Quote of the Day

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law… That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly, … and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.

- Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Wisdom Of The Week

In what may come as a surprise to freethinkers and nonconformists happily defying social conventions these days in New York City, Paris, Sydney and other centers of Western culture, a new study traces the origins of contemporary individualism to the powerful influence of the Catholic Church in Europe more than 1,000 years ago, during the Middle Ages.

According to the researchers, strict church policies on marriage and family structure completely upended existing social norms and led to what they call “global psychological variation,” major changes in behavior and thinking that transformed the very nature of the European populations.

The study, published this week in Science, combines anthropology, psychology and history to track the evolution of the West, as we know it, from its roots in “kin-based” societies. The antecedents consisted of clans, derived from networks of tightly interconnected ties, that cultivated conformity, obedience and in-group loyalty—while displaying less trust and fairness with strangers and discouraging independence and analytic thinking.

The engine of that evolution, the authors propose, was the church’s obsession with incest and its determination to wipe out the marriages between cousins that those societies were built on. The result, the paper says, was the rise of “small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility,” along with less conformity, more individuality, and, ultimately, a set of values and a psychological outlook that characterize the Western world. The impact of this change was clear: the longer a society’s exposure to the church, the greater the effect.

Around A.D. 500, explains Joseph Henrich, chair of Harvard University’s department of human evolutionary biology and senior author of the study, “the Western church, unlike other brands of Christianity and other religions, begins to implement this marriage and family program, which systematically breaks down these clans and kindreds of Europe into monogamous nuclear families. And we make the case that this then results in these psychological differences.”

- Western Individualism Arose from Incest Taboo

Quote of the Day

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Quote of the Day

I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

- Lao Tzu

Quote of the Day

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Quote of the Day

A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.

- Henri J.M. Nouwen

Quote of the Day

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.

- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

Quote of the Day

Wisdom Of The Week

There are several implicit assertions in the JAFFE set. First there’s the taxonomy itself: that “emotions” is a valid set of visual concepts. Then there’s a string of additional assumptions: that the concepts within “emotions” can be applied to photographs of people’s faces (specifically Japanese women); that there are six emotions plus a neutral state; that there is a fixed relationship between a person’s facial expression and her true emotional state; and that this relationship between the face and the emotion is consistent, measurable, and uniform across the women in the photographs.

At the level of the class, we find assumptions such as “there is such a thing as a ‘neutral’ facial expression” and “the significant six emotional states are happy, sad, angry, disgusted, afraid, surprised.”At the level of labeled image, there are other implicit assumptions such as “this particular photograph depicts a woman with an ‘angry’ facial expression,” rather than, for example, the fact that this is an image of a woman mimicking an angry expression. These, of course, are all ‘performed” expressions—not relating to any interior state, but acted out in a laboratory setting. Every one of the implicit claims made at each level is, at best, open to question, and some are deeply contested.

[---]

In the case of ImageNet, noun categories such as “apple” or “apple butter” might seem reasonably uncontroversial, but not all nouns are created equal. To borrow an idea from linguist George Lakoff, the concept of an “apple” is more nouny than the concept of “light”, which in turn is more nouny than a concept such as “health.”[17] Nouns occupy various places on an axis from the concrete to the abstract, and from the descriptive to the judgmental. These gradients have been erased in the logic of ImageNet. Everything is flattened out and pinned to a label, like taxidermy butterflies in a display case. The results can be problematic, illogical, and cruel, especially when it comes to labels applied to people.

ImageNet contains 2,833 subcategories under the top-level category “Person.” The subcategory with the most associated pictures is “gal” (with 1,664 images) followed by “grandfather” (1,662), “dad” (1,643), and chief executive officer (1,614). With these highly populated categories, we can already begin to see the outlines of a worldview. ImageNet classifies people into a huge range of types including race, nationality, profession, economic status, behaviour, character, and even morality. There are categories for racial and national identities including Alaska Native, Anglo-American, Black, Black African, Black Woman, Central American, Eurasian, German American, Japanese, Lapp, Latin American, Mexican-American, Nicaraguan, Nigerian, Pakistani, Papuan, South American Indian, Spanish American, Texan, Uzbek, White, Yemeni, and Zulu. Other people are labeled by their careers or hobbies: there are Boy Scouts, cheerleaders, cognitive neuroscientists, hairdressers, intelligence analysts, mythologists, retailers, retirees, and so on.

As we go further into the depths of ImageNet’s Person categories, the classifications of humans within it take a sharp and dark turn. There are categories for Bad Person, Call Girl, Drug Addict, Closet Queen, Convict, Crazy, Failure, Flop, Fucker, Hypocrite, Jezebel, Kleptomaniac, Loser, Melancholic, Nonperson, Pervert, Prima Donna, Schizophrenic, Second-Rater, Spinster, Streetwalker, Stud, Tosser, Unskilled Person, Wanton, Waverer, and Wimp. There are many racist slurs and misogynistic terms.

Of course, ImageNet was typically used for object recognition—so the Person category was rarely discussed at technical conferences, nor has it received much public attention. However, this complex architecture of images of real people, tagged with often offensive labels, has been publicly available on the internet for a decade. It provides a powerful and important example of the complexities and dangers of human classification, and the sliding spectrum between supposedly unproblematic labels like “trumpeter” or “tennis player” to concepts like “spastic,” “mulatto,” or “redneck.” Regardless of the supposed neutrality of any particular category, the selection of images skews the meaning in ways that are gendered, racialized, ableist, and ageist. ImageNet is an object lesson, if you will, in what happens when people are categorized like objects. And this practice has only become more common in recent years, often inside the big AI companies, where there is no way for outsiders to see how images are being ordered and classified.

[---]

In 1839, the mathematician François Arago claimed that through photographs, “objects preserve mathematically their forms.”[19] Placed into the nineteenth-century context of imperialism and social Darwinism, photography helped to animate—and lend a “scientific” veneer to—various forms of phrenology, physiognomy, and eugenics.[20] Physiognomists such as Francis Galton and Cesare Lombroso created composite images of criminals, studied the feet of prostitutes, measured skulls, and compiled meticulous archives of labeled images and measurements, all in an effort to use “mechanical” processes to detect visual signals in classifications of race, criminality, and deviance from bourgeois ideals. This was done to capture and pathologize what was seen as deviant or criminal behavior, and make such behavior observable in the world.

And as we shall see, not only have the underlying assumptions of physiognomy made a comeback with contemporary training sets, but indeed a number of training sets are designed to use algorithms and facial landmarks as latter-day calipers to conduct contemporary versions of craniometry.

[---]

Datasets aren’t simply raw materials to feed algorithms, but are political interventions. As such, much of the discussion around “bias” in AI systems misses the mark: there is no “neutral,” “natural,” or “apolitical” vantage point that training data can be built upon. There is no easy technical “fix” by shifting demographics, deleting offensive terms, or seeking equal representation by skin tone. The whole endeavor of collecting images, categorizing them, and labeling them is itself a form of politics, filled with questions about who gets to decide what images mean and what kinds of social and political work those representations perform.

- Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen