feralimal

Of course your eye is a sensor. As are all your senses. The difference is that the input it receives is unmediated by external sensors and software. Visualising atoms or DNA is fine, but it is an inferior source of information. By a long way.

Imagine you were born deaf and couldn't hear music. But that someone showed you a music visualiser.

Do you think if you were watching the output of that visualiser you would now know the music in some meaningful way?

Yes, look at all that squashed DNA, lol.

Seriously though, how do we know that is DNA? It just looks like wiggly worms.

And the DNA pic is black and white, but the picture of graphite is in colour. How is it in colour? Is it 'enhanced' with photoshop or something?

You don't think there's a difference between what you see with your naked eye, and what is visualised for you by sensors and software?

Perhaps this is a water filter advert: "Using activated carbon filtration devices (like Brita filters) can help reduce TCE in drinking water"

But really, how could they possibly narrow it down to that? How can they ignore all the metals that we are injected and sprayed with as possible alternative causes?

I'm sure its a cool project.

But its not showing things directly, is it? Its interpreting a frequency and converting that to an image. Is it really that different to a music visualiser?

I've looked into this a bit more, specifically reading this essay:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244014542585

which seems a fair synopsis for me, of Hayden White's position in Metahistory. I thought this quote was interesting:

"In this climate, White (1966) believes that the duty of the researchers in present time is to transform the historical studies so as to liberate the present from the burden of history and to make the historical studies fit in the aims of the community. Seen in this light, history is not seen as a fixed ultimate entity that cannot be touched and that the historians have to accept it as it is. However, the historians should refuse to study the past as an end or ultimate being but contribute to offer some solutions for the problems of the present, which the professional historiography is unable to achieve."

I liked the general analysis that it seems White provides, but I don't like the moral relativism that is implied in the quote above. Why is it a historian's job to provide solutions for the present? What special values do they have? I don't like post-modern, moral relativism - where 'my truth' is the same as 'the truth'.

My position is that our knowledge of history is imperfect, that we cannot know the past. But a single past really did occur. Rather than express the evidence and express their reasoning for what that means, when historians apply narratives over the evidence they are covering an mystifying the past. This is to say I am receiving negative knowledge - I am receiving an informed but biased view that I will find it hard to unpick. And that is all history afaik! So little primary evidence, so many books and articles!

Metahistory! That's exactly what I'm talking about. I'll take a look and thanks for the recommendation :)

That's a refreshingly honest reply! Thanks!

This is why I said that history is an interpretative act. I don't have an issue with the making the best of a past that is hard (impossible?) to discern. And that while our subject matter might be the past, we ourselves are in the present and express our understanding from our own biases and understandings - we talk ourselves into the past, in a way.

What I object to is the indisputable tone - this happened, these are the reasons, etc. It gives the reader the impression of knowledge, but this is an illusion, possibly a dangerous one. It conveys none of the reasoning, jumps and ambiguity that, I think, are the main part of these sorts of investigation.

Personally I would rather have the ambiguity, referring to source material, and try to develop a theory given the evidence - evidence-driven theories. I don't mind if there is no overarching narrative to explain it all. But it seems to me that professional historians feel empowered to present exactly that sort of a narrative, sometimes whether or not it is really supported by the evidence.

Thanks for the link.

You also say "January 6, 1614". Very specific again! Where did you get that from? There are no dates that I can see, nevermind the 6th of January.

Did you read the cover page? Not where it confirms that the book is a reproduction of another book held at Chatworth House. Ie not an original.

I mean the bit where it says: "By the Gentlemen of Graies-Inne, at the Court of White-hall, in the Banquercing House, vpon Twelfe night, 1613."

Here's a link: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Maske_of_Flowers/qC...

This says to me that the book although published (perhaps) in 1614 relates to a time in 1613.

Whenever I look into this stuff, I get more uncomfortable.

"A dance of “glorious and strange beauty” took place in a wintry garden in the south of England on January 6, 1614."

So specific!! And that's just the first line!

Is it just me, or are they just telling stories about the 16th century? Historians themselves will say history is an interpretative act. 'History' is for us in the present - it only lightly relates to what may or may not have occurred in the past, even if it presented as a fait accompli. I don't think it is possible to get this detail about what went on back then.

