"Probably 30% of people exclusively watch stuff that you would find disgusting."

Proof that Americans are lying about their sexual desires - Vox: 

"Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of Everybody Lies, a new book that uses data on America’s Google habits as an insight into our national consciousness. Two findings from the book dominated the conversation: America is riddled with racist and selfish people, and there may be a self-induced abortion crisis in this country. But there was plenty more revelatory data in the book that we didn’t cover. So I wanted to follow up with Stephens-Davidowitz to talk about some of the other provocative claims he is making. I was particularly interested in sexuality and online porn. If, as Stephens-Davidowitz puts it, “Google is a digital truth serum,” then what else does it tell us about our private thoughts and desires? What else are we hiding from our friends, neighbors, and colleagues? A lot, apparently. 

Among other things, Stephens-Davidowitz’s data suggests that there are more gay men in the closet than we think; that many men prefer overweight women to skinny women but are afraid to act on it; that married women are disproportionately worried their husband is gay; that a lot of straight women watch lesbian porn; and that porn featuring violence against women is more popular among women than men...

 It’s interesting. Some sexual preferences I first learned about on The Jerry Springer Show, which featured really poor, uneducated people. People attracted to animals or family members or the elderly. But, now from seeing porn data, I realize those preferences also exist among wealthy, educated people. Wealthy, educated people are more cognizant of contemporary social norms, which means if you have such an attraction, you hide it..

 All right, give me a couple of unusual desires you noticed — one from men and one from women. 

 It is really amazing how much tastes can vary. There are women who just watch porn featuring short, fat men with small penises. There are men who just watch porn featuring women with enormous nipples. 

 How about other countries? 

The number one Google search in India that starts "my husband wants ..." is "my husband wants me to breastfeed him." Porn featuring adult breastfeeding is higher in India than anywhere else. In just about every country, just about every Google search looking for advice on breastfeeding is looking how to breastfeed a baby. In India, Google searches looking for breastfeeding advice are about equally split between how to breastfeed a baby and how to breastfeed a husband. After I published this finding, some journalists interviewed people in India. Everyone denied this. But I am sure, based on the data, that there are a reasonable number of adult Indian men desiring to be breastfed. It is really amazing that this desire can develop in one country without ever being openly talked about. 

Any other findings from countries not named America? 

Japanese men have recently become obsessed with tickling porn. More than 10 percent of Pornhub searches by young Japanese men are for “tickling.”"

"The data from porn tells us that everybody is weird. Thus, nobody is weird."

Any other surprising findings about women in America? 

About 20 percent of the porn women watch is lesbian porn. A lot of straight women watch lesbian porn. 

That’s not very surprising. 

Porn featuring violence against women is also extremely popular among women. It is far more popular among women than men. I hate saying that because misogynists seem to love this fact. Fantasy life isn't always politically correct. The rate at which women watch violent porn is roughly the same in every part of the world. It isn’t correlated with how women are treated.

So what’s the future of online porn? Where is it going? 

 I think anal sex will pass vaginal sex in porn within three years. That's what my data models suggest. 

 Somehow that feels like a perfect point on which to end."

That Google Memo.

Nobody cares about it anymore because it was a million news cycles ago, but I found the whole thing kind of insane and had a bunch of notes in my queue that I'm finally getting around to organizing.  The reporting on the actual content of the memo was highly disingenuous, imo.

"I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem."

 

No, the Google manifesto isn’t sexist or anti-diversity. It’s science - The Globe and Mail: "Despite how it’s been portrayed, the memo was fair and factually accurate. Scientific studies have confirmed sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our interests and behaviour. As mentioned in the memo, gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone – higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood. Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated by men. 

We see evidence for this in girls with a genetic condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who are exposed to unusually high levels of testosterone in the womb. When they are born, these girls prefer male-typical, wheeled toys, such as trucks, even if their parents offer more positive feedback when they play with female-typical toys, such as dolls. Similarly, men who are interested in female-typical activities were likely exposed to lower levels of testosterone. As well, new research from the field of genetics shows that testosterone alters the programming of neural stem cells, leading to sex differences in the brain even before it’s finished developing in utero. This further suggests that our interests are influenced strongly by biology, as opposed to being learned or socially constructed. 

Many people, including a former Google employee, have attempted to refute the memo’s points, alleging that they contradict the latest research. I’d love to know what “research done […] for decades” he’s referring to, because thousands of studies would suggest otherwise. A single study, published in 2015, did claim that male and female brains existed along a “mosaic” and that it isn’t possible to differentiate them by sex, but this has been refuted by four – yes, four – academic studies since. This includes a study that analyzed the exact same brain data from the original study and found that the sex of a given brain could be correctly identified with 69-per-cent to 77-per-cent accuracy. Of course, differences exist at the individual level, and this doesn’t mean environment plays no role in shaping us. But to claim that there are no differences between the sexes when looking at group averages, or that culture has greater influence than biology, simply isn’t true."

