truth to public debate, and to politics. Cynicism is destroying Western liberal democracy.
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by mhneu 9y ago
Yes, you've put your finger on the core of it - the way Facebook compromises privacy. It's about informed consent on sharing data - we need companies to get informed consent.
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by mhneu 9y ago
There's just a ton more money on the right - the Koch network and GOP billionaire donors dwarf the spending by progressives. So it's a lot easier for right-wing purchased media and social media and purchased think tanks (Cato&#x2F
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by mhneu 9y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po... >YouTube, the Great Radicalizer https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/13/james-dam...
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by mhneu 9y ago
Zuckerberg SAYS that. But I think we've all known CEOs who live in a reality distortion field. I'm not sure he believes that Facebook isn't a bad actor. But he has a ton of financial incentive to deny it's a bad actor
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by mhneu 9y ago
Stamos has weighed in on twitter: >Alex Stamos >Despite the rumors, I'm still fully engaged with my work at Facebook. It's true that my role did change. I'm currently spending more time exploring emerging security risks
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by mhneu 9y ago
This is in some sense an extension of the Myers-Briggs-type personality typing, which in its early days also grew out of data analysis. People use the Myers-Briggs typing at work because it helps you work with (read persuade) people. So you
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by mhneu 9y ago
Good question, as they are equally undemocratic (they hew to the goals of the billionaires that control the GOP - which is to destroy the gov't to cut taxes on the rich.) To be fair, Obama's team also used data. But right now th
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by mhneu 9y ago
Sad but true
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by mhneu 9y ago
I agree the problem is money, and I also agree that bad faith and disinformation are true measures of problematic political communication. A principle we could rely on is openness. Just disclose who is paying for what. And disclose the ad
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by mhneu 9y ago
So about 0.1% of the American populace knew that. (Ball park: call Facebook 30k employees. If you want to add a whole lot of digital marketers take that to even as high as 3M. That's still only 1% of the US population.)
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by mhneu 9y ago
p.s. Did you know Steve Bannon looked at tech workers as people he could bamboozle to be his political footsoldiers? That's why the Mercers completely fund Breitbart - to propagandize young, mostly tech, men and boys. From Josh Greene

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