I see this sort of article as 'myth making'. Its not to do with reality - no sources are provided for us to check. Its just presented as a ready narrative, and we are meant to accept it.

So, what if that is the myth what are meant to take from it? I think we are meant 'edu-tained'. We can laugh at the fools back then who were literally blowing smoke up each others arses, in reclined splendour. We can enjoy a cannabis narrative - this talks to how we legalise it nowadays. These sorts of myths support the idea of how we are progressed, superior, etc.

What helps, I find, is to think of governments as administrations. The civil service does implements whatever it has been told. Politicians are voted in - this is a slight of hand to distract the public. (I think of politics as a soap opera for the middle classes.) All the while the real governors operate through global undemocratic organisations, such as the UN and the WHO.

It was relegated to acceptance about 10 years ago.

I enjoyed this article. Perhaps because I agree! There are many quotes I could pull, but I liked this:

"true education is the opposite of what many think it is. For many, becoming educated means knowing things and feeling assured that there are no important questions left in the fields you have studied and that you have now become more capable and powerful than those without an education."

I would even push a little bit further... Where the author says:

"Aside from math/formal systems, the only way we truly know anything is by honest conversations between people of drastically different experiences and worldviews."

Well, what is maths? 1 + 1 = 2, right? While that is fine conceptually, what is the real world application? What things are 'ones' that can be counted as if they were the same? Is there anything that is the same as another thing? I don't think so. Which is to say, that maths is a model too - a useful one - but it does not describe an underlying reality, only the fabricated one we create for ourselves!

PS I loved the liberation image!

For me, this touches on everything that is wrong with the setup we find we have. How we lose our privacy and are beholden to our corporations and governments.

* We are separated from our data. It should be ours, and we should be able to allow for corporates to access it if we choose to and we are able to understand the usage.

* The options we are given here are to be able to move our data from one corporate entity to another. Hardly the solution individual ownership of one's data and privacy.

* We are looking to government legislation to make this right for us, but governments like having access to all the data that the corporations share with them. Governments are in the business of managing populations at scale - the more information they have, the better modelling, nudging, manipulations of the population they can do. Basically corporate and governmental interests align.

* Not to forget that corporations lobby governmental entities for the legislation they want. Even if the legislation states one thing, there are ALWAYS backdoors that are understood.

I'm sorry to say that the attack on privacy is a coordinated one with governments AND corporations. If you hope that this time the government will write better legislation or that corporates will do the right thing, you are mistaken. They only care about being perceived to do the right thing - so public relations.

If you are aware of all that, and have a solution, I would be interested to hear. I think any solution would involve individuals acting very defensively about their data. Any solution that begs government or corporations for better action this time is doomed.

I find it really strange, amazing even that this is still a flammable topic. I mean, erosion of privacy is at the heart of Google's business. How does everyone forget this? They are a business and don't care about people or their privacy - its literally their opposition.

So, of course it makes sense that they would like the people whose privacy they are eroding to be in the dark about how much they know about them! Cos then they won't even know to protest! People are already forgetful, if the information is hidden too, in the dark Google et al will have free reign to do what they like.

Your product has a feature that curtails 'addiction' for the benefit of the user - ie to improve knowledge via spaced repetitions. A knowledgeable customer will recommend you and come back for more. Great!

Social media requires time from those users - they want to know you, crack you open psychologically, so they can then be better at selling you stuff (and, incidentally, pass all that info on to 3 letter agencies for their population modelling etc). That is a different model. They want you to be deeply engaged for a long time. The longer the better.

I absolutely agree!

But, the reality we need to accept and work from is that with vested corporate interests aligning so well with intrusive governmental and military interests, nothing is going to change.

Don't hold your breath for privacy protection legislation.

Cheers.

Its a fight for attention! I often do long comments, but sometimes I'm try to get things down to a concise yet witty nugget ;)

"Our findings show the need to go beyond genomic analyses in cancer diagnostics, as mRNA events that are silent at the DNA level are widespread contributors to cancer pathogenesis through the inactivation of tumour-suppressor genes."

