What I Read or Listened to This Week


Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:

  • Biased - This book was great at balancing academic studies on racial biases with personal anecdotes. I found it startling how much of an influence priming can have on racial biases (black faces are more likely to be picked out when induced to think about crime, aggressive words are more likely to be picked out after being shown photos of black faces) and the role that this can play in police being more violent towards black men.

    • There is less brain activity in the areas that process faces when someone sees a face of someone of a different race than their own.
    • “Categorization - grouping like things together - is not some abhorrent feature of the human brain, a process that some people engage in and other do not. Rather, it is a universal function of the brain that allows us to organize and manage the overload of the stimuli that constantly bombard us.”
    • “Bias, even when we are not conscious of it, has consequences that we need to understand and mitigate. The stereotypic associations we carry in out heads can affect what we perceive, how we think, and the actions we take.”
    • “In a series of studies, they asked people to rate the height, weight, and strength of young black and white men from photographs showing only their faces. Study participants consistently rated black men as taller, heavier and stronger than white men.”
    • In a study involving a mock altercation between a black man and a white man that students didn’t know was scripted “the students used a much lower threshold for labeling black actions as violent.”
    • “The same fear response that’s supposed to keep us safe can activate bias in ways that stigmatize and threaten others.”
    • “Research supports the notion that raising the issue of race and discrimination explicitly can lead people to be more open-minded and act more fairly, particularly when they have time to reflect on their choices.”
    • “Encouraging children to remain blind to race dampened their detection of discrimination, which had ripple effects. Color blindness promoted exactly the opposite of what was intended: racial inequality.”
    • “It’s true that we are wired for bias. But the problem with narrowly settling for that perspective is that it can lead us to care less about the danger associated with bias, instead of more. When something is regarded as a norm, people cease to judge it as harshly. … They feel less agency and less motivation to change.”
    • “The worry is that groups that sign on the the easy, socially responsible training might be less likely to attempt to mitigate bias and address inequities later, especially when it’s hard - when it involves changes in cultural practices and policies, for example.”
    • “When we are forced to make quick decisions using subjective criteria, the potential for bias is great.”
  • Volume 2, Issue 93: King of You - “I want as many people to read what I’m doing as I can, don’t get me wrong. But I’m not interested in tricking them into it, or pretending to be something I’m not in order to persuade more of them to artificially inflate a number. I just write, about the things I care about, to the best of my abilities, and then trust that there are enough people out there on my wavelength, interested in what I have to say and how I say it, to allow me to keep doing it.”

  • Facial recognition creeps into everything at CES 2020 - Facial recognition becoming more widely used is such a violation of privacy - you can’t change your face.

  • Countdown to Zero Day - A detailed account of Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm, sabotaged an Iranian nuclear facility by targeting the programmable logic controllers in the facility to ruin their centrifuges. The book goes into detail on how it was discovered by a small group of security researchers and the level of sophistication that went into the attack and related intelligence gathering attacks as well as the sloppiness that lead to its detection after going undetected for years. It also touches on what it means for the future of cyber attacks.

    • “The targets most in danger from a digital attack in the United States are not just military systems but civilian ones - transportation, communication, and financial networks; food manufacturing and chemical plants; gas pipelines, water, and electric utilities; even uranium enrichment plants.”
    • “A bomb dropped on a target might cause collateral damage, but it would be local. Computer networks, however, are complex mazes of interconnectivity, and a cyberweapon’s path and impact once unleashed aren’t always predictable.”

See also