@kims

Wooo!

I really enjoyed the two years here

I’ve connected with so many amazing new people!

@lkanies

Thank you -- I've been meaning to read that for ages, this is tipping me over to doing it

I mean it's not like the overall point -- that moral behavior is heavily influenced by our environment, and so environments/rules/jobs that encourage and endorse horrid behavior and power-wielding will *produce* horrid behavior -- is wrong

But the balance of understanding got decisively tipped away from probing and investigating the role and lure and satisfaction of cooperation in human affairs

It's interesting to think about what was going on, culturally, in this period of the mid-to-middle 20th century, that all these theories of "the horrible, selfish, violent people that lurk within us" gained such currency

WWI and WWII, certainly, but there's got to be a lot of factors at play in why these theories grew so big and loomed so high

5/5

And I'm thinking also of game theory -- which, when it emerged in the early-to-mid 20th century, predicted that people would behave as selfish maximizers

But when they started testing the theory with real people, it didn't work that way

real people were as liable to cooperate and give a fair shake to their supposed competitors

4/x

There's also "Lord of the Flies", which came out in 1954, and cemented the idea that young boys -- when removed from the moral guardrails of proper British society -- would become absolute terrors to one another

But when this happened in reality -- when six boys were marooned on a remote island for 15 months -- they all cheerfully banded together and co-operated, including carefully tending for one boy who broke his leg, while it healed: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

3/x

More evidence -- this time with audio tapes from the original experiment -- showing that the Stanford Prison Experiment was rigged to encourage terrible behavior by the guards

In Medium: https://gen.medium.com/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/K7gMN

Talking about this with my son, I was struck by how many pieces of major science/theory/culture in the mid-20th-century insisted that they "proved" humanity was inherently, natively selfish -- but turned out to be much less true

1/x

Check out the work of the anti-Trump PAC that is placing ads on porn sites warning that "Trump and Vance's Project 2025 will ban porn," adding "enjoy it while you can"

Turns out doing political advertising on porn sites is not only pretty cheap, but you can target swing states easily and be assured of reaching a lot of young men who are, statistically, likely Trump voters

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/01/nx-s1-5168877/2024-election-pac-trump-porn-sites

Project 2025 mentions banning porn on page 5 of the intro: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/project-2025-porn-ban-lgbtq-transgender-rcna161562

Behold the work of Darya Kawa Mirza, a self-taught Kurdish photographer who produces astonishingly detailed pictures of the moon ...

... by zooming in close on individual tiny craters, taking over 80,000 shots of those, then compositing them together into individual, incredibly detailed landscapes

Item #1 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-26-cryptophasia-wigner-crystals-and-how/

Behold a custom-made 21-segment LED that uses a font design from 1898

Item #14 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-25-the-third-thumb-prairie-strips-and/

This letter written by Charles Babbage in 1840 is fascinating ...

... since it appears to be his earliest ever attempt to describe computational recursion in plain language

He *had* to use plain language -- the very concepts he was struggling to enunciate didn't yet have names

As Bruce Sterling puts it, this passage is “a breathless, painful description of the unique ability of software to operate on itself”

Item #12 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-25-the-third-thumb-prairie-strips-and/

@mcc @jeisom

aha, very cool -- did not know about these!

Super interested to see your Servo experiments -- I was poking around the servo repo a month ago wondering what it would be like to spin something out of it

Mastodon hive-mind!

I require your assistance

I'm wondering -- what was the first American song written about the problems of becoming famous as a singer/performer? Of the hassles of fame, of life on the road, etc?

When did this become a subject matter of songwriters and performers?

Please boost, the more brains on this one the better

"If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality"

Charlie Warzel on the flood of hurricane-related bullshit

I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is

What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.

The Atlantic (www.theatlantic.com)

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/PhRvu

"Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock."

There are so many right-wing, pro-Trump conspiracy theories about this hurricane season that yesterday, Chuck Edwards -- a Republican congressman in North Carolina -- put up a page of debunkings:

https://edwards.house.gov/media/press-releases/debunking-helene-response-myths

It's pretty wild

Disinfo experts predict that lies and conspiracy theories will worsen this season: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/november-election-hurricane-disinformation/680202/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/7RJUj

@stefan

oooooooo nice