Sentience? Perception? Cognition? Knowledge?

"Intelligence?" "Educability?"

   

WHAT DOES IT REALLY MEAN TO LEARN?
A leading computer scientist says it’s “educability,” not intelligence, that matters most.
Joshua Rothman, Aug 27, 2024, The New Yorker

... Arguably, it’s one of the tragedies of humanities education that so much of it occurs between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. We don’t teach people to drive at twelve, when they’re carless; why should we make them read novels about life’s regrets when they have none? Yet there’s a theory behind the assignment of “Middlemarch” to sophomores: it’s that knowledge acquired too early gets stored away. Patterns of thinking established now will be retraced later; ideas encountered first in art will prime us for the rest of life. This sounds chancy and vague, until you reflect on the fact that knowledge almost never arrives at the moment of its application. You take a class in law school today only to argue a complicated case years later; you learn C.P.R. years before saving a drowning man; you read online about how to deter a charging bear, because you never know. In the mid-twentieth century, Toyota pioneered a methodology called just-in-time manufacturing, according to which car parts were constructed and delivered as close as possible to the hour of assembly. This was maximally efficient because it reduced waste and the cost of storage. But the human mind doesn’t work that way. Knowledge must often molder in our mental warehouses for decades until we figure out what to do with it.
.
Leslie Valiant, an eminent computer scientist who teaches at Harvard, sees this as a strength. He calls our ability to learn over the long term “educability,” and in his new book, “The Importance of Being Educable,” he argues that it’s key to our success. When we think about what makes our minds special, we tend to focus on intelligence. But if we want to grasp reality in all its complexity, Valiant writes, then “cleverness is not enough.” We need to build capacious and flexible theories about the world—theories that will serve us in new, unanticipated, and strange circumstances—and we do that by gathering diverse kinds of knowledge, often in a slow, additive, serendipitous way, and knitting them together. Through this process, we acquire systems of beliefs that are broader and richer than the ones we can create through direct personal experience. This is how, after our first divorce, we find that we can draw on wisdom borrowed from English literature...

Interesting. Particularly in the wake of "The Death of Truth."

And head-scratcher stuff like this.

What?

 

Well, we can safely assume she's referring to human sensory cognition. What might this infer? ALL perceptions are illusory? Irrespective of organ input channel(s)? Across ALL iincoming topical information in need of accurate cognitive consensus resolution?

So, all perceptions are illusory? 'scuse me, but that stuff long been the tedious bane of undergrad Philosophy 102.

"There are no objective truths. Everything is subjective. Except, of course, for THIS assertion."

 

OK, then...

Necessarily assumes revealable truths?

…Recognizing that we process different belief systems in our brains in similar ways does not mean that they are to be treated as equivalent. There is no contradiction in an individual differentiating among belief systems as being worthy or not of their support.

Science as a Belief System
Fluency with belief systems gave humans the opportunity to develop the advanced technological civilization that we have. While the power of science is for all to see, the reasons it has been so productive in the past are not so self-evident. Even less obvious is what we need to do to keep the benefits of science flowing in the future.

Science is a belief system. A critical component of it is the idea that there are important patterns in the world that are not readily visible but are worth the effort to discover. That there is a moderate number of chemical elements and all materials on Earth are composed of these is not self-evident and had to be demonstrated through ingenuity and labor. Similarly, the bacterial and viral causes of disease are not obvious to the eye. The individuals who made these discoveries believed that useful but well-hidden patterns existed and could be found.

Science as a belief system, even when pursued by imperfect self-interested individuals, has strong self-correcting tendencies. An announcement of any significant result will prompt other scientists to seek to verify it by repeating the experiment or analysis. Also, there is usually wide agreement on the interpretation of an experimental result or an analysis with respect to a relevant question. These two facts in tandem keep the scientific enterprise on track, despite all the mistakes that may occur along the way. They also keep the incidence of fraud to a low level and the influence of any one such fraudulent act usually to a short duration…

…The reasons science works so well are more to do with the world to which it applies than the particular way humans approach it. Science might be compared to a gold mine where each field of science is a vein. Near each vein of well-established science, so much more new science can be unearthed. Venturing beyond these known productive veins gives less predictable results but can lead to new even more productive veins.

