#habituation

[wowbright]

I wish I could find a trailer for this film online but I can't. It's so good! It's unlike any other nature documentary I've watched before. Like, tears streaming down my face during multiple parts of the film because it was so moving (NOT because something horrible happened) and hit on a lot of stuff I've been thinking about forever. Absolutely recommend for anyone who is interested in primates and exploring the difficult decisions and trade-offs involved in wildlife conservation, and also the relationships between humans and other great apes. It's also a personal story about family relationships, war, diaspora, and a wildlife filmmaker's struggle to understand and shape his masculinity (which honestly I didn't relate to on a personal level but could empathize with because the film told the story so well).

In the US, you can watch it for free on Xumoplay. I *never* watch Xumoplay because I find the frequency of commercials annoying but it was worth it for this. In the UK I believe it can be watched through BBC.

(If you are interested in gorilla protection in DR Congo in general, Virunga is also very good, though difficult to watch at times. Silverback focuses on lowland gorilla habituation and Virunga is about mountain gorillas.)

#silverback 2024 #silverback #gorillas #habituation #conservation #dr congo #vianet djenguet #miles blayden-ryall #documentary #wow watches movies

[theidealistphilosophy]

Each one of us is what he pursues and cares for. In everyday terms, we understand ourselves and our existence by way of the activities we pursue and the things we care of.

Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy).

#philosophy tumblr #philoblr #german philology #philosopher #heidegger #phenomenology #existentialism #habituation #valuation #axiology #self actualization #meaning #dark academia #life quotes

[quetzalpapalotl]

honestly at this point I don't even care about blocking the bots, it's like looking both ways before crossing the street, just something you do.

#i open tumblr i have new followers block and report #i go to the tags there's bots report #habituation

[thepenguinlad]

guess I'm officially the guy in the park who yells at squirrels

except I'm not mad at them, I'm only mad at the people who feed them every day, continuing the process of their habituation and comfort with humans- which in the end is mortally dangerous to them and not truly impactful to us in the least

the ultimate danger to wildlife is when they're too comfortable with humans

#fuck yall #ik u mean well but this is not fucking it #habituation #squirrels #fall #my post #it just makes me sad

[littlemizzlinguistics]

Studying linguistics is actually so wonderful because when you explain youth slang to older professors, instead of complaining about how "your generation can't speak right/ you're butchering the language" they light up and go “really? That’s so wonderful! What an innovative construction! Isn't language wonderful?"

#linguistics #gen z slang #english #as people in the reblog pointed out! #most gen z slang comes from (or was appropriated from) aave #honestly I was just excited to talk about how people in my field actually get excited about non standard uses of English #instead of ridiculing speakers #and I tagged incorrectly and didn’t point out the very real issues of language and power and appropriation inherent in modern slang #in that much of it was appropriated #and even that which experiences language change in the wider culture still originated in aave #aave is just as linguistically valid as any other English dialect because it is a proper language #and the grammar is incredible!!! #habitual be is fantastic and an excellent example of how a richer case system or a certain case can render an adverb unnecessary #and the phonology is just beautiful #anyway I’m very sorry #I fucked up

[rodgermalcolmmitchell]

Habituation: The secret to not being shocked.

Those who have not fallen into the MAGA sphere shake their heads in wonderment at what his followers choose to ignore. I won’t lose any voters. They have become habituated to his behavior to a point where they seemingly will live his famous assertion, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters.” While that claim was part of a boast about loyalty from…

View On WordPress

#habituation #hedonic adaptation #heroin to the dispossessed

[fokikowest]

Opinion: I’m the child of a Holocaust survivor. I know the trauma inflicted on Gaza will last for generations

Opinion: I’m the child of a Holocaust survivor. I know the trauma inflicted on Gaza will last for generations

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-11-17/generational-trauma-gaza-children-holocaust-survivor

#trauma #intergenerational trauma #family legacy #legacy of trauma #habituation #Holocaust #nations

[thatpunnyperson]

According to NBC here in the US, the missing titanic sub has been found. As debris. Off the bow of the Titanic wreckage.

And it looks like the sub suffered what we all suspected, and what was undoubtedly the more merciful of the two options: a catastrophic implosion from the pressure.

Also, more info has come to light about the fishing trawler with the hundreds of migrants that sank cataclysmically off the coast of Greece, indicating that the greek coast guard knew about the vessel AND how much trouble the vessel was in, and were towing it at a speed that made it capsize, at which point they unhooked the tow line and watched the trawler sink without helping the passengers to safety. Despite a bunch of other ships trying to help as well throughout the whole ordeal.

So a lot of people are dead, all because of regulations (and the lack thereof) regarding sea-faring vessels and rescue protocols. People shouldnt be allowed to make a business charging a ton of money for a ride on an uncertified, unsafe, un-seaworthy ship going deep into the ocean with no distress beacon or tether to the mothership. People also shouldnt be allowed to enact laws that criminalize the ferrying of refugees, which then force the refugees to hitch rides on fishing trawlers, and which also prevent people from helping those fishing trawlers full of refugees due to fear of legal consequences.

Hopefully BOTH of these events spark changes on an international scale in terms of what is legally allowed to be sailed, who is legally allowed to be the passengers, and what the rescue protocols are in the event of disaster for any seafaring vessel, illegal or not. It shouldnt be just the global 1% who get 24/7 search parties and remote-operated submersibles helping rescue them.

#the question of 'what do we owe to each other' can be answered simply with 'the dignity of retrieving our remains when we die' #another answer is 'the dignity of thinking about each other fellow humans with similar motivations and feelings' #also 'stopping someones potentially self-destructive behaviors just because theyre rich and want to feel special' #also i feel like humans have been sailing the seas long enough that it should be guaranteed that people will survive sea voyages #im very mad about specifically mediterranean maritime disasters because we have ancient writing saying they made it safe #sailing from Egypt to Greece was so old hat and safe that people legit took the ancient equivalent of cruises back and forth #cleopatra habitually sailed from alexandria to rome with a ton of ships and was fine #Nero tried to have his mother drowned at sea by orchestrating a dramatic shipwreck while she was our sailing AND SHE SURVIVED #and then swam to shore got back to rome and whooped his ass #fuckin pliny the elder tried to evacuate people from pompeii and the surrounding coast villages when vesuvius erupted #and he actually WAS able to rescue people #but he himself had an asthma attack from the fumes which led to a heart attack and he died on the beach #there is legit no excuse for that trawler of migrant refugees to have wrecked #negligence all around #anyway #oceangate

[ithastogosomewhere6]

Habituation

These are the steps in my hostel that lead to the toilet. The surfaces have been rubbed smooth and the edges have been rounded by the amount of feet that travel through this place every day. On top of that, the lights for the area are switched off after 10 pm so as not to disturb the nearby rooms. So every night, I have to walk in the darkness to the light of the toilet.

In the past, I have stubbed my toes against the stairs, tripped a few times, missed a few steps and almost fell once. But now, I can walk down these stairs while looking at my phone and nothing will happen. It would be a smooth walk. But what’s interesting is that if I concentrate on walking those stairs, I always trip.

Habituation is a weird thing. You never know when you actually stopped concentrating on just walking through the darkness and not hitting anything. It's just one day, when you just suddenly feel something in your brain and stop, do you realize that you are just used to it. It’s amazing how the human mind works, adapting to every circumstance, whether it’s bad or good. In the end, it’s just normal life for us, whether the situation is good or bad, beneficial or detrimental to us.

#hostel #stairs #habituation #habits

[kociamieta]

fabric study but He is there . got my display tablet to work once more and wanted to render a bit more than usual. fun!!!

wip below

#habitually stargazing #rain world oc #my art #rain world

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Supervised AI isn't

It wasn't just Ottawa: Microsoft Travel published a whole bushel of absurd articles, including the notorious Ottawa guide recommending that tourists dine at the Ottawa Food Bank ("go on an empty stomach"):

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1692233111260582161

After Paris Marx pointed out the Ottawa article, Business Insider's Nathan McAlone found several more howlers:

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-removes-embarrassing-offensive-ai-assisted-travel-articles-2023-8

There was the article recommending that visitors to Montreal try "a hamburger" and went on to explain that a hamburger was a "sandwich comprised of a ground beef patty, a sliced bun of some kind, and toppings such as lettuce, tomato, cheese, etc" and that some of the best hamburgers in Montreal could be had at McDonald's.

