Self-Deception

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The psychologist Ray Hyman has spent most of his life studying the art of deception. Before he entered the halls of science, he worked as a magician and then moved on to mentalism after discovering he could make more money reading palms than performing card tricks. The crazy thing about Hyman’s career as a palm reader is, like many psychics, over time he began to believe he actually did have psychic powers. The people who came to him were so satisfied, so bowled over, he thought he must have a real gift. Subjective validation cuts both ways.

Hyman was using a technique called cold reading where you start with the wide-angle lens of generalities and watch the other person for cues so you can constrict the iris down to what seems like a powerful insight into the other person’s soul. It works because people tend to ignore the little misses and focus on the hits. As he worked his way through college, another mentalist, Stanley Jaks, took Hyman aside and saved him from delusion by asking him to try something new – tell people the opposite of what he believed their palms revealed. The result? They were just as flabbergasted by his abilities, if not more so. Cold reading was powerful, but tossing it aside he was still able to amaze. Hyman realized what he said didn’t matter as long as his presentation was good. The other person was doing all the work, tricking themselves, seeing the general as the specific.

Mediums and palm readers, those who speak for the dead or see into the beyond for cash, depend on subjective validation. Remember, your capacity to fool yourself is greater than the abilities of any conjurer, and conjurers come in many guises. You are a creature impelled to hope. As you attempt to make sense of the world you focus on what falls into place and neglect that which doesn’t fit, and there is so much in life that does not fit.

David McRaney, You are Not so Smart

Wasting Our Love

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We may have a feeling of love for mankind, and this feeling may also be useful in providing us with enough energy to manifest genuine love for a few specific individuals. But genuine love for a relatively few individuals is all that is within our power. To attempt to exceed the limits of our energy is to offer more than we can deliver, and there is a point of no return beyond which an attempt to love all comers becomes fraudulent and harmful to the very ones we desire to assist.

Consequently if we are fortunate enough to be in a position in which many people ask for our attention, we must choose those among them whom we are actually to love. This choice is not easy; it may be excruciatingly painful, as the assumption of godlike power so often is. But it must be made.

Many factors need to be considered, primarily the capacity of a prospective recipient of our love to respond to that love with spiritual growth. It is unquestionable that there are many whose spirits are so locked in behind impenetrable armor that even the greatest efforts to nurture the growth of those spirits are doomed to almost certain failure.

To attempt to love someone who cannot benefit from your love with spiritual growth is to waste your energy, to cast your seed upon arid ground. Genuine love is precious, and those who are capable of genuine love know that their loving must be focused as productively as possible through self-discipline.

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

26 Articles about the Dangers of AI

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Justice Department Pushes Companies to Consider AI Risks - Wall Street Journal

Could AI Lead to the Escalation of Conflict? PRC Scholars Think So – Lawfare Media 

Police officers are starting to use AI chatbots to write crime reports. Will they hold up in court? – Associated Press  

Will A.I. Ruin the Planet or Save the Planet? – New York Times 

How Experts in China and the United Kingdom View AI Risks and Collaboration – Data Innovation  

A booming industry of AI age scanners, aimed at children’s faces - Washington Post

Why AI Risks Are Keeping Board Members Up at Night – Wall Street Journal  

Many safety evaluations for AI models have significant limitations – Tech Crunch 

There’s no way for humanity to win an AI arms race – Washington Post  

Using AI to write a fan letter – NPR

Can machine-learning algorithms distinguish truth from falsehood? – The Atlantic

A.I.’s Insatiable Appetite for Energy – New York Times  

Nicolas Cage Says He’s Terrified AI Will "Steal" His Body – Futurism 

Researcher Studying Married Men With AI Girlfriends – futurism  

A Hacker Stole OpenAI Secrets, Raising Fears That China Could, Too – New York Times

AI is not a magic wand – it has built-in problems that are difficult to fix and can be dangerous – The Conversation

First Came ‘Spam.’ Now, With A.I., We’ve Got ‘Slop’ - New York Times

AI start-up sees thousands of vulnerabilities in popular tools – Washington Post 

AI Is Helping Scammers Outsmart You—and Your Bank - Wall Street Journal

AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution. - Washington Post 

AI boyfriends from Replika and Nomi are attracting more women – Axios

Opinion: A.I.’s Benefits Outweigh the Risks - New York Times

Google’s AI Search Gives Sites Dire Choice: Share Data or Die – Bloomberg  

A booming industry of AI age scanners, aimed at children’s faces - Washington Post  

AI's Trust Problem – Harvard Business Review  

U.S. Army soldier charged with using AI to create child sexual abuse images – Washington Post

A student built a fusion reactor at home in just 4 weeks using $2,000 and AI - BGR

AI Definitions: Perplexity AI

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Perplexity AI - A good research option among the generative AI tools, it acts like a search engine but includes results from the web (unlike ChatGPT). Automatically shows where the information came from, so it’s more reliable than ChatGPT. Users can specify where they want the information to be drawn from among a few categories such as academic sources or YouTube. Users can also upload documents as sources and ask it to rewrite prompts. It suggests follow-up questions you might not have considered. Less useful for creative writing. In tests, it was better at summarizing passages, providing information on current events and do coding better than other chatbots. Unmatched speed and accuracy in processing millions of data makes it very useful to data scientists for advanced predictive models. Free. Video tutorial here.

