Let’s get real. Facebook is not to blame for Trump. – Recode

2016/11/22 Leave a comment

While I think Williams downplays the role and responsibility of social media (see Social Media’s Globe-Shaking Power – The New York Times), his raising of confirmation bias is valid.

Communications technology is not neutral, and perhaps it is time to reread some of the Canadian classics by Harold Innis (Empire and Communications) and Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man):

Much of the coverage and outrage has been directed toward social media, its echo chambers, and specifically those of the Facebook platform. While, to be sure, much of the fake or inaccurate news is found and circulated on Facebook, Facebook is not a news outlet; it is a communication medium to be utilized as its users so choose. It is not the job of Facebook’s employees, or its algorithms, to edit or censor the content that is shared; in fact it would be more detrimental to do so. This is for two very good reasons:

One, either human editors, or artificial intelligence editors, by removing one item or another will appear to introduce bias into the system. The group who’s content is being removed or edited will feel targeted by the platform and claim it, rightly or wrongly, is biased against their cause. Even if the content is vetted and found to be true or false.

Two, censorship in any form is bad for the national discourse.

So rather than blaming Facebook or other platforms for the trouble in which we find ourselves, let’s give credit where credit is due: The American people.

This comes down to two very important concepts that our society has been turning its back on, in the age of social media: Confirmation bias and epistemology.

Explained by David McRaney, the You Are Not So Smart blogger and author of “You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself,” confirmation bias is the misconception that “your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis,” and that the truth is that “your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information which confirmed what you believed while ignoring information which challenged your preconceived notions.” Or, more precisely: The tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs.

If we find a piece of content that says that Donald Trump is clueless, or that Hillary Clinton belongs in prison, we accept the one because it reinforces our like for one candidate over the other, and discard the negative item as some falsehood generated by the opposing party to discredit your candidate. We don’t care about the information or what it says, as long as it reinforces how we feel.

That brings us to epistemology, “the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity,” a branch of philosophy aptly named from the Greek, meaning “knowledge dscourse.” This is a concept that has existed since the 16th century and very likely conveniently ignored in political campaigns ever since, perhaps because it’s just easier to believe and propagate than it is to read and validate.

In fact, a recent Pew Research Center survey called the American Trends Panel asked if the public prefers that the news media present facts without interpretation. Overwhelmingly, 59 percent of those posed the question preferred facts without interpretation, and among registered voters, 50 percent of Clinton supporters, and 71 percent of Trump supporters preferred no interpretation. While those numbers may seem incredible, the telling result is that 81 percent of registered voters disagree on what the facts actually are. Aren’t facts just facts? Yes, they are, but our biases and distrust of intellectual sources say otherwise.

Does Facebook create echo chambers on both sides of the political spectrum? No. Facebook and other social media only serve to provide a high-speed amplifier of what already exists in our society; especially to those who enjoy the communal effect of sharing information with others in their personal circles. Facebook goes give them a wide and instant audience.

In a 2012 study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, computer scientists Chei Sian Ma, and Long Ma said, “… we also establish that status seeking has a significant influence on prior content sharing experience indicating that the experiential factor may be a possible mediator between gratifications and news sharing intention.”

Or, in other words, it’s fun to share something and get congratulatory high-fives from your like-minded friends. Facebook does make that activity almost instantaneous. Sharing news, or fake news, and being liked for doing so feels good. Never mind the ramifications on the accuracy of cultural or political discourse.

During his final press conference in Berlin with Angela Merkel, President Obama puts this as succinctly as it could possibly be said: “If we are not serious about facts, and what’s true and what’s not . . . if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.”