For Anchorage, Microsoft recommended trying the local delicacy known as "seafood," which it defined as "basically any form of sea life regarded as food by humans, prominently including fish and shellfish," going on to say, "seafood is a versatile ingredient, so it makes sense that we eat it worldwide."

In Tokyo, visitors seeking "photo-worthy spots" were advised to "eat Wagyu beef."

There were more.

Microsoft insisted that this wasn't an issue of "unsupervised AI," but rather "human error." On its face, this presents a head-scratcher: is Microsoft saying that a human being erroneously decided to recommend the dining at Ottawa's food bank?

But a close parsing of the mealy-mouthed disclaimer reveals the truth. The unnamed Microsoft spokesdroid only appears to be claiming that this wasn't written by an AI, but they're actually just saying that the AI that wrote it wasn't "unsupervised." It was a supervised AI, overseen by a human. Who made an error. Thus: the problem was human error.

This deliberate misdirection actually reveals a deep truth about AI: that the story of AI being managed by a "human in the loop" is a fantasy, because humans are neurologically incapable of maintaining vigilance in watching for rare occurrences.

Our brains wire together neurons that we recruit when we practice a task. When we don't practice a task, the parts of our brain that we optimized for it get reused. Our brains are finite and so don't have the luxury of reserving precious cells for things we don't do.

That's why the TSA sucks so hard at its job – why they are the world's most skilled water-bottle-detecting X-ray readers, but consistently fail to spot the bombs and guns that red teams successfully smuggle past their checkpoints:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851

TSA agents (not "officers," please – they're bureaucrats, not cops) spend all day spotting water bottles that we forget in our carry-ons, but almost no one tries to smuggle a weapons through a checkpoint – 99.999999% of the guns and knives they do seize are the result of flier forgetfulness, not a planned hijacking.

In other words, they train all day to spot water bottles, and the only training they get in spotting knives, guns and bombs is in exercises, or the odd time someone forgets about the hand-cannon they shlep around in their day-pack. Of course they're excellent at spotting water bottles and shit at spotting weapons.

This is an inescapable, biological aspect of human cognition: we can't maintain vigilance for rare outcomes. This has long been understood in automation circles, where it is called "automation blindness" or "automation inattention":

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29939767/

Here's the thing: if nearly all of the time the machine does the right thing, the human "supervisor" who oversees it becomes incapable of spotting its error. The job of "review every machine decision and press the green button if it's correct" inevitably becomes "just press the green button," assuming that the machine is usually right.

This is a huge problem. It's why people just click "OK" when they get a bad certificate error in their browsers. 99.99% of the time, the error was caused by someone forgetting to replace an expired certificate, but the problem is, the other 0.01% of the time, it's because criminals are waiting for you to click "OK" so they can steal all your money:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ema-report-finds-nearly-80-130300983.html

Automation blindness can't be automated away. From interpreting radiographic scans:

https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ai-could-safely-automate-some-x-ray-interpretation

to autonomous vehicles:

https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/automated-vehicles-may-encourage-new-breed-distracted-drivers

The "human in the loop" is a figleaf. The whole point of automation is to create a system that operates at superhuman scale – you don't buy an LLM to write one Microsoft Travel article, you get it to write a million of them, to flood the zone, top the search engines, and dominate the space.

As I wrote earlier: "There's no market for a machine-learning autopilot, or content moderation algorithm, or loan officer, if all it does is cough up a recommendation for a human to evaluate. Either that system will work so poorly that it gets thrown away, or it works so well that the inattentive human just button-mashes 'OK' every time a dialog box appears":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/21/let-me-summarize/#i-read-the-abstract

Microsoft – like every corporation – is insatiably horny for firing workers. It has spent the past three years cutting its writing staff to the bone, with the express intention of having AI fill its pages, with humans relegated to skimming the output of the plausible sentence-generators and clicking "OK":

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-news-cuts-dozens-of-staffers-in-shift-to-ai-2020-5

We know about the howlers and the clunkers that Microsoft published, but what about all the other travel articles that don't contain any (obvious) mistakes? These were very likely written by a stochastic parrot, and they comprised training data for a human intelligence, the poor schmucks who are supposed to remain vigilant for the "hallucinations" (that is, the habitual, confidently told lies that are the hallmark of AI) in the torrent of "content" that scrolled past their screens:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Like the TSA agents who are fed a steady stream of training data to hone their water-bottle-detection skills, Microsoft's humans in the loop are being asked to pluck atoms of difference out of a raging river of otherwise characterless slurry. They are expected to remain vigilant for something that almost never happens – all while they are racing the clock, charged with preventing a slurry backlog at all costs.

