Posted on 11/19/2017 9:37:09 PM PST by poinq
ne of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he’s not alone. In fact I’d say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. We have a burgeoning genre of “OMG, what have we done?” angst coming from former Facebook and Google employees who have begun to realise that the cool stuff they worked on might have had, well, antisocial consequences.
It never seems to have occurred to them that their engines could be used to deliver ideological and political messages
It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters. Hence the obvious question: how could such smart people be so stupid? The cynical answer is they knew about the potential dark side all along and didn’t care, because to acknowledge it might have undermined the aforementioned licences to print money. Which is another way of saying that most tech leaders are sociopaths. Personally I think that’s unlikely, although among their number are some very peculiar characters: one thinks, for example, of Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel – Trump’s favourite techie; and Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber.
So what else could explain the astonishing naivety of the tech crowd? My hunch is it has something to do with their educational backgrounds. Take the Google co-founders. Sergey Brin studied mathematics and computer science. His partner, Larry Page, studied engineering an...
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Well they have a point - traditional journalists are having to compete with social media, the 24/7 news cycle, the fact that new technology is often breaking stories before they can, etc. They’ve lost control of the “news”. Now the leftist IT gods and thier elite leftist masters are trying to figure out how to get control of THAT in order to institute the one-world one-truth Ministry of Propaganda.
His argument has an origin he leaves unnamed; the Russians stole the election for Trump.
It is case he heard in the Media and as it fit his own bias he took it, like religious convictions, as gospel truth.
Yet careful examination of the facts shows that the level and breadth of Russian interjections into the media & social media spheres, was minuscule compared to the massive input from both Billary, Inc. & Trump campaigns, the DNC & RNC, all the two parties other election campaigns, all the myriad American political organizations, pacs, publications and web versions of publications, as well as what all of them did on social media, as well as the American TV networks and news organizations. Collectively they make the “Russian” interjections look like an ant climbing an elephant. I doubt the elephant even noticed.
That is exactly correct.
> No but if you are a brilliant programmer, you still might not be able to pass math or English.
Are you a programmer?
Correct. I barely passed Math.
I agree with him that many of our ‘tech billionaires’ are seriously out of touch. But the problem has as much to do WITH the collage education instead of without it. These guys are ‘half educated’ because the ONLY got college education and then someone handed them billions for some well timed ideas. They never had to work hard in the real world and never got any of that practical experience.
So they actually think stupid crap like package delivering drones makes sense.
collage education
= = = = = = = = = =
Not everyone can sort or present pictures in a proper manner.
Sorry, I was glancing down the page and it just ‘jumped out’ at me.... I will have to be super super careful on my next venture in the responding world...<: <: <:
(Yes, people consider me anal)....
> Correct. I barely passed Math
All right FRiend. I don’t want to argue with you. You misunderstood my point, but that could partly have been because I didn’t make it very well.
I will say as a software developer for over thirty years that arithmetic, mathematics and English communications deficiencies in developers continue to cause glaring, expensive and dangerous problems.
Also, that universities are still teaching useful and necessary stuff, but they are adding lies and poison to it. Beware.
> These guys all dropped out because running the companies they’d created didn’t leave a lot of time for school.
I would have done the same thing. I didn’t even read the article, but I am pretty confident that the basic education of these guys in the areas of US and world history, and in theology, was highly deficient. I’m talking about early education and not college. I am responding to the title of the article — only.
“So they won’t call it a crime or pass laws to stop it. The government wants in on it. And by the way, so does every other government around the world.”
So you want the government to restrict the flow of info in order to protect us from the government!? Are you nuts?
I’d rather get everybody’s propaganda, that’s much better than having only one party controlling the propaganda organs. I’ll filter the crap myself.
What the Romans cautioned people 2000 years ago still applies today - “caveat emptor”.
“It never seems to have occurred to them that their competitors could also use their advertising engines to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters.”
There ... fixed it.
“So they won’t call it a crime or pass laws to stop it. The government wants in on it. And by the way, so does every other government around the world.”
So you want the government to restrict the flow of info in order to protect us from the government!? Are you nuts?
No I want Google and Facebook to collect only those pieces of information we actively give to them for the purpose we give it. I do not like them, say, scanning our emails. Or following us when we turned off their app. or changing the settings on my computer. Your cable company is barred from giving out info on what you specifically watch. And libraries are barred from giving information on which books you read. But your phone can track every move you make and even turn on your microphone to listen or your camera to watch you. The police currently can do this.
O...
K...
I read the article as saying that tech titans would be better off with more background in the traditional humanities. I agree, I just think that the author's prescription for acquiring that knowledge, time spent in college, is far more likely to be an impediment in acquiring such knowledge.
People would be better off if they read Socrates, Polybius, Cicero, de Tocqueville, Burke, Elliot, Mill... Unfortunately, most “liberal arts” majors do not do so.