...In fact, research has shown that cultures with greater gender equity have larger sex differences when it comes to job preferences, because in these societies, people are free to choose their occupations based on what they enjoy. As the memo suggests, seeking to fulfill a 50-per-cent quota of women in STEM is unrealistic. As gender equity continues to improve in developing societies, we should expect to see this gender gap widen. This trend continues into the area of personality, as well. Contrary to what detractors would have you believe, women are, on average, higher in neuroticism and agreeableness, and lower in stress tolerance. Some intentionally deny the science because they are afraid it will be used to justify keeping women out of STEM. But sexism isn’t the result of knowing facts; it’s the result of what people choose to do with them. This is exactly what the mob of outrage should be mobilizing for, instead of denying biological reality and being content to spend a weekend doxxing a man so that he would lose his job. At this point, as foreshadowed in Mr. Damore’s manifesto, we should be more concerned about viewpoint diversity than diversity revolving around gender."

Gender & Toys: Monkey Study Suggests Hormonal Basis For Children's Toy Preferences | HuffPost: "In experiments, male adolescent monkeys also prefer to play with wheeled vehicles while the females prefer dolls — and their societies say nothing on the matter. The monkey research, conducted with two different species in 2002 and 2008, strongly suggested a biological explanation for children’s toy preferences. In recent years, the question has become: How and why does biology make males (be they monkey or human) prefer trucks, and females, dolls? New and ongoing research suggests babies’ exposure to hormones while they are in the womb causes their toy preferences to emerge soon after birth. As for why evolution made this so, questions remain, but the toys may help boys and girls develop the skills they once needed to fulfill their ancient gender roles. 

First, in 2009, Gerianne Alexander, professor of psychology at Texas A&M University, and her colleagues found that 3- and 4-month-old boys’ testosterone levels correlated with how much more time they spent looking at male-typical toys such as trucks and balls compared with female-typical toys such as dolls, as measured by an eye tracker. Their level of exposure to the hormone androgen during gestation (which can be estimated by their digit ratio, or the relative lengths of their index and ring fingers) also correlated with their visual interest in male-typical toys. “Specifically, boys with more male-typical digit ratios showed greater visual interest in a ball compared to a doll,” Alexander told Life’s Little Mysteries. 

Kim Wallen, a psychologist at Emory University who has studied the gender-specific toy preferences of young rhesus monkeys, said, “The striking thing about the looking data shows that the attraction to these objects occurs very early in life, before it’s likely to have been socialized.” Further buttressing the idea that toy preferences are caused by hormones, last year, a group of British researchers found that girls with a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who experienced abnormally high levels of the male sex hormone androgen while in the womb, prefer to play with male-typical toys. [Why Is Pink for Girls and Blue for Boys?] But why would male sex hormones make people favor wheeled vehicles and balls? A common explanation holds that these toys facilitate more vigorous activity, which boys are evolutionarily programmed to seek out. But the 2009 study indicated that their affinity for balls and trucks predates the stage when children actually start playing with toys. At just 3 months old, the newborn boys already fixed their eyes on the toys associated with their gender. “Given that these babies lack physical abilities that would allow them to ‘play’ with these toys as do older children, our finding suggests that males preference for male-typical toys are not determined by the activities supported by the toys (i.e., movement, rough play),” Alexander said. Wallen approaches the data more cautiously. “It’s hard to interpret what the looking data mean because we don’t know why people are attracted to specific things. 

Clearly children recognize that certain objects in their environment are appropriate for certain activities. They could be looking at a certain toy because it facilitates an activity they like,” he said. The debate over why boys prefer toy vehicles and balls continues. In a new study, Alexander and her colleagues investigated whether 19-month-olds move around when playing with trucks and balls more than they do when playing with dolls. According to the study, they don’t. Toddlers with higher levels of testosterone are more active than toddlers with lower levels of the sex hormone, but the active toddlers moved around just as much when holding a toy truck, ball or doll. “We find no evidence to support the widely held belief that boys prefer toys that support higher levels of activity,” she wrote in an email. A paper detailing the work has been accepted for publication in the journal Hormones and Behavior. If it isn’t vigorous activity they’re after, it could be that boys simply find balls and wheeled vehicles more interesting, while human figures appeal more to girls. 

As for why evolution would program these toy preferences, the researchers have a few ideas. According to Alexander, one possibility is that girls have evolved to perceive social stimuli, such as people, as very important, while the perceived worth of social stimuli (and thus, dolls that look like people) is weaker in boys. [The Smarter Sex? Women’s Average IQ Overtakes Men’s] Boys, meanwhile, tend to develop superior spatial navigation abilities. “Multiple studies in humans and primates shows there is a substantial male advantage in mental rotation, which is taking an object and rotating it in the mind,” Wallen said. “It could be that manipulating objects like balls and wheels in space is one way this mental rotation gets more fully developed.” This is purely speculative, Wallen said, but boys’ superior spatial abilities have been tied to their traditional role as hunters. “The general theory is that well-developed skills in mental rotation allowed long distance navigation: using an egocentric system where essentially you navigate using your perception of your location in 3D space,” he said. “This might have facilitated long distance hunting parties.”"

The Google Memo: What Does the Research Say About Gender Differences? | HeterodoxAcademy.org:

By Firing the Google Memo Author, the Company Confirms His Thesis - Reason.com: "Most of the mainstream media refers to the former Google engineer's leaked internal memo as the "anti-diversity memo." Recode calls it "sexist." And Google fired James Damore for "perpetuating gender stereotypes." But in reality, the problem isn't diversity; it's that a senior software engineer admitted, perhaps unwittingly, to pondering three of the most scandalous thought crimes of contemporary American society. 

 The first crime is proposing that a meritocracy might be healthier for a company than bean-counting race, ethnicity and sex. The second is pointing out that ideological diversity matters. The third and most grievous of all is suggesting that men and women are, in general, physiologically and psychologically different, and thus they tend to excel at different things. 

"On average," asserts Damore, "men and women biologically differ in many ways." He then has the temerity to accuse women of generally displaying a "stronger interest in people rather than things," of having empathy and "openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics," and of being less pushy and having less interest in status than male colleagues. Women, this guy says, are "more cooperative" than men and search out better "work-life balance." There's much more, but I don't want to further upset any female readers. 

One of the problems with this kerfuffle was that the vast majority of the histrionic reactions on social media and elsewhere have misrepresented not only what the memo says but also its purpose. It was neither a screed nor anti-diversity. It was the kind of unvarnished, dispassionate and meticulous case that I imagine many engineers offer. It's difficult to believe anyone who read through it with an open mind could interpret the author's notions as an attempt to consolidate the patriarchy or make life less diverse in his field. 

 The other, bigger problem is the reaction to it demonstrates that the author is completely right about the lack of ideological diversity and the consequences of that lack. Damore's contentions about the bias at Google is a near-perfect summation of the dangers manifest in all close-minded institutions, including most of the news media and many universities. He points out that conflating "freedom from offense with psychological safety" shames people into silence. Further, he argues that these monocultures foster unhealthy environments where people can no longer honestly debate important topics. Finally, and most destructively, he says that these bubbles then promote "extreme and authoritarian elements." 

 We see incidents of this close-mindedness all the time. In schools. In government. In business. Just ask Brendan Eich, who was hounded out as CEO of Mozilla in 2013 for having the wrong opinion on gay marriage in 2008, despite zero evidence that he had ever discriminated against anyone in his life. Or, better yet, ask Danielle Brown, Google's new vice president of diversity, integrity and governance. She wrote in response to the engineer's memo, "Diversity and inclusion are a fundamental part of our values and the culture," and then rebuked the statement, telling employees that she wouldn't link to the letter because everyone disagrees with its contents. Rather than showing appreciation for diverse thinking among her ranks, Brown even went on to insinuate that the engineer's suggestions in the memo might undermine "discrimination laws." 

Does Brown believe that dissenting Google employees will now feel safer sharing their opinions when they see that the company won't stand by those making unpopular ones? Because, after all, any old VP of diversity, integrity and governance can defend positions that confirm the biases of the majority of their workforce. Of course, nothing in the letter states women aren't as good as men, or that women deserve less money, or that women aren't suited to be good at tech jobs, or that they should be victimized by the company. The author mostly theorized as to why self-selection might account for some of the disparity at Google."

In Defense of the Google Manifesto – AREO: "...you would think Damore wrote the next iteration of Mein Kampf. Gizmodo labelled it an “anti-diversity screed.” Mashable called it a “racist/sexist manifesto” when reporting that the author’s identity had been revealed. Tweetstorms were fashionable, with one user even positing that Damore was saying “Your gender means that you’re biologically incapable of doing this job and should never have been hired.” A popular response by a Yonatan Zunger chided the author as causing “significant harm to people across this company,” and for being incorrect in everything — except Damore’s points on the male gender role being inflexible. Even the respectable Atlantic managed to pipe up with a “Googler’s Would-Be Manifesto Reveals Tech’s Rotten Core,” by an Ian Bogost. Another Mashable piece complained “the text of that Google employee’s manifesto is just like every other MRA rant,” with the writer of the piece strangely going on to say, “The biological arguments get into some weird assumptions around gender that are also offensive for reasons unrelated to the tech industry.” 

Weird assumptions, you say? The sciences of sex differences and their results on cognition and behavior are not the purview of a fringe group of men operating in bunkers to prove their sexist fantasies about subjugating women. They are established, respected fields. I’m not sure what I can say to convince those who have reacted so adversely to Damore’s claims about biological, developmental, and hormone related male and female differences in behavior and personality, except to try to marshal the relevant information — and hope that their ideological biases don’t impinge on their willingness to accept scientifically arrived at truths. The reactions from hyperventilating journalists and bloggers has been akin to: “What Damore wrote goes against everything I know and my worldview. Which means… that he’s a sexist and racist.” "

...Prenatal and pubertal organizational hormones have an effect on individual behavior with “good evidence that exposure to high levels of androgens during prenatal development results in masculinization of activity and occupational interests, sexual orientation, and some spatial abilities.” Girls exposed to high testosterone levels in the womb have more male-typical career interests. Men are more interested in things, women in people. Newborn male and female children, (scientists use newborns to rebut the objection that children are socialized to behave in certain patterns) show a distinction in what they find interesting. Male infants exhibit a stronger interest in the physical-mechanical-mobile while female infants show a stronger interest in the face (the proxy for “interest” here being the time of fixed gaze). Men and women in 55 different countries show clustered patterns in the big five personality traits — with women reporting higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than men do across most nations. These sex differences are also seen in nonhuman primates in play and grooming, and object manipulation patterns also emerge in rhesus monkeys, with toy preference paralleling those of human children. Sex differences in mate preferences and status-seeking have also been studied heavily across cultures."

