Sufism (Arabic: ٱلصُّوفِيَّة), also known as Tasawwuf[1] (ٱلتَّصَوُّف), is a mystic body of religious practice within Islam characterized by a focus on Islamic spirituality, ritualism, asceticism and esotericism... it is precisely because it is historically proven that "many of the most eminent defenders of Islamic orthodoxy, such as Abdul-Qadir Gilani, Ghazali, and the Sultan Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn (Saladin) were connected with Sufism"[74] that the popular studies of writers like Idries Shah are continuously disregarded by scholars as conveying the fallacious image that "Sufism" is somehow distinct from "Islam." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism (note "dervish") (more)

The Digital Polarization Initiative, or “DigiPo”, is ADP's (American Democracy Project) national effort to build student civic, information and web literacy by having students participate in a broad, cross-institutional project to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in our Twitter and Facebook feeds. DigiPo is spearheaded by ADP's inaugural Civic Fellow Mike Caulfield of Washington State University Vancouver.

Political polarization (spelt polarisation in British English, Australian English, and New Zealand English) is the divergence of political attitudes away from the center, towards ideological extremes.[1][2][3] Scholars distinguish between ideological polarization (differences in the policy positions) and affective polarization (an emotional dislike and distrust of political out-groups).[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_polarization (more)

Renee Diresta: The Web’s Recommendation Engines Are Broken. Can We Fix Them? (more)

Eric Levitz: The ‘Twitter Files’ Is What It Claims to Expose.Twitter is not what it seems. The social media platform poses as a neutral marketplace for the exchange of ideas and information...But it is actually a tool of progressive power. That’s the story that conservatives want to tell about what Twitter used to be, in the bad old days before Elon Musk begrudgingly bought it. (more)

see COVID-19

The Twitter Files are a series of Twitter threads based on internal Twitter, Inc. documents shared by owner Elon Musk (Musk Buys Twitter) with freelance journalist Matt Taibbi, opinion writer Bari Weiss, and author Michael Shellenberger in December 2022. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the release of the documents with Twitter management. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files cf content moderation (more)

In the United States, electoral fraud, or voter fraud,[1] involves illegal voting in or manipulation of United States elections. Types of fraud include voter impersonation or in-person voter fraud, mail-in or absentee ballot fraud, illegal voting by noncitizens, and double voting.[2][3][4] The United States government defines voter or ballot fraud as one of three broad categories of federal election crimes, the other two being campaign finance crimes and civil rights violations.[1][5] Electoral fraud is very rare in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_in_the_United_States (more)

Fox News stars and executives privately trashed Donald Trump's election fraud claims, court document reveal. The messages, included in a legal filing as part of Dominion Voting Systems’s $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News, showed that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham brutally mocked lies being pushed by former President Donald Trump’s camp asserting that the election was rigged. (more)

The National Rifle Association of America (NRA) is a gun rights advocacy group based in the United States.[4][5][b] Founded in 1871 to advance rifle marksmanship, the modern NRA has become a prominent gun rights lobbying organization while continuing to teach firearm safety and competency. The organization also publishes several magazines and sponsors competitive marksmanship events.[6] The group claimed nearly 5 million members as of December 2018, though that figure has not been independently confirmed.[7][8][9] The NRA is one of the most influential advocacy groups in U.S. politics.[10][11][12] The NRA Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) is its lobbying division, which manages its political action committee (PAC), the Political Victory Fund (PVF). Over its history, the organization has influenced legislation, participated in or initiated lawsuits, and endorsed or opposed various candidates at local, state, and federal levels. Some notable lobbying efforts by the NRA-ILA are the Firearm Owners Protection Act, which lessened restrictions of the Gun Control Act of 1968, and the Dickey Amendment, which blocks the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from using federal funds to advocate for gun control. Starting in the mid- to late 1970s, the NRA has been increasingly criticized by gun control and gun rights advocacy groups, political commentators, and politicians. This criticism began following changes in the NRA's organizational policies, following what is now referred to as the Revolt at Cincinnati at the 1977 NRA annual convention. The changes, which deposed former NRA executive vice president Maxwell Rich and included new organizational bylaws, have been described as moving the organization away from its previous focuses of "hunting, conservation, and marksmanship" and toward a focus on the defense of the right to bear arms.[13][14][15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association

