Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped.

  In June, the Turing Institute, the UK's national center for data science and AI, put out a report summing up discussions at a series of workshops it held in late 2020. The clear consensus was that AI tools had made little, if any, impact in the fight against covid.

• A Famous Honesty Researcher Is Retracting A Study Over Fake Data

  According to the 2012 paper, when people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than the end, they were less likely to lie. A seemingly cheap and effective method to fight fraud, it was adopted by at least one insurance company, tested by government agencies around the world, and taught to corporate executives. It made a splash among academics, who cited it in their own research more than 400 times.
  ...
  Years later, he and his coauthors found that follow-up experiments did not show the same reduction in dishonest behavior. But more recently, a group of outside sleuths scrutinized the original paper's underlying data and stumbled upon a bigger problem: One of its main experiments was faked "beyond any shadow of a doubt," three academics wrote in a post on their blog, Data Colada, on Tuesday.

• Outline of Galef's "Scout Mindset"

  Book review and outline of Julia Galef's book "Scout Mindset" at LessWrong blog.

  And for a shorter summary see Soldier or Scout?

  She says that when you operate from the soldier mindset, your actions stem from reflexes rooted in a need to protect yourself and your side and to defeat the enemy, whoever or whatever it may be.

  On the other hand, when you operate from the scout mindset, your actions are based not on attacking or defending but on understanding the terrain and potential obstacles. You want to know what’s really there as accurately as possible.

• Have Democrats Become the Party of the Rich?

  If you're waiting for Democrats to talk as frankly about wealth as they do about race, don't hold your breath.

  For all the good things they do, there are some things you can rely on the Democrats not to do. They won't push hard for a genuinely progressive income tax. They won't raise corporate taxes in a way that would darken the brow of Bezos and Dorsey, Zuckerberg and Gates, or increase the inheritance tax in a way that might make an impression on the grandchildren of the Stanford class of 1985.

  It looks like the answer is yes:
  Wealthy Lobbyists Have Already Slashed Biden’s Tax Reform by Three-Quarters
  
• A "Full Stack" Approach to Public Media in the United States

  In the mid-1960s, the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television conducted a major study to research the role of noncommercial television in U.S. society.

  [It] sought to design a new system as an alternative to existing commercial networks, one that would use broadcast technologies to enable free and open expression, serve the diverse information needs of the public, and foster connection and mutual understanding among communities.

  ... More than 50 years later, the United States suffers from an information disorder. The business models for local media are all but defunct. Although the market for digital advertising is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, the platforms' market power means that content creators collect a tiny share of ad revenues.

  ... This paper proposes an agenda for transforming public media, broadly understood, into a vital bulwark for digital democracy. We use the term "public media stack," based on the concept of a technology stack, to refer to a layered, interconnected network comprised of information infrastructures-"hard" technologies and "soft" institutional arrangements-operating according to civic principles.

• Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice

  Heterodox Academy blog from 2016 -- Jonathan Haidt

• Xi's Dictatorship Threatens the Chinese State

  George Soros opinion in the Wall Street Journal ($)

  In his quest for personal power, he's rejected Deng Xiaoping's economic reform path and turned the Communist Party into an assemblage of yes-men.

• Ben and Jerry's boycott Israel

  The Double Standards Fallacy by Peter Beinart

  There's no history of Ben and Jerry's refusing to hire Jews or making antisemitic comments. The company itself was founded by Jews. The only evidence critics have of Ben and Jerry's supposed antisemitism is its refusal to sell ice cream in West Bank settlements. But there's a logical, moral, non-antisemitic reason for not selling ice cream in the West Bank: It's a place where Israeli Jews enjoy full political rights and their Palestinian neighbors have none. It's a place where discrimination is the law.

• Virtual contact worse than no contact for over-60s in lockdown, says study

  Staying in touch with friends and family via technology made many older people feel more lonely, research finds.

  The problem, said Hu, was that older people unfamiliar with technology found it stressful to learn how to use it. But even those who were familiar with technology often found the extensive use of the medium over lockdown so stressful that it was more damaging to their mental health than simply coping with isolation and loneliness.

• Metabunk

  Website devoted to debunking UFO sightings and other myths.