Aggiungo

https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads?subtitle=it

#Ted #ZeynepTufekci #resistenza #25aprile

I think a lot about the Zeynep pillow-over-keyboard moment:

"There's going to be a point at which I feel about my own work the way I feel about some older scholars: you should quit while you're ahead, right? The problem is you never know when that moment is, everybody misses it. So I have some requests out to friends to put a pillow over the keyboard when they notice that right? That's the best thing you can do to a friend is to cut them off from the keyboard as soon as possible after that point. … I feel I'm not there yet. Now, of course, this is my nightmare: I'm going to always think I'm not there yet, because nobody ever thinks they're there yet." — #ZeynepTufekci via https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/a-journalist-of-the-plague-year

Everyone on here has a "shut up on social media for a week/month/year" emergency button for me—shout "I'm putting a pillow over your keyboard till $DATE" and I will honor that. (I recognize that people are least likely to disconnect the Ethernet when they most need to—some of you know where I live, you know what to do.)

A fatal chicken-or-the-egg problem: The vast majority of our capacity to produce a bird flu vaccine requires incubation of doses in eggs, but the bird flu itself is highly fatal for chickens!

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/opinion/bird-flu-h5n1-pandemic.html

#Flu #Influenza #Birds #BirdFlu #AvianInfluenza #H5N1 #Pandemic #Epidemic #PublicHealth #Vaccine #NYTimes #ZeynepTufekci

A fatal chicken-or-the-egg problem: The vast majority of our capacity to produce a bird flu vaccine requires incubation of doses in eggs, but the bird flu itself is highly fatal for chickens!

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/opinion/bird-flu-h5n1-pandemic.html

#Flu #Influenza #Birds #BirdFlu #AvianInfluenza #H5N1 #Pandemic #Epidemic #PublicHealth #Vaccine #NYTimes #ZeynepTufekci

Reflecting on #Qatargate and a July NYT piece by #zeyneptufekci (iterated upon by #mattiaferraresi in Domani), I am missing a convincing political alternative focused on addressing the climate crisis and socio-economic inequality that is built around how power works and how to affect it, and can therefore create lasting change (rather than just bring people on the street or create social media outrage).

And @bookandswordblog reminds me of this epic and practical commandment from our goddess Zeynep Tufekci:

“Zeynep's law: Until there is substantial and repeated evidence otherwise, assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones in magnitude (Aka if the particle is going faster than light, check your cables) https://nitter.ca/zeynep/status/1478766408691556353
#ZeynepTufekci

Zeynep Tufekci, who between early warnings about masks, variants, and vaccines/boosters has probably done more than anyone outside my family to safeguard my wellbeing, is talking about medical misinformation online:

'Last year, I asked this to immunologists of different policy views. They all said ~the above. I asked if they want to correct this on Twitter? They said why bother trying to refute "cranks", "loons" and "maniacs" (their exact words) when all it gets you is harassment. Essentially, there's stuff that's not controversial to scientists, but is lost to Twitter simply because of this pile-on behavior.

(Some unresolved internal debates? Yes. Are there nuances? Of course. But no version of the stuff that goes viral on Twitter).' https://nitter.ca/zeynep/status/1592215787783491584#m

It's lowkey terrifying that there are basically a few folks whom I follow like an Israelite following a prophet—folks like Zeynep and Ed Yong, etc.—whom I trust to ask questions and satisfy their own very high standards for verifiability and to communicate that to me.

In https://octodon.social/@22/103370431648734634 I excerpted some amazing bits of Dan Kahan's paper where he writes, "To live well—or just to live—individuals (including scientists) must accept much more [decision-relevant science] than they can ever hope to make sense of on their own". It's now so incredibly easy to get your decision-impacting science from totally bogus folks (who are telling their believers that they're the true prophets, the others are false). Terrifying epistemological ground for me.

#ZeynepTufekci

Zeynep Tufekci, who between early warnings about masks, variants, and vaccines/boosters has probably done more than anyone outside my family to safeguard my wellbeing, is talking about medical misinformation online:

'Last year, I asked this to immunologists of different policy views. They all said ~the above. I asked if they want to correct this on Twitter? They said why bother trying to refute "cranks", "loons" and "maniacs" (their exact words) when all it gets you is harassment. Essentially, there's stuff that's not controversial to scientists, but is lost to Twitter simply because of this pile-on behavior.

(Some unresolved internal debates? Yes. Are there nuances? Of course. But no version of the stuff that goes viral on Twitter).' https://nitter.ca/zeynep/status/1592215787783491584#m

It's lowkey terrifying that there are basically a few folks whom I follow like an Israelite following a prophet—folks like Zeynep and Ed Yong, etc.—whom I trust to ask questions and satisfy their own very high standards for verifiability and to communicate that to me.

