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As U.S. election looms, this ‘rumor researcher’ tracks—and combats—falsehoods in real time | Science | AAAS
After the war, Japanese American researcher Tamotsu Shibutani helped change how rumors were seen, casting them as a rational response to disasters and uncertainty. To Shibutani, who had spent the war imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp in California, rumor was more of a verb than a noun, a collective process of making sense of the world. His view was heavily influenced by his experience in the camp, Starbird notes, where the community used rumors to try and cope with the “horrible uncertainty” they faced. “In times of crisis and anxiety and these kinds of conditions, to participate in rumoring is a natural thing to do, and then there’s other folks that are going to exploit that,” she says. “Those dynamics have always been there.”
Starbird initially expected her research to tell a positive story: how rumors spread by some users are quickly fact checked and corrected by others. “I’d sort of seen that in the early data, where we would see rumors and misinformation, but they were quickly corrected,” Starbird says. “They weren’t causing a lot of damage, as far as we could tell.” It was the idea of a self-correcting crowd, a kind of Wikipedia in the wild.
But her first few studies quickly disabused her of this notion. “We could really see, especially between 2013 and 2015, that rumors and misinformation were becoming a larger and larger part of the discourse online during these crisis events,” she says. Rumors were rarely being corrected—and when they were, the correction usually came too late and reached far fewer people than the original, false information. A rumor that the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag attack by Navy SEALs, for instance, circulated on Twitter (now X) for days. Social media algorithms, designed to keep people’s attention, often advantaged the sensational. “And it turns out that falsehoods and conspiracy theories tend to be more sensational than the truth,” Starbird says.
Index funds : everyone is going the same direction
Index funds have exploded in popularity for good reason—they’re cheap, easy to buy, and have historically outperformed most actively managed funds. But people are forgetting one crucial fact: past performance does not guarantee future results. The stock market doesn’t care about your neat little charts showing average annual returns. And while the S&P 500 has indeed delivered solid returns over the long run, there have been brutal stretches where it’s gone nowhere. Just ask anyone who invested during the 2000s and saw their portfolio flatline or lose value for ten years.
Today, we’re walking into a similar trap. Money is flooding into index funds like never before. These funds now control over 60% of the U.S. stock market. But what happens when everyone piles into the same investment? Valuations get bloated, returns get squeezed, and eventually, the whole thing comes crashing down. If you think the stock market is a guaranteed money machine, think again. It’s setting up to punish those who are following the crowd without thinking.
'Trumpism isn't a cult'
How I define it in my class is by two benchmarks. The first is: Cults manage to shift people’s beliefs rapidly away from the broader society and away from the beliefs they had before they joined. The second thing I emphasize is that cult members act against their own interests and their families’ interests quite strikingly. The reason I highlight those two things is that when I’m talking about the psychology of cults, I’m interested in how the cult, and usually the cult leader, is able to have this kind of influence. Typically, the cult leader is benefiting in an exploitative way off of these two things, so many of those strange beliefs are about the leader being very important, often divine, the key to salvation against the apocalypse, etc. And then, more importantly, often the cult members’ labor is making the leader rich, or female cult members are expected to have sex with the leader and all men, besides the leader, have to be celibate. Cult members make extreme sacrifices that benefit the leader.
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz
Third, California is justifiably famous for our many thousands of cults, from EST to the Peoples Temple, from Heaven’s Gate to the Manson Family. Many, although not all, of these cults are harmless, and maybe even serve a purpose for alienated people who find homes in them. But some are very dangerous indeed, and cults have a notoriously hard time straddling the line that ultimately leads to violence and death.
And the reality, which is obvious to everyone in the Bay Area but probably not outside of it, is that “AI risk” has developed into a cult, which has suddenly emerged into the daylight of global press attention and the public conversation. This cult has pulled in not just fringe characters, but also some actual industry experts and a not small number of wealthy donors – including, until recently, Sam Bankman-Fried. And it’s developed a full panoply of cult behaviors and beliefs.
Academia is a cult - The Washington Post
That asymmetry contributes to a culture of dependency, convincing graduate students that they must obey the dictates of their advisers if they hope to obtain increasingly scarce jobs. It is also, at least in part, a response to the desires of tenured faculty members, hungry for disciples of their own, regardless of whether there are jobs for them. Inevitably, it results in a growing pool of academics who teach on an adjunct basis, frequently making less than minimum wage, without benefits, subsisting in patterns of unfair employment not unlike those of the church employees I knew growing up: financially insecure and thus susceptible to offers they can’t refuse. With little practical training even in teaching, the implied career goal of many research fields, grad students who venture out of their discipline may appear overqualified to employers wary of the initials following their names, but they are usually underqualified, their concrete experience limited to the service jobs and freelance gigs keeping them afloat between terms. Those faithful who adjunct, whether by necessity or choice, commonly earn less than $5,000 per class, and in 2015 the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center reported that a quarter of part-time faculty members are on public assistance, further foreclosing their options and avenues of escape.
The ‘Sex Cult’ That Preached Empowerment - The New York Times
Nearby, a number of colorful sashes hung on hooks. Each color in the hierarchy was not only a higher state of self-awareness but also reflected a member’s ability to recruit more members. Some higher-ranked sashes have never been attained, Bronfman whispered. You don’t trade up directly to a new color of sash but first must get four silk stripes ironed onto your existing sash, a process known as “moving up the stripe path.” The rigid hierarchy and doctrinaire teachings pushed members to revere those with a higher level of sash, to whom they were encouraged to pay tribute in words and deeds.
The cult of the academy: jargon, insularity and status
I think we lost a few generations of art critics to academia. They all learned to write in a similar style, which I find very jargon-filled and impenetrable; and I also feel that their taste flattened and everybody liked the same fifty-five artists, and they would quote the same twenty writers over and over. I thought, “The art world is not this boring; how can this be?” Now, I’m seeing more and more younger writers starting to write online, making sense, speaking in ways that you can understand and, most importantly, putting out opinions. The juice of criticism is opinion. I really admire Artforum; I’ve never written for it for good reason: I’m not smart enough, but I look in the second-to-the-last paragraph and I see a phrase like “this problemetized the show.” Is that positive or negative? There is no judgment in it. Everybody is smart. So I can’t fit in that art world because I never went to school; I have no degrees; I am not schooled in the language of the empire.
Inside the Rise & Fall Of A 1970s Upper West Side Cult: Gothamist
After the raid, the pillagers returned to their seven-story co-op at 2643 Broadway. “We were prepared for them to invade,” says Paul Sprecher, a member of the Sullivan Institute for over a decade. “We had security down at the front door to make sure they would be duly chastised. I don’t remember, I think one guy showed up to complain and he was manhandled.” (According to a 1989 New York Magazine article, the complaining tenant was “beaten by more than a dozen members,” one of whom “broke four knuckles punching the young boy in the face.”)
The paint splatter that started the ordeal is still visible today, on the brick wall just above the Metro Diner on 100th and Broadway. It is perhaps the last physical reminder of a psychotherapy cult—informally known as the “Sullivanians”—that once had 500 members living in three buildings on the Upper West Side.