The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) was a multidisciplinary program for the study of abuse in information technologies, with a focus on social media, established in 2019. It is part of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, a joint initiative of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Law School.[1] The program ended in 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Internet_Observatory (more)

Facebook security chief Alex Stamos quits, joins Stanford 'Information Warfare' group. Facebook's longtime Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos is quitting, as announced earlier this year. The company seems to think it doesn't need a new CSO, despite having just acknowledged Tuesday it is the subject of ongoing, sustained, coordinated information warfare attacks just ahead of the 2018 midterm elections (more)

Rob Walling started to notice a pattern emerging among the pool of bootstrappers (BootStrapping) who were able to successfully replace their income, buy back their time, and quit their jobs... I call it The StairStep Approach... (more)

Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity and the Invisible Professional. Picture a meeting you’ve been in — probably more than once. The agenda is ambitious, the stakes are real, and you’ve done your homework... And somehow, again, the meeting moves around you. The person who delivered three confident-sounding sentences about “alignment” and “moving the needle” gets the nod. Your point — the careful one, the one with the nuance and the caveats and the actual evidence — gets a polite “that’s interesting” before the conversation cheerfully rolls on without it. (mediocrity) (more)

Cyc (pronounced /ˈsaɪk/ SYKE) is a long-term artificial intelligence (AI) project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc focuses on implicit knowledge. The project began in July 1984 at MCC and was developed later by the Cycorp company... By 2002, Cyc was described as having "consumed $60 million and 600 person-years of effort from programmers, philosophers and others—collectively known as Cyclists—who have been codifying what Douglas Lenat calls 'consensus reality' and entering it into a massive database... The knowledge base is divided into microtheories (claims?). Unlike the knowledge base as a whole, each microtheory must be free from monotonic contradictions. Each microtheory is a first-class object in the Cyc ontology; it has a name that is a regular constant. The concept names in Cyc are CycL terms or constants... An inference engine is a computer program that tries to derive answers from a knowledge base. The Cyc inference engine performs general logical deduction.[9] It also performs inductive reasoning, statistical machine learning and symbolic machine learning, and abductive reasoning... A Semantic Web version of OpenCyc was available starting in 2008, but ending sometime after 2016... The Cyc project has been described as "one of the most controversial endeavors of the artificial intelligence history".[26] Catherine Havasi, CEO of Luminoso, says that Cyc is the predecessor project to IBM Watson.[27] Machine-learning scientist Pedro Domingos refers to the project as a "catastrophic failure" for the unending amount of data required to produce any viable results and the inability for Cyc to evolve on its own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc (more)

The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce - by Umberto Eco, Thomas Albert Sebeok et al (more)

The Knoesphere project was an influential 1983 research initiative in AI and hypertext co-authored by prominent computer scientists Douglas Lenat and David McDonald. The Goal: It was an early attempt to construct an expert system with encyclopedic knowledge. (more)

magazine that became Mondo2k. Also pural of Reality Hacker.

Mondo 2000 was a glossy cyberculture magazine published in California during the 1980s and 1990s. It covered CyberPunk topics such as Virtual Reality and Smart Drug-s. It was a more anarchic and subversive prototype for the later-founded Wired Mag.[1] (more)

Digital Philosophy (DP) is a new way of thinking about the fundamental workings of processes in nature. DP is an atomic theory carried to a logical extreme where all quantities in nature are finite and discrete. This means that, theoretically, any quantity can be represented exactly by an integer. Further, DP implies that nature harbors no infinities, infinitesimals, continuities, or locally determined random variables. (more)