In https://octodon.social/@22/103370431648734634 I excerpted some amazing bits of Dan Kahan's paper where he writes, "To live well—or just to live—individuals (including scientists) must accept much more [decision-relevant science] than they can ever hope to make sense of on their own". It's now so incredibly easy to get your decision-impacting science from totally bogus folks (who are telling their believers that they're the true prophets, the others are false). Terrifying epistemological ground for me.

#ZeynepTufekci

"Without commenting on the plausibility of the different versions of the origin theories of COVID-19 [...], can we at least acknowledge that what happened past year is no way to check any “facts” or even fight misinformation?  If anything, all this overreach and hurry to declare everything a conspiracy theory or “not following the science” just helps erode what trust authorities or fact-checkers may have had"

#ZeynepTufekci

https://www.theinsight.org/p/checking-facts-even-if-one-cant

#FactChecking #covid19

@kensanata "Why Zuckerberg’s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn’t Fixed Facebook"

There is no other way to interpret Facebook’s privacy invading moves over the years—even if it’s time to simplify! finally!―as anything other than decisions driven by a combination of self-serving impulses: namely, profit motives, the structural incentives inherent to the company’s business model, and the one-sided ideology of its founders and some executives. All these are forces over which the users themselves have little input, aside from the regular opportunity to grouse through repeated scandals. And even the ideology—a vague philosophy that purports to prize openness and connectivity with little to say about privacy and other values—is one that does not seem to apply to people who run Facebook or work for it. Zuckerberg buys houses surrounding his and tapes over his computer’s camera to preserve his own privacy, and company employees went up in arms when a controversial internal memo that made an argument for growth at all costs was recently leaked to the press—a nonconsensual, surprising, and uncomfortable disclosure of the kind that Facebook has routinely imposed upon its billions of users over the years.

Tufekci, 2018.

https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerberg-15-year-apology-tour-hasnt-fixed-facebook/

#ZeynepTufekci #facebook #MarkZuckerberg #surveillance #privacy #hypocrisy #trust #sincerity #credibility

Do Protests Even Work?

It sometimes takes decades to find out

Zeynep Tufekci, June 24, 2020

... In the long term, protests work because they can undermine the most important pillar of power: legitimacy. Commentators often note that a state can be defined by its monopoly on violence, a concept going back to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and codified by the sociologist Max Weber. But the full Weber quote is less well known. Weber defined the state by its “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.” The word legitimate is as important as the words physical force, if not more. Especially in the modern world, that monopoly on violence isn’t something that self-perpetuates. Violence doesn’t just happen; it has to be enacted and enabled by people. The Soviet Union did not fall because it ran out of tanks to send to Eastern Europe when the people there rebelled in the late 1980s. It fell, in large part, because it ran out of legitimacy, and because Soviet rulers had lost the will and the desire to live in their own system. ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/06/why-protests-work/613420/

(Emphasis in original.)

Previously. Previously.

#FeetToTheFire #ZeynepTufekci #protest #legitimacy #MaxWeber

The Pandemic Heroes Who Gave us the Gift of Time and Gift of Information

Moderna’s vaccine was apparently designed in just a few days, over a weekend, after the genetic sequence became available on January 10th, 2020.

Here’s why that date matters: the sequence was published ten days before China acknowledged the severity of the problem by admitting sustained human-to-human transmission and shutting down the city of Wuhan, on January 20th. The sequence was published while China—and the WHO, which depended on China for information—were still downplaying what was going on, in their official statements. The sequence wasn’t published in an official document. Instead, it was published independently in an open-source depository by Yong-Zhen Zhang, a professor at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center and School of Public Health.

https://zeynep.substack.com/p/the-pandemic-heroes-who-gave-us-the

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257544

#ZeynepTufekci #COVID19 #YongZhenZhang #OpenAccess #vaccines #censorship #genomes #PublicGenome #OpenSource

Zenep Tufekci has written some of the best online media analysis there is. She's got landlord problems

My landlord wants me to sign a new lease that gives me only two hours notice to show the house to potential buyers, upon which I am supposed to vacate the house—and if I don't do that three times, he can evict me. Two hours notice. In the middle of a pandemic.

-- Zeynep Tufekci

https://nitter.net/zeynep/status/1313212697706668037

This is unconscionable both for Tufekci and for renters everywhere. Please give this visibility.

#landlords #TenantsRights #eviction #ZeynepTufekci #pandemic #covid19