Background: My mother was a teacher, my late husband was a teacher; I switched from a Spanish to a Science major when Sputnick flew; I was a voracious reader. I came to the conclusion that for me the only necessary classes were Science, Language, and the Arts. All else was reading and thinking. My husband and I were college graduates. Our 2 sons are not. Number 1 son did 3 years of ROTC and entered the Army at graduation. He left after his 4 years in 82nd Airborne. Worked but not very happy for a few years. I asked him what the problem was. He said, “I like to get up at 6 am and run 5 miles.” Well, I guess that explained it. He reenlisted and has now finished 20 years, currently in Special Forces. His father, he, and his son were all restless, can’t sit still types, like many people especially young men who are not well suited to routine sedentary work. My other son was dyslexic, dropped out and was doing nothing. I helped get him informally apprenticed to a young man (orphan) I had helped, and he became a good worker. He is now married, 2 children, and running his own construction business.
A significant problem with modern education and catch all solutions like “No Child Left Behind” or Common Core is the focus on “College Education.” At Harvard it was stated that the Common Core State Standards were intended to set a common high standard for student achievement all across the country. … The goal is to set standards at such a level that virtually all students who graduate high school will be both ready to do successful college work or to enter a 21st-century high skill/high knowledge career and be successful in that.” from: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/11/core-objectives/
Have these educated idiots forgotten that while 1/2 the population is above average and should be able to be successful in college or at some detailed technical trade, the other half of the population is below average and while able to work successfully at something, needs to be specifically helped to learn working skills. Thus for half the population the stated goals of Common Core are impossible to ever reach. Thus large numbers of our students are neglected for those who can reasonably be expected to measure up to the “common high standard for student achievement.” Schools used to have decent programs of technical and practical education. Sixty years ago the courses in sewing, cooking, and home nursing have proved to be some of the most useful for my entire life. I taught my sons cooking, light sewing, and health maintenance which they have used successfully. They also helped me with carpentry, brick laying, and electric line running. My father taught my brothers auto mechanics and light home construction.
One result of of the total failure and neglect of technical and trade education in our schools is that large chunks of population especially, for example, black people in our cities have left school totally unprepared to do needed non collegiate work. As a result, developers and contractors have been happy to hire undocumented labor coming in from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Now we have both urban blacks and small town and rural white people furious at the system which has so shamelessly neglected their legitimate needs with the elitist fallacy that all you need to succeed and have a successful society is a college education or education in a 21st-century high skill/high knowledge career.
When I got my BA in 1959 I discovered I could not advance in science without at least an MS or PhD, or get a white collar job until I had shorthand and faster typing. They never told me that in college, and this lack of useful information seems equally common today after almost 60 years. I recently spoke for 20 minutes with a successful restauranteer running for political office about vocational education for the restaurant field. I asked his opinion of our city’s culinary arts program. “Not very good.” When I asked him what was the most important thing these students needed to learn. He said, “to smile.” Ah, yes, service with a smile, how novel!
Yeah, that’s a decent point, but more fundamental is that they teach reading, writing and basic math such that even below-average students who ought to be able to handle reading, writing, and basic math can’t.
The total deemphasis on industrial arts is one reason why so many people who work with their hands have been driven out of the middle class and replaced by illegal aliens. The greed of the elites in the industry and their political allies who refuse to enforce the law are another.
College is a business. The college industry misreads the stats that people with a college degree do better than those who do not have a college degree. They purposely don’t look into whether college degrees are causation or correlation with regard to success. In my experience, college acceptance has virtually the same correlation with success as college graduation. And college has very little if any causation for success. Actual, going through college gives you little in terms of knowledge that you can’t get anywhere else (internet, on the job, random observance). And the networking you do is easily done at your first job, or a city apartment complex, or a work out room.
As an employer I did not care what someones degree was in. I only cared which college they were accepted to. It was an IQ test. University of Chicago meant you were smarter than Michigan State. Programmers were the only position that I required a degree in the subject. (Obviously CFOs and lawyers need a specific degree.)
The new college student has to unlearn much of college. Gone are the days where you are taught. You need to learn to be successful. Gone are the days when you are supposed to do your own work. Collaboration is the key to success. Risking, getting something pretty close to right, invention and throwing out what you worked on to throw in with a colleague who has a better idea is part of work and scorned by colleges.
Your kids, especially with wives who help out, are probably great. Especially if they are industrious and have an industrious partner.
You make a good point in your last line (actually in the others too). My son who dropped out in the 10th grade is happily married to a college graduate who is working in a biomedical field. My son who went straight into the Army is married to a woman who graduated from a well recognized arts school, and got an MA in a specialized area of art. She earns good money and they are working on getting a building that she can use both as a studio and store. In the Army my son has gone through a number of trainings which he figures will be useful for getting post Army work.
I had read Trump’s book 30 years ago and my net worth is probably double what it would have been if I had not read it. I used an equity line of credit to gift my boys enough money to each buy a fixer upper house with room enough to have some kids. Without that help I might still have only one grandchild instead of 4. When I discovered the Starker exchange, I used it to trade an inherited property 1,000 miles from home for a desirable vacation property 120 miles from home. My sons have sought my advice on things like home buying and HELOCs which has advanced their lives too. Parents with enough education or intelligence need to recognize that roads to success today may not be the same as they were 30 or 40 years ago, and that they can help their kids by learning about new employable skills. Also, they say many people will do at least 3 types of work in their lifetime as things are these days.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.