There Are Eight Forms of Intelligence, Not Just One: Which Apply to You?

10 Quotes That Make You Say Yes to Life

What happens when the boss spreads misinformation?

 

Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

 

The big fear when Elon Musk took over Twitter was that the social media platform would turn into the Wild West, with disinformation running roughshod over the truth and all that’s right. Could Musk control it? Would he want to control it? Well, our fears are not easily being put to rest. Musk hadn’t even owned the company for 72 hours before he had to take something down that linked to misinformation. And it’s at this point that we should note that the retweet was his retweet. Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton tweeted a Los Angeles Times story about the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Clinton wrote, “The Republican Party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories. It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result. As citizens, we must hold them accountable for their words and the actions that follow.” Musk responded to Clinton’s tweet by tweeting that “there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story.” Musk then linked to an opinion story from a site with serious credibility issues that, without proof, made accusations about Paul Pelosi and what was behind the attack. That rumor — again unproven and since debunked by the FBI — has been circulating among some conservatives and Musk’s little stunt managed to lend credence to it. Yael Eisenstat, a vice president of the Anti Defamation League and former Facebook executive, was among those who blasted Musk, tweeting, “When the world’s richest man/owner of this very site himself traffics in conspiracy theories days after claiming to advertisers that he’s going to be a responsible leader, all I can say is: I’m not overreacting by expressing my concerns. Actions always speak louder than words.” After much backlash, Musk eventually deleted his tweet even though it might not have, technically, broken any of Twitter’s current content rules. And it isn’t even clear why Musk took down the tweet. But the backlash continued. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel tweeted to Musk, “it has been interesting, over the years, to watch you blossom from the electric car guy into a fully-formed piece of (expletive).” That might have been a funny dig, but the ramifications here could be far more damaging than getting poked by a late-night comedian. The Washington Post’s Elizabeth Dwoskin and Faiz Siddiqui wrote, “… it highlights the conflict Musk faces as he takes over a social media platform whose moderation policies he’s consistently criticized as too strict while also pledging that he won’t allow it to become a free-for-all that advertisers might not want to associate with. Already, Musk has had to acknowledge that suspended accounts like former president Donald Trump’s won’t be reinstated until a so-far-undefined ‘moderation council’ has convened to determine policy.” They added, “(Musk’s) willingness to spout misinformation — or to boost it by using the tactic of ‘just raising questions’ — could create major conflicts for him and for Twitter now that he owns the company.” About that fake Pelosi story … The Los Angeles Times’ Samantha Masunaga wrote about The Santa Monica Observer — the outlet behind the false story that Paul Pelosi knew the person who attacked him and was drunk and with a male prostitute at the time. A year ago, The L.A. Times had an editorial that wrote that the Observer “claimed that Hillary Clinton had died and that a body double had been sent to debate Donald Trump. Months later it reported, incorrectly, that Trump had appointed Kanye West to a high-level position in the Interior Department. Last year, it reported falsely that sunlight could be a remedy for COVID-19 sufferers and that Bill Gates, a major funder of vaccine research, had been responsible for a polio epidemic.” Masunaga writes, “With an official-sounding name and a professional-looking website, the Observer is one of a number of outlets masking themselves as legitimate news sources. The phenomenon has been growing and indicates how bad actors are increasingly trying to fool the public into seeing them as purveyors of accurate information.” It doesn’t help when one of the most powerful men — with nearly 113 million Twitter followers — lends a hand to those bad actors. More on Musk and Twitter and Pelosi

Businesses founded by Li were implicated in a major money-laundering case in New Zealand in 2020. Authorities in Australia have also linked his local money-moving businesses to more than $1.4 billion in fund transfers over eight years, many of which appear suspect or to have links to Chinese organised crime and underground Asian sex rings

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Open Culture: “Intelligence is a fraught subject of discussion, and only becoming more so. Among the frameworks developed safely to approach it, one has gained special prominence: the theory championed by developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, author of the book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. And how many such intelligences are there? In the Big Think video above — posted in 2016, 33 years after Frames of Mind — he names ten: language, logic and mathematics, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, teaching, and existential.  

Some of these may strike you as only tangentially related to intelligence, traditionally defined. Gardner has considered this: “People say, ‘Well, music’s a talent, it’s not an intelligence.’ And I say, ‘Well, why, if you’re good with words, is that an intelligence, but if you’re good with tones and rhythms and timbres…” Nobody, in his telling, has ever come up with a convincing response. Hence his mission to expand the definition of intelligence beyond the aggregate measure of brainpower long known as the general intelligence factor — or more commonly, “g factor” — to encompass the sort of skills whose usefulness we can see in the real world, away from the constructed rigors of psychometric tests…”

Pew: “A small but growing share of U.S. adults say they regularly get news on TikTok. This is in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years. In just two years, the share of U.S. adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has roughly tripled, from 3% in 2020 to 10% in 2022. 

The video-sharing platform has reported high earnings the past year and has become especially popular among teens – two-thirds of whom report using it in some way – as well as young adults Adults under 30 are the most likely group to say they regularly get news on TikTok. About a quarter of Americans in this age group (26%) say they regularly get news there, higher than in 2021 and 2020. This compares with 10% of those ages 30 to 49, 4% of those 50 to 64 and just 1% of those 65 and older.

1. “The most important teacher of philosophy in America, if not the world, for a third of a century” — a documentary about Bob Gurland, a longtime, highly-regarded teacher of philosophy at NYU (link is to the film’s trailer)
2. Travel as a philosophical activity — Emily Thomas (Durham) interviewed on travel, philosophy, women and other subjects
3. “People don’t like being tricked, especially when the trickery results in giving another person affections they don’t deserve” — Jesse Hamilton (U. Penn) on “stolen valor”
4. “I think a lot of wisdom in life (and in philosophy) is about being able to see why things are confusing—once you can see that the confusion itself is a lot easier to live with even if you still don’t have the answer” — an interview with philosopher and advice-columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith (Princeton)
5. “Philosophers increasingly face difficult choices in balancing sustainability with other considerations in teaching and research, event organizing, department governance, and institutional service” — an upcoming APA webinar on sustainable practices in philosophy
6. “There is a persistent conventional wisdom that… Adam Smith holds a labor theory of value” — but, despite there being a “kernel of truth” in this, it’s not quite right, explains Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)
7. “The clarity championed in analytic philosophy is indebted to the clarity indigenous to science; but that there is another sort of clarity: one found in poetry but occasionally also found in philosophy, to that philosophy’s benefit” — James C. McGuiggan on varieties of clarity