The 30th Block: Watch me, validate me

For better or worse, we're narcissistic sheeple.

Nov 29, 2020

The day this newsletter is sent out, I will be speaking at a virtual conference. I have a small regret about pausing the audio segment on my newsletter because my presentation skills have certainly declined since the Amplify series wrapped up.

I don’t think a lot of people know this, but I have a vocal warm-up routine that I do before going on-air, and a shortened version for when I was not originally scheduled to go on-air but had to jump in at the last minute.

My programme director when I was at BFM, Caroline Oh, would often provide coaching or send me for training, and that’s how I’ve gone from being a monotonous, jaw-clenching mumbler to somewhat intelligible. I still rely a lot on these vocal warm-ups because, without them, I easily fall back into my lazy speech pattern, false starts, and mispronunciation.

Some of these vocal exercises are really technical and boring (breathing exercises, QEQR, hums, etc.) but I find a lot of joy working on minimal pairs. I have absolutely no problem saying anaesthesiology, deoxyribonucleic acid, and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus – all words and phrases I’ve said on-air – but minimal pairs are the bane of my existence.

My favourite, which was the example I used when I was arguing against putting me on-air, is the distinction between the pronunciation of sheep and ship [IPA: /i:/ and /ɪ/]. Well, in my head, I can make the distinction, but when the word comes out of my mouth, you don’t know which one I’m referring to. An example phrase I often mutter to myself in the bathroom five minutes before going on-air is, “These six silly sisters took a ship to meet this sweet sheep.” Let me know some of your favourite tongue-twisters and minimal pair practices, I’ll be repeating them to myself all day:

Surveillance capitalism wasn’t built by powerful companies alone

From data fetishisation to individualism, a brilliant piece by Anouk Ruhaak for CIGI:

Only when we drop the belief that predictive machines are all powerful, and instead consider them in their social and political context, do we allow for governance models that center human and planetary concerns. Similarly, once we replace notions of individual control over data with a focus on individual and collective agency, do we create the possibility for data governance models that truly challenge the status quo.

tl;dr: this AI sums up research papers in a sentence

Semantic Scholar unveiled a new feature that automatically generates one-sentence summaries of research papers to help users to skim-read papers faster.

Jeffrey M. Perkel and Richard Van Noorden for Nature:

The free tool, which creates what the team calls TLDRs (the common Internet acronym for ‘Too long, didn’t read’), was activated this week for search results at Semantic Scholar, a search engine created by the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington. For the moment, the software generates sentences only for the ten million computer-science papers covered by Semantic Scholar, but papers from other disciplines should be getting summaries in the next month or so, once the software has been fine-tuned.

I tried it out on a paper by Kris McGuffie and Alex Newhouse, The Radicalization Risks of GPT-3 and Advanced Neural Language Models. Here’s the generated tl;dr version:

In this paper, we expand on our previous research of the potential for abuse of generative language models by assessing GPT-3’s strength in generating text that accurately emulates interactive, informational, and influential content that could be utilized for radicalizing individuals into violent far-right extremist ideologies and behaviors.

And here’s the full abstract:

In this paper, we expand on our previous research of the potential for abuse of generative language models by assessing GPT-3. Experimenting with prompts representative of different types of extremist narrative, structures of social interaction, and radical ideologies, we find that GPT-3 demonstrates significant improvement over its predecessor, GPT-2, in generating extremist texts. We also show GPT-3’s strength in generating text that accurately emulates interactive, informational, and influential content that could be utilized for radicalizing individuals into violent far-right extremist ideologies and behaviors. While OpenAI’s preventative measures are strong, the possibility of unregulated copycat technology represents significant risk for large-scale online radicalization and recruitment; thus, in the absence of safeguards, successful and efficient weaponization that requires little experimentation is likely. AI stakeholders, the policymaking community, and governments should begin investing as soon as possible in building social norms, public policy, and educational initiatives to preempt an influx of machine-generated disinformation and propaganda. Mitigation will require effective policy and partnerships across industry, government, and civil society.

What do you think?

Vaccine hesitancy a looming hurdle to ending pandemic

This segment by Ioanna Roumeliotis on CBC’s The National is a well-produced piece on vaccine hesitancy. There are legitimate reasons to be hesitant about the COVID-19 vaccines in particular and this piece provided a balanced approach to the subject, not pandering to conspiracy theories – but addressing those legitimate concerns. I’m appalled, but not surprised, by the like-dislike ratio.

Some quotes to ponder upon:

I’m definitely not an anti-vaxxer by any means. There’s diseases that we were able to eradicate as a result of vaccines and vaccinations. But I don’t even like early tech. When a new iPhone comes out, I’m like, I’ll wait until it works out the bugs and the kinks. And I’m feeling the same way when it comes to the vaccines. – Tanya Hayles, mother (timestamp: 1:24).
Vaccine hesitancy is not inherently misinformation. It can contain misinformation and often does, but is itself not. You can have very legitimate concerns about vaccines, and not be anti-science or anti-intellectual. – Aengus Bridgman, Media Ecosystem Observatory researcher (timestamp: 2:53).
The so-called moveable middle may not be anti-vaxxers. But a barrage of misinformation online, around everything around everything from the accelerated speed of vacine development, to pauses in vaccine trials can fuel mistrust. – Ioanna Roumeliotis, reporter (timestamp: 3:08).
I’m a normal, healthy adult. It’s not that I'm not worried about it, I am. But I don’t really feel that I need to jump to getting a vaccine... I feel like there’s not enough information about it and I’d rather wait and see. I’m happy to wear a mask, I’m happy to socially distance from people. And, you know, other people’s health is important to me. I just feel like I’m not in urgent need of this vaccine. – Lisa Cottingham, mother (timestamp: 5:20).
But if hesitant Canadians become holdouts, that poses a risk to herd immunity. With no other health measures in place, experts estimate around 70 per cent of the population would need to be vaccinated to stop the virus from spreading. – Ioanna Roumeliotis, reporter (timestamp: 5:51).

What I read, watch and listen to…

I’m reading what life is like on the inside as a locked-in patient by Josh Wilbur on The Guardian. Truly the worst of my fears.
I’m watching Ann Reardon debunk fake banana hacks.
I’m listening to Floor Jansen and Marko Hietala of Nightwish talk about aliens – not in a pseudoscientific way, by the way! I’m amazed by the scientific and historical studies cited throughout this conversation. I’m proud to know the members of my all-time favourite band are incredibly smart and well-informed. You can tell by the music they create.