The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Fixing and making things, what tools to get and what skills to learn, ...
bryan
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by bryan »

Dragline wrote:
cmonkey wrote:
Ego wrote:Kids born today will probably never drive a car.
A pretty bold suggestion and I tend to agree with it but not for the reason you believe. Grand kids perhaps. Self-driving cars have replaced flying cars after everyone figured out that wouldn't work. There is nothing beyond a few dog and pony shows put out by a couple of "super smart" companies to suggest they will be here on a mass scale within our lifetimes.
Yeah, I don't see this happening anytime soon in the US except on a very limited basis in some kind of "model community", largely for legal and cultural reasons. (Commercial trucking from depot-to-depot along major highways might be different.) It would be more likely to occur in modern places with strong governments like Singapore, Dubai or one of the newer cities in China. The key to making it work is really banning most human-driven cars and trucks in a given area and then normalizing all the streets in some machine-friendly manner.
I think Tesla has made a really nice strategic move by outfitting their fleet with all of the sensors, hardware needed for self-driving and feeding all the data back to HQ where it can be used as a training/testing/regression set. The gradual shift of collecting while humans drive -> collect while highway drive assist is on -> collect while full auto plus the ability to do a software update for an improved full auto which has been back, regression tested already sets Tesla up to introduce full auto years before the competition. As far as collecting driving, environment data goes: Tesla >> Google >> Auto Manufacturers. Self-driving is _already_ at mass scale (Model S, Model 3, Model X I mean), it's just not enabled (you already paid for it, assuming Tesla doesn't charge for the full auto software update).

https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self- ... tesla-cars

Banning human drivers and making streets machine-friendly would be nice, but Tesla, Google have known that it's not likely before they even started development for self-driving.
jacob wrote:While funny, I think that was a bit flippant. My point was, what happens when the web becomes "100% social media" widely adopting the norms and methods of social media. This means no more single standing websites (they will be social); no more news reporting (it will be algorithmically combined tweets); no forums (it will be a newsfeed that either limits thoughts to 140 characters or wants you to convert ideas that are longer then 3 sentences into a note); no search engines (because if it's important somebody will "share" it in the feed).
Well we can consider what happened as we transitioned from word of mouth, assemblies -> carrier services e.g. mail -> printing press -> telegraph -> telephone -> radio -> television -> internet/email/forums -> cell phones/texting -> social media silos (youtube, Vine, Twitter, Instagram, FB, snapchat). Kind of for better or worse.. More accessible communication mechanisms means the general public has grown in importance (consuming and producing).

jacob
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

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Fake news getting worse. So it's clear now what happens when people won't bother to verify, but what happens when they can't verify.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/30/media/f ... index.html

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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

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Twitter suffering under its own format. It's easier to insult someone with an anonymous 140 chars than it is discuss publicly as adults. Consider twitter an extreme case. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles ... ng-twitter

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Ego
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by Ego »

Ego wrote:
jacob wrote: But perhaps that is exactly the "emotional uncertainty" that Harari is talking about?! If facts don't matter then it does indeed become very important to learn how to deal with a society where facts are irrelevant and all that matters are emotional perceptions, facts be damned.
Well, he seems to think the algos will solve that problem through manipulation on a scale that is unimaginable to us even though we've been playing the game for a few years now.

Watch 3 minutes from the starting point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ1yS9J ... e&t=49m14s
I have not read it yet, but I believe Informocracy by Malka Older touches on this. The publisher has made it available for free. It is available until midnight eastern tonight.

http://giveaway.tor.com/

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jacob
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by jacob »

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... y-theories ... and more.

Some recent coverage describing how it's been profitable to set up fake-news sites and write targeted niche content to have be shared a few thousand times on social media and get the resulting ad money from uninformed people clicking back. The example I saw was a 17 year old teenager in Macedonia running a news site writing targeted fake news much like an aspiring romance writer might focus their writing efforts on writing kindle short stories. Once an article gets disproven and taken down or stops getting shared, the website owner could already have made a few hundred bucks in ad revenue from people clicking back.