I think this means that RNA vaccines could inactivate the genes that suppress cancer.

For me this talks to the wider issue of rushing out cures under 'emergency legislation' as the testing is being undertaken on the population at large. These sorts of eventualities have not been considered or accounted for in a testing process that has shrunk from 10 years into just a few months.

Fair enough - these statements are very open to interpretation.

The way I view them is to try to take an approach that a lawyer would. Could a lawyer try to argue that they process the data and generate an artifact that is passed to facebook, and that is fine because they are not passing the content? I think a lawyer could and would fancy their chances. And anyway, who's going to take them to court?

Do you recollect all the kerfuffle about the NSA collecting meta-data not the actual content? I think what I'm suggesting is akin to that already existent process.

We can trace the throw away culture back to Edward Bernais.

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/pr-created-...

I think consumer goods were made and advertised as being 'made to last'. However, it is far better for the manufacturer to have a customer that buys the same goods more frequently, say every 5 years, rather than every 20 or 30.

Bernais created the concept of a consumer and influenced the masses to buy goods so they could meet their unconscious desires, not according to function.

That is the root of the issue. If as consumers we think we're buying a fridge, but are actually unknowingly buying an aspirational lifestyle. We may think we're too savvy for to be taken in by marketing - but we are not. We need to get far more savvy!

What I would love to see is open source white goods: fridges, printers, ovens, cars even. And to use them.

"The privacy and security of your personal chats with family and friends will never change.

Neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see the content you share with family and friends, which includes your personal messages and calls, the attachments you share, or the location you send. We do not keep logs of who everyone is messaging or calling, and WhatsApp does not share your contacts with Facebook."

Does this mean that Whatsapp will not share invasive data with Facebook? I think not.

Does it mean that they are able to run whatever profilers they like over the data and then share the output of that? I think so. They wouldn't be sharing the content per say, just the evaluation of the data. I would also suspect that shared profiling would have been going on from asap from the day they bought whatsapp.

How dare you! My comment, I felt, cut to the nub of what is going on!

Google is scrapping information from you from your phone, your browser, your emails, your searches. They track you at scale. They track millions of people at scale! Using all that data + data mining + their AI capabilities + psychologists, they are able to generate incredibly detailed models of each individual. Their models will have predictive power. And that is what their whole business is about - how to best monetise you for their customers and shareholders. (Of course Apple, Facebook, Amazon etc are trying to do the same.)

So, think about it, they have all this information, and will continue to collect it, but won't give you an indication on what they are collecting - why would they do that? Its because we are reaching a data equivalent of the uncanny valley - where google (et al) know you better than you know yourself, but don't want you to know that!

Luckily, modern life has made the interminable meetings of the 70's a thing of the past. Right? Right?!?

Yes, as the US cedes the economy to China, they will also surely become stronger militarily. And with the US (and other Western countries) in a perpetual lockdown in the coming years, which will accelerate the transition - we had better make sure we are able to copy the tech!

'cos it would be too creepy if they did!

Democrats are democratic in the US, of course.

Oh, I see. Names don't matter if they are inconvenient....

Nazis (a literal shortening of Nationalsozialismus) - no they weren't the left.. 'cos Hitler, and Hitler bad.

Freedom is speech, but not 'hate speech'. (Who defines 'hate speech'?) What is hate speech except for a reason to stop people speaking. These are ideological positions couched as morality. And everyone needs moral busybodies who know it all, to tell them what to do, right?

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” - CS Lewis

Ok - here's my criticism of the 'right'. They talk about less government, but never do anything about it! Never. They will say whatever it is that sounds good to conservatives, but do the opposite.

Left and right are all on board with the same system. And this is increasing a fascist system, run by corporations.

But whatever the case - if people purport to have a constitution that allows for free speech - but that a lot of people do not have meaningful ability to exercise it, well its not surprising that places like Gab spring up. And that all those de-platformed views make their way there. People need to be able to have their say.

It used to be that it was a left position to say 'I don't like what you say, but I'll fight for your right to say it'. Those days are long gone - de-platform the hate speaker!

No it's not. They built roads, made the people's wagon (volkswagen), etc.

Stalin and Mao were communists.