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Elliot

@eecp.bsky.social

lawyer, but not your lawyer. views mine. formerly: YLS, tOSU Neuro & History of Sci/Tech, Wikimedia Fellow, HMS/MGH Center for Law Brain Behavior, LawAI

13 Posts296 Follower603 Folgt
Greg Priest@gregpriest.bsky.social · last yr.

Carl Sagan’s famous quote about the photo, and an excerpt from his manuscript: 🐡🧪 #HistSTM #STS MS from Library of congress: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss85590.042/?sp=18&st=image&r=-0.712,-0.046,2.425,1.412,0

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.A page from Sagan’s manuscript.
Greg Priest@gregpriest.bsky.social · last yr.

OTD in 1990, Voyager 1 took the “pale blue dot” photo of earth. The spacecraft was about 6 billion kilometers away from earth at the time. Traveling at the speed of light, it took almost 5 and a half hours for the photo to transmit from Voyager to NASA. 🐡🧪 #HistSTM #STS

The Voyager Pale Blue Dot photo.
Jared Hutchins@pablohutch.bsky.social · 2y ago

I teach a class on data science here at Illinois and during the seminar I host a competition for the class called "The Hunt for the Worst Data Visualization." This was my most popular post on Xitter, so reproducing some of the best submissions from previous years here:

The HPS Podcast@hpspodcast.bsky.social · 2y ago

It's here! In this episode we talk with the amazing Simon Schaffer about the classic HPS Book 'Leviathan and the Air-Pump' The interview was so good, we have had to break it into 2 parts. Part one out today, part two next week Listen to a master communicator at work. #hps #histsci #philsci #sts 🧪

S4 Ep 2 - Simon Schaffer on 'Leviathan and the Air-Pump: 40 years later' (Part 1) - The HPS Podcast - Conversations from History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science

This episode is the first of two in which the celebrated Professor of History of Science, Simon Schaffer, discusses the famous HPS publication, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experi...

thehpspodcast.buzzsprout.com

Dr Dean Burnett@drdeanburnett.bsky.social · 2y ago

“Sleeping on It” Helps With Rational Decision Making - neurosciencenews.com/sleep-decisi... Once again, when it comes to problem solving, "sleep on it" is neurologically sound advice. For many reasons. This new study adds another one. 🧵 /1

"Sleeping on It" Helps With Rational Decision Making - Neuroscience News

A new study reveals that while snap judgments heavily influence decisions made immediately, "sleeping on it" helps people make more rational choices.

neurosciencenews.com

Dr. Jude Seal - 'Unfunded Hobbyist'@judeseal.bsky.social · 2y ago

Another publisher rules out allowing authors to opt out of having their work used to train AI created by companies they will not name. *Kafka's coffin lid creaks* www.thebookseller.com/news/wiley-s...

Wiley set to earn $44m from AI rights deals, confirms “no opt-out" for authors

The US publisher is the latest to capitalise on deals to give tech firms access to its authors’ content to train their Large Language Models (LLMs).

thebookseller.com

Pete Miles@petermiles.eurosky.social · 3y ago

"Policy might ideally 'follow science' but whose science?" Policy making as a struggle between narratives, important new paper (free to read, I found). #Complexity

Policy making as a struggle between narratives Policy making involves competing narratives (about problems, how they arose, and how they will be resolved), institutions (especially government and its bureaucratic machinery), and interests (financial, political, ideological). Policy might ideally "follow science," but whose science and why? Science shapes policy narratives through an "inside track" (such as official advisory committees) and, to a lesser extent, through an "outside track" (such as less mainstream scientists and citizen movements).4 Pandemic policy making has been characterised not by clearly identified knowledge gaps that science obligingly fills but by toxic clashes between competing scientific and moral narratives. Getting the mode of SARS-COV-2 transmission right matters, because preventive strategies follow (box 1).5 6 Being honest about scientific uncertainty also matters, because-among other reasons-it is hard to backtrack after declaring a policy to be "evidence
Trish Greenhalgh@trishgreenhalgh.bsky.social · 3y ago

How covid spreads: narratives, counter-narratives and social dramas. Our paper for BMJ to inform the UK's covid-19 inquiry. So far, all the things we claimed in this paper have been borne out in the inquiry. This is an international scandal. www.bmj.com/content/378/...