This is a case where the AI sharing algorithms coupled with innate human social tendencies and ignorance is mutually reinforcing. It's actually quite genius but it's hard to imagine how this can be a good thing.

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Ego
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by Ego »

jacob wrote:Fake news getting worse. So it's clear now what happens when people won't bother to verify, but what happens when they can't verify.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/30/media/f ... index.html
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/ ... -from-real

The researchers at Stanford's Graduate School of Education have spent more than a year evaluating how well students across the country can evaluate online sources of information.

Middle school, high school and college students in 12 states were asked to evaluate the information presented in tweets, comments and articles. More than 7,800 student responses were collected.

In exercise after exercise, the researchers were "shocked" — their word, not ours — by how many students failed to effectively evaluate the credibility of that information.

The students displayed a "stunning and dismaying consistency" in their responses, the researchers wrote, getting duped again and again. They weren't looking for high-level analysis of data but just a "reasonable bar" of, for instance, telling fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from neutral sources and ads from articles.


Take a look at the executive summary. They provide examples of real and fake ads as well as snippets on how the students arrived at their decisions. Amazing.

https://sheg.stanford.edu/upload/V3Less ... .21.16.pdf

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

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In 1671, Governor William Berkeley of Virginia wrote: "I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing and I hope we shall not have, these hundred years, for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both." As the British government once told the governors of Massachusetts, "Great inconvenience may arise by the liberty of printing."

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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by jacob »

https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/15/faceb ... -checkers/

http://www.journalism.org/2016/12/15/ma ... confusion/

I predict that the number of high school graduates who "think they know all the facts" because they "read all the news [on facebook]" will decrease. I know I'm looking forward to seeing this effect in at least a few people.

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Ego
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by Ego »

Q: Do you think the Bowling Green Massacre justifies President Trump’s travel ban?

http://i.imgur.com/YNntq88.jpg

http://www.recode.net/2017/2/10/1457618 ... -fake-news

[Mod edit: Memes should preferably remain "link only" (use URL not IMG) lest the forum discourse collapse several Wheaton levels downhill real fast. As mentioned elsewhere I'm trying to keep this forum/site a few levels above firing slogans and pictures at each other. Insofar that's unpossible we might as well go to facebook, right? :? ]

Dragline
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

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Evidently, they like the taste of scapegoating Koolaid. With a shaker of sadism mixed in for the 5-year olds in handcuffs as a "threat to national security."

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Ego
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/opin ... ruths.html

Why We Believe Obvious Untruths

You know that smoking causes cancer. But can you articulate what smoke does to our cells, how cancers form and why some kinds of smoke are more dangerous than others? We’re guessing no. Most of what you “know” — most of what anyone knows — about any topic is a placeholder for information stored elsewhere, in a long-forgotten textbook or in some expert’s head.

The sense of understanding is contagious. The understanding that others have, or claim to have, makes us feel smarter. This happens only when people believe they have access to the relevant information.

The key point here is not that people are irrational; it’s that this irrationality comes from a very rational place. People fail to distinguish what they know from what others know because it is often impossible to draw sharp boundaries between what knowledge resides in our heads and what resides elsewhere.

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Ego
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by Ego »

Ego wrote:
I wonder if Tesla's technique of having the wealthy fund development that will benefit the masses isn't also a way to get those who have a greater influence on the system to buy in. Paint It Black!

https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self- ... tesla-cars
One step beyond.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FseeVy7uvU

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Ego
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by Ego »

Conditioning Association Habituation

One of the fringe benefits of travel is that it turns a spotlight on just how many of the things that I believe are bottom-of-the-pyramid needs are actually things to which I've become habituated. They can often be barriers to the change needed for reinvention. Fortunately, with effort they can be unlearned.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Ego:

I agree, but two things that have changed since you and I were children are that there are twice as many humans on the planet, and most of them now live in urban locations.

I believe that the most basic skill sets needed by humans are those that are now required for our survival, because evolution gave us big brains in exchange for long guts, fur, and serious teeth. If you found yourself alone in any sort of wilderness, and you could only bring one tool with you, it would probably be a knife or an ax. If you could only bring a few skills with you, they would probably be fire-starting-and-maintenance and/or water acquisition/filtration and/or rough shelter from the elements creation.

