Pandemic #2: Divisiveness Caused by Social Media

For the first step in defeating Pandemic #2, please watch the new documentary, "The Social Dilemma." (You'll find it on Netflix).

As you use social media, try to cruise at 10,000 feet like a disinterested anthropologist and then ask yourself whether kind-hearted intelligent people should be talking at each other like much of what you will see.

Pandemic #2 is invisible, just like Pandemic #1, and you'll feel like you are in charge of your thoughts the entire time. Pandemic #2 quietly invades our minds, then erects filter bubbles around us that destroy the possibility of civil discourse on the most important issues facing us. Pandemic #2 destroys the possibility of e pluribus unum. We need to take action now, because huge misplaced financial incentives guarantee that Big Tech is not going to rescue us.

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Sam Harris Explores the Global Epidemic of Child Sexual Abuse

In his introduction to "The Worst Epidemic," Sam Harris warns that the subject matter might be difficult for listeners. The topic is the global epidemic of child sexual abuse involving children as young as one year old. Sam is joined by Gabriel Dance, a NYT reporter who has thoroughly investigated this issue. Until I forced myself to listen, I had assumed that this predatory behavior was relatively rare, but I was shocked to learn that sexual predators have exploited every corner of the Internet. To illustrate, Dance mentions that law enforcement experts estimate that of the 9 million citizens of New Jersey, 400,000 have been exposed to these highly illegal images and videos, some of this exposure being inadvertent, but much of it being intentional. It makes you wonder who we are, as a nation, that so many among us are willing to torture children. The tragedy is widespread, making the technical challenges and law enforcement needs overwhelming.

As a public service, Sam has put this episode in front of his paywall. The topic spirals in many directions, including the misleading concept of “child pornography,” the failure of governments and tech companies to grapple with the problem, the tradeoff between online privacy and protecting children, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, photo DNA, the roles played by specific tech companies, the ethics of encryption, “sextortion,” and the culture of pedophiles.

I am proud to say that I have been a paid subscriber of Making Sense for years. Sam Harris does a great job of exploring complex and oftentimes thorny issues unflinchingly, week after week.  From Sam's About Page:

His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.

If you are unfamiliar with the work of Sam Harris, I invite you to listen to this Episode, or any Episodes of Making Sense.

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The Problem of False Positives When Trying to Protect Your Website From Spam Comments on a WordPress Site

I've been running Dangerous Intersection since 2006, which now offers more than 7,000 posts.  When you are not running your own website, there are a lot of things that you need not worry about.  Technical issues often arise, and I've been doing my own tech work on my site.  That sometimes means I need to spend significant time to figure out why a Wordpress configuration, a widget or a plugin isn't working correctly. DI has generated a lot of comments over the years, almost 30,000 comments to date. It occurred to me today that there haven't been any comments for weeks.  I carefully analyzed my WordPress setup and could not see any problem.  No issues, which is typical of Wordpress, which is an amazing (and free) website platform.

Then I moved to my anti-spam protection plugin, Askimet, which has done a great job over the years.  But not anymore.  Recently, Askimet has been improperly identifying ALL of my incoming comments (even my own comments) as spam.  I tried to figure out how to reconfigure, but couldn't.  I have no intention of scanning thousands of spam comments each day (many millions of spam comments over the years) in order to identify the real comments, manually pulling them out of the "spam" folder. Thus, I thought, "Maybe it's time for a new form of comment spam protection."

I did some research and decided to install CleanTalk Anti-Spam, a comprehensive program with a delightfully easy installation.  There is no Captcha involved.  I don't quite understand how they do it, but it CleanTalk is a wonderful system with rave reviews on Wordpress and more than 430,000 installations.  I'm not getting paid anything for recommending CleanTalk.  I am writing this with the hope that others who are frustrated with the deluge of spam comments that you get when you run a blog will appreciate this option.

I've been testing out CleanTalk for the past fifteen minutes and it's working like a charm.  CleanTalk is free for one year, then costs $8/year, which is more than reasonable, given how well the program works. I have no problem paying low prices for excellent services that will save me many hours over the year.

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Need to Up My Game on Photoshop

I've dabbled with Photoshop over the years, but I have decided to (as Stephen Covey suggested) "sharpen the saw."  In other words, I want to incorporate new tools so that I can get things done better and more efficiently when I use Photoshop.  Shane Parrish of Farnham Street would identify this as "Compounding," which is a really cool concept, especially when applied to things other than earning interest on money.

And what a better time to learn tips on using photoshop than modern times, when you can attend Youtube University or pay a bit from many other online instructors?  I've already incorporated one change when compositing, something I should have done years ago: Instead of trimming a the top image with the eraser tool, I've started making use of layer masks.  That, and use of the "x" key to switch colors from black to white (black conceals, white reveals), has made it a joy to display only what I want on the top layer.  Whenever you make a mistake, it's non-destructive and hitting the "x" key lets you bring back what you accidentally took away.  What you'll see below is an image I created using the layer mask to display precisely what I wanted in my own body (I'm the guy on top).   I'll paste in the FB commentary so you can experience the joke too:

Last night I spotted my buddy Eddie White at the Southside YMCA. Eddie is active duty U.S. Army and I think his military exercise routine requires him to bench press a house. I was happy to serve as his weight-lifting partner.





My body looks pretty tidy, but it took a long time (about 45 min) to get it looking good. I kept zooming in deep to make the cuts precisely and I was using a mouse. My next step in my education is to learn to use the Wacom Intuos Wireless Graphics Drawing Tablet that I just purchased. There's going to be a learning curve, but I've seen a lot of testimonials from people who learn it and love it so much that you couldn't take it back unless you pried it out of their cold dead hands. So that's my next step in my education, my quest to do more than simply "dabble" with Photoshop.

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