... "It goes without saying: noting different patterns in male and female cognition says nothing about the moral distinction about equality or treating people as individuals — a point Damore makes himself. But the reactionaries don’t seem to understand this. Pointing out aggregate differences in population does not mean we can justify discrimination. I’ll also note that the objectors in this instance are usually the types to say “we should trust scientists, they know best,” when it comes to issues like climate change, but when it comes to taboo topics like sex differences in behavior between men and women they are the first to plug their ears and cry out: “sexism, misogyny, biological determinism!”"

#TheStruggle

"...my always-on, always-connected state had rendered me largely useless."

How I Got My Attention Back: "It felt like a cop-out—like I wasn’t allowed to escape the “real world” so easily. But the quieter my mind became, and the deeper I went into my own work, the more I realized how my always-on, always-connected state had rendered me largely useless. “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” wrote Blaise Pascal. Did any of us remember how to sit quietly, alone, without a phone in hand? I certainly didn’t. By the time the curtain closed on act one of our political tragedy, if there was action to be taken, I was in no state to take it. I had long since lost control of my attention...

Today, I could live on Twitter all day, everyday, convincing myself I was being productive. Or, at least inducing the chemicals in the mind that make me feel like I’m being productive. Read more news. Send more replies. Start more threads. Each incoming reply activating a corresponding dopamine pop. Largely pushing nothing in the world forward. Maybe I lost my attention because I’m weak, lonely, pathetic. Maybe everyone else has total control; they can resist all the information spun by algorithms—all the delicious dopamine hits in the form of red circles. Bing! Maybe it’s just me...

If I tell people I went offline for a month, it’s like telling them I set up camp on Mars. It hints of apostasy, paganism. Tribes seem to find pleasure in knowing all members suffer equally. But, really, is the situation so dire that we can’t wrangle a little more control? We’ve opted into this baffling baseline of infinite information suck, always-availability. Nobody held a gun to our head. We put our own mouths on the spigot every single day. But it’s so delicious. That spigot goo — buoyed by pull-to-refreshes and pings and wily dots. Giving up attention, so seductive...

There is a qualitative and quantitative difference between a day that begins with a little exercise, a book, meditation, a good meal, a thoughtful walk, and the start of a day that begins with a smartphone in bed."

When you cultivate oppressed victimhood as an identity, you find it everywhere it isn't.

The continued bullshit of victim and outrage culture.

"...the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together. They are “alone together.” You are where your attention is."

Andrew Sullivan: My Distraction Sickness — and Yours: "By the last few months, I realized I had been engaging — like most addicts — in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life, an add-on, as it were. Yes, I spent many hours communicating with others as a disembodied voice, but my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality. “Multitasking” was a mirage. This was a zero-sum question. I either lived as a voice online or I lived as a human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time...

We all understand the joys of our always-wired world — the connections, the validations, the laughs, the porn, the info. I don’t want to deny any of them here. But we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs, if we are even prepared to accept that there are costs. For the subtle snare of this new technology is that it lulls us into the belief that there are no downsides. It’s all just more of everything. Online life is simply layered on top of offline life. We can meet in person and text beforehand. We can eat together while checking our feeds. We can transform life into what the writer Sherry Turkle refers to as “life-mix.” But of course, as I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together. They are, in Turkle’s formulation, “alone together.” You are where your attention is. If you’re watching a football game with your son while also texting a friend, you’re not fully with your child — and he knows it. Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human...

Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety. In an essay on contemplation, the Christian writer Alan Jacobs recently commended the comedian Louis C.K. for withholding smartphones from his children. On the Conan O’Brien show, C.K. explained why: “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away,” he said. “Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.”"

Beauty, still not in the eye of the beholder.

Swiftian title aside, interesting stuff.  Maybe it’s because white people are more beautiful?: "When Russian and Hong Kong coders, supported by Microsoft and Nvidia held a beauty contest judged entirely by an algorithm, 600 000 people from around the world sent in selfies and waited for judgement day. Oh boy. It did not go quite as planned...

Both MotherBoard and the Guardian are scrambling to explain how this might have happened, arguing that even though people did send in selfies from Africa, India, China and  all over the US, the sample sizes skewed white, and because the AI was using a deep learning technique, this affected the outcomes.  Another term for deep learning is reinforcement learning, so this explanation does kind of make sense. If the largest set of base images the algorithm is using features white faces, then whiteness will become a criteria for ‘beauty’, in addition to things like facial symmetry and skin wrinkling. When you consider a totally separate study that showed a machine learning to associate Black sounding names (Jamal,  Ebony) with unpleasantness and white sounding names (Matt, Emily) with pleasantry, the case seems quite solid that seemingly neutral machines do indeed pick up and replicate our prejudices...

