Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
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YouTube Flagged The Notre Dame Fire As Misinformation And Then Started Showing People An Article About 9/11 - Maybe the algorithms are the problem not the solution
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15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook - “The message also highlighted another of the company’s original sins: its assertion that if you just give people better tools for sharing, the world will be a better place. That’s just false. Sometimes Facebook makes the world more open and connected; sometimes it makes it more closed and disaffected. Despots and demagogues have proven to be just as adept at using Facebook as democrats and dreamers. Like the communications innovations before it—the printing press, the telephone, the internet itself—Facebook is a revolutionary tool. But human nature has stayed the same.”
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‘Calling bullshit’: the college class on how not to be duped by the news - “the class operates under the assumption that the structures through which today’s endless information comes to the consumer – algorithms, data graphics, info analytics, peer-reviewed publications – are in many ways as full of bullshit as the fake news we easily recognize as bogus”
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How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care
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Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest - I thought the most interesting section was the strategies different governments have used to suppress and censor information
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AI is not coming for you - “From banking and insurance to Youtube’s algorithm and Facebook’s news feed, it’s become extremely popular to refer to the “AI” governing the critical decisions each face. One reason is because “AI” is easy to blame when things go wrong (“whoops, the system made a mistake!”), but it also conceals the deliberate human choices behind how those systems actually work. Facebook has built the “AI” behind its News Feed to maximize engagement, and Youtube to (somewhat clumsily) match interests to keep you watching videos. This is why, as a 30-something year old white man, portals into the alt-right rathole literally follow me around these platforms. Blaming “AI” for these choices is rich theater by executives who don’t wish to be pressed on the negative externalities of their engagement-maximizing directives.”