More AI definitions here.

18 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

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Do AI models produce more original ideas than researchers? - Nature

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats: A Comprehensive SWOT Analysis of AI and Human Expertise in Peer Review – Scholarly Kitchen

How Are AI Chatbots Changing Scientific Publishing? – Science Friday

New academic AI guidelines aim to curb research misconduct – Global Times

Generative AI-assisted Peer Review in Medical Publications: Opportunities Or Trap – JRIM Publications

GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: preempting evidence manipulation – Harvard

AI Editing: Are We There Yet? - Science Editor – Science Editor  

AI tool claims 94% accuracy in telling apart fake from real research papers – Deccan Herald  

AI firms must play fair when they use academic data in training – Nature

AI Scientists Have a Problem: AI Bots Are Reviewing Their Work ChatGPT – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

A list of more than 500 papers with clear evidence of generative AI use - Academ-AI

Is AI my co-author? The ethics of using artificial intelligence in scientific publishing – Taylor & Francis Online 

Is ChatGPT a Reliable Ghostwriter? – The Journal of Nuclear Medicine

A new ‘AI scientist’ can write science papers without any human input. Here’s why that’s a problem – The Conversation

Could science be fully automated? A team of machine-learning researchers has now tried. - Nature

How AI tools help students—and their professors—in academic research – Fast Company  

AI-Generated Junk Science Research a Growing Problem, Experts Say – PYMNTS  

Did a criminal Russian academic paper mill use AI to plagiarize a BYU professor and his student? – Deseret News

Literature and Rigid Thinking

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Want someone to get past their rigid thinking and increase their openness? Put a novel in their hands. Canadian researchers say it will help them become more sophisticated thinkers and increase their creativity.  

University of Toronto students were asked to read either one of eight short stories or one of eight essays. Afterward, they each filled out a survey to measure the desire for certainty and stability. The short story readers had much lower scores on that test than those who read the essays. The fiction readers showed they needed less order and had more comfort with ambiguity. This was particularly true for participants who already read regularly.  

Writing in the Creativity Research Journal, the researchers say, “Exposure to literature may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.” 

Fiction readers can more easily follow thinking styles that differ from their own—they can feel along with characters they may not even like—gaining a better understanding of the viewpoint. 

Read more about the study here. 

Stephen Goforth

AI Definitions: Supervised training

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Supervised training - In this type of AI training, the data is labeled by humans before giving it to the AI. For example, the AI might be given a database of messages labeled either “spam” or “not spam.”  This is the most common type of machine learning. Expensive and time-consuming, this type of training is used in voice recognition, language translation, and self-driving cars. Anything that takes only a second for a person to do is something that might be performed by AI through supervised training. This is why jobs that are a series of one-second tasks are at risk from it (such as security guard). Most of the present economic value of AI comes from this type of training.

More AI definitions here.

Regretting your Choices

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The choices we make are statements to the world about who we are. When all you could do was buy Lee’s or Levi’s, the jeans you bought were not a statement to the world about who you are because there wasn’t enough variety in the jeans you bought to capture the variety of human selves. When there are 2,000 kinds of jeans, or 20,000 kinds of jeans, well, now all of a sudden it is a statement to the world about who you are because there’s so much variety out there. This is true of jeans. It’s true of drinks. It’s true of music videos. It’s true of movies. That makes even trivial decisions seem important, and when that happens, people want the best. We’ve got a bunch of studies that show that large choice sets induce people to regard the choices they make as statements about the self, and that, in turn, induces them to raise their standards.If there are 200, and you buy a pair of jeans that don’t fit you as well as you hoped, now it’s hard to avoid blaming yourself. The only way to avoid regretting a decision is not making it, so I think a lot of the reason people don’t pull the trigger is that they’re so worried that when they do pull the trigger, they’ll regret a choice they made.

Barry Schwartz quoted in Vox

26 free (mostly one hour) Journalism courses

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These short online courses will strengthen your journalism skills (and add a line to your resume). Most of these Poynter courses are one-hour in length or less.

Journalism Fundamentals: Craft & Values - A five-hour, self-directed course that covers basics in five areas: newsgathering, interviewing, ethics, law and diversity.

Telling Stories with Sound - Learn the fundamentals of audio reporting and editing in this self-directed course.  