Is the Golden Ratio racist? If it’s a universal expression of beauty, how can it be? Consider, too, that markers of youth and fertility, such as blushing or lip color are easier to detect the lighter the skin. Beauty is a rough synonym for fertility and health. The desire for health and fertility is hardly unique to any one race. These may be uncomfortable conversations to have, precisely because we do indeed live in a world where many Black people are treated unfairly and discriminated against because they are Black. Racism is a thing, but that doesn’t mean everything is racist. It might be superficially satisfying to scream racism when algorithms prefer white names and white faces, but the issues are far more complex than that and quite frankly, interesting. Truth must always be our guide. If we stop caring about, seeking out and valuing truth above all else, we cannot progress.  

Personally, I would rather live in a world where people feel uncomfortable handling truth but still do it, and I’ll spend my time advocating that we pay attention to truths that cast our own groups in poor light, and not just others. Sure, ‘white’ features might be more beautiful, but why are our kids so dumb compared to Asians? Why are Black people so astonishingly innovative in music? And given that musical ability is so strongly correlated with mathematical ability, why aren’t the majority of PhD holders in mathematics and Field’s Medal winners Black? These are interesting questions, worth exploring."

Pic via

#Triggered

Reading - Spring 2016.

Robert B. Parker's Slow Burn by Ace Atkins
Morning Star: Book III of The Red Rising Trilogy by Pierce Brown
The Getaway God: A Sandman Slim Novel by Richard Kadrey
Killing Pretty: A Sandman Slim Novel by Richard Kadrey
The Wild Diet by Abel James
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams
The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer
In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy by Adam Carolla 
Tough Sh*t: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good by Kevin Smith
Growing Up Gronk: A Family's Story of Raising Champions by Gordon Gronkowski
The God's Eye by Barry Eisler

Lazarus: The First Collection Hardcover & Lazarus: The Second Collection Hardcover by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark

Postal Volume 1 by Bryan Edward Hill, Matt Hawkins and Isaac Goodhart
The Multiversity, Deluxe Edition by Grant Morrison and various artists

Can't Stop the Signal: "Print Your Own Drugs." Welcome to the Future.

Reason.com: "The first commercially 3D-printed drug, the epilepsy medication SPRITAM, went on sale in March of this year. SPRITAM doesn't fulfill Cronin's promise of custom medications printed by patients—3D production in this case is used to create a rapidly disintegrating, easily swallowed pill—but it's a demonstration of the medical use of the technology earlier than most people expected to see anything of the sort. 

And even as SPRITAM prepared to go to market, "investigators from Wake Forest University, Columbia University and the University of North Carolina created a prototype computer algorithm featuring software for 3D printing of personalized medications" and successfully used it to print varying doses of pills. The software isn't yet ready to make an appearance at pharmacies, much less in people's homes, but it works now. That brings the goal of personalized medicine much closer to fruition, just a few years after Cronin invoked Star Trek. This "could very well change how we treat serious and common medical conditions, from epilepsy to chronic pain, on a patient-specific basis, making medications customizable and therefore cheaper, more accurate, and more effective than ever before," predicted 3Ders.org...

Holmes' reminder that any attempt to restrict the use of 3D printing is likely to be bypassed rings more true than Cronin's hopes for unhackable chemical ink and printers. Innovation has its own logic—its potential isn't so easily confined to the preferred parameters of its creators, let alone politicians and government bureaucrats. That should be apparent 17 years after Napster and its spawn revolutionized the enjoyment of music and film, three years after Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed 3D-printed a functioning firearm and pushed gun control laws toward futility, and at a moment when FBI officials throw public temper tantrums over encryption. As with every other exercise of creativity, 3D printing is changing the world in ways that the powers-that-be might or might not like. They'll have to adjust. But they may kick and scream a bit on the way. 

With SPRITAM on the market, lawyers and regulators are sweating bullets about what it all means—and their worries only start at kitchen-table ecstasy tablets, then range far beyond. Recently, the Dutch law firm De Clercq Advocaten Notarissen cautioned at length about the intellectual property and liability threats 3D printing poses to the current order, as well as the dangers of "printing of weapons, keys for police handcuffs, military material, medication or illegal drugs, or other undesirable products." At almost the same moment, Bloomberg BNA spoke with legal experts who warned that "the recent FDA approval of the first 3D printed drug could lead to several complicated legal, product liability and intellectual property conflicts that could derail the new technology before it even starts.""

Dean.

I am not alone. "I don't have a cellphone. You probably don't need one, either."

Via Vox: "But recently people have started asking me a different question — not why, but how do I live without a phone? It's as if they've met a monk or a child, lost and wandering in the big city. How do I find my way? What about my job, my wife, our 3-year-old daughter, Hazel? 