Automation blindness is inescapable – and it's the inconvenient truth that AI boosters conspicuously fail to mention when they are discussing how they will justify the trillion-dollar valuations they ascribe to super-advanced autocomplete systems. Instead, they wave around "humans in the loop," using low-waged workers as props in a Big Store con, just a way to (temporarily) cool the marks.

And what of the people who lose their (vital) jobs to (terminally unsuitable) AI in the course of this long-running, high-stakes infomercial?

Well, there's always the food bank.

"Go on an empty stomach."

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

West Midlands Police (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/westmidlandspolice/8705128684/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic #automation blindness #humans in the loop #stochastic parrots #habitual confident liars #ai #artificial intelligence #llms #large language models #microsoft

[dreambetternow]

"Is that all there is?" Do you find yourself chasing the #rainbow, always #pursuing your #happiness while never really sustaining it and being #happy? You believe that if you had something, you'd live happily ever after but soon after realize that that is not so. Your happiness boost deflates, #habituation sets in, and you're back at the level of happiness you were before. This applies to #unhappiness as well. You can choose to either chase the rainbow forever or you can choose to do something about getting off your #hedonic #treadmill and find true #joy. Happiness can change and you can determine that change. If you don't know how to change your happiness level, contact me or DM me. Please comment to share your beliefs how we can change our happiness baseline. #happinessplatform https://www.instagram.com/p/CfXBlTluHnT/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#rainbow #pursuing #happiness #happy #habituation #unhappiness #hedonic #treadmill #joy #happinessplatform

[severalowls]

Hashtag joke. But watch out! Somebody might get hurt in this one.

#do people just habitually press the blaze button and spend money

[webonchin]

Dream worm...

(og idea bellow ,It was so funny i needed to draw it)

#dreamling #the sandman #dream of the endless #hob gadling #i would love him if he was a worm #I can imagine Dream habitually asking Hob if he would love him if he was a totally different thing every time he asks #clearly. patient and devoted Hob would say yes every time #and would stay thinking at night how it would influence their relationship if Dream were a mouse or a shoe #alot to think about #my art #edited because this shit got mixed up tfw

[waymond-wang]

PRISCILLA (2023) dir. Sofia Coppola ↳ Well, it’s either me or a career, baby. When I call you, I need you to be there for me.

#filmedit #filmgifs #priscilla #priscilla 2023 #cinematv #cinemapix #userstream #userbbelcher #filmtvcentral #mgifs #mdiary #8.5 out of 10 #sofia coppola and her habitual montages #flashing tw

[bearotonin-international]

Apex predator, my ass. I’m going to pet the dog 🐻🐻‍❄️🐼

perhaps now is a good time for some responsible bear programming to remind everyone that as cute and cuddly as they may seem, bears are lethal apex predators and should absolutely be treated accordingly if ever encountered.

DO

NOT

PET

#Responsible Bear Programming #^^ that's our tag for bears doing what they naturally do #if you do not like seeing bears behave as they naturally do -- as apex predators -- then please filter this tag accordingly friends #we are actually not accepting any complaints or suggestions about our tagging system or the content we post at the present moment #or at any point in the foreseeable future #so please don't try to comment or suggest otherwise #informative rant over now commencing educational rant #DO NOT try to pet the lethal beasts #you will be mauled and or killed #and then the bear will be killed for attacking a person #if you like bears the best thing you can do is ensure that they are not habituated to humans and do not view us as a source of food #either through your trash or through your flesh #keep yourself your neighbors and the bears safe by keeping human-bear interactions as minimal as possible #okay the team's done ranting now #(we're having A Day) #(it has a lot to do with the squirrels breaking into the floor of HQ and eating through our electrical wiring) #ask