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Oppportunity for cognitive easing + Future of angry mobs: Some suggestions

#1
C C Offline
Cognitive Easing: Human Identity Crisis in a World of Technology
http://futurememes.blogspot.com/2017/01/...risis.html

EXCERPT: A contemporary problem seems to be technology’s controlling presence in the world. Jobs are disappearing due to technological unemployment. News is fed to us that does not correspond to reality. Mysterious big data algorithms direct from the background. We no longer seem able to think for ourselves with “the cloud” automatically piloting our lives. What happened to caprice and serendipity, to our very humanness?

However, I argue the opposite. It is not the infantilization of humans by technology that is happening, but rather the opportunity for cognitive easing. We are not always accustomed to using our brains in the most creative and productive ways. Therefore we feel dumbed-down by technology when cognitive easing is actually freeing us from mental drudgery....



The Future of Angry Mobs and the End of Pitchforks
https://incrediblevanishingpaperweight.w...itchforks/

EXCERPT: I don’t join angry mobs too often. I’m not saying I wouldn’t, but it just doesn’t happen regularly. But if I did, I probably wouldn’t grab a pitchfork. Or even a torch. When we talk about angry mobs, why are these still the tools and implements we envision? I think it’s time for an upgrade, at least, technologically, to our concept of angry mobs. Most people wouldn’t even know where to buy a pitchfork or a torch. I’m sure as long as there is government corruption, inequality, suffering, or injustice, there will be angry mobs. So, these aren’t going away. But why hasn’t our definition changed?[mob1] Here’s a quick list of things I think you should take if you find yourself joining an angry mob in the future. If you can think of other things, please add in the comments below. Leave your pitchforks and torches behind...
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#2
Ben the Donkey Offline
So with regard to the first article, CC, how do you feel about the linked text with reference to modern art or music?
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#3
C C Offline
(Jan 28, 2017 06:16 PM)Ben the Donkey Wrote: So with regard to the first article, CC, how do you feel about the linked text with reference to modern art or music?


Apparently still clandestine or cloaked to my browser, even after switching to the desktop version of the page.
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#4
Secular Sanity Offline
(Jan 28, 2017 07:08 PM)C C Wrote:
(Jan 28, 2017 06:16 PM)Ben the Donkey Wrote: So with regard to the first article, CC, how do you feel about the linked text with reference to modern art or music?


Apparently still clandestine or cloaked to my browser, even after switching to the desktop version of the page.

I'm curious, too.  

Here, C C.


Cognitive Easing is the aim of much of our endeavor, whether explicit or implicit. We have never wavered from trying to create a life of ease, enjoyment, and fulfillment. The definition of Cognitive Easing is spending less mental effort to achieve a result.


A contemporary problem seems to be technology’s controlling presence in the world. Jobs are disappearing due to technological unemployment. News is fed to us that does not correspond to reality. Mysterious big data algorithms direct from the background. We no longer seem able to think for ourselves with “the cloud” automatically piloting our lives. What happened to caprice and serendipity, to our very humanness?


However, I argue the opposite. It is not the infantilization of humans by technology that is happening, but rather the opportunity for cognitive easing. We are not always accustomed to using our brains in the most creative and productive ways. Therefore we feel dumbed-down by technology when cognitive easing is actually freeing us from mental drudgery. Consider the amount of effort spent on “last-mile cognition problems” such as planning and coordination. Instead, cognitive load could be increasingly outsourced to algorithms. This has been the promise of technology from the beginning, easier lives.


A pushback is that lower-level cognitive tasks might seem like part of the definition of what it is to be human. However, while we have had to occupy our time this way, it does not have to be who we are. We need to challenge the false and nostalgic notion of defining our humanness by the tasks we do, and this might not be easy. Even scarier than how we will spend our time after technological automation is the question of who we are – our very identity.


Technology is forcing us to question what it is to be human. We have defined ourselves by physical labor and lower-level mental tasks, and it is abrupt to have to change this, especially because we do not know who we are. Worse, there is a timing lag with technology replacing what we think our humanness consists of before we have had a chance to redefine what it could be. We feel out of step with technology, and that we are regressing instead of greatly progressing. We think paradoxically that technology robs us of our humanity when in fact it is doing what we wanted all along, providing physical and cognitive easing.


