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Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Rightwing computer scientist and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer was the top donor to Donald Trump's presidential campaign. He contributed $13.5 million and laid the groundwork for what is now called the Trump Revolution. Mercer also funded Cambridge Analytica (CA), a small data analytics company that specializes in "election management strategies." CA boasts on its website that it has psychological profiles, based on 5,000 separate pieces of data, on 220 million American voters. CA scoops up masses of data from peoples' Facebook profiles and uses artificial intelligence to influence their thinking and manipulate public opinion. They used these skills to exploit America's populist insurgency and tip the election toward Trump.
[...] We enter and participate in this digital world every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. We are living in a new era of propaganda, one we can't see, with the collection and use of our data played back in ways to covertly manipulate us. All this is enabled by technological platforms originally built to bring us together. Welcome to the age of platform capitalism—the new battleground for the future.
Previously on SoylentNews: Do Advertisers Know You Better Than You Know Yourself?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:55PM (2 children)
Looks like bullshit to me. As in the guy is lying about what his sources actually say.
For example, he claims:
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role.
But the actual source material [archive.org] is practically the opposite of that sinister portrait:
163 The diagnostic and directive function.
...
The mere offering of various forms of instruction does not complete the work of the secondary school. It must, as far as may be possible, add to that function the function of exploring, testing, diagnosing, and directing the education of the pupil. It must permit the pupil to discover and test his own special aptitudes and capacities...
The source material says its school's job to help kids figure out what they are good at and your guy twists that into forcing kids to conform to their 'proper' role.
Your guy obviously didn't conceive of a world where his claims could be fact-checked in a few minutes. He relied on his sources being entombed in the dusty vault of a library that few have access to so that we would have to trust his interpretation to be honest.
Maybe his other claims have more merit, but its telling that the very first one I decided to check turned out to be duplicitous. I really don't have the spare time to give him the benefit of the doubt after that.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:14PM (1 child)
Present day school policy managers perhaps also twists the original purposes the same way? That teacher after all tried to analyze his actual experiences during decades of teaching and student interaction. So even despite this, there's something seriously wrong with the way the school works.
How come we can make Mars rockets but not fix school?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:54PM
Part of the problem is that factory-schooling can only have so much variety. But you can not look at it in a vacuum.
Prior to public schooling, princelings got personal tutors, merchant kids got very small class-sizes, like ~6 kids per teacher and everybody else got apprenticeships, almost always in the family trade.
Compared to that, public schooling provides much broader options for the majority of pupils than would otherwise be available. So it isn't that conformity was a design goal, it is a result of the limited available resources.
I am not qualified to comment on which pedagogical strategies are better or worse. I'm just smart enough to recognize that the idea that public school is intended to turn kids into conformist robots is conspiracy theory and thus counter-productive. It might be satisfying to believe there is an enemy deliberately working to hold down the proletariat, but if you don't understand the reality of the situation you can't hope to fix it.