No human activity or judgment occurs in isolation. They all occur in the context of some belief system. For any judgment or activity, one ought to declare the context in which it can be justified. For example, the perspective of this volume is the science belief system from a computational perspective…

The Scientific Revolution
While the gift of educability may yet bring humanity to its destruction, it has also led to great triumphs. Educability is a capacity that has taken a long time to have its impact. The possibility of accumulating knowledge discovered by others and creating new knowledge from it may have existed for hundreds of thousands of years. Eventually this gift spectacularly caught fire as the Scientific Revolution, which unfolded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its principal protagonists lived in different corners of Europe, employed variously by universities, rulers, and religious entities, or living on personal wealth. They had Latin as a common language. They published their work in printed books, a technology invented not much earlier. They read one another’s work. Clubs and meeting places arose to bring together local groups of scientific researchers in Italy, Spain, England, Germany, and France. By the late seventeenth century, these had evolved into academies, including the Royal Society in London, the Académie des Sciences in Paris, and the Leopoldina in Germany.

Why this unique event, the Scientific Revolution, took place exactly when and where it did, some three hundred thousand years after the emergence of our species, is open to debate. The precipitating event was not a genetic mutation in fifteenth-century Europe…

…Humanity is finally exploiting the gift of educability in a systematic way and on an industrial scale. At the same time, it is enjoying all the benefits the new scientific knowledge provides.

It is quite possible that further improvements can be made in the scientific research process itself.4 A scientist needs access to previous knowledge, convenient ways of isolating those pieces that are relevant to the research question at hand, and new ideas. The sharing of information on the web and the use of search engines have already had important effects. Scientists can now more rapidly follow what is happening in their field, which will have orders of magnitude more participants than Kepler or Newton had to follow. Digital technology may well be launching a phase of scientific progress that is even more intense than before. This is not just because of all the opportunities computers offer for simulating scientific theories and detecting patterns in data, but more simply because digital technology offers another revolution in the dissemination of knowledge.

Equality
That “all men are created equal” was “sacred and undeniable” to Thomas Jefferson in his draft of the United States Declaration of Independence. With later editing, it became “self-evident” in the final document. While historians still debate Jefferson’s own intent, the continuing impact of his phrase prompts the question of how to interpret the words now. Can one justify Jefferson’s final wording as a statement of fact? Several religions support the concept of equality, and hence Jefferson’s choice of “sacred” would be more understandable. At no point in history, however, has equality been self-evident from looking around. Different social classes in the same region and the same classes in different regions have had different enough lives to make such a proposition counterfactual on the surface.

I suggest that the educability hypothesis fills a gap here in providing an angle from which to view our equality. Educability implies that humans, whatever our genetic differences at birth, have a unique capability to transcend these differences through the knowledge, skills, and culture we acquire after birth. We are born equal because any differences we have are subject to enormous subsequent changes through individual life experience, education, and effort. This capacity for change, growth, and improvement is the great equalizer. It is possible for billions of people to continuously diverge in skills, beliefs, and knowledge, all becoming self-evidently different from each other. This characteristic of our humanity, which accounts for our civilization, also makes us equal.

Perhaps the most serious challenge to the notion of human equality that came from modern science was the eugenics movement. The term comes from the Greek word for “well-born.” The adherents believed that inequality at birth was fundamental. The movement flourished from the 1880s to the 1930s in Europe and North America, driven by the eugenicists’ fear that if people with so-called “superior” genes reproduced at a lower rate than those with “inferior” genes, then humanity’s genetic stock would decline. The eugenicists proposed to take measures to discourage reproduction of what they considered the “inferior” genes. The criteria they considered as valid to discriminate between superior and inferior included measures such as IQ scores as well as membership of national and racial groups.

The reason for eugenics eventually falling into disrepute was neither the ethical issue it obviously raised nor scientific questioning, but rather the wide-ranging use of its tenets by the Nazi regime in Germany. Subsequently, in 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention, which included in its definition of genocide the imposition of any measures intended to prevent births within a “national, ethnical, racial or religious” group.

The history of eugenics deserves study as an example where the self-correcting tendency of science was not in evidence for a long time. Several of the creators and primary movers of eugenics were among the most prominent scientists of their time. Some of them laid the foundations of modern statistics. Users of statistics will recognize their names and the statistical techniques they contributed: Francis Galton (regression to the mean, standard deviation), Karl Pearson (chi-squared test, principal component analysis), and Ronald Fisher (tests of significance, maximum likelihood testing).

