04 OCT 2024 by ideonexus
Undecided Voters are Uninformed and Disengaged
Many commentators have suggested that undecided voters’ opinions are better understood not as deeply held, thought-through beliefs, but as a sort of verbal Muzak. You say, of a candidate who has given many policy specifics already (and whose opponent speaks in word salad), “I need more policy specifics,” because it sounds better than “I don’t know what policies I want.” You say “The candidates just attack each other” because it sounds better than “I don’t actually know wha...So why do we put so much emphasis on their political opinions?
07 MAY 2024 by ideonexus
How the Powerful Influence Culture
Signification, which is the only function of a word admitted by semantics, reaches perfection in the sign. Whether folk-songs were rightly or wrongly called upper-class culture in decay, their elements have only acquired their popular form through a long process of repeated transmission. The spread of popular songs, on the other hand, takes place at lightning speed. The American expression “fad,” used for fashions which appear like epidemics – that is, inflamed by highly-concentrated ec...Folksonomies: culture critical theory
Folksonomies: culture critical theory
22 DEC 2023 by ideonexus
What Will be Left After the AI Bubble Pops?
Every bubble pops eventually. When this one goes, what will be left behind? Well, there will be little models – Hugging Face, Llama, etc – that run on commodity hardware. The people who are learning to “prompt engineer†these “toy models†have gotten far more out of them than even their makers imagined possible. They will continue to eke out new marginal gains from these little models, possibly enough to satisfy most of those low-stakes, low-dollar apÂ...Folksonomies: technology ai
Folksonomies: technology ai
14 OCT 2023 by ideonexus
Academia Progresses "One Funeral at a Time"
Pick up any business magazine or how-to management book, and you’ll run into words like “nimble†and “move fast†on virtually every page. The ability to change direction and shift priorities in reaction to consumer preferences or competitor actions often makes a decisive difference in marketplace success. One can’t think of an enterprise less “nimble†than the modern American university. Or a practice better designed to limit flexibility than...23 SEP 2023 by ideonexus
Nothing is Harder to do Than Nothing
Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily. We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands. For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experi...Folksonomies: cyberpunk attention economy
Folksonomies: cyberpunk attention economy
17 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
Learned VS Common Culture
In many private schools and academies, we find several things taught now which were never made the subjects of systematical instruction in former times; and in those of our universities in which it is the interest of the tutors to make their lectures of real use to their pupils, and where lectures are not mere matters of form, the professors find the necessity of delivering themselves in English. And the evident propriety of the thing must necessarily make this practice more general, notwiths...Folksonomies: education
Folksonomies: education
03 MAR 2021 by ideonexus
A 2030 Vision for Gaming Culture
Young gamers are having fun, learning from each other, and learning to be good citizens of gaming and online communities. They are able to transfer some of their skills and citizenship sensibility to other aspects of their lives. They are connecting and mentoring each other in online gaming spaces that are safe, mixed age, and centered on creation, exploration, inquiry, and friendly competition. Youth and their parents have a deeper understanding of digital citizenship, supported and taught...03 MAR 2021 by ideonexus
Roots of Toxic Online Game Culture
Streamers behave badly as a way to increase their views and likes, which in turn maximizes their profits and those of their company sponsors. Game companies cannot fully control who plays their games, despite Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) ratings. Younger players play mature games and learn through their interactions with older and often toxic audiences. Cultural stigmatization of gaming leads to a lack of educator involvement in supporting prosocial and educational gaming sp...02 MAR 2021 by ideonexus
Top-Down VS Bottom-Up Approaches to Design in Software
One of the hallmarks of the Athena project was that faculty were asked to build their own educational software. Most worked with a set of assumptions about learning: students begin by learning “fundamental concepts”; formal, mathematical representation is always the best approach; students would use simulations the way designers intended. As Athena unfolded, none of these assumptions proved true. To begin with, students approached simulation with a wide range of personal intellectual styl...Folksonomies: abstraction simulation
Folksonomies: abstraction simulation
27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Fluid Intelligence has Made the Most Gains
So which kinds of intellectual performance have been pushed upward by the better environments of recent decades? Surprisingly, the steepest gains have not been found in the concrete skills that are directly taught in school, such as general knowledge, arithmetic, and vocabulary. They have been found in the abstract, fluid kinds of intelligence, the ones tapped by similarity questions (“What do an hour and a year have in common?”), analogies (“BIRD is to EGG as TREE is to what?”), and ...Folksonomies: intelligence iq
Folksonomies: intelligence iq