How to Spot Misinformation Online - Learn simple digital literacy skills to outsmart algorithms, detect falsehoods and make decisions based on factual information.

Understanding Title IX - This course is designed to help journalists understand the applications of Title IX.

Clear, Strong Writing for Broadcast Journalism - One-hour video tutorial  

Powerful Writing: Leverage Your Video and Sound - In this one-hour video tutorial, early-career journalists will learn how to seamlessly combine audio, video and copy in captivating news packages.  

Writing for the Ear - In this five-part course, you’ll learn everything you need to write more effective audio narratives.  

Fact-Check It: Digital Tools to Verify Everything Online

News Sense: The Building Blocks of News - What makes an idea or event a news story?

Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More - Finding and fixing the most common style, grammar and punctuation errors.

Avoiding Plagiarism and Fabrication

The Writer’s Workbench: 50 Tools You Can Use 

Ethics of Journalism Build or refine your process for making ethical decisions

Conducting Interviews that Matter   

Make Design More Inclusive: Defeat Unconscious Bias in Visuals

Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Publishers - Three important areas of media law that specifically relate to gathering information and publishing online: defamation, privacy and copyright.

Freedom of Information and Your Right to Know - How to use the Freedom of Information Act, Public Records Laws and Open Meetings Laws to uphold your right to know the government’s actions.

Journalism and Trauma - How traumatic stress affects victims and how to interview trauma victims with compassion and respect. 

How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust (International Edition)

What news audiences in various parts of the world don’t understand about how journalism works

Is This Legit? Digital Media Literacy 101

MediaWise’s Campus Correspondents explain the fact-checking tools and techniques that professionals use in their day-to-day work.

The On-Ramp to Media Literacy

How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust 

Dignity and Precision in Language 

How to Avoid Being Sued: Defamation Law in the 21st Century

Conducting Interviews That Matter

Power of Diverse Voices: Writing Workshop for Journalists of Color

15 Articles about AI’s impact on College Faculty & Administrators

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Real Beginnings

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When we are ready to make a new beginning, we will shortly find an opportunity. The same event could be a real new beginning in one situation and an interesting but unproductive by-way in another. The difference is whether the event is “keyed” or “coded” to that transition point, the way that electronic key cards are set to open a particular hotel room door. When the card code matches, the door opens and the whole thing happens as if it were scripted. When it doesn’t match, the event is just an event and you are still in the neutral zone. The neutral zone simply hasn’t finished with you yet.

What isn’t finished is the inner realignment and renewal of energy, both of which depend on your being immersed in the chaos of the neutral zone. It is as though the thing that you call “my life” had to return occasionally to a state of pure energy before it could take anew shape and gain new momentum.

William Bridges, Transitions

5 Tips for a Healthy Use of AI

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The following strategies can help you maintain a healthy balance between your expertise and AI assistance:

  1. Generate rough drafts from notes, rather than from a blank page: It’s fine to generate drafts with AI, but do your thinking first, put together some structured notes, and treat AI-generated content as a first draft that requires critical review and substantial editing. This approach can help mitigate the risk of anchoring bias.

  2. Rotate between AI-assisted and non-assisted writing: To develop and maintain your own writing skills, interweave AI tools into your writing workflow, rather than relying on them for chunks of text. This will also help you maintain your own voice.

  3. Customize AI prompts: Learn to craft specific prompts that guide the AI to produce more relevant and useful outputs for your particular needs.

  4. Ethical considerations: Be transparent about AI use, especially in academic writing, and follow any guidelines or policies set by your institution or publication venues.

  5. Fact-check and verify: Always verify facts, citations and specific claims made by AI. These tools have a tendency to generate “hallucinations,” plausible-sounding but inaccurate chunks of information.

From The Transmitter

Emotional Blackmail

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When someone attempts to make you take responsible for their feelings, they are committing what psychologists call emotional blackmail. A parent uses this when telling a child, "You've hurt me so much," or when a spouse says, "You hurt my feelings.

It is placing responsibility for their emotional outcome on you—pretending you have control over something that you do not. The parent may choose to become angry or sulk or become bitter or irritable toward the child. Someone may claim your action justifies their emotion. But that person is still doing the choosing of their own emotions.

When you see a family tiptoe around the house because "we don't want to upset mother (or father)," then you have a family who has decided to make everyone responsible for a single person's feelings—taking on a burden they were never meant to carry. Each family member is responsible for his or her actions. It’s the wrong goal to aim at preventing someone from ever being upset.

Elizabeth Kenny once said, “Anyone who angers you conquers you.” To allow someone else to decide how you feel is abdicating your responsibility to define yourself. Don't allow someone else to sell you on the idea that you are responsible for what they feel. Don't blackmail those around you by threatening to unleash an emotional outburst for something you yourself created.

Stephen Goforth