It is now widely thought that these statisticians were mistaken in their belief in the primacy of human inequality at birth. How could such a group have been so wrong? Their published papers were chock-full of data, and they were applying their scientific expertise—statistics—for analyzing the data. Their statistical methodologies continue to be the basis for understanding data in the empirical sciences to this day. My suggestion is that the data available to them did not provide much information about the power of educability. They had little systematic data on individuals of different classes, cultures, ethnicities, and gender being subject to the same educational opportunities over an extended period. Human educability is a surprising and amazing phenomenon that these statisticians—and their contemporaries—failed to detect. Some would explain the eugenics movement by saying simply that the participants were biased by the beliefs of their times. The power of beliefs is, of course, a central theme of this book—but beliefs come from somewhere, and one should try to understand their origin.

For many measurable traits of plants and animals, scientists have sought to distinguish the effects of nature and nurture by assigning percentages to each of these sources using statistical analysis. Such analysis by itself provides no understanding of the mechanisms by which nature and nurture influence the trait. For cognitive traits, such analysis is particularly problematic if we accept that education plays a role in the development of the trait. Educability allows the influence of the environment to be quite enormous. The essence of educability is the unique and extreme power of this influence.

The answer to the eugenicists’ fear is that the capacity to change through experience and education is at the very center of the architecture of the human mind. Fortunately for humanity, the main social development of the last century has been the worldwide expansion of education. We are still in the middle of this expansion. Improvements in education and in the numbers receiving it have overwhelming potential. Pursuing this potential is the most rewarding focus for anyone aiming to improve a society.

Worldviews
Belief systems that are broad enough to suggest positions on diverse issues have been called worldviews. Religions are examples. Political and economic systems are others. Throughout human history there have always been widely held and wildly different belief systems about race, class, and gender, about who is the enemy, and about who is fully human.

Worldviews continue their struggle for acceptance every day. In each epoch various worldviews have been particularly influential. It is customary to be smug about one’s own worldview and dismissive of those of others, especially those of earlier times. Educability offers, among other things, an onlooker’s vantage point on this struggle.

Currently, a worldview with much influence is science. I think this is good. Nations that include most of the human population are teaching science to their young and putting resources into exploiting it for the benefit of their citizens. The proven success of this enterprise is one thing that we can be sure about and would do well to further. A scientific consensus on the nature of the Civilization Enabler may be impactful. Some convergence on what defines us may promote commonality among the ruling worldviews.

We therefore have opportunities.

What about the threats? What guarantees do we have that the ruling worldviews will not follow trajectories that most would currently regard as undesirable, such as returning to widespread human sacrifice? The answer seems to be none. Humans are just too facile with absorbing and applying arbitrary belief systems, and we seem to have much weaker countervailing abilities to evaluate the consequences or validity of our beliefs. This volume shows that one can discuss aspects of belief system acquisition and processing with some precision. Much remains to be discovered. What makes an individual commit to a belief system? What makes an individual maintain their commitment or give it up when it is challenged?

There is little evidence that our civilization is securely on an upward slope. Wars and oppressive political regimes persist and continue to attract supporters. I see no guarantee that belief systems that are worse, or much worse, than those that currently dominate around the world will not displace them. The only actionable defense I see is to seek a better understanding of how we process beliefs. Understanding our critical capacity could help guard against its worst dangers.

Educability is an information processing capability that humans have. It has enabled us to stand on each other’s shoulders and build the edifice of beliefs that is our current civilization. Our power to generate and adopt new beliefs has few limits. The beliefs we adopt govern how we act and have consequences without end. One would hope that if educability is recognized to be the defining human capability, then the search for a deeper understanding of it would become a unifying quest. Surely, we can direct our power of being educable at ourselves, to better understand the nature of this power and set a steadier course…

Valiant, Leslie. The Importance of Being Educable: A New Theory of Human Uniqueness (pp. 217-225). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. 

See what you think. I've really just begun my close study of this book.

More shortly...

_________

  

Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery

"This week has not been easy."

"For years, I’ve cringed every time I hear the reporting about Trump calling members of our military "suckers" and those who died in battle "losers."

But to see Trump use Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery for his own political gain — for his staff to verbally and physically abuse the official trying to protect the sanctity of that hallowed ground — is something I never anticipated.

My name is Karen Meredith, I am a Gold Star mother, and my son is buried in Section 60.

My only child, 1LT Ken Ballard, joined the Army after graduating high school in 1995. As an Army granddaughter, Army daughter, Army sister, and Army mom, I couldn't be more proud of his decision.

My son deployed to Iraq in May of 2003, and 384 days later he was killed while fighting an Iranian-backed militia in Najaf. He had been scheduled to return home eight days earlier, but his tour was extended.

Ken, like others in our family, were not "suckers" for making the decision to serve their country. He was not a "loser" either.

Ken, and those who put on the uniform, are the best this country has to offer. But to Trump, they’re nothing more than props for his campaign…"

  

An orchestrated smiling "thumbs-up-on-3" group pose—a con begetting a Trump 2024 campaign photo-op around a KIA veteran's headstone?

 

In explicit violation of federal law and DOD policies, one ought note.

Like he gives a shit.

FROM THE ATLANTIC

…For Trump, defiling what is sacred in our civic culture borders on a pastime. Peacefully transferring power to the next president, treating political adversaries with at least rudimentary grace, honoring those soldiers wounded and disfigured in service of our country—Trump long ago walked roughshod over all these norms. Before he tried to overturn a national election, he mocked his opponents in the crudest terms and demeaned dead soldiers as “suckers.”

But the former president outdid himself this week, when he attended a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 American soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the final havoc-marked hours of the American withdrawal. Trump laid three wreaths and put hand over heart; that is a time-honored privilege of presidents. Trump, as is his wont, went further. He walked to a burial site in Section 60 and posed with the family of a fallen soldier, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs-up for his campaign photographer and videographer…

_________

  

As we turn toward the U.S. Nov 5th elections final approach,

we would do well to get all up in our Brill.

  

This book just came to my attention yesterday, while reading a review of another title. It jumped my queue, and, I'm now a good way through it. It is so timely.

 

 

I've cited the work of the astute Steven Brill multiple times across multiple posts previously.

 

 

Relatedly, how about some Tom Nichols, "The Death of Expertise?"

 

 

See also my prior riffs on disinformation.

UPDATE: MORE FROM UP IN OUR BRILL

Here is a selection of the completely false stories that appeared online and gained traction on social media platforms around the world over just a four-week period beginning in mid-June 2023. These and many more added to the debris that was already online in a vaster, much worse, wasteland:

Deaths blamed on bird flu were actually caused by cell phone radiation; U.K. government report shows COVID-19 vaccines caused five hundred excess heart disease deaths weekly; the World Economic Forum called for a new Bible written by artificial intelligence; elderberries are more effective protection against flu than a vaccine; Disney-Pixar animation movies contain hidden references to adrenochrome, a chemical product from adrenaline that QAnon conspiracy theorists say is harvested from blood trafficked for its anti-aging chemicals; the Iwo Jima memorial will be updated to feature the Pride flag; a photo has surfaced of Aileen Cannon, the federal judge presiding over the Trump national security documents case who is thought to favor Trump, at a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania; Brendan Whitworth, the chief executive officer of Anheuser-Busch, is a CIA operative; the actor Jamie Foxx was left blind and paralyzed by a COVID vaccine; no Amish children have been diagnosed with chronic conditions like cancer, diabetes, or autism because Amish children do not get vaccinated; NATO was behind the Wagner Group rebellion in Russia; electric cars have been spontaneously combusting throughout Europe; Target is selling satanic clothing; the 2023 Canadian wildfires were caused by arsonists wanting to promote fear of climate change; a whistleblower with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma was found dead; Michelle Obama is transgender; Vladimir Putin ordered the destruction of COVID-19 vaccine stockpiles in Russia; John Kerry said U.S. farms could be confiscated by the government to fight global warming; photos from the humiliating invasion of Beijing in 1900 by eight countries, including the United States, are displayed in a U.S. military classroom; a video shows a U.S. soldier opening a gate and allowing immigrants to illegally cross the border; the World Health Organization confirmed that COVID-19 vaccines can induce multiple sclerosis; the Italian food company Barilla withdrew its pasta due to insect contamination; California law allows kids to receive gender-affirming procedures without parental consent; the Presidential Records Act allows outgoing presidents to retain classified documents; a video shows Maricopa County election officials breaking into voting machines; U.S. missiles in Ukraine are trafficked to Mexican cartels; Europe and the U.K. are offering citizenship to mercenaries who fight in Ukraine; Ontario doctors suggested the unvaccinated should be given psychiatric medication; Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are not melting; a Washington state law allows the government to take children from the custody of parents who do not let their children get gender-affirming surgery; the Ukrainian intelligence chief is in a coma in Germany; Bill Gates is funding a new Chinese pathogen that will sicken Americans.