Sarah Fackrell@design-law.bsky.social · 3y ago

"Scholastic said it was necessary to segregate these titles because 'there is now enacted or pending legislation in more than 30 U.S. states prohibiting certain kinds of books from being in schools'.... What laws...? Scholastic declined to answer the question."

Scholastic's "bigot button"

Scholastic, the popular publisher of children's books, is a big business. It is a publicly-traded company with a market capitalization of $1.15 billion. Its CEO, Peter Warwick, collected a total compe...

popular.info

Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 3y ago

This from Rebecca Solnit is my biggest fear about AI. Writing teaches me about myself, and I can't imagine handing that over to a machine whose only incentive is monetizing every aspect of my life. But many people will make that bargain, sacrificing their own self-awareness in the process.

Are there certain parts of the writing process that you can't really imagine AI replicating? Or can you just talk a little bit about the kind of labor that goes into writing the work that you do? I'm a writer because I want to write. I don't want a machine to do it for me. I'm a writer because the process of writing is creative in what I do with language, but also in how I understand the subject. I often feel that I don't think hard enough about things until I have to write about them. Often my understanding changes in the process of writing. That's exciting for me. That's my own development, which, ideally, is somehow also something I can share with the readers. I'm engaging in thinking, and what is the point of handing the job of thinking itself over, of understanding something more deeply, seeing the pattern that underlies? Why would I want to give up that profound experience?
Elliot@eecp.bsky.social · 3y ago

Interesting conversation if you care about things like information source, platform, quality, and accessibility (which IMO we all should). Larger issues of how research and writing, especially for the public, are funded loom in the background, but that doesn't mean we can avoid hard questions.

Helen Rosner@hels.bsky.social · 3y ago

One thing I find fundamentally distressing about the monetized-newsletter model is the way it financially rewards cultivating a walled info garden/cult of personality situation — done right from a creator perspective, it narrows the readers’ sense of the world rather than expands it

Ben Gross@bhgross144.bsky.social · 3y ago

“There is no magic lens that will enable us to look at, to see nature unclouded … uncolored by any values, hopes, fears, anxieties, desires, goals that we bring to it." -Evelyn Fox Keller (1936-2023) news.mit.edu/2023/profess... #histsci #histSTM #STS #RIP

Professor Emerita Evelyn Fox Keller, influential philosopher and historian of science, dies at 87

MIT Professor Emerita Evelyn Fox Keller, a groundbreaking philosopher and historian of science who helped reshape discussions of science, gender, and objectivity, as well as biological determinism, ha...

news.mit.edu

Bloomberg News@bloomberg.com · 3y ago

Elon Musk’s X was cited as the biggest outlet for peddlers of disinformation as the European Union urged Silicon Valley platforms to step up their vigilance to combat Russia’s “war of ideas”

EU Faults Musk’s X in Fight Against Russia’s ‘War of Ideas’

Elon Musk’s X was cited as the biggest outlet for peddlers of disinformation as the European Union urged Silicon Valley platforms to step up their vigilance to combat Russia’s “war of ideas.”

bloomberg.com

Ross Dahlke@rossdahlke.bsky.social · 3y ago

Who falls for misinformation around the globe? Individuals with high analytic cognitive style, accuracy motivations, and valuing of democracy are better at discerning misinformation from true claims. Really fascinating paper that looks at 16 countries across 6 continents.

Figure 3: Consistent cross-cultural evidence that truth discernment is associated with analytic thinking, accuracy motivations and ideologyCross-country misinformation accuracy and sharingMisinformation accuracyFigure 6: Ratings from even small groups of laypeople can reliably distinguish true from false headlines
John Scalzi@scalzi.com · 3y ago

I'm an okay human who imagines what the better version of himself would do and tries to do that, with the hope that eventually all those better things will sink in. It's taking longer than I would hope, and I don't always manage to be my best self. But making the effort is its own reward.

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