The #mainstream#media's constant "On the one hand... on the other..." approach to pretty much every #issue is definitely not helping the general public's apparent endorsement of the #aphorism "For every #complex#problem, there is a simple, easy-to-understand #wrong#answer".
If we want an educated - or at least informed - public, we have to stop over-simplifying the issues and facts, turning them to blenderized pablum, and get people to appreciate that real life isn't simple, black-and-white.
#BarackObama offered a complex analysis of the conflict between #Israel & #Hamas, telling thousands of former aides that they were all “complicit to some degree” in the current bloodshed.
“I look at this, & I think back, ‘What could I have done during my presidency to move this forward, as hard as I tried?’” he said in an interview conducted by his fmr staffers for their podcast, Pod Save America. “But there’s a part of me that’s still saying, ‘Well, was there something else I could have done?’”
#Obama entered the WH convinced he could be the president who would resolve the decades-old conflict between #Israelis & #Palestinians.
He left office after yrs of friction & mistrust w/PM #Netanyahu of #Israel, who was frustrated by the president’s masterminding of the #Iran nuclear deal & by his demands that Israel suspend new #settlements.
In his comments, delivered at a gathering of his fmr staff in Chicago, #Obama acknowledged the strong emotions the #war had raised, saying that “this is century-old stuff that’s coming to the fore.”
You won’t believe the numbers. With inflation taken into account, this year’s planned budget for the #Pentagon and the Department of Energy’s work on #nuclear#weapons is $886 billion. More than half of the discretionary budget is now spent on the Pentagon This means that areas like #education, public #health, job training, and protecting the #environment have to compete
You won’t believe the numbers. With inflation taken into account, this year’s planned budget for the #Pentagon and the Department of Energy’s work on #nuclear#weapons is $886 billion. More than half of the discretionary budget is now spent on the Pentagon This means that areas like #education, public #health, job training, and protecting the #environment have to compete
I'm still amazed by this every time. Watch the transient dynamics (relatively synchronous dampening #oscillations) of autotroph biomass in a 5-patch #metacommunity turn into an oscillatory #Turing pattern with completely asynchronous dynamics. #Emergence in #complex#systems#science
AND I'M DOING ACTUAL RESEARCH WITH THIS CAN YOU BELIEVE IT THIS IS SO COOL
Whenever I assign junior #programmers a substantive task, they inevitably return with a #complex solution. I would then analyse their solution, simplify it, and show the simpler version to them, they respond every time, "OK, what's so great about that? It's so stupidly #simple."🤷
A little piece I spoke to, and which my #ANU#Cybernetics colleague, Lauren Pay, wrangled into coherence - it's about the history of #speechRecognition as a #complex#system - and how the ANU School of Cybernetics can help you learn how to interrogate and shape such systems.
Written to promote the school's new short courses.
#MyersBriggs#PersonalityTests is popular and that is about the only thing it has going for it. In reality it is no better than rolling die and assigning people a personality profile based on the die roll.
Carl Jung's ideas are at the base of the test. Unfortunately Jung's work has never been empirically tested. Hint when your base level construct is unsound you might have a train wreck on your hands.
"Useful" in that it points some people to the brand-new idea of #diversity (formerly "irrational behavior" that needs to be addressed by monologues on "why you should see it my way").
Harmful in that it tries to boil down the #complex to the #complicated, with no proper foundation because there can't be one. Especially harmful in its management-by-psychotest form: we'll "understand" each other much better once we've properly labelled ourselves, for life.
"It’s increasingly looking like this may be one of the most hilariously inappropriate applications of AI that we’ve seen yet." I am riveted by the extensive documentation of how ChatGPT-powered Bing is now completely unhinged. @simon has chronicled it beautifully here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/
Complex analysis in insane
Your function is bounded? Congrats, this function is constant!...