It Takes an Algorithm to Know a Lot About You

“I believe the primary role of the state is to teach, train, and raise children. Parents have a secondary role.”  - Hillary Clinton, “It Takes a Village”

Sci-fi movies like Minority Report, with a trio of psychics called “recogs” who can see “pre-visions” of crimes yet to be committed, setting in motion a Pre Crime Unit, came to mind when reading about China’s effort to detect “pre-crime.”

Bloomberg Business is reporting that “The Communist Party has directed one of the country’s largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collect data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur.” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-03/china-tries-its-hand-at-pre-crime

It was reported that the DOD’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) called for research proposals to study social media and how it could facilitate insights into people’s real thoughts, emotions and beliefs, and thus predict behavior.

It is obvious that Facebook is collecting data on people’s beliefs, likes and dislikes, often prompting them to play silly personal discovery games that yield a score after ten questions are asked which may seem random to the average person but they are cleverly designed to mine data and information on that person.

Algorithms are said to “accurately detect key features of speech linked to structural patterns such as humor, metaphor, emotion, language innovations, and subtle non-verbal elements of communication such as pitch, posture, gesture, from text, audio, and visual media.”

Measuring cognitive behavior, it is alleged that a software called ‘Beware’ is already being used to analyze social media activity, property records, records of friends and associates, assigning a “threat score.” Police might use such a “threat score” to pre-judge if a person is dangerous. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-08/the-crime-you-have-not-yet-committed

Can computers accurately predict the future? Amazon uses algorithms to guess what you are likely to purchase, meteorologists make short-term accurate weather forecasts, and Facebook pop up ads from companies you liked or offering similar items you have purchased on line from various vendors; videos of movies you may like to watch may pop up on the screen as suggestions based on your past viewing. In certain cases computers have made strides in “predicting who will commit a violent crime.”

Controlling someone’s life, whether through data-mining or medical breakthroughs that involve DNA typing, does not stop with intrusive research and computer manipulation. Overt government control of our children is promoted by many on the left, including presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. She is of the opinion that parents are secondary in raising their child, the state comes first in its job to teach, train, and raise a child in order to better influence who they are, what they become, and where their loyalties reside.

I still remember the wife of the socialist dictator Ceausescu, Elena, who told the soldiers who arrested her in 1989 that she raised them, how dare they put handcuffs on her? We were to refer to her as our mother and the mother of the country, that our biological parents were just caretakers entrusted by the state.

Ambry Genetics, a prominent DNA-testing firm located in Orange County, CA, revealed a new database that contains the aggregated genetic information of 10,000 patients with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. With the explanation that insights may lead to better medicines and a healthier future for everybody, the company welcomes “collaboration with pharmaceutical companies to speed the discovery of new diagnostic targets, treatments, and cures to save more lives, sooner.” Ambry Genetics “hopes to expand the database by adding genetic information from 20,000 individuals each year.”

Drug Discovery and Development magazine interviewed Ambry CEO Charlie Dunlop who said, “Based on the sheer volume of the data we have released, we have already close to 200 new genes implicated in breast and ovarian cancer. This is about 10 times more genes than was publicly known yesterday, broadening understanding and potentially opening up more drug targets than from any single data release in history.” http://www.dddmag.com/articles/2016/03/massive-genetic-database-opens-public

But certain risk factors do not necessarily mean that a patient typed with such risk will actually get the disease. Are such genetic banks only about “preventing” genetic diseases? Might they have culling implications? Is playing God a good idea? Doing in vitro fertilization, screening the embryos, discarding the imperfect ones, creating 3-parent embryos, where will it stop? If you have changes in BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, might insurance be refused to you, or perhaps a birth permit will be denied if it goes that far.

Might life imitate art eventually? In the 1997 movie “Gattaca,” the main character, Vincent Freeman, cannot travel into outer space because he is genetically inferior, an “in-valid.” In order to pursue his dream, he must purchase the genes of a laboratory-engineered “valid.”

From an unclassified document released in January, Money Morning is reporting that “the FBI’s Office of Partner Engagement revealed a new agency initiative based on Britain’s ‘anti-terror’ mass surveillance program.” This agency “requests that high school educators across the country inform on students who express ‘anti-government’ or ‘anarchist’ political beliefs.” Upon their observations, teachers report behaviors that they think might lead to violence, including persons who believe in conspiracy theories such as global government, police state, are those who believe in “libertarianism or constitutionalism.” http://moneymorning.com/2016/03/10/fbi-recruits-u-s-educators-to-inform-on-your-childs-political-affilliations/

Is Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s vision of a dystopian future in which “humans were genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order” still just his dark fiction that has frightened readers since 1931?

In our new and highly computerized world, “the lives of others” can be effortlessly watched and dissected to the DNA level and then lovingly controlled in order to preserve them the right way.

 

 

Behavior Modification and "Interrupting Whiteness"

Behavior modification is a type of therapy also known as applied behavior analysis. First mentioned in 1910, it focuses on “decreasing maladaptive behavior through extinction or punishment.”

Behavior modification, similar to operant conditioning, can be achieved by various means: reinforcement (positive or negative via rewards or lack of them), punishment, extinction, shaping, fading, and chaining.

Behavior modification can be used to treat obsessive compulsive disorders (OCD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), phobias, enuresis (bed-wetting), generalized anxiety disorder, and separation anxiety disorder.

Behavior modification draws from the operant conditioning principles developed by the American behaviorist B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) who discussed using operant conditioning to shape behavior of humans and animals by reinforcement or lack of reinforcement in his 1938 book, The Behavior of Organisms. Skinner is highly regarded and studied in universities across the country, particularly in Education and Psychology.

Extinction, such as putting a child in time-out when he/she misbehaves is an example of “nudging” unwanted behavior by separating a child from his parents or an individual from a group.

Negative reinforcement is a “behavior whose reinforcing properties are associated with its removal.” Terminating an existing electric shock after a rat pressed a bar is negative reinforcement.

By rewarding desirable behavior, undesirable behaviors are replaced with more desirable ones. Using punishment through aversive or unpleasant stimuli is a way to discourage unwanted behavior. One example would be taking away smart device privileges. If the reinforcement is removed permanently, behaviorists call it extinction.

Two very important questions remain, who decides the desirable behavior parameters and to what ends? Do the ends justify the means?

Suppose your desire is to have a “national conversation on race” because you believe the majority white population is racist and therefore their behavior must be extinguished. Aside from non-stop race-baiting discussions on the liberal main stream media outlets with low viewership, you engage the liberal academia at various colleges through their progressive departments of studies of women, race, and social justice.

If their outrageous accusations and ideas don’t stick, then they move the notch to “interrupting whiteness” in American schools, “leading while white,” “challenging white supremacy in society,” and eliminating “white privilege” of Caucasian students, “white domination of thought,” achieving “racial equity,” and how to “decenter whiteness.”

If these topics seem twilight-zonish, then perhaps we should attend the national conference for teachers and school administrators taking place in Baltimore, MD on October 10, 2015 which focuses on race, “leading while white,” and “systemic racism” in our schools and society. http://www.summitforcourageousconversation.com/overview/

The conference titled The National Summit for Courageous Conversation 2015 is organized by the Pacific Educational Group (PEG), “a large and influential consulting firm hired by hundreds of school districts nationwide – often under pressure from the federal government – to address ‘racial gaps’ in scholastic performance and behavior problems in the classroom.” According to PEG, “public education should be infused with Afrocentrism.” http://www.pacificeducationalgroup.com/public/pages/home

Why not discuss relevant topics such as improving reading scores, math scores, science scores, overall achievement in school, graduation percentages, and reducing violence, truancy, drugs, and dropout rates in school? Why not attempt to fix what is wrong with families and society in general that produce such moral and mental decline in our children, regardless of skin color?

In the fundamentally transformed new and improved America, “is this the kind of race-obsessed confrontational philosophy that should be guiding instruction and curricula in the nation’s public schools?” http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2015/10/07/interrupting-whiteness-education-conference-blame-white-teachers-and-students/

No mention is made of personal responsibility, the destruction of the black family unit by dependency on welfare programs, the absence of dads in the home, drugs, violent behavior of blacks on blacks, recidivism after jail, abortions, the lack of self-control, lack of motivation to study, school dropout rates among black students, huge unemployment rates among black teens, and other issues that plague the black community.

It is convenient instead to blame non-existent “white privilege.” Critical Race Theory dissects the concept of “whiteness” as the focus point of guilt for all societal problems. Because we are Caucasian, we somehow benefit unjustly from this “racist” system; we are part of the system, and thus automatically racist. The struggle of millions of whites to succeed by working hard against many odds is somehow irrelevant in this half-baked theory.

According to Critical Race Theory, “racism represents both prejudice and power. Since the theory espouses that blacks have no power in society, they cannot possibly be racist.”

The PJ Media post of October 7, 2015 lists some of the workshops. The titles are sheer propaganda meant to re-educate, to shape the white population’s behavior into the desired direction of utopian “racial equity.” Communist societies used “re-education” to force people into confessions of their non-existent guilt and acceptance of the new ideology. If they refused, they were sent to re-education camps, labor camps, prison, or shot. http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2015/10/07/interrupting-whiteness-education-conference-blame-white-teachers-and-students/

To nudge students into desired behavior, PEG focuses on “restorative justice,” an euphemism for eliminating detention and suspension for students who exhibit violent behavior at school and offering them therapy and counseling sessions instead. Since July 2015 “restorative justice” is now official government policy.

The September 15, 2015 Executive Order titled “Using Behavioral Science Insights to Better Serve the American People,” will use behavior “to support a range of national priorities, including helping workers to find better jobs; enabling Americans to lead longer, healthier lives, improving access to educational opportunities and support for success in school; and accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy.”

The Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) proposed in this EO will use empirical findings from government-recruited behavioral science experts to help people “access public programs and benefits” with ease,  to present information in such a way that ”affects comprehension and action by individuals,” to “most effectively promote public welfare, as appropriate, giving particular consideration to the selection and setting of default options,” and “review policies and programs that are designed to encourage or make it easier for Americans to take specific actions, such as saving for retirement or completing education programs.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/15/executive-order-using-behavioral-science-insights-better-serve-american