Smartphones, it seems, have gone from accessories to necessities, from sunglasses to shoes. Only monks leave home without them. And, as with monks and children, people are romanticizing my phone-free life. I wish I could do that, says one of my students. Good for you, says the incredulous restaurant host. This is bizarre to me, since I experience my own life as perfectly normal — hassle-free, fully modern, and no more virtuous than anyone else's. There are moments that throw my choice into sharp relief, but not the emergencies or inconveniences that people imagine. Rather, the airplane pilot makes an announcement, the subway doors open, and poof! — all around me smartphones bloom in perfect unison, a fleeting garden in which I am oddly barren. 

 Then the moment passes, and my decidedly un-monkish day resumes as professor, journalist, husband, father. I check email regularly at home and at work, meet people in agreed-upon locations at scheduled times, pick up my daughter from school, ask my wife about her day during dinner, watch Game of Thrones on Amazon, play a video game, scroll through Twitter. I catch planes without a hitch, get picked up when I arrive no problem, conduct interviews on Skype or my office line. 

...it means that for an average person like me, a phone is far from indispensable, even in situations that appear to demand one. I'm rarely lost, for instance, and never for long. I look up directions at home and memorize them or write them down. Occasionally I ask strangers to guide me. On long road trips I use a dedicated Garmin, which I would need even if I had a cellphone, in areas that don't get a good signal. Then there's texting, which is not a way I communicate. I'll admit this inconveniences members of my morning running group who have to email me separately with updates. (The genius of smartphones is how they magnify such tiny inconveniences into massive setbacks.) But overall I'm not impressed with texting's efficiency. 

Instead of going back and forth countless times to work out a location and a time to meet, I prefer a short phone call, made ahead of time, live. There are those, I know, who prefer texting to talking. That's fine, as long as everyone remains aware that texting, like owning a phone, is a preference, not an objectively better way to communicate. The same is true for those who say that texting allows them to stay in touch. I prefer to hear my wife's thoughts and experiences in person, not piecemeal, in texts, during the day. (Bonus: People can't text me to say they're running late, and I can't text them either, which I find makes for timelier meetings.)

...Perhaps the most common reason people give for having a phone is safety. But here, too, I'm confused. If safety is really a concern, why do nearly half of all Americans text and drive? Personally I feel safer without a blinking, buzzing distraction. And others are safer too, since distracted driving kills more than 3,000 people per year and injures 400,000 more. (Texting is apparently the worst, but using phones to navigate is also a risk.) For the vast majority of us there is no empirical foundation to the idea of phones as essential to our security.  That myth depends on something psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky call the "availability heuristic."  Our minds focus on unusual, dramatic possibilities: the broken-down car on a dark and lonely highway; a health emergency where immediate contact is essential. But in reality those scenarios are extremely rare — rarer, no doubt, than accidents while texting or muggers preying on distracted phone users. Focusing on them leads to biased assessment of risk, which, in turn, contributes to a biased assessment of smartphones' utility. 

I'm convinced that the necessity and advantageousness of phones is an illusion And of course, let's not forget that despite the perks, phones have serious downsides. At least, that's what I gather from the explosion of concern about their use, more often than not from owners themselves. Popular phone addiction apps now allow you to check your phone to see whether you check your phone too much. There are nearly as many phone detoxes as juice cleanses. 

Experts have even coined a term for phone separation anxiety — nomophobia — and some propose including it in the DSM. That's hardly surprising: The 68 percent of Americans who own smartphones (up a staggering 33 percent over only five years) check them an average of 221 times daily. My friends confirm the existence of nomophobia. Some of it, they say, comes from the thought of facing big fears — criminals and car breakdowns — without a phone. But I've also been told about subtler anxieties, over "wasted" events that might go unphotographed, uncommunicated, unquantified, as if reality depended on digitization. There's even a pathological aversion to plain old boredom. What if a few minutes waiting for a friend becomes insufferably dull? As one person put it to me: "I mostly use my phone to avoid being alone with my thoughts.""

"The problem is that we get scared of everything that we didn’t grow up with; it’s what human beings do." - Gary Vaynerchuk

Stop Judging Other People’s Escapism: "...everyone wants to complain that the Kardashians, or whoever it is at the moment, was on every article and magazine 237 times last month. But the fact is that it’s not the Kardashians’ fault that they’re being talked about non-stop. It’s not the hucksters’ fault who are selling you that “bullshit.” 

The market isn’t decided by the marketers or the media, it’s decided by the consumer and the spam artists are just reacting to it. It’s cool if you think the Kardashians are shit, but millions of other people find value in them. It’s a fair game and that’s why I love it, period. But an even more important point than the fairness of the marketplace is that we need to stop judging other people’s escapism in the first place! I don’t care if you like the Kardashians—good for you! I like the Jets! That could be a complete waste of five hours out of a day where I’m not hustling. The fact of the matter is that everybody needs escapism and it’s very important that you understand what may be a waste of time for you is someone else’s solace and moment to unwind...