Technology, automation, and cognitive easing are requiring us to redefine what it is to be human based on the higher-level capacities we have. These higher-level faculties include creative problem solving, artistic expression, storytelling, and quirky ingenuity. Only humans have the ability to perceive the world and react with unique and inventive solutions. We can now contemplate a new class of problems that we did not have the luxury of addressing before, deploying our creative problem-solving capability to a greater extent. The vision for the future is engaging with more of our unique humanness, increasingly freed from both physical and mental drudgery, to be more of who we really are, creative, serendipitous, problem-solving beings exploring and enacting our world in new and ingenious ways.
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#5
C C Offline
Oh, I reflexively assumed Ben meant there was literally an obscured link in the text that transported one to a blog, essay or paper about art / music in the context of the post-work age. That's what happens when I dabble with too many in-line text URLs, like some in this post. First thing that pops to mind.

The expense of a post-drudgery future surely couldn't be supported minus it coinciding with the smart-machine era. Even then, most probably expect it to be a situation of: The Future Doesn't Work - The Utopian ideal may be a 21st century nightmare. But to indulge the over-optimism and the possibility for creativity which the free-time slash "cognitive easing" might allow...

While the New Escapologist ideology might place emphasis on creativity (among other pursuits) in a post-workist's era, the initial signs are that the high forms of it would be outputted by a still active, functional elite population (wealthy and upper class professionals). Given that affluence is supposedly sought for its increased leisure-time, they're ironically the ones anticipated to spend more time working.

There's an expectation that whatever survives of the middle class will return to its 19th-century artisan tendencies.[3]

Whereas a rising tide of unemployed and part-time employed Millennial males (proto-nerds?) seem content to fill their hours watching television, playing video games, browsing the Internet, and sleeping; and becoming more socially isolated as a result. Even their desire for real sex has toppled[2], compared to former generations. They consume entertainment[1], aesthetic and imaginative products rather than produce them. (To do much else would mean not qualifying for that semi-jobless, jobless or social-welfare niche to begin with or having already crawled out of it.)

But I doubt that pattern could hold into a maturing Z-generation and beyond. Though its poverty resulted from Rust Belt causes, the changes happening in Youngstown, Ohio may also be a template for the near future[4] of the smart-machine transition. That includes Millennials that are more motivated and involved in shaping the community[5].

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[1] Derek Thompson: "At the very moment that the labor market obliterated manufacturing jobs and shifted toward more soft-skill service jobs, diversion became a vastly discounted experience that could provide a moment’s joy at home. As a result, entertainment has become an inferior good, where the young and poor work less and play more." --The Free-Time Paradox in America

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[2] Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Then there's Xbox. As the economist Erik Hurst notes, young men are spending a lot of their time playing video games. This is particularly prevalent among the growing demographic of young men without college degrees, who are frequently unemployed and unmarried. As Hurst explains, "The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one-for-one with leisure time ... Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games. The average low-skilled, unemployed man in this group plays video games an average of 12, and sometimes upwards of 30 hours per week."

Thirty hours! How are you going to meet a partner when you're playing video games that much?

And, most importantly, there's porn. The Post interviews an 18-year-old virgin male who is not really interested in having sex, because he'd rather watch YouTube.

But isn't he curious about actual sex?

"Not really," he says. "I've seen so much of it ... There isn't really anything magical about it, right?"
--Why Millennials Aren't Having Sex

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[3] Derek Thompson: Artisans made up the original American middle class. Before industrialization swept through the U.S. economy, many people who didn’t work on farms were silversmiths, blacksmiths, or woodworkers. These artisans were ground up by the machinery of mass production in the 20th century. But Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, sees the next wave of automation returning us to an age of craftsmanship and artistry. In particular, he looks forward to the ramifications of 3‑D printing, whereby machines construct complex objects from digital designs. --A World Without Work

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[4] Derek Thompson: John Russo sees Youngstown as the leading edge of a larger trend toward the development of what he calls the “precariat”—a working class that swings from task to task in order to make ends meet and suffers a loss of labor rights, bargaining rights, and job security. In Youngstown, many of these workers have by now made their peace with insecurity and poverty by building an identity, and some measure of pride, around contingency. The faith they lost in institutions—the corporations that have abandoned the city, the police who have failed to keep them safe—has not returned. But Russo and Woodroofe both told me they put stock in their own independence. And so a place that once defined itself single-mindedly by the steel its residents made has gradually learned to embrace the valorization of well-rounded resourcefulness.

