'...research has shown that most Americans believe conspiracy theories of some sort. Why then, if most of us believe conspiracies, do we generally think of conspiracy theorists as loony?
New research from the University of Illinois Chicago found that it’s because people are quite bad at identifying what is or isn’t a conspiracy theory when it’s something they believe.'
'Over the past decade, increasing evidence suggests artistic expression emerged much earlier in human evolution than scientists once thought, and it's reshaping our understanding of the cognitive abilities of archaic humans, such as Neanderthals and earlier hominins.'
The price of Huggies diapers went up 6% between April- June 2023.
Inflation, right? Wrong.
Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Huggies, reported that the cost to make its products fell by $75 million.They took the money and ran, banking $168 million in operating profits in Q3 2023.
Now, new research shows that corporate profits drove 53% of inflation during the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2023. During the 40 years prior to the pandemic, profits drove just 11% of price growth.
'Are people really less kind than they used to be? That’s the question that has bothered psychologist Adam Mastroianni most of his life. He set out to find an answer—a search that recently culminated in a paper published in the journal Nature titled, “The Illusion of Moral Decline.”'
(A podcast but I chose to read the transcript instead. Very long read but interesting.)
Maybe in another life I will eventually understand what happened to the opensource culture/ethos which has been (in) my life for such a long time: tolerance, kindness, paying forward, reciprocity/mutual aid, collaboration, learning, working & sharing (in the open, as much as possible... "a rising tide..." and such).
Apart from the sheer contempt & stereotypes received over night, some people literally don't know jack about me, yet seem hell-bent on making me part of the greater problem and throwing DYOR tantrums...
Not once was I questioning the reality of the abuse, harm & other types of oppression present in tech/opensource circles. Even though it wasn't anywhere on the radar of my own lived opensource experience, I've not been blind to these issues, the reports or the suffering in other communities and I can muster some empathy. We are in full agreement that something must change for the better, uregntly and not just in FLOSS. Having some personal questions about chosen language, tone of voice, effectiveness &implementation aspects of the currently put-forward solution (aka CoC) to the larger/deeper problem — none of this is grounds to be questioning my values or being written off as an ignoramus, non-ally or even enemy and implied part of the cause why social change is needed...
Repeating for the 3rd time in this thread: After some actual great, helpful tangible views/insights/examples from other people, adding a CoC (with the right language) for my projects seems the currently best available solution/signal I can offer to people. I'm on board. Yet, I'm also actively bracing myself about taking this step, since the actual true change here is not the publishing of some standard behavior rules, but also having to enforce them later... This leads to the other factor of uncertainty of my original questioning: I'm not sure how well equipped I'll be to deal with such arbitration/enforcement tasks, i.e. emotional(!), personal bandwidth, stress tolerance and potential lack of immediate availability to deal with any such new issues, in addition to all the other project maintenance tasks already consuming so much of my time/focus...
So whereas others are viewing these issues purely on an abstract systemic level and it's all nicely crystal clear and unquestionable what to do, to me the issue is a personal/pragmatic one, and I imagine it's similar for many other smaller projects (run by single devs, small groups) who've already been looking into CoCs, but are holding back with adoption (regardless that they're trying to achieve the right goal). No reason to give those people shit...
Assumption: We want to do right by people and not violate the trust that certain behaviors are expected and enforced. Do we signal a warm message to the world by adopting a clear set of rules with a friendly tone of voice (yet to be selected), but then later maybe end up in conflict ourselves due to not being able to effectively resolve some violations in a timely manner and getting emotionally & motivationally super drained by the whole process? Is it so hard to acknowledge that this is far from being an easy decision, taking on yet another burden of open source project management, especially if one is stretched thin already?
FWIW I'm not expecting a reply from anyone, so please don't feel pressured to provide your "free labor" here to help someone figuring this all out a bit more... Still, I'd be grateful for any answers! Thank you in advance! ✌️
If you are curious about the novel results published in Science and Nature by the collaboration btw Meta and US academics, you might want to read #ComplexityThoughts
I try to build some background for non-experts of #ComputationalSocialScience and summarize the main findings.
Finally, I dig into the ongoing debate, covering existing documents and my chats with Sandra González-Bailón, Sander van der Linden, Pierluigi Sacco and others
This debate might be of high interest for self-organized decentralized platforms, such as #Mastodon and the #Fediverse in general
AI Revolution: Simulating Human Behavior for Groundbreaking Social Science.
Summary: A team of researchers predicts artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), could redefine social science research.
They believe LLMs, trained on vast amounts of text data, can mimic human responses to aid in extensive and rapid human behavior studies.