LINKS - February 16th, 2022
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
“The Descent of Man,” 150 years on
“Today, students are taught Darwin as the 'father of evolutionary theory,’ a genius scientist. They should also be taught Darwin as an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices that warped his view of data and experience. Racists, sexists, and white supremacists, some of them academics, use concepts and statements ‘validated’ by their presence in ‘Descent’ as support for erroneous beliefs, and the public accepts much of it uncritically.”
The Socialists Who Love Talking to Conservatives
By Ian Ward, Politico
“That makes it a unique artifact of the ideologically scrambled post-Trump era: A podcast designed to give committed leftists a critical take on the American right that became a trusted source for old-fashioned rightists and many others in between. Along the way, it has exposed a growing appetite on both the left and the right for a new style of political discourse that avoids predictable Trump-bashing and takes seriously the ideas behind the conservative movement.”
Fake faces created by AI look more trustworthy than real people
By Christa Lesté-Lasserre, New Scientist
“Nightingale and her colleague Hany Farid at the University of California, Berkeley, asked 315 participants, recruited on a crowdsourcing website, to say whether they could distinguish a selection of 400 fake photos from 400 photographs of real people. Each set consisted of 100 people from each of four ethnic groups: white, Black, East Asian and South Asian.
“This group had an accuracy rate of 48.2 per cent – slightly worse than chance.”
It’s a matter of dignity and justice to acknowledge African American cemetery erasure
By Shannon Peck-Bartle & Antoinette Jackson, Tampa Bay Times
“What does the past mean today? What does the paving over and erasure of cemeteries mean to all of us? And what can we do right now and right here in the Tampa Bay area to bring dignity to the deceased? These questions are being posed by the African American Cemetery Alliance of Tampa Bay, a grassroots alignment of the community and community institutions, scholars, educators and local policy makers, focused on finding, locating, marking, memorializing and educating people about erased African American cemeteries in the Tampa Bay area.”
Math is RACIST AF!
By Zach's Strange Corners of Thought, YouTube Channel
“Some people say math is racist. So I looked through the history of mathematics only to find the shocking truth about math. How is math related to the type of society that uses it? How many different types of math are even out there? Can math be racist?”