This is in reaction to many posts showing sympathy for a killed person whose actions have divided people and apparently keep dividing people. And as in most disputes, in the end we all loose out and some other is suddenly in charge of everything.
Tai Chi
Since a month I am bombarded on social media with adds showing muscular, bare breasted, 58 year old Asian looking men telling me, and I assume others, that in order to loose weight, gain strength and feel healthier I do not need to go to a gym. Tai Chi for 7 minutes a day suffices.
Earlier this year it was chair yoga. This time promoted by young men who advised it to their fathers in their 50’s and 60’s.
It is clear that I am targeted because of my age. I do make the occasional remark about yoga, the traditional kind, I don’t think I share details about my health, and if I would, it would be all positive. I guess by saying this, I did share about my health.
We all read about the fact that google, facebook, tiktok and any other social media, collects data about us so they can make money. We also know they sell adds to businesses and organisations. And that they use algorithms to find out what we like to read and what adds draw out interest. I guess. What I don’t understand why they continue showing me these adds when I constantly click them away. I have no interest in bare chested men.
Algorithms
It turns out that the word algorithm comes from the name of a mathematician called Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. He lived between 780 and 850, was born in a region called Khwarazm in what was part of the Persian empire and now in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Working in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, he made several discoveries and one of his treaties, Al-Jabr, led to the word Algebra which we still use.
On the wikipedia page there is an informal definition : “A set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations”. And that fits well with an explanation by a Harvard Professor. In this video Professor David J. Malan explains algorithms in several ways, and he starts with a simple recipe to make peanut butter sandwiches. I should add that he got great help from Addison Vincent.
If algorithms are a set of rules, it is interesting to see what rules has led the chair yoga and Tai Chi adds to be directed to my feeds.
Silk Road Mountain Race and Heart Stopping Building Climbers
The Silk Road Mountain Race appeared on my feed out of nowhere. And I did not click this away. Au Contraire, I looked at it and did so for every day new posts were added.
(NOTE! Just to warn you, if you click on the videos I have linked in this post, you might experience the same feelings I had and youtube will send you more. You are responsible! Of course clicking the Silk Road Mountain Race will get you more bicycle rides videos, and that will improve your life)
I do not like to stand on the top of a building or stairs, looking down. I don’t feel good at heights. So I clicked on a video with a man climbing an unfinished building. Not to the top floor, but all the way to the top of the crane that was mounted on the top of the building.
While I held myself tight to my chair, feet firm on the ground floor inside my house, I followed how the man walked to the end of the crane. I held my body back while his camera showed the depth under the crane. He then lowered himself and hung with one hand holding the frame of the crane. I watched the whole video and since then I watched countless people scaling the Burj Khalifa.
I do understand that I influenced those algorithms. I clicked, so I get more.
Politics and late Night talk shows
My whole life politics have intrigued me. I have yet to listen to a politician with who I agree everything, and I have come to realise there are so many aspects of life that make us all do things in a slightly different way, that unless I become a politician myself, I will never meet my true representative.
All my life I have followed the news, reading papers, magazines watching the television and in modern times, doing this all mostly online.
To support media I do have 2 subscriptions to Dutch publications, so I don’t feel too bad reading the rest for free.
I do enjoy certain talk shows, especially when they combine humour and information.
Besides reading and listening these channels, I often read back ground posts, books and I try to find reliable information on a topic that is presented in a very brief way. And after more than 60 years I have build up a massive amount of general knowledge, so I feel I am an informed person. And yet I am willing to change my opinion when confronted with new information.
Charlie Kirk
Over the years I have seen clips in which Charlie Kirk expressed an opinion. An opinion that stood in direct opposition on where I stand. His negative remarks about coloured people, people from the LGTBQ community and women. Many of my friends belong to a group that Charlie Kirk spoke about with disdain.
He also mentioned that white people had rights over other people, and this is not something I agree with.
Since his killing I have seen countless posts by some of my friends belonging to communities he spoke badly off, expressing grief over the murder of Charlie Kirk. My first thought was: “Why do they know of Charlie Kirk?”. My second thought was; “Why the grief?”. My third thought: “Why no post when children are killed in Ukraine, Gaza or Burma?”
A friend revealed one reason. She herself noticed the same in her circles. And described the experience of two friends who had opposing opinion on Charlie Kirk. One saw him as a dedicated father, a true Christian and a man open to debate. The other one saw him as a homophobe, racist, misogynist and white suprematist.
They didn’t get into a verbal fight, they decided to listen. The one who saw him as a racist watched clips that the other one shared. “I was listening to a men with reasonable things to say, things I agreed with”.
Then she showed clips where he ranted against black people and her friend said: “I am shocked, I have never seen this”.
It turned out that both had seen clips of Charlie Kirk either the caring Christian father or the hate mongering racist. Neither had seen any of the clips that the other had seen.
It would be as if a Ronaldo fan only gets clips of him playing at Manchester United and another fan only clips from him playing at Real Madrid. And are never told he played at other clubs as well.
Human Intelligence
I dislike fake things. Once somebody complimented the display in my vegetable shop. The greens from lettuce, kale, brussel sprouts, cabbage, celery next to the orange of carrots and oranges, next to the red of beets, cabbage and chillies, next to the white of cauliflower, garlic and chicory, next to the yellow of lemons, grapefruits and bananas and all the colours in between. The compliment was supported by this sentence: “It is so beautiful it looks like artificial fruit and vegetables”.
I was stunned, how could real things be like the object that tries to imitate the real thing. This was 40 years ago. Since then we have access to apps that can improve our photos, our writing. We have apps that can turn text into cartoons. Voice-overs aren’t people any more and as a result most read articles on the internet have similar perfect boring voices.
And since a few years we can ask ai to create photos, writing and songs. And the result is frightening. It gets harder to separate an attempt to copy from a genuine piece. Videos with politicians saying things that shock us, they still look awkward enough to at least make you look twice. In a glance you store it for real.
I have yet to use ai. The only thing I need to do with photos is cropping. Not to delete a person I don’t want to be associated with, but when I take a photo of an art work on the wall and I want to take the wall part out.
The only writing aid I use is that red line under miss spelled words. No automatic correction, especially since it seems very hard to get rid of the American spelling. I need the red lines to show me my mistakes created by my limited language skills and poor typing skills.
No grammarly for me. What does a piece of writing tell of me if it has sentences re-constructed by an app?
And you can guess, ai will have a hard time to enter my tool kit. People have shown me what it can do, and it is frighteningly good. And I am sure used in health care it will help find cures for conditions we are still clueless about.
AI doesn’t need to write down what I want to share. I am aware that it gets harder to see if the things I read are ai or written by a person. AI is like fake vegetables often used in displays.
We need Human Intelligence, we need to keep questioning what we hear and read. We need to listen to each other and make sure we do see all the sides of a person, of an issue.
And we need to keep some basic principles on top of our decision making.
And perhaps we all should do more chair yoga and Tai Chi.