Again, this is new material that got traction on the internet over just a four-week period in 2023. — Whether it is a matter of be: by the legitimate businesses that are the essence of a free market economy, people around the world are contending with a sea of misinformation and disinformation aimed at triggering their insecurities, exploiting their grievances, and drowning out the trustworthy sources that they once relied on. This modern information environment has shattered trust, laying the groundwork for those hoping to thrive when enough people believe nothing or are willing to believe anything. [The Death of Truth, pp 98-100]

"Flood the zone with shit"—Steve Bannon

 

MONDAY PM UPDATE

 

I finished The Death of Truth. A riveting read. It could not be more timely. 

Over the last two decades we have seen the center eroded. The truths and trust shared by those in the center eroded, too. When government stopped working for people in that center, they drifted off to the fringes, lured by the fringe information they were barraged with online. Like so many of the rioters who stormed the Capitol or people who refused a safe vaccine, they became vulnerable to the false promises promoted by the demagogues, hucksters, and conspiracy theorists that the algorithms were steering them to. 

[In  chapter 15] we have listed the practical ways that governments can step in to make the internet a calmer, safer place. If that happens and if, at the same time, those who have been lured to the fringes begin to see their elected officials—given attention by calmer, more trust-building online content—working together and actually getting things done, the disaffected and the alienated will be less cynical and less likely to sign on to the demagogues’ alternatives. If some of what these center-oriented officials get done is in areas where there is dire need and broad consensus—such as initiatives aimed at fixing immigration or public education, creating a fairer tax system, or addressing elder-care and health-care costs—public cynicism and vulnerability to those bad actors and their toxic misinformation barrages will likely recede further. This could create a virtuous cycle in place of a downward spiral. Those who have been lured to the fringes will start to believe again in democracy, in government, and in other institutions and experts. They will be less likely to believe that the world is full of conspiracies that threaten them. 

They will start to believe in truth again. [The Death of Truth, pg. 236]

The final chapter (15) discusses Steve's broad range of promising tech and political reforms. The latter include  things such as "top two," "ranked choice" elections voting mechanisms, and direct plebiscite ballot referendum initiatives to counter and/or mitigate the pernicious effects of gerrymandering and deep-pockets dark money PACs. While I find that all intriguing, I cannot shake my abiding concerns going to interference by courts stuffed with reactionary FedSoc judges.

In any event, Steven Brill rocks. And, this book harks to a number of prior post relevant topics:

Might U.S. military veterans take up arms against us?

The Age of Grievance
Define "Civility"
The AI Mirror
The new Apple of my AI
Project 2025 posts

Just to cite a few (click any headline). Below, a conversation with the author.

 

 

 

TUESDAY UPDATE

 

Generally apropos of this overall riff? My daily stop at The Atlantic turned this up.

When the coronavirus pandemic started, the media scholar Lilie Chouliaraki, who teaches at the London School of Economics, knew she’d have to be more careful than many of her neighbors. A transplant recipient and lymphoma patient, she was at very high risk of serious illness. In her new book, Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, she writes that rather than feeling victimized by this situation, she was grateful to have the option of sheltering in place. Still, as the pandemic wore on and opponents of masking and social distancing in Britain—as well as in the United States and many other nations—began to claim that they were victims of government overreach and oppression, Chouliaraki grew both confused and compelled by the role that victimhood language was playing in real decisions about the degree to which society should reopen.

 

COVID isn’t the only recent context in which victimhood has gotten rhetorically vexing. At the height of #MeToo, in 2017 and 2018, the U.S. seemed to engage in a linguistic battle over who got to call themselves victims: those who said they had suffered assault or harassment, or those who stood accused of committing those offenses. In Wronged, Chouliaraki links this debate to pandemic-era arguments about public health versus personal freedom in order to make the case that victimhood has transformed into a cultural trophy of sorts, a way for a person not just to gain sympathy but also to accumulate power against those who have wronged them. Of course, people call themselves victims for all sorts of very personal reasons—for example, to start coming to grips with a traumatic experience. But Chouliaraki is more interested in the ways victimhood can play out publicly—in particular, when powerful actors co-opt its rhetoric for their own aims.