We’re wasting way too much time judging other people’s choice of how they spend their leisure time. If you don’t like something, you can stop buying or engaging with it. It’s that simple."

This Generation Will Be Fine: Why Social Media Won’t Ruin Us: "When people express concern about how smartphones are damaging our young people, I laugh. This anxiety that the internet is going to ruin real human interactions is reminiscent of parents in the 50s who were worried that Elvis shaking his hips was the devil. 

Let’s be very clear here. Being concerned about cultural progression “damaging us as a society” always repeats itself with the current trend and will continue to play itself out again and again and again. Millennials are no different from Gen Y, Gen X, or any previous generation when it comes to being affected by a culture shift. 

In the 1940s, people had their heads in the newspaper and theirs ears to the radio. By the 60s, it was the TV. What about everyone today on their laptop and smartphones at a Starbucks? See what I’m getting at? What’s happening with technology in our culture and society is just evolution. Technology is not undermining real human interactions. Instead, it is exposing people for who they really are. I have been asked many times, “What are we teaching the young people?” I’ve watched the behavior of 14 year old girls spending 10 minutes to take the best selfie, post it on Instagram, and then take it down when it doesn’t get enough likes. This superficial behavior tends to concern pundits who think that technology is the cause of this appearance driven, attention seeking behavior in teenagers. But the thing is, teenagers have always strived to be liked and sought the attention of their peers and potential significant others. Selfies on Instagram is the evolution of this same behavior."

"

This Generation Will Be Fine: Why Social Media Won’t Ruin Us: "Technology provides us additional pathways to act on these behavioral tendencies that have always existed...

The problem is that we get scared of everything that we didn’t grow up with; it’s what human beings do. Every new medium brings along a healthy fear that the newest invention will ruin society. But, the truth is that people will always be looking for new ways to be entertained, consume media, and engage with each other. 

Tweet Technology has not changed us, it just makes it easier to engage in behaviors that we would rather be doing anyway. Some families watched TV instead of talking to each other in the 60’s. Today, those same families play on their phones and check their likes on Instagram during dinner. In no way am I telling you how your family should be spending time with each other, but there is always going to be something in every generation that is going to “bring us down” as a society.” Either you are a pessimist or optimist on this issue. I am an optimist. This is just evolution."

"The problem with predictions of the future is the assumption that society coordinates itself rationally."

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

"...the reality is that corruption and criminality flourish in secret, and that government corruption and criminality does far more damage to national security than any whistleblower ever could."

 "Author and former CIA officer Barry Eisler spoke at the Association of Former Intelligence Officers opposite ex-CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden on Monday."  

Freedom of the Press Foundation:  "I’ll start by talking about whistleblowing, and in particular about Edward Snowden. I’m confident there’s a range of opinion in this room about the merits of what Snowden did. A divergence of opinion about acts so consequential isn’t just inevitable; in a democracy, it’s desirable...  But regardless of how our views might differ, there are a couple of items I think the media has distorted—distortions that make honest debate more difficult. And those distortions are part of what I’d like to talk to you about today...

You might have come across a phrase involving Snowden—in fact, this phrase isn’t easy to avoid if you favor establishment pundits like David Brooks and Fred Kaplan and Josh Marshall—to the effect that Snowden violated his “oath of secrecy.” Even former CIA director David Petraeus has claimed—awkwardly, in retrospect—there is such an oath...  All of us in this room know there is no “oath of secrecy”—that the notion of such an “oath” is the product either of ignorance or propaganda. There is a secrecy agreement—what here in Silicon Valley we typically call a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA. But to inflate the status of such an agreement to the level of an “oath,” akin to, say, the president’s oath of office, is false and misleading...

And worse, the false and misleading notion of an “oath” of secrecy obscures the existence of an actual oath—the oath we in this room have all taken, and continue to adhere to: the oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Edward Snowden signed a secrecy agreement. He also swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. You might not think he got the balance right—that, despite the subsequent rulings of several federal courts, the programs Snowden revealed were not in fact unconstitutional. Or that a secrecy agreement should always trump an oath to protect the Constitution. Or that Snowden went about protecting the Constitution in the wrong way. We should have those conversations. They’re important. But what we shouldn’t do is to suggest, implicitly or otherwise, that an obligation to protect secrecy exists in a vacuum. We shouldn’t pretend that the oath to protect and defend the Constitution is unimportant, or worse, that it doesn’t even exist...

Now, at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some people here are wondering, “Well, Barry, that’s fine, but what if everyone did what Snowden did? What if every top-secret cleared federal employee took it upon herself or himself to declassify whatever she or he deemed to be in the public interest?” It’s in interesting question. But I think it’s a misleading one. Here’s why.  First, because the question is essentially a fantasy. Whistleblowers are in fact incredibly rare. The government has been so draconian in its application against whistleblowers of the 1917 Espionage Act that the demonstrated risks and costs of whistleblowing deter almost everyone. So the reality is that only people of the most exceptional conscience, courage, and conviction have ever become whistleblowers, and only a handful ever will. 

