Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
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How we survive the surveillance apocalypse - “But no, privacy isn’t dead. A path to reclaiming it — fuzzy and almost too late — is starting to emerge. We just have to be angry enough to demand it.”
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The Meritocracy Trap - The meritocracy trap is basically a snowball effect in which middle class jobs get displaced by more highly skilled, higher paying jobs. Those with the higher paying jobs then use their money to ensure that their kids are able to get these high paying jobs starting with placing them in expensive pre-schools and high schools to give them the best chance to get into the highly regarded universities to give them the best chance at getting the high paying jobs. As a result, what the author calls the superordinate working class works harder and longer than they ever have before, essentially exploiting their own skills just to maintain their place. Another result is that innovations are more skewed towards the skills that the superordinate workers already have, making their skills even more valuable. In the end nobody wins.
- “The division between gloomy and glossy jobs causes elites to give their children the extraordinary investments needed to get the glossy jobs.”
- “The rise of an elaborately educated elite induces the innovations that bias work and income to favor the skills that this elite possesses.”
- “What is conventionally called merit is actually an ideological conceit, constructed the launder a fundamentally unjust allocation of advantage.”
- “Meritocratic inequality divides society into the useless and the used up.”
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Our Neophobic, Conservative AI Overlords Want Everything to Stay the Same
- “Ultimately, machine learning is about finding things that are similar to things the machine learning system can already model. Machine learning systems are good at identifying cars that are similar to the cars they already know about. They’re also good at identifying faces that are similar to the faces they know about, which is why faces that are white and male are more reliably recognized by these systems — the systems are trained by the people who made them and the people in their circles.”
- “Empiricism-washing is the top ideological dirty trick of technocrats everywhere: they assert that the data “doesn’t lie,” and thus all policy prescriptions based on data can be divorced from “politics” and relegated to the realm of “evidence.” This sleight of hand pretends that data can tell you what a society wants or needs — when really, data (and its analysis or manipulation) helps you to get what you want.”
- “The question of what the technology does is important, but far more important is who it is doing it for and who it is doing it to.”