Central to Chouliaraki’s exploration is the distinction she draws between victimhood and vulnerability. She argues that victimhood is not a condition but a claim—that you’re a victim not when something bad happens to you, but when you say, “I am wronged!” Anyone, of course, can make this declaration, no matter the scale (or even reality) of the wrong they’ve suffered. For this reason, per Chouliaraki, victimhood should be a less important barometer for public decision making than vulnerability, which is a condition. Some forms of it are physical or natural, and cannot be changed through human intervention. As a transplant patient, Chouliaraki is forever more vulnerable to illness than she used to be. Other sorts of vulnerability are more mutable. A borrower with poor credit is vulnerable to payday lenders, but regulatory change could make that untrue (or could make payday loans affordable). Such an intervention, crucially, would protect not just present borrowers but future ones. Focusing on vulnerability rather than victimhood, she suggests, is a better way to prevent harm…

Just what I need—another book dropped into the endlessly accruing pile.

We'll see how this coheres with Frank Bruni's The Age of Grievance. Ahhh... "victimhood."

Ever heard of the "Rescuer-Victim-Persecutor Triangle?" The "scripts people live?"

Steiner's book was the first one Cheryl and I read together in 1974 at our outset. It has aged rather well, IMO (It's been updated / re-issued w/ a new Forward, BTW).

Short take: To the extent you live a "scripted" life (your socially shaped "persona"), you are not "free" (in the moral agency sense). Don't know about you, but I've spent most of my 78+ years laboring to unlearn that shit.

Of late I can think of no more poignant "Victims" than those of our Poor Oppressed Majority of the Heritage Christian Nationalist Project 2025 drama.

 

LILIE CHOULIARAKI UPDATE

This woman personifies the word "scholar" at its best.

THE PLATFORMIZATION OF PAIN

Although our languages of pain are deeply grounded in the past, there is nonetheless something irreducibly new about the uses of victimhood today. The platformization of pain—that is, the performance of vulnerability on and through the commercial logic of social media platforms—has transformed the premises upon which victimhood is now claimed. It has done so in two ways: by reorganizing the communicative politics of pain and by expanding the realms of suffering in which victimhood can be claimed.

To begin with, platformization has enabled everyone with a mobile phone and a social media account to broadcast their pain to the 4.48 billion users across social media platforms. Such openness on internet platforms had earlier been greeted as a democratizing move, where marginalized groups found a way to voice their suffering and mobilize social forces for political change. Merlyna Lim, for example, had early on argued that to understand the massive Arab Spring protests of 2011 against the Hosni Mubarak regime, we need to explore the online habits of Egypt’s oppositional youth. Their engagement with Facebook and Twitter, she said, gave them “the means to shape repertoires of contention, frame the issues, propagate unifying symbols, and transform online activism into offline protests.”

In the course of the past decade, however, most scholars became ambivalent about this potential. Rather than a matter of benign technological connectivity, they contend, such expansion of voice has been driven by digital platforms’ corporate interests, which capitalize on user attention and engagement for profit. This means that even though social media platforms continue to make a difference, for instance in the case of the hashtag #MeToo, where they amplified women’s voices about their experiences of violence and abuse, they often do more harm than good. A sinister counterexample that makes the point is the emergence of misogynistic activisms that claim victimhood in order to legitimize violence against women. In this context, Alice Marwick and Robyn Caplan discuss the “manosphere,” a male-only community in websites such as incels.com that spreads its “misogynistic ontology by portraying feminism as a man-hating movement which victimizes men and boys” and that uses this portrayal as an excuse for attacking women. Such groups instrumentalize the communication of pain to turn women into wrong-doers who sexually manipulate their “vulnerable and innocent victims.” This online amplification of misogyny, critics argue, should be seen not only as a matter of patriarchal ideology but also as a matter of the algorithmic logic of platforms that in the pursuit of profit maximize the visibility of any claim to pain so as to monetize user attention: “The misogynist manosphere,” as Molly Dragiewicz and her colleagues’ research shows, “is significantly empowered by the ability to exploit the affordances and algorithmic characteristics of the contemporary digital media environment.”

