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You don't always get the chance to see the model behind a painting

By Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Fig. 160. "The appearance of blood Vessels in the ears of a white rabbit." Experimental Pharmacology. 1917

To be clear, I used the term intellectuals to refer specifically to the (intelligentsia), while Zak uses the term in a more philosophical sense, I believe.

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It runs counter to what I wrote a few months earlier, but it's a very compelling argument

— أبو فراس الحمداني

I present to you the top 0.01% of the top 0.01% :

BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street: These three firms, the Big Three as they are known in financial circles, effectively own American capitalism. No, I am not exaggerating. Most people have not heard of them but they have heard of the companies the Big Three own, which include America’s major airlines (American, Delta, United Continental), much of Wall Street (JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup) and car makers such as Ford and General Motors. Together, the Big Three are the largest single shareholder in almost 90% of firms listed in the New York Stock Exchange, including Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, General Electric and Coca-Cola. As for the dollar value of the Big Three’s shares, it has too many zeros to mean much. At the time of writing, BlackRock manages nearly $10 trillion in investments, Vanguard $8 trillion and State Street $4 trillion. To make sense of these numbers: they are almost exactly the same as the US national income; or the sum of the national incomes of China and Japan; or the sum of the total income of the eurozone, the UK, Australia, Canada and Switzerland. — Technofeudalism, by Yanis Varoufakis

مو لهالدرجة بس يلا البلاسيبو هم يشتغل مرات

Bot: ﴿وَقَالَ أَي محمّد الرّازيّ: يَنبَغِي لِلطبِيب أَن يُوهم المَرِيض أَبدًا الصِّحَّة وَيرجّيه بهَا وَإِن كَانَ غَير وَاثق بِذلك فمزَاج الجِسم تَابع لِأخلَاق النَّفس﴾ - ابن جلجل، طبقَات الأطبّاء (420)

What begins with us training Alexa to do things on our behalf soon spins out of our control into something that we can neither fathom nor regulate. For once we have trained its algorithm, and fed it data on our habits and desires, Alