📚 Quinn's Highlights

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A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .

The Self-Reinforcing Stigmatization of Public Spaces (Like Libraries) Summary: Public libraries are facing various physical problems due to under-investment. They are often the last option for people who lack access to basic services. Libraries are used as shelters for the homeless, warm places for those suffering from addiction, and even childcare centers. This over-reliance on libraries to solve societal issues has stigmatized these public spaces. The lack of investment in addressing core problems has turned libraries into spaces of last resort. This sends a message to affluent Americans that if they want a gathering place, they should build their own in the private sector. Transcript: Speaker 1 One of the problems we have now is most cities, suburbs, towns in America have public libraries there. There's neighborhood libraries. The building is there. The buildings are generally not updated. They need to have new HVACs. They need new bathrooms. They need new furniture, but a lot of new books. Stomachs still not accessible to people in wheelchairs. There's all kinds of problems with libraries, just physically because we've under-invested in them. Libraries, unfortunately, have become the place of last resort for everyone who falls through the safety net. If you wake up in the morning in the American city and you don't have a home, you're told to go to a library. If you wake up in the morning and you're suffering from an addiction problem, you need a warm place. They'll send you to a library. If you need to use a bathroom, you'll go to a library. If you don't have child care for your kid, you might send your kid to a library. If you're old and you're alone, you might go to the library. We've used the library to try to solve all these problems that deserve actual treatment. How many times have you talked to someone who said it's basically a homeless shelter? What's happened is we've stigmatized our public spaces because we've done so little to address core problems that we've turned them into spaces of last resort for people who need a Hand. As we do that, we send another message to affluent middle-class Americans, and that is if you want a gathering place, build your own in the private sector.

The Infrastructure of Community

How to Keep Time

Cynics are those who actively oppose change. NOBL recognizes that “cynics’ negativity can be annoying,” but engaging with them and trying to convince them can often be a huge time suck when it comes to leading change. Here’s the magic: “cynics are just disappointed idealists.” Perhaps they have gotten their hopes up about change only to be let down. Unlike a fence-sitter, a cynic is at least actively engaged with the change effort so spend your time delivering “something that matters” to your cynics, because actions will speak much louder than words. And if you are successful, your greatest cynics, once won over, will often become your greatest advocates.

Becoming a Changemaker

Alex Budak

While Algorithmic Decision-Making Does Suffer From Bias, It Offers the Potential for Unparalleled Transparency In the Decision-Making Process Summary: Algorithms offer a transparent and accountable way for decision making. They can detect bias and perpetuated patterns, but must be transparent, independently audited, and not proprietary or snake oil. Transcript: Speaker 1 And then the response comes back saying yes but if you're basing it on historical data then you're feeding in biases of the past which you're going to propagate into the future there Is a kind of new attitude about all this which is kind of orthogonal to these two axes which I personally find pretty compelling and it's come up in from a couple of different places independently I could drop a few names but let me just say that the attitude is that algorithms at their best offer a new way for decision making to be transparent and accountable that's at their best So you know if an algorithm is something that everyone understands how it works everyone understands why we are chose to use this algorithm how it was trained and it's something which Can be independently audited it's even something which could be tinkered with to see if it could be made more fair and more accurate that kind of algorithm could raise the standard of Decision making in many areas and let us detect bias where it crops up and also help us detect where historical patterns are being perpetuated and what we might do to fix that but the big But is they have to be transparent they have to be independently audited they can't be proprietary and opaque and hidden behind veils of intellectual property and they also can't just Be snake oil right so there is a lot of snake oil out there there's a lot of products being put out to market which have not in any sense been independently verified or validated and where Their users and customers frankly don't really know whether their results ought to be interpreted the way they ought to be interpreted and so there needs to be a lot more critical thinking Aimed at these

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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