Karen Schubert, a 54-year-old writer with two master’s degrees, accepted a part-time job as a hostess at a café in Youngstown early this year, after spending months searching for full-time work. Schubert, who has two grown children and an infant grandson, said she’d loved teaching writing and literature at the local university. But many colleges have replaced full-time professors with part-time adjuncts in order to control costs, and she’d found that with the hours she could get, adjunct teaching didn’t pay a living wage, so she’d stopped. “I think I would feel like a personal failure if I didn’t know that so many Americans have their leg caught in the same trap,” she said. Perhaps the 20th century will strike future historians as an aberration, with its religious devotion to overwork in a time of prosperity.

Among Youngstown’s precariat, one can see a third possible future, where millions of people struggle for years to build a sense of purpose in the absence of formal jobs, and where entrepreneurship emerges out of necessity. But while it lacks the comforts of the consumption economy or the cultural richness of Lawrence Katz’s artisanal future, it is more complex than an outright dystopia. “There are young people working part-time in the new economy who feel independent, whose work and personal relationships are contingent, and say they like it like this—to have short hours so they have time to focus on their passions,” Russo said.
--A World Without Work

- - - - - - - -

[5] Makers, Millennials and Maple Syrup: The Future of Youngstown: Youngstown is one of six cities in the United States with a poverty rate above 40%. It is also home to the number one university-affiliated business incubator in the World. After two years working in this city of extremes, I’ve come to learn that Youngstown’s brightest opportunities can be described by three themes: Makers, Millennials and Maple Syrup." [...] Millennials: A key group of Youngstowners have come back home, have recently arrived, or never left. Born after the steel mills shut down in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they see Youngstown not for what it has lost, but for what they can help it become. Leading the change are diverse twenty-and-thirty-somethings, sometimes dubbed the Millennial generation. Here are three of the many who are reinventing Youngstown.
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#6
Secular Sanity Offline
Is that what you’d call thinking outside of the Xbox?  Big Grin

I do feel that having time to think is a luxury that not everyone can afford, but at the same time, I think that advancing technology is taking up more of our time.  PC’s have changed almost everything, including our identities.  We’re no longer adopting our occupations and identities from our parent, or other traditional methods, but there’s still that pressurized cooker of conformity through public profiles.

We have the tools to create our own image now, but to know thyself and show thyself is very problematic. Drawing conclusions about what others may or may not think of you is not an easy task, and meta-perceptions are fraught with inaccuracies. Instead of experiencing the moments, we’re behind the lens and in front of the camera.  A choreographed masquerade through social media is very time consuming. It seems like we’re just chasing ourselves through a maze of mirrors with elaborate trapped doors, and secret rooms where not even the slightest whisper could be considered private.  

Quote:A pushback is that lower-level cognitive tasks might seem like part of the definition of what it is to be human. However, while we have had to occupy our time this way, it does not have to be who we are.


Some of these lower-level tasks may be the very underpinnings of such aha moments.  Without the background noise rumbling in our subconscious brains, we might end up with just more meaningless platitudes. Easy to perceive stimuli has such a cheerful tempo, doesn’t it?

"Perceived beauty and judged truth have a common underlying experience, namely processing fluency. Indeed, experiments showed that beauty is used as an indication for the correctness of mathematical solutions. This supports the idea that beauty is intuitively seen as truth."

If truth and beauty are bedfellows that might explain why we’re still sleeping with the gods.

Quote:Technology, automation, and cognitive easing are requiring us to redefine what it is to be human based on the higher-level capacities we have. These higher-level faculties include creative problem solving, artistic expression, storytelling, and quirky ingenuity. Only humans have the ability to perceive the world and react with unique and inventive solutions. We can now contemplate a new class of problems that we did not have the luxury of addressing before, deploying our creative problem-solving capability to a greater extent. The vision for the future is engaging with more of our unique humanness, increasingly freed from both physical and mental drudgery, to be more of who we really are, creative, serendipitous, problem-solving beings exploring and enacting our world in new and ingenious ways.

Cognitive ease—redefining what it is to be human; isn’t that what got us into this mess in first place?


