flâneur

Jordan Sucher

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on the atlas — 75

highlights — 566

  • Research Centers Directory
    Extending the Timeliness of a Topic Idea - Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper - Research Guides at University of Southern California
  • To isolate the impact of cable news channels, the researchers exploit a quirk in Americans’ viewing habits: All else equal, we tend to watch channels with low numbers (e.g., channel 15) more than those with high numbers (e.g., channel 56). And since the channel number assigned to cable networks varies randomly across markets, one can gauge the broadcasters’ political influence by comparing areas where MSNBC and Fox News are assigned low numbers to those where they’re assigned high ones.
    How cable news triggered America’s culture war | Vox
  • “A lot of research institutions, it’s 100 pages, mostly unusable recommendations,” she said in an interview. "CUF is different in that their recommendations tend to be very actionable, very practical, tethered to reality and therefore more accessible for policymakers.”
    Center for an Urban Future is quietly shaping New York City policies | Crain's New York Business
  • Maybe you are making something that has a very particular agenda, one that is much different than the people there would make, and that’s incredibly valuable. You could be wrong about those reasons. You could be wrong about those choices, but you must own all of it. Every single one of us has to own all of who we are in this world of image-making.
    The Present Moment: A Conversation with Kirsten Johnson - World Records
  • Derrida nailed it. As you’re filming him, he says about you: “She sees everything. She’s blind.”
    The Present Moment: A Conversation with Kirsten Johnson - World Records
  • I am discovering that reality, coming into that with no defenses. Hers are built because she needs to enable herself to continue to do her work
    The Present Moment: A Conversation with Kirsten Johnson - World Records
  • In principle, you’re there for the future. But when you get there, you’re in the present
    The Present Moment: A Conversation with Kirsten Johnson - World Records
  • I will often realize that I thought that what was happening was not happening at all! I might be falling for a person when everyone around me is aggravated or having less positive feelings. But that’s interesting to me, as well – the times when everyone around me is resisting something and I’m being drawn in.
    The Present Moment: A Conversation with Kirsten Johnson - World Records
  • What I experience while shooting is an avid search for clues to what I am missing
    The Present Moment: A Conversation with Kirsten Johnson - World Records
  • “It feels like the idea is to make it harder to identify the consequences of the policy changes that we’re seeing right now,” said Marlene Schwartz, the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut.
    Trump Canceled 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid. Here’s What Never Arrived. — ProPublica
  • Law is a partial and dynamic terrain of political, economic, and social struggle. It is a place and a language where power is shaped and contested, and where relations of class, race, gender, and ability are made and remade. It is a tool, a strategy, a tactic, and it contributes to the terms of life, death, and democracy.
    A Horizon Beyond Legalism: On Non-Reformist Reforms - LPE Project
  • Non-reformist reforms aim to undermine the prevailing political, economic, social order, construct an essentially different one, and build democratic power toward emancipatory horizons. In contrast to a reformist approach, which seeks to address social problems while leaving the prevailing governing system untouched, non-reformist reforms seek to redistribute power and reconstitute who governs and how.
    A Horizon Beyond Legalism: On Non-Reformist Reforms - LPE Project
  • Whether intentionally or not, the mayor-elect’s approach reflects a view that is going mainstream in climate circles: To succeed, climate policies need to lose the label.
    What Zohran Mamdani’s Win Means for New York's… | New York Focus
  • The first step toward sensible policy-­driven solutions, the First Chicago School believed, was work that would convince the broader public that these immigrant enclaves, which seemed so foreign and inscrutable, actually represented ordered social worlds structured by familiar norms.
    The Trials of Alice Goffman - The New York Times
  • “Servicers have been very reluctant to do them,” said Ted Tozer, a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center. “They are actually losing money on each one that they do because they have substantial costs that are not covered by the fee they can charge.”
    Assumable Mortgages Are Making a Comeback in a High-Rate Market - The New York Times
  • Assuming a mortgage isn’t some type of gimmick; it’s a built-in benefit on certain government-backed mortgages, as long as the new owners qualify
    Assumable Mortgages Are Making a Comeback in a High-Rate Market - The New York Times
  • Another abyss-staring strategy I’ve found useful is to talk to someone else. One reason that I sometimes procrastinate on staring into the abyss is that, when I try to think about the uncomfortable topic, I don’t do it in a productive way: instead, I’ll ruminate or think myself in circles. If I’m talking to someone else, they can help me break out of those patterns and make progress. They can also be an accountability buddy for actually spending time thinking about the thing.
    Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
  • In my experience, people everywhere are deeply excited about finding anyone who’s actually put a lot of time and thought into learning about something and thinking seriously about it, rather than just learning surface level knowledge and knowing the right “passwords” to say at the right time. I experience some people as having a uniquely warm glow of aliveness to them. A sense of presence. Just being in the room with them makes me feel like I have deep company. These people come from very different parts of my life and have very different background and beliefs. The thing they have in common i…
    Strategies for Learning - by Andy Masley
  • It makes it easier for me to learn about macroeconomics knowing that I have a strong network of friends who will hang out with me even if I don’t know the deal with macroeconomics. This sounds silly, but we’re social animals and the background feeling of social stability I feel makes it much easier to take status hits in other areas.
    Strategies for Learning - by Andy Masley
  • avoiding hits to your ego is maybe the main way you can get stuck and stagnant in life
    Strategies for Learning - by Andy Masley
  • Openness to what you don’t understand is emotionally challenging, and gets harder as you age. Learning basic economics or calculus for the first time at age 15 feels exciting. Learning either for the first time at 30 makes you feel like you missed important opportunities and that you have limited time left
    Strategies for Learning - by Andy Masley
  • People are drawn to activities that make them feel high status, and repelled from activities that make them feel low status. Actually learning often involves wrestling with strange new ideas that make you feel stupid and that might not fit neatly into your pre-existing worldview
    Strategies for Learning - by Andy Masley
  • What is the alternative to naïve cynicism? An active response to what arises, a recognition that we often don’t know what is going to happen ahead of time, and an acceptance that whatever takes place will usually be a mixture of blessings and curses. Such an attitude is bolstered by historical memory, by accounts of indirect consequences, unanticipated cataclysms and victories, cumulative effects, and long timelines. Naïve cynicism loves itself more than the world; it defends itself in lieu of the world. I’m interested in the people who love the world more, and in what they have to tell us, wh…
    The Habits of Highly Cynical People, by Rebecca Solnit
  • But historical forces are not bowling balls. If bowling had to be the metaphor, it would be some kind of metaphysical game shrouded in mists and unfolding over decades. The ball might knock over a pin and then another one in fifteen years and possibly have a strike in some other lane that most of us had forgotten even existed.
    The Habits of Highly Cynical People, by Rebecca Solnit
  • Naïve cynics shoot down possibilities, including the possibility of exploring the full complexity of any situation. They take aim at the less cynical, so that cynicism becomes a defensive posture and an avoidance of dissent. They recruit through brutality. If you set purity and perfection as your goals, you have an almost foolproof system according to which everything will necessarily fall short. But expecting perfection is naïve; failing to perceive value by using an impossible standard of measure is even more so. Cynics are often disappointed idealists and upholders of unrealistic standards.…
    The Habits of Highly Cynical People, by Rebecca Solnit
  • Examples of breaching experiments included things like standing too close to someone in an elevator thereby violating personal space norms, negotiating the price of a non-negotiable item in a supermarket, responding to casual questions (like “How are you?”) with detailed, serious answers, using formal language in an informal setting, or vice versa.
    Rethinking platform studies: The challenges of researching algorithms and the case for renewing breaching experiments | Media@LSE
  • Outsiders to government technology blame politics for an environment hostile to building good software. But the failure to build good software has also deeply influenced our politics. When the child of immigrants is told that good grades and a little bit of paperwork can make them the first in their family to go to college, and that promise turns out to be false, that’s one more person likely to seek hope in strongman rule
    AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity — Digitalist Papers
  • In other words, an agency known for taking money from the public inspired trust, while another known for giving money away broke trust. How does that happen?
    AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity — Digitalist Papers
  • The muscles we build when we enable insights and information to flow up the hierarchy, not just down, are the muscles we’ve needed (and had too little of) in the transition to the internet era, and the ones we really can’t do without as we make this next transition
    AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity — Digitalist Papers
  • I was recently asked by a Congressional office what they might do to force a particular federal agency to perform better. “I think you’re asking me what mandates and constraints you might impose on them,” I replied. “But this agency has been subject to a neverending stream of these orders and rules for decades, and their performance isn’t improving.” The staffers agreed. Rather than assuming they’d been imposing the wrong ones, and that someone with greater digital expertise might help find the right ones, I asked them to consider asking entirely different questions. “What is keeping this agen…
    AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity — Digitalist Papers
  • instead of developing digital competency, government has developed extensive processes and procedures for purchasing digital work
    AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity — Digitalist Papers
  • Mandates are meant to be the gas to constraints’ brakes. But telling an agency to do something doesn’t help them do it. In theory it could help them prioritize it, but mandates aren’t priorities. You can’t have unlimited priorities, by definition. You can, and in government do, have unlimited mandates
    AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity — Digitalist Papers
  • Improving government’s capacity starts with correcting these glaring imbalances between watching and doing (to borrow from Mark Schwartz), between stop energy and go energy. (14)
    AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity — Digitalist Papers
  • The cascade of rigidity is beginning
    AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity — Digitalist Papers
  • The point of the legacy process is not to select the best candidate, but to be able to defend the ultimate selection from criticism through strict adherence to a process in which no judgment can be questioned, because no judgment was used
    AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity — Digitalist Papers
  • Why does this happen? In a risk-averse culture, rules intended merely to guide processes are interpreted very rigidly. In accordance with law, HR rules try to reduce bias in hiring. The safest way to do that, the logic goes, is to allow only HR professionals, who are specially trained in complex, obscure rules and processes, to review resumes and assess candidates
    AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity — Digitalist Papers
  • The tech team might be able to convince their direct supervisors that their plan was sound, but to go forward with it, each successive layer above will also have to essentially take the word of a team whose work is foreign to them and who is often very distant from them not only organizationally but physically, culturally, and even temporally (it can take a long time for these approvals to even get to the higher-ups). In the meantime, there are compliance officers whose job is defined around “better safe than sorry” and who are strongly disincentivized from approving anything other than all 30…
    AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity — Digitalist Papers
  • FISMA, as written, is a fine law. But as practiced, it doesn’t just make the software worse; it actually impairs the security of our systems.
    AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity — Digitalist Papers
  • “You have to be smart but not too smart to put in the years,”
    Opinion | Michael Lewis on Chris Mark of the Department of Labor - Washington Post
  • the process is well described and extensively practiced, either through the evolving practice of “citizen assemblies” globally, or, as Jim Fishkin of Stanford has crafted them, through “deliberative polls.”
    Protected Democracy — Digitalist Papers
  • we must first come to see what democracy as we conceive of it was conditioned on. What did it presume? And when we see what it presumed, and recognize that presumption no longer obtains, we can begin to craft an alternative context for democratic action, one less vulnerable to the negative effects I’ve described.
    Protected Democracy — Digitalist Papers
  • That is the key to AI’s potential: once it has a goal, it can experiment broadly to hit that target, and in that experimentation, it will deploy wildly more creative strategies than we humans ever could.
    Protected Democracy — Digitalist Papers
  • Yet observing that AI could be used for good is like observing that bulldozers could be used to help build affordable public housing. It is possible, of course, but is it likely?
    Protected Democracy — Digitalist Papers
  • We could imagine, for example, an AI that would act as an efficient agent for voters— identifying the policy preferences of voters, and engaging with the political system to effect those policies. “Talk to the City,” for example, is an LLM-based AI that enables large groups to engage and deliberate about how best to address common problems. (3) Pol.is and CrowdSmart.ai similarly identify common understandings among large and diverse publics, more effectively or meaningfully than public opinion polls
    Protected Democracy — Digitalist Papers
  • In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich decimated the institutions that supported members in developing policy responses to the problems that they were concerned about—shuttering the Office of Technology Assessment, radically reducing the budgets of the Congressional Research Service and General Accountability Office
    Protected Democracy — Digitalist Papers
  • Representatives within our representative democracy are dependent on private resources to do their work
    Protected Democracy — Digitalist Papers
  • Representatives within our representative democracy are dependent on private resources to do their work
    Introduction: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America — Digitalist Papers
  • Concerns about social and economic disruption, election disinformation, monopoly power, surveillance, privacy violations, and algorithmic discrimination, to name just a few, have fed into a common presumption that our technological future trends toward dystopia
    Introduction: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America — Digitalist Papers
  • 6. Squeeze out the juice
    A Recipe for Training Neural Networks
  • 2. Set up the end-to-end training/evaluation skeleton + get dumb baselines
    A Recipe for Training Neural Networks