One of our regular bloggers suggested paying people to vote.
Q: Should people be paid to vote? Is that a good idea? Make your pro/con arguments below.
Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive biology, social behavior, morality and history.
One of our regular bloggers suggested paying people to vote.
Q: Should people be paid to vote? Is that a good idea? Make your pro/con arguments below.
In Chicago, the runner-up in the mayoral vote in April complained that a Twitter account masquerading as a news outlet had used A.I. to clone his voice in a way that suggested he condoned police brutality.
What began a few months ago as a slow drip of fund-raising emails and promotional images composed by A.I. for political campaigns has turned into a steady stream of campaign materials created by the technology, rewriting the political playbook for democratic elections around the world.Increasingly, political consultants, election researchers and lawmakers say setting up new guardrails, such as legislation reining in synthetically generated ads, should be an urgent priority. Existing defenses, such as social media rules and services that claim to detect A.I. content, have failed to do much to slow the tide.
As the 2024 U.S. presidential race starts to heat up, some of the campaigns are already testing the technology. The Republican National Committee released a video with artificially generated images of doomsday scenarios after President Biden announced his re-election bid, while Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida posted fake images of former President Donald J. Trump with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former health official. The Democratic Party experimented with fund-raising messages drafted by artificial intelligence in the spring — and found that they were often more effective at encouraging engagement and donations than copy written entirely by humans.
The senator ticked off the problems with Alito’s argument: factual omissions (e.g., the standard for exempt gifts does not include transportation); Alito’s lame effort to turn an airplane into a “facility” to jam it into an exempt-gift category (“It doesn’t pass the laugh test,” Whitehouse said); Alito’s plea that he couldn’t possibly have known Singer had a financial stake ($2 billion) in the outcome of a case before the court (although it was widely reported in the media); and the insistence that yet another billionaire was a “friend,” which somehow absolved him from his obligation to report gifts of “hospitality.” And, Whitehouse argued, it strains credulity that Alito (like Justice Clarence Thomas) could be confused about reporting requirements when there is a Financial Disclosure Committee expressly set up to help judges navigate these issues.
All in all, the poorly reasoned argument amounted to what Whitehouse called “a painful exhibit for an actual ethics code.” A bill he co-authored with Judiciary Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), set to be marked up after July 4, would confirm that the code of ethics applicable to all judges applies to the high court, set up a process for screening ethics complaints and allow chief judges of the circuit to advise on how their circuits handle similar matters. This is “not remotely unconstitutional,” he noted. Whitehouse wryly remarked that the last thing the justices want is a comparison to circuit courts’ conduct. “The best way to show that a stick is crooked is to lay a straight stick alongside it,” he said.
Whitehouse has long maintained that the court’s unprincipled, outcome-oriented and partisan decision-making is very much linked to the ethics problems. “The ethics problem is not just relevant to expensive gifts and fancy vacations,” he told me. The ethics issues “don’t occur in a vacuum,” he said. They point to “a bigger enterprise whose purpose is to capture the court.”
Online platforms spreading misinformation could face millions of dollars in penalties under new proposed government legislation that bolsters the power of Australia's media watchdog.The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) would be armed with the ability to require digital platforms to keep certain records about matters regarding misinformation and disinformation and turn them over when requested.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said this would "essentially mean that the regulator is able to look under the hood of what the platforms are doing and what measures they are taking to ensure compliance".According to the draft bill, misinformation is defined as unintentionally false, misleading or deceptive content.
“Cytoelectric Coupling”: A GroundbreakingHypothesis on How Our Brains FunctionBrain waves act as carriers of information. A recently proposed “Cytoelectric Coupling” hypothesis suggests that these wavering electric fields contribute to the optimization of the brain network’s efficiency and robustness. They do this by influencing the physical configuration of the brain’s molecular framework. [translation: changing the structures in and around neurons]
In order to carry out its multifaceted functions, which include thought, the brain operates on various levels. Information like objectives or visuals is depicted through synchronized electrical activity among neuronal networks. Simultaneously, a combination of proteins and other biochemicals within and surrounding each neuron physically execute the mechanics required for participation in these networks.“The information the brain is processing has a role in fine-tuning the network down to the molecular level,” said Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, who co-authored the paper in Progress in Neurobiology with Associate Professor Dimitris Pinotsis of MIT and City —University of London, and Professor Gene Fridman of Johns Hopkins.[1]“The brain adapts to a changing world,” Pinotsis said. “Its proteins and molecules change too. They can have electric charges and need to catch up with neurons that process, store, and transmit information using electric signals. Interacting with the neurons’ electric fields seems necessary.”A major focus of Miller’s lab is studying how higher-level cognitive functions such as working memory can rapidly, flexibly, and yet reliably emerge from the activity of millions of individual neurons. Neurons are capable of dynamically forming circuits by creating and removing connections, called synapses, as well as strengthening or weakening those junctions. But, that merely forms a “roadmap” around which information could flow, Miller said.
The specific neural circuits that collectively represent one thought or another, Miller has found, are coordinated by rhythmic activity, more colloquially known as “brain waves” of different frequencies.
Fast “gamma” rhythms help transmit images from our vision (e.g. a muffin), while slower “beta” waves might carry our deeper thoughts about that image, (e.g. “too many calories”). Properly timed, bursts of these waves can carry predictions, enable writing in, holding onto, and reading out information in working memory, Miller’s lab has shown.If the brain carries information in electric fields and those electric fields are capable of configuring neurons and other elements in the brain that form a network, then the brain is likely to use this capability. The brain can use fields to ensure the network does what it is supposed to do, the authors suggest.
“Cytoelectric Coupling connects information at the meso‐ and macroscopic level down to the microscopic level of proteins that are the molecular basis of memory,” the authors wrote in the paper.
The article lays out the logic inspiring Cytoelectic Coupling. “We’re offering a hypothesis that anybody can test,” Miller said.
We propose and present converging evidence for the Cytoelectric Coupling Hypothesis: Electric fields generated by neurons are causal down to the level of the cytoskeleton. This could be achieved via electrodiffusion and mechanotransduction and exchanges between electrical, potential and chemical energy. Ephaptic coupling organizes neural activity, forming neural ensembles at the macroscale level. This information propagates to the neuron level, affecting spiking, and down to molecular level to stabilize the cytoskeleton, “tuning” it to process information more efficiently.