Sorry.  I’m feeling a little cynical today. I should've posted this in Confused2's rant thread.  Undecided
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#7
Ben the Donkey Offline
It actually brought to mind something I read a while back regarding the Archibald Prize - Australia's biggest art prize.
The article stated the number of entrants had been steadily dropping for years now, something they attributed to a possible decline in people actually picking up a paintbrush and learning how to paint due to a plethora of technological pursuits (i.e. entertainment luxuries like TV, movies... and computer games) making it less likely for youth to learn something so time-consuming. This doesn't seem to have affected music so much, as musicians still enjoy a certain social status that artists don't, among youth particularly. Having said that, of course, there is a significant difference in numbers learning guitar as opposed to violin. 

Just wondering if you'd come to similar conclusions.

Also - I've already touched on your point [2] in your second reply, when I mentioned the herbivore men in Japan in another thread. It's a very real phenomenon. They (the Japanese) have several other social groupings becoming more prevalent as well, something we in the West haven't quite latched onto yet as the Japanese, but they exist.
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#8
C C Offline
(Jan 29, 2017 11:00 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote:
Quote:We can now contemplate a new class of problems that we did not have the luxury of addressing before, deploying our creative problem-solving capability to a greater extent. The vision for the future is engaging with more of our unique humanness, increasingly freed from both physical and mental drudgery, to be more of who we really are, creative, serendipitous, problem-solving beings exploring and enacting our world in new and ingenious ways.


Cognitive ease—redefining what it is to be human; isn’t that what got us into this mess in first place?


Yeah, it seems more a conditioned assumption we acquire nowadays that the "default" setting for all humanity is a craving for problem-solving and aesthetic inventiveness. IF we weren't burdened by the "drudgery" of doing what's necessary to stay afloat or doing what we aren't natively interested in.



(Jan 30, 2017 07:58 PM)Ben the Donkey Wrote: It actually brought to mind something I read a while back regarding the Archibald Prize - Australia's biggest art prize.
The article stated the number of entrants had been steadily dropping for years now, something they attributed to a possible decline in people actually picking up a paintbrush and learning how to paint due to a plethora of technological pursuits (i.e. entertainment luxuries like TV, movies... and computer games) making it less likely for youth to learn something so time-consuming. This doesn't seem to have affected music so much, as musicians still enjoy a certain social status that artists don't, among youth particularly. Having said that, of course, there is a significant difference in numbers learning guitar as opposed to violin.


There may no longer be the upfront screaming hordes of girls that once besieged early Elvis and The Beatles, but doubtless the beacon of idol status for the gals and the improved sex-life for the guys is still there as an incentive. Even if it's usually confined to a meager local popularity at best. Like the guitars, popular vocalists nowadays have their singing modified, augmented, and corrected so much by digital electronics that one occasionally wonders what's supposed to be so unique and appealing about their talent as opposed to what that technology and the technical crew behind them is contributing.

In any creative fields that are declining (and in addition to other factors), whatever aura of "special-ness" they may have once enjoyed could be evaporating. Which might have formerly lured some youngsters to participate and develop further in them, to begin with. Overkill from all directions reducing such to commonplace.

- - - - - - - -

JANETTE IKEDA: "There's a glut of creative work on the web. A tsunami of artwork, fan-fiction, independent music and songwriting, poetry, videos of sculpting, etc. Sometimes I feel like the non-monetary value of beauty and virtuosity has fallen sharply. When everybody in this neighborhood has super powers, Green Lantern is just another lawn-gnome added to the resident banality of Willow Street."
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#9
Secular Sanity Offline
Time: What are you doing?
Man:  Passing time.
Man:  What are you doing?
Time: Passing you by.

It’s a love hate relationship, isn't it?  Escapism; we all do it in one form or the other.  Whether it’s reading, learning, crafting, gardening, or whatever. Whether it’s productive and constructive or not, is a matter of taste, and like with almost everything, anything in excess is bad.

Amusing ourselves to Death by Neil Postman is a book about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

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".
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, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In BRAVE NEW WORLD, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

The happiness machine—should happiness, he wondered, be something you can carry in your pocket? Or, he went on, should it be something that carries you in its pocket?  

Nowadays, we do carry it in our pockets.

