Category: Psychology

Rooftop Revelations: Booker T. Washington predicted Black Lives Matter

David Leave a comment

2022-02-02 Eli Steele

Pastor Corey Brooks wished to share his thoughts on Black Lives Matter and Booker T. Washington . . .

What makes me especially mad is that we have had blacks like these who milked black pain for money ever since we came out of slavery. We called them trickster figures. When Booker T. Washington wrote these words over 100 years ago, he was describing BLM:

“There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs—partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Let me repeat: “Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances.”

Let that sink in, folks. You know who they are talking about? The folks right here. Right here in these streets. They want these folks to stay beaten down and downtrodden. They want to hold up the very people whose lives I’ve been trying to improve everyday for the last 20 years, and they want to hold these people up to Americans and say, see how bad you treat us, give us money.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/rooftop-revelations-booker-t-washington-predicted-black-lives-matter

What Are Dreams For?

David Leave a comment

2023-08-31 Amanda Gefter

In a series of papers, Blumberg articulated his theory that the brain uses REM sleep to “learn” the body. You wouldn’t think that the body is something a brain needs to learn, but we aren’t born with maps of our bodies

…

In 2013, Blumberg published a paper in Current Biology titled “Twitching in Sensorimotor Development from Sleeping Rats to Robots.” In it, he asked, “Can twitching, as a special form of self-generated movement, contribute to a robot’s knowledge about its body and how it works?”

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/what-are-dreams-for

Password advice

David Leave a comment

There have been news stories about how the Office of Inspector General, U.S. Department of the Interior found weak passwords in the Department of Interior’s Active Directory accounts:

The OIG report:
P@s$w0rds at the U.S. Department of the Interior: Easily Cracked Passwords, Lack of Multifactor Authentication, and Other Failures Put Critical DOI Systems at Risk
It has password advice on page 8:

NIST SP 800–63 recommends using passphrases instead of passwords …

Password vs. Passphrase Examples
Password = 5pr1ng*Ish3re
Passphrase = DinosaurLetterTrailChance

I believe the passphase words have to be chosen randomly from a large word list to be effective, but it is easier to remember than a complex password.

Ryan Reynolds reveals the No. 1 skill that’s helped him succeed: ‘It really changed my life’

David Leave a comment

2022-10-13 Morgan Smith

“We live in a world that’s increasingly gamified, and I think we have an instinct to win, crush and kill,” he said. “But if you can disengage or disarm that instinct for a second and replace it with seeking to learn about somebody instead, that, as a leadership quality, for me, has quite literally changed every aspect of my life.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/ryan-reynolds-credits-his-success-to-one-skill-it-changed-my-life.html

A Thought on the Lovelace Test

David Leave a comment

The Lovelace test demands of a computing machine that it not only produce an artifact that is by conventional standards amazing, but it leaves everyone looking at it
stupefied as to how it does what it does: including in this stupefaction the creators and designers of the machine.
– Selmer Bingsjord [1]

 

An artificial agent, designed by a human, passes the [Lovelace] test only if it originates a “program” that it was not engineered to produce. The outputting of the new program—it could be an idea, a novel, a piece of music, anything—can’t be a hardware fluke, and it must be the result of processes the artificial agent can reproduce. Now here’s the kicker: The agent’s designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program. [2]

 

My thought is if God made humans, can a human use creativity to make an artifact, so that God can’t explain how it was made?

 

[1]
Artificial Intelligence: Will Machines Take Over? (Science Uprising, Ep. 10)
2022-09-21 YouTube channel: “Discovery Science”
https://youtu.be/suuxAZbDCYE?t=362

[2]
Forget Turing, the Lovelace Test Has a Better Shot at Spotting AI
2014-07-08 Jordan Pearson
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgaany/forget-turing-the-lovelace-test-has-a-better-shot-at-spotting-ai

Vladimir Putin Has Fallen Into the Dictator Trap

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2022-03-16 Brian Klaas

For those of us living in liberal democracies, criticizing the boss is risky, but we’re not going to be shipped off to a gulag or watch our family get tortured. In authoritarian regimes, those all-too-real risks have a way of focusing the mind. Is it ever worthwhile for authoritarian advisers to speak truth to power?

As a result, despots rarely get told that their stupid ideas are stupid, or that their ill-conceived wars are likely to be catastrophic. Offering honest criticism is a deadly game and most advisers avoid doing so. Those who dare to gamble eventually lose and are purged. So over time, the advisers who remain are usually yes-men who act like bobbleheads, nodding along when the despot outlines some crackpot scheme.

…

When despots screw up, they need to watch their own back. Yet again, they can become victims of the dictator trap. To crush prospective enemies, they must demand loyalty and crack down on criticism. But the more they do so, the lower the quality of information they receive, and the less they can trust the people who purport to serve them. As a result, even when government officials learn about plots to overthrow an autocrat, they may not share that knowledge. This is known as the “vacuum effect”—and it means that authoritarian presidents might learn of coup attempts and putsches only when it’s too late. This raises a question that should keep Putin awake at night: If the oligarchs were to eventually make a move against him, would anyone warn him?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-dictator-trap-russia-ukraine/627064/