 Source: Let’s get real. Facebook is not to blame for Trump. – Recode

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Glenn Gould offers lessons for Apple, and Ottawa, on innovation

2016/10/20 Leave a comment

Interesting piece (have seen earlier articles on Gould’s influence at Apple but not with this angle to the current Canadian innovation strategy policy discussions):

Institutionalizing the nebulous concept of innovation won’t be easy. Jobs himself faced a similar challenge when he was diagnosed with a cancerous tumour in his pancreas in 2004, forcing him to contemplate a day when he would no longer be able to terrorize Apple’s designers and engineers. In 2008, he quietly began laying the groundwork for Apple University by hiring Joel Podolny, the dean of Yale’s school of management. “The idea was to take what is unique about Apple and create a forum that can impart that DNA to future generations of Apple employees,” a former Apple executive told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “No other company has a university charged with probing so deeply into the roots of what makes the company so successful.”

[Joshua] Cohen’s presentation on Gould is just one of several he gives at the university, where he’s now employed full-time. It’s part of a series called  “The Best Things”—a reference to a remark that Jobs once made about “trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing.” His first presentation in the series was about New York’s Central Park, which was designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to show that America could create beautiful, natural public spaces that rivalled the best of Europe. Gould, by contrast, created a thing of beauty by reinterpreting the baroque work of a German composer who was widely seen as a touch old fashioned, even by his contemporaries.

Equally as compelling for Apple employees is Gould’s forward thinking attitude about technology. Gould once told an interviewer in 1966 that live audiences were a “force of evil” because pleasing them took precedence over his pursuit of perfection. “I really thank God that I’m able to sit in a studio with enormous concentration and do things many times, if necessary,” he said. “I think a whole new role has been opened in this way.” Bob Ezrin, the Canadian music producer known for his work with Pink Floyd, Lou Reed and Taylor Swift among others, (and, to a different demographic, for sparking a Twitter war earlier this year with rapper Kanye West), says Gould was way ahead of his time. “He was the first guy to edit classical performances,” he says. “That was just anathema to the classical world. Edit multi-track recordings? This was stuff that was only beginning to happen in popular recording because performers couldn’t do it all in one take.”

If it all sounds a touch pedantic for a company that builds smartphones, recall that Jobs credited part of the original Mac’s success on his decision to study calligraphy at Reed College in Portland, OR. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts,” he said during a 2005 commencement address at Stanford. “And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.” This is also a man who once said, shortly before his death, that great technology by itself wasn’t sufficient to make great products: “It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.”

At its core, Cohen says Apple’s mission is indeed to develop products that should be built, not finding a way to shoehorn every piece of new technology into people’s lives, wanted or not. “They [Apple products] enable people to do things that are good to do,” he says, adding it’s not all that different from Gould’s effort to create a moment of pure musical bliss. “You’re trying to do something that’s great and animated by a big idea,” says Cohen. “But what makes it great is there’s an important human good at stake in it.”

It sounds straightforward enough. But it’s remarkable how many tech firms allow the cord to wag the computer. Google, for all its success, is frequently guilty of packing unnecessary functions into its products, making them unnecessarily difficult to use. An Apple University professor apparently once used a Google TV remote control as an example of what not to do at Apple, according to the Times. It had no fewer than 78 buttons. Meanwhile, other up-and-coming tech giants often seem more interested in disrupting entrenched industries than they are in serving their customers. The increasingly heated debate over short-term rental platform Airbnb is a case in point, with some arguing it’s contributing to a housing crisis by convincing landlords it’s more profitable to rent to tourists than tenants.

So what, if anything, can Ottawa learn from Gould as it seeks to implement its “Innovation Agenda?” He obviously didn’t have much to say about the value of “innovation clusters” or the appropriate tax policy when it comes to stock options. But, Cohen says, he’s confident Gould wouldn’t think much of trying to replicate, pixel for pixel, Silicon Valley’s stunning success.  “Gould himself would say, almost in these words, ‘There’s no point performing something that’s been performed a thousand times before unless you do it differently,’” Cohen says. At the same time, however, the secret to Gould’s success was his dogged insistence to make sure what he did was worth doing, and that he did it to the best of his abilities—even if some thought he was being completely unreasonable in the process. Says Cohen: “That kind of comes with the territory of doing something that’s different and truly great.”

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