However, and this is a big however, the reality of the almost universal prevalence of technology and urbanization of very large human population pretty much either renders the above moot or secondary. In urban situation of 21st century affluence, a 6 year old of average IQ can order a pizza to be delivered to a hotel room using a phone app. In urban situation of 21st century poverty, a 6 year old can dig through a giant trash heap looking for copper or food scraps. It is not the case in either urban setting that a 6 year old can freely make use of a knife and some matches.

What I am trying to get at here is that in any situation more populated than "alone on 20 acres with my dog", survival skills will necessarily be secondary to social skills. Since current reality is that there is only something less than 2 acres per human (forget about pets!) on planet, social skills rule the school.

IOW, even when addressing most bottom pyramid needs on Maslow's ladder, it is almost always and everywhere necessary to first engage in contact, communication, contract, co-operation and/or conflict with other humans first. Even though my current travels are primarily limited to realm also traveled by Native Americans by foot or canoe in my region 500 years ago, within this realm I find myself in areas of greatly varying affluence and population density, and it seems to me that these are the primary determinants of skills needed for survival in given domain.

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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by jacob »

One of the interesting thing Jared Diamond noted in his book about traditional societies (and ours) was that in traditional [tribal] societies, sex is practically available on demand whereas food is scarce and intermittent. This is the exact opposite of modern/western society where sex is often restricted to one or zero partners. Interestingly, traditional societies have sex to deal with the frustration from lack of food much like moderns will eat to deal with the frustration from lack of sex. Maslow is thus flipped around and as such seems like a WEIRD construct.

Add: Consider how sexual frustration was used as a lens for psychoanalysis (Freud) in the west. Insofar scarcity determines psychosocial development, what would similar theories look like when/if food is the scarce element (like in hunter gatherer societies)... or intellectual stimulation for that matter (for high IQ outsiders)?

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@jacob:

True, and this is not unrelated to the fact that in traditional societies the only overweight (by modern BMI measure) members of a tribe are likely to be fertile women.

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jennypenny
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by jennypenny »

Netflix has a show on now called The Creative Brain IIRC. It's not overly informative but it does confirm a lot of the discussion here about how to get better at learning and unlock creativity. Short answer ... keep learning, try new things, and make your brain uncomfortable. They didn't mention models and frameworks specifically, but they alluded to them and how they can be applied in many different disciplines.

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Ego
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by Ego »

jacob wrote:
Wed Apr 17, 2019 6:21 pm
Maslow is thus flipped around and as such seems like a WEIRD construct.

Add: Consider how sexual frustration was used as a lens for psychoanalysis (Freud) in the west. Insofar scarcity determines psychosocial development, what would similar theories look like when/if food is the scarce element (like in hunter gatherer societies)... or intellectual stimulation for that matter (for high IQ outsiders)?
For the past few weeks I've been immersed in an honor/shame culture and have been pondering how this influences what people believe are basic human needs.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt-Sha ... f_cultures

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Teaching inner city 6th graders will also immerse you in an honor/shame culture, which is why I tend towards avoiding it. I find Sheriff Andy Griffith like behavior to be the best antidote.

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Ego
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Re: The Skills Necessary for Constant Reinvention

Post by Ego »

I've thought of this thread several times during the Times of Covid as people have been sheltering in place and getting virtually all of their information from media(ted) sources. The ability of those sources to manipulate has improved remarkably in just the few years since this tread was started. Twitter, which is still excellent for following primary sources without intermediation, has been censuring content so that the current version and the Arab Spring version appear to be different products. They have opened the door for a censor-proof decentralized version that may someday fill the gap but then there is always the Gab problem (becomes know as a place for nutjobs so the legitimate primary sources avoid it). We shall see.

Also, one of the tangents in this thread was the discussion of autonomous driving. This video of an autonomous taxi navigating a rainy Guangzhou is pretty damn amazing.

https://youtu.be/nlBiSnxWsqM

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