Music Video maker and self professed "Fashion Victim" who is hoping to apply Rationality to problems and decisions in my life and career probably by reevaluating and likely building a new set of beliefs that underpins them.
That Nixon one really wow'd me, the fact that it exaggerated his jowls but after a bit of google searching it seems like other models also seem to have been trained on the Nixon caricature rather than the man himself.
I'm also a big fan of that Fleischer style distracted boyfriend remix.
Never the less, the ease of 'prompting' if that's what you can even call it now is phenomenal.
I'm looking at this not from a CompSci point of view by a rhetoric point of view: Isn't it much easier to make tenuous or even flat out wrong links between Climate Change and highly publicized Natural Disaster events that have lot's of dramatic, visceral footage than it is to ascribe danger to a machine that hasn't been invented yet, that we don't know the nature or inclinations of?
I don't know about nowadays but for me the two main pop-culture touchstones for me for "evil AI" are Skynet in Terminator, or HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (and by inversion - the Butlerian Jihad in Dune). Wouldn't it be more expedient to leverage those? (Expedient - I didn't say accurate)
I want to let you know I've been reflecting on the reactive/proactive news consumption all week. It has really brought into focus a lot of my futile habits not just over news consumption, but idle reading and social media scrolling in general.[1] Why do I do it? I'm always hoping for that one piece of information, that "one simple trick" which will improve my decision making models, will solve my productivity problems, give me the tools to let me accomplish goals XY&Z. Which of course begs the question of why am I always operating on this abstracted, meta-level, distanced level from goals XY&Z and the simple answer is: if I knew how to solve them directly, I'd be actively working on the sets to solve them.
That's a lot of TMI but I just wanted to give you a sense of the affect this had on me.
That's not how proactive thinking works. Imagine if a company handed you a coupon and your immediate thought was "how can I use this coupon to save money"? That's not you saving money. That's the company tricking you into buying their product.
Or those little "specials" at the Gas Station - buy one chocolate bar, get another free - the customer didn't save 100% of the price of the second chocolate bar, they lost 100% because they had no intention of buying a chocolate bar until they saw that impulse-hacking "offer".
On the flip side is the wasteful consumption that I don't read - my collection of books that I probably won't ever read. Why buy them? Seems as pointless as reading ephemeral news slop.
I think you're right. Although I'm having a hard time expressing where to draw the line between a simile and a analogy even after glancing at this article; https://www.grammarpalette.com/analogy-vs-simile-dont-be-confused/
I'm interested in how you can convert that information proactively?
I'm aware that, for example, keeping abreast of macro or geopolitical changes can influence things like investing in the stock-market. But I'd be lying if I'm aware of any other possibilities beyond that.
I think that, more than drinking from the propaganda trough makes me an NPC, protagonists in games do novel things, potentially unexpected (from the perspective of the game designers). NPCs are predictable and habitual. If I cannot extract utility from the news, macro or micro, then I fear I'm an NPC.
I'm not talking about post-rationalizations like "Oh I just read for entertainment" or "Well it helps me engage in conversation and make small talk" - because, again, those are NPCish predictable expected means of extracting utility.
I mean something which comes under the broad category of 'lateral thinking' or 'radical problem solving'.
We have Shannon Information, Quantum Information, Fisher Information, and even Mutual Information and many others. Now let me present another type of information which until I find a better name will certainly be doomed to reduplication induced obscurity: Informative Information.
One of the many insightful takeouts from Douglas Hubbard's Book - How to Measure Anything for me was that if a measure has any value at all then it influences a decision. It informs a decision.
If I see a link come up on my social media feed "5 rationality techniques you can use today" and I don't click it, that was a decision. I could click it (and commit to reading it) or I could not click it. We all know what a decision is.
Informative Information is any input that that changes the output of a decision. In the case of the link, maybe it was the promise of a vapid listicle that informed my decision not to click it - making reading it less attractive than passing over it. Informative Information is anything that makes one action more or less attractive than another mutually exclusive action.
Imagine that you receive invitations to both Alice's Party and Bob's Party on Friday night, they are at the same time, and on opposite ends of the city from your house making them in a conveniently-contrived-way equally attractive or unattractive. Your friend Calvin messages you, asking if they'll see you at Alice's Party. You're a friend of Calvin, you always have a hoot with him - and the suggestion that he'll be at Alice's Party is informative information that makes you decide to go to Alice's Party.
Of course, a decision always implies the option of not-acting: you can read the listicle or... not, you could go to Alice's Party, or Bob's party, or you could stay home and go to neither. That would leave Calvin to stand around awkwardly striking up conversations with Alice's friends, longing for the easy going banter and general mischief makes your friendship with Calvin so special.