Our imagination is our mental palate that allows us to solve complex problems and come up with new ideas, but it also makes us error-prone, and leaves us with the constant need for stimulation.

The Science of Imagination

"It is accepted as the innate ability and process of inventing partial or complete personal realms within the mind from elements derived from sense perceptions of the shared world."

We react to external stimuli in order to maintain stable conditions that favor survival.  We need external stimuli in order to make sense out of surroundings. Without it, we’ll lose our minds.  

Why does the perceptually deprived brain play such tricks?

Cognitive psychologists believe that the part of the brain that deals with ongoing tasks, such as sensory perception, is accustomed to dealing with a large quantity of information, such as visual, auditory and other environmental cues. But when there is a dearth of information, says Robbins, “the various nerve systems feeding in to the brain’s central processor are still firing off, but in a way that doesn’t make sense. So after a while the brain starts to make sense of them, to make them into a pattern.” It creates whole images out of partial ones. In other words, it tries to construct a reality from the scant signals available to it, yet it ends up building a fantasy world.

Secondly, we derive meaning from our emotional states largely through contact with others. Biologists believe that human emotions evolved because they aided co-operation among our early ancestors who benefited from living in groups. Their primary function is social. With no one to mediate our feelings of fear, anger, anxiety and sadness and help us determine their appropriateness, before long they deliver us a distorted sense of self, a perceptual fracturing or a profound irrationality. It seems that left too much to ourselves, the very system that regulates our social living can overwhelm us.

Psychologists who study how people cope with isolation have learnt much from solo explorers and mountaineers. For many adventurers deprived of human company – albeit voluntarily – the landscape itself can serve as an effective surrogate, drawing them out of themselves into the beauty or grandeur of their surroundings. Norwegian psychologist Gro Sandal at the University of Bergen in Norway, who has interviewed many adventurers about how they cope in extreme environments, says that transcending the reality of their situation in this way is a common coping mechanism. “It makes them feel safer. It makes them feel less alone.”

Isolation may very often be the “sum total of wretchedness”, as the writer Thomas Carlyle put it. However, a more upbeat assessment seems equally valid: it is possible to connect, to find solace beyond ourselves, even when we are alone. It helps to be prepared, and to be mentally resilient. But we shouldn’t underestimate the power of our imagination to knock over prison walls, penetrate icy caves or provide make-believe companions to walk with us.

How Extreme Isolation Warps Minds

(Jan 30, 2017 07:58 PM)Ben the Donkey Wrote: Also - I've already touched on your point [2] in your second reply, when I mentioned the herbivore men in Japan in another thread. It's a very real phenomenon. They (the Japanese) have several other social groupings becoming more prevalent as well, something we in the West haven't quite latched onto yet as the Japanese, but they exist.

As for the herbivore man, I think that we’re experiencing the same sort of dilemma here in the states.

Virtual realities and online social media can satisfy some of our needs. Marriage rates are dropping fast here in the states, as well.  Millennials no longer feel the same societal pressure to marry. Many believe that marriage fails the cost/risk–benefit analysis.

"Young women must also reconsider their own expectations of men. According to what young women say and surveys that have been taken of their opinions, when it comes to a male partner a great many of them are looking for a man who is strong-willed, reliable, and will assertively take charge of them. But this desire only reinforces the old gender paradigm in which men are dominant and women are subordinate. It is clearly not an approach that will lead to a society in which both men and women participate as equals. But here extremely difficult problems exist." [1]

(Jan 18, 2017 09:25 PM)Syne Wrote: Institutionalized feminism. It's paved the way to single-parent households, which many studies cite as the single largest predictor of things like criminality, drug-use, etc.. It's demonized males and made natural male behaviors, like a need for more physical activity and competition, unacceptable. If you were raised in a culture that says you're not supposed to be quite and have manors, there's no value or benefit to being a mother, all others deserve preference over you, and any interest you have in sex must be depraved, how do you think you'd feel?

I laughed when I read this.  

I think that women are still battling with the repression of female sexuality.  It invokes passivity, and the idea that her needs are less important, and not worthy of discussion.  I think a lot of them are left sexually dependent, hoping that they’ll find a man who can somehow read their mind.  

However, the stigma surrounding female sexuality is fading fast and social media has removed the accessibility barrier.  Why hunt when you can order take-out, or have it delivered to your front door(?)
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