The platformization of pain, to summarize, does not simply disseminate content but further reorganizes the communicative politics of pain in terms of how and by whom claims to pain are made, who gets the most visibility, and which online communities get legitimized and empowered or not. At the heart of this process lie the platforms’ technosocial architectures, specifically their capacity for anonymous and automated connectivity, which enables competing claims to pain to proliferate online, disconnected from their conditions of emergence—that is, both from the identity of the claimant (through anonymity) and from the context of the claim (through automation)—and so further dismantles the distinction between sufferer and perpetrator. At the same time, the platforms’ orientation toward virality—quantifying user engagement by response counts (retweets, likes) and size of communities (followers)—amplifies already popular claims to suffering without asking questions about who makes them or in which contexts of violence those claims are made. As José van Dijck puts it, “There is no quality assessment built into these [app] buttons[, so that] online quantification indiscriminately accumulates acclamation and applause and, by implication, depreciation and disapproval.”

Beyond restructuring the communication of victimhood, platformization has also expanded the realms of vulnerability within which claims to pain can be made. Digital violence, particularly in the form of online hate speech, has today extended these realms of suffering in that as hate speech goes online, it transfers already existing claims to trauma or injury onto social media platforms… [Chouliaraki, Wronged, pp. 30-33]

Jus' sayin'. Read her Sheet.

 

Scholar. Eminently so. LSE is lucky to have her.

 

More to come..

_________

  

Harris, obviously

 

"Call your next witness."

  

"Nothing further, your Honor."

 

The Defendant shall be sentenced to 4-8 years of the Harris-Walz Administration.

 

NEWS ERRATUM

“The stakes for Trump this election are arguably the highest they’ve ever been. His criminal cases don’t go away if he loses. Yet he seems to be phoning it in, running a remarkably low-energy, undisciplined campaign,” explained Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump spokesperson. “From spending days off the campaign trail golfing to coming up with frankly weak nicknames like ‘Kamabala,’ it feels like he’s lost his mojo."

_________

  

Project 2025 keeps popping up at DNC 2024 in Chicago

 

Yeah, sure.

 

First, let's hear from the ever-astute Legal Eagle Liz Dye.

 

 

Also, a quick summation from the Wall Street Journal.

 

I've long been way deep into this P.2025 thing. See "A breadth of sneering anti-"Woke Cultural Elites" vitriol. One Convenient Location." See also my July 4th post, "A Republic, if we can keep it."

 

 

One need only peruse to page 4 of 918 to catch the start-to-finish permeating odor.

 

More Photoshop fun with their cover art:

"Dead Before Arrival?"

 

Back to DNC 2024 shortly. Final night. Wednesday night was very nice.

 

UPDATE

 

SOME WEDNESDAY RECAP STUFF

 

My Guv Wes Moore was a primetime speaker.

 

He began by recounting our Baltimore bridge disaster back in March, and the immediate assistance proactively provided by the Biden-Harris administration.

Also speaking: Oprah, and Mayor Pete. Both were marvelous.

Finally the VP nominee, MN Guv Tim Walz,

 

FINAL NIGHT

 

Al Sharpton introduced The Central Pa=k Five, wrongfully, racially targeted by the lifelong bigot Trump.

I come with a bit of personal reflection on racial bigotry.

_________

  

Michelle Obama speaks at DNC 2024

 

And, oh yeah, her husband spoke as well.

 

 

A BRIEF AUG 21ST OBSERVATION

  

_________

  

Democratic National Convention week 2024

One hopes it will be peaceful and safe.

BUT, FIRST, FAST-FORWARD TO NOV 5TH. NY TIMES.

What Worries Me Most About Election Night

…Imagine an election night this November in which the two parties are trading swing-state victories. The Democrats capture Nevada, while the Republicans take Arizona. The Republicans win the big prize of Pennsylvania, while the Democrats top them in Wisconsin and Michigan. The nation is waiting on Georgia. If Georgia goes red, it’s President Trump; if Georgia goes blue, it’s President Harris.

Then, local news headlines start to circulate. There are reports of unspecified “problems” in the vote in Fulton County. And in Gwinnett County. And in DeKalb, Coffee and Spalding Counties. Republican officials are refusing to certify the results in their counties. They say they are making “reasonable inquiries.”

As legal challenges wend through the courts, a wave of disinformation, confusion and propaganda swells, fueled by unproven claims that something is amiss in these Georgia counties, and also by similar noise — and possibly also certification refusals — in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Nevada. (All have seen local Republicans try the certification refusal ruse since 2020.)