Not all knowledge is informative information. Trivia is not informative information. My knowing that Caesar was assassinated during the Ides of March 44BC is unlikely to influence any important decision I may have (unless you consider a multiple choice question at pub-trivia night important). My opinion that Amon Duul II's Wolf City is one of my favorite tenuously lupine-themed music titles outside of all of Chelsea Wolfe's discography is really going to struggle to be informative information.
Is prior experience Informative Information? Good question. I'm going to say "no".
Prior experience is part of the decision making model, it informs how you weight new Informative Information. I have prior knowledge that articles which promise to be listicles aren't good reading, and I have prior knowledge that Calvin and I have good time at parties. That isn't Informative Information, that is part of the decision making model. Knowing that THIS article is a listicle, or that Calvin is attending THAT party (but not Bob's) is Informative Information.
Sometimes don't we make decisions based on bad information? Yes, of course.
Informative Information isn't always good or accurate information, it could be information that was accurate at the time you received it (maybe Calvin catches a cold between now and Friday and can't go to Alice's Party), it is any input to your decision which changes the output.
Tractability, what is tractable to a world government is different to what is personally tractable to me. Then the tractability of the news increases based on how many actions or decisions of an individual reader the news can inform or influence. I cannot change macroevents like wars, but they may influence my personal decision making.
This of course opens the door to counterproductive motivated reasoning. For example of a top-of-mind news story: the Palisades fire - can I stop the fires? No. But maybe I can donate something to those who were displaced? That is something which is personally tractable. But, let's say for the same of example I decide against it because I convince myself "the only people displaced were rich people who can afford to live there, so I wouldn't be helping anybody." - I've convinced myself, probably against the evidence, that it is intractable or at least futile.[1]
Maybe my line of thinking is unproductive because it is just kicking the can up the road? Making news consumption a problem of personal agency simply raises the question of "okay, well, how do you put a reasonable circle around your agency?" and the current question of "which news should I consume" remains unanswered.
No need for anyone to inform me that there can be a difference between something being intractable and it being futile.
Lighting a candle and writing a prayer/request addressed to Inanna that I burn on the candle that I may have a good Valentines Day is tractable. The tasks themselves I am capable of and manageable. I am confident it is futile for me, even the placebo effect wouldn't work because I personally don't believe in that goddess's power.
Not all activity is productivity, as Alice found in Through the Looking Glass, you can expend a lot of energy to end up in the same place.
Like wise you can read a lot of news, but is it actually informing any decisions?
Off the top of my head it's because people are weary of Chesterton's Fence/Sealioning (feigning 'just asking questions' when actually they have an agenda which they mask with the plausible deniability of feigning naive curiosity) and as you say - the topic being sensitive so it generates a 'ugh field' are two pillars of what makes certain topics difficult to discuss.
I've noticed this pattern on a lot of, usually political topics but it could also be some kind of interpersonal drama/gossip, someone asks a you question which appears to be an invitation to get your opinion on something.
"Hey what do you think about Blork?"
You give a non-commital answer, but that neutrality is enough and they are off and away with their soliloquy on why Blork is either the greatest thing to happen to Western Civilization or the very end of it. Very rarely is it followed up with: "What do you like about Blork?" or "How do you friend's feel about Blork?" or any other question question which is rooted in a genuine desire to learn about Blork rather than a pretense to soapbox on it.
The amount of times that I've had someone monologue to me a "you know everyone gets it wrong about [thing which has a bad reputation]" despite (or perhaps because) I haven't shown any judgement, and despite the fact I have shown no interest or curiosity in discussing the topic further. I think this has taught people to be very on-guard about any 'sensitive' topic. After all, now if I have someone ask a seemingly innocent question about Blork, I'm going to shut down the conversation least I risk another monologue.
This naturally makes it very hard for people who want to understand why Chesterton's Fence is there like your situation with lead poisoning being a cause of sexism: curiosity is mistaken a veil of plausible deniability for a ready formed a position.
What I'm forgetting is there's the plausible deniability on the other side, overcompensating and exaggerating their disgust or even projecting their own feelings.
"Why are you justifying sexism? I wouldn't do that, because I'm not sexist. Do you see how not-sexist I am by accusing you of being sexist? Methinks I am not protesting too much. Do you see how progressive I am"
Take for example a controversy on Australian television involving Harry Connick Jnr, where a amateur talent contest segment of a variety show features a imitation of the Jackson 5, with the backup dancers in blackface, and the singer in exaggerated white-face. Connick Jnr was one of the judges on the panel and was furious, even demanding an on-air apology. Others pointed out that Connick may have been burned from his own past doing blackface on SNL.
Now the Connick Jnr example isn't a discussion, but it does add another possible pillar to why people make assumptions about intentions on broaching sensitive topics.