The Saunterer

Jaron Lanier on how Facebook has the potential for mass behavior modification

    During Mareen Dowd”s interview with Jaron Lanier (Arts section of The New York Times, November 9, 2017) he says:

    The whole internet thing was supposed to create the world’s best information resource in all of history. Everything would be made visible. And instead we’re living in this time of total opacity where you don’t know why you see the news you see. You don’t know if it’s the same news that someone else sees. You don’t know who made it be that way. You don’t know who’s paid to change what you see. Everything is totally obscure in a profound way that it never was before. . . . The Facebook business model is mass behavior modification for pay. And for those who are not giving Facebook money, the only — and I want to emphasize, the only, underlined and in bold and italics — reward they can get or positive feedback is just getting attention. And if you have a system where the only possible prize is getting more attention, then you call that system Christmas for Asses, right? It’s a creep-amplification device. . . . Once Facebook becomes ubiquitous, it’s a sort of giant protection racket, where, if you don’t pay them money, then someone else will pay to modify the behavior to your disadvantage, so everyone has to pay money just to stay at equilibrium where they would have been otherwise. I mean, there’s only one way out for Facebook, which is to change its business model. Unless Facebook changes, we’ll just have to trust Facebook for any future election result. Because they do apparently have the ability to change them. Or at least change the close ones. . . . When you look at all the ways of manipulating people that you can do with just a crude thing like a Facebook feed — when people are just looking at images and text on their phones and they’re not really inside synthetic worlds yet — when you can do it with virtual reality, it’s like total control of the person. So what I’m hoping is that we’re going to figure this stuff out so we don’t make ourselves insane before virtual reality becomes mature.

    For a brief biography of Jaron Lanier, click here. For images of or relating to Jaron Lanier, click here.

   For more of his views, see his forthcoming book Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality.

 

 

John McPhee on how to open a creative nonfiction piece of writing

    He recommends this:

    All leads—of every variety—should be sound. They should never promise what does not follow. You read an exciting action lead about a car chase up a narrow street. Then the article turns out to be a financial analysis of debt structures in private universities. You’ve been had. The lead—like the title—should be a flashlight that shines down into the story. A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don’t use the lead.

    (Quoted from page C9 of The Wall Street Journal, September 2 - 3, 2017, a review of John McPhee’s book on writing, Draft No. 4.)
    For a brief biography of John McPhee, click here. For images of or relating to John McPhee, click here.

St. Bonaventure on the reason to not harm any creature

    That includes taking their lives. St. Bonaventure:

    Seen with the eye of contemplation, creatures are vestiges, the very footprint of God.

    (Quoted from page 8 of The Highland Voice, November, 2017.)

Richard Dawkins’s advice to Donald Trump

    In an August 10, 2017, interview with science journalist John Horgan of Scientific American, Richard Dawkins offered the following advice to President Trump:

    Listen to experts better qualified than you are. Especially scientists. Be guided by evidence and reason, not gut feeling. By far the best way to assess evidence is the scientific method. Indeed, it is the only way if we interpret “scientific” broadly. In particular—since the matter is so urgent and it may already be too late—listen to scientists when they tell you about the looming catastrophe of climate change.

    For a brief biography of Richard Dawkins, click here. For images of or relating to Richard Dawkins, click here.
    For a brief biography of John Horgan, click here. For images of or relating to John Horgan, click here.

Henry David Thoreau on how childhood beats adulthood

    Reading Henry David Thoreau’s journals this past summer, we liked the following entry of July 16, 1851, made at age 34 (ask yourself if it is true of you):

    July 16. Wednesday. Me thinks my present experience is nothing; my past experience is all in all. I think that no experience which I have to-day comes up to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my boyhood. And not only is this true, but as far back as I can remember I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence. My life was ecstasy. In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet to me. I can remember how I was astonished.

    (Quoted from page 60 of The Journal: 1837-1861, by Henry David Thoreau, Damion Searls editor, New York Review Books, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Henry David Thoreau, click here. For images of or relating to Henry David Thoreau, click here.

James D. Watson on: Would you want to know whether you were going to get Alzheimer’s disease?

    James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, had his DNA mapped but does not want to know if he has the gene associated with a heightened risk of Alzheimer’s, for this reason:

    I had absolutely no desire to waste time worrying about having some genetic predisposition to such a hideous disease.

    (Quoted from page 4 of the August 20, 2017 issue of The New York Times Book Review.)
    For a brief biography of James D. Watson, click here. For images of or relating to James D. Watson, click here.

John Updike on writing

    With some of us, wanting to write begins in childhood. John Updike:

    Think of a pencil. What a quiet, nimble, slender and then stubby wonder-worker he is! At his touch, worlds leap into being; a tiger with no danger, a steam-roller with no weight, a palace at no cost. All children are alive to the spell of pencil and crayons, of making something, as it were, from nothing; a few children never move out from under this spell, and try to become artists!

    (Quoted from page 4 of First Person Singular: Writers on Their Craft, by Joyce Carol Oates. Ontario Press Review, 1983.)
    For a brief biography of John Updike, click here. For images of or relating to John Updike, click here.

The irreplaceable value of myths

    Here is an excerpt from Deanie Rowan Blank’s letter to The New York Times Book Review, page 8, September 24, 2017:

    How we think about life and death, how we use symbols, and approach what we don’t understand, how we develop our systems of morals and values, are all enhanced by the force of myth.
    While entertaining, myths can instruct and explain. Stories told in myth, especially when they enliven and charm, have power with deep roots in the real. Myths, both ancient and contemporary, religious and secular, reiterate the beliefs, behaviors, and feelings of people about their world. Imaginary, remote and timeless, mythic tales show the universal aspects of our human condition.

    For Deanie Rowan Blank’s website, click here. For images of or relating to Deanie Rowan Blank, click here.

How the religious argument called intelligent design harms society

    This is from the main editorial in The Salt Lake Tribune, November 5, 2017:

    Intelligent design is biology’s version of fake news. It is propagated to undermine well understood science in the hope of making a religion-based explanation more plausible. We should be advancing science instead of having to defend it.

Henry David Thoreau on the inadequacy of science that is just cold knowledge

    Reading Henry David Thoreau’s journals this summer confirmed our belief that science should be food for imagining. His entry of December 25, 1851, made at age 34, explains:

    I witness a beauty in the form or coloring of the clouds which addresses itself to my imagination, for which you account scientifically to my understanding, but do not so account to my imagination. It is what it suggests and is the symbol of that I care for, and if, by any trick of science, you rob it of its symbolicalness, you do me no service and explain nothing. I, standing twenty miles off, see a crimson cloud in the horizon. You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all other rays and reflects the red, but that is nothing to the purpose, for this red vision excites me, stirs my blood, makes my thoughts flow, and I have new and indescribable fancies, and you leave not touched the secret of that influence. If there is not something mystical in your explanation, something unexplainable to the understanding, some elements of mystery, it is quite insufficient. If there is nothing in it which speaks to my imagination, what boots it? What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination? …That is simply the way in which it speaks to the understanding, and that is the account which the understanding gives of it; but that is not the way it speaks to the imagination, and that is not the account which the imagination gives of it . Just as inadequate to a pure mechanic would be a poet’s account of a steam-engine.
    If we knew all things thus mechanically merely, should we know anything really?

    Quoted from page 101 of The Journal: 1837-1861, by Henry David Thoreau, Damion Searls editor, New York Review Books, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Henry David Thoreau, click here. For images of or relating to Henry David Thoreau, click here.