Under recently revised federal law, each state has until Dec. 11 to send official, certified state results to Washington for the Electoral College count. But if a state doesn’t meet that deadline, then what?

The point of these certification refusals may not be to falsify or flip a result, but simply to prevent the emergence of one. If one or more states fail to produce official results, blocking any candidate from reaching 270 =electoral votes, the 12th Amendment prescribes Gerald L.K. Smith’s dream scenario: a vote in the newly elected House of Representatives to determine the presidency. Each state delegation would get one vote; today, Republicans control 26 state delegations; Democrats control 22; and two are evenly divided.

Our democratic system is not invincible, but it is strong. Certification of election results is a ministerial responsibility that is not discretionary. Legitimate election challenges are handled with recounts and litigation, not by individual election board members. There is no loophole that allows bad-faith officials to so flummox the electoral system that they take the choice of the next president away from the American people…

…A recent report in The Times quoted an official with the conservative Heritage Foundation saying that “the conditions” in the country are now such that “most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.” Michael Whatley, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, has declined to answer when asked if the party intends to try to block vote certifications…

Opponents no doubt will fight any certification denials in the courts. Those efforts are important, and every state should be shoring up its own legal and electoral system now to prepare for, deter and defend against any effort to sabotage certification. But stopping such subterfuge also depends on an informed public that refuses to let false narratives take hold…

…Now is the time to get to know your local election board, especially if you live in a place where election denialism has taken hold, and where certification refusals may be coming. Public awareness and vigilance can make a difference. No one should be surprised when certification refusals happen or when they are then exploited to try to maximize chaos and upset… [Rachel Maddow, Aug 19th, NY Times]

Goes to the concerns of my prior post.

 

MR TRUMP'S DNC WEEK

 

 

ERRATUM: 15 SEC PHOTOSHOP OVERLAY

UPDATE:

ALSO RELEVANT TO THE PRIOR POST

 

Click here.

Quick excerpt:

The F.B.I., which has worked to protect Americans from extremist violence since the nineteen-twenties, when it took on the Ku Klux Klan, has warned of a resurgence of the far right. Near the end of Trump’s term in office, the Department of Homeland Security declared for the first time that domestic violent extremists, rather than foreign terrorists, were “the most persistent and lethal threat” to the nation, primarily in the form of “lone offenders and small groups.” Christopher Wray, the F.B.I.’s director, clarified to a congressional committee that the threat was largely from adherents to “some kind of white-supremacist-type ideology.” Then came the storming of the Capitol. President Joe Biden, on his first day in office, commissioned White House staff to draft the first-ever “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.” The document, issued in June, 2021, promised “a comprehensive approach to addressing the threat while safeguarding bedrock American civil rights and civil liberties.”

Liberal critics of the F.B.I. complain that its laboriously nonpartisan terminology hides the disproportionately greater size and lethality of the current threat from the right. According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, at the University of Maryland, between 2012 and 2022 far-right extremists killed two hundred and nine people; the far left killed thirty-seven. (Most of that violence took place after Trump’s election, including a hundred and fifty of the killings by the far right.) Yet the F.B.I.’s odd taxonomy serves a purpose: it avoids any hint that the agency is basing investigative choices on an antipathy toward certain political beliefs. The officials repeatedly reminded me that the First Amendment protects even the most abhorrent bigotry. One of them noted, “We will not investigate people for being antisemitic, because it is not illegal.” And ever since the Senate’s Church Committee revealed, in 1975, that the F.B.I. had conducted politically motivated surveillance of civil-rights leaders, environmentalists, and others on the left, agency bureaucrats have feared the wrath they would face from Congress and the public if they were again caught crossing that line.

DNC OPENING NIGHT WRAP

 

Rsn way long. We got to bed at about 12:30 a.m. It was worth staying up to see and hear all six and a half hours. I found it quite uplifting overall. Notwithstanding that DNC 2024 is obviously a highly partisan national event, the relative lack of bitter bad faith and ill will have been thus far palpable contrasts to the relentless derisive, hyperbolic, aggrieved tone of the preceding RNC convention in Milwaukee.. A couple of my favorite takeaway lines:

"Stand Up;

Speak Up;

Show Up."

  

"Kamala Harris, for the People."

That latter phrase comprised the first five words uttered introducing Kamala in court as she began her career as a prosecutor in California.

 

CODA

  

Recall “The Age of Grievance.”

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