To try to frame the question as some version of, “Well, what if there were in fact innumerable whistleblowers?” is therefore akin to discussing angels dancing on pinheads—not an exercise in which intelligence professionals would ordinarily engage. Interestingly, the tendency to focus on the fantasy of what might happen rather than on the reality of what is happening is not unique to discussions of whistleblowing. It is also prominent in discussions of torture, where torture proponents try to frame the issue around a hypothetical that has never happened and will never happen—the ticking time bomb, where the government has captured a terrorist we know has planted a bomb, who we know can disarm the bomb, and who we know will tell us under duress where the bomb is and how to disarm it. And this fantasy then obscures the reality of the actual costs of torture—erosion of our adherence to our own laws and values; wild goose chases; alienation of indigenous populations and a drying up of potential walk-in sources of intelligence; and a propaganda bonanza for our enemies...

So: what reality does the “What if everyone were a whistleblower” fantasy obscure? Three things: First, the reality is that the government classifies far too much information, frequently in violation of applicable laws governing what information may and may not be classified. We knew this long before Edward Snowden; we know it even more now. A little secrecy is necessary to protect democracy. Too much secrecy begins to strangle it. So rather than focusing on the fantasy problem of what might happen if more secrets were revealed, shouldn’t we be focusing on the real problem of what is happening because too many secrets are being created? Why do we blame whistleblowers for revealing things we might believe should be secret, while giving the government a pass on classifying things that shouldn’t be secret? Why would we want to obscure the many harms caused by over-classification, including demonstrably horrendous decision-making like the Bay of Pigs invasion, nonexistent missile gaps, and the Gulf of Tonkin basis for our war in Vietnam?

Second, the reality is that if we really are worried about the unauthorized disclosure of secrets, we should be prosecuting the thousands of officials who incessantly leak secrets favorable to the government. Instead, secrecy is enforced selectively, with the government prosecuting the few leaks it doesn’t like while smiling benignly on the thousands it does. In this regard, a Martian might find it strange that the Espionage Act has been deployed, say, against former CIA employee John Kiriakou, and not against former CIA director David Petraeus, whose misdeeds regarding classified information were at least equally noteworthy. Or against former CIA employee Jeffrey Sterling, but not against Hillary Clinton, who stored classified information on an unsecured personal email server. Or against any of the numerous government officials who leak supportive details about America’s drone assassination program, even as the CIA resists in court Freedom of Information Act demands about the most basic aspects of when, where, how, and whom the US government believes it can kill with drones. There are countless other examples of this apparent double standard, and our Martian might conclude that the only difference between the people prosecuted for leaking secrets and the ones who aren’t is that the latter class is more powerful, or leaks in a fashion the government likes. It would be hard to argue that the reality of such a one-sided and hypocritical enforcement of secrecy rules—or of any law—could be healthy for a democracy...

Third, the reality is that corruption and criminality flourish in secret, and that government corruption and criminality does far more damage to national security than any whistleblower ever could. One of the things we learned from Snowden’s revelations is that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was lying in his Senate testimony about whether the NSA collects data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans. Even Clapper himself subsequently acknowledged that his testimony was “untruthful.” When a whistleblower reveals that the head of American intelligence is lying in his testimony to a Senate oversight committee—a federal crime akin to perjury—I think as citizens we ought to focus more on how national security is being damaged by the lying than on how it might be damaged by the whistleblowing that exposes those lies. But instead, in response to every whistleblower revelation ever, the government’s scripted response is to claim “grave” or “irreversible” damage to our national security, or “blood on the hands” of the whistleblower and the media that then reports on the whistleblowing, only to have those claims subsequently revealed to be alarmism at best...

So to distort facts, to overlook inconvenient facts, and to focus on fantasy hypotheticals while ignoring actual costs are dangerous habits for intelligence professionals. Indeed, I would argue that these habits are a form of propaganda, which we should understand to be abhorrent in part because propaganda is the opposite of intelligence...

There are so many related examples of propaganda creeping into intelligence I think are worth discussing: the notion that Dianne Feinstein was being unacceptably emotional when she reacted to Americans torturing prisoners (or, as it’s more commonly known, “conducting EITs on detainees”)—while we view the wars we launched in Afghanistan and Iraq immediately following 9/11 the products only of pure logic, reason, and dispassion; that former CIA director James Woolsey, in calling for Snowden to be “hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted” is perhaps himself just slightly in the grip of ungovernable and undesirable emotions; that a failure to deploy killer sky robots or otherwise go to war is identical to “inaction,” as General Hayden suggested in a recent New York Times op-ed; that the mission patches released by organizations like the National Reconnaissance Office, depicting creatures like demons, raptors, the Grim Reaper, and a giant, angry octopus strangling, eating, and/or assaulting the earth, are perhaps telling us something we ought to heed about the collective id of what we refer to in our friendly, benevolent way as the “intelligence community.”"

Design Flaws.

Jokes about "Liberal Tolerance" in 3, 2, 1...

Political Polarization & Media Habits | Pew Research Center:

Logical fallacies aside, that's funny.

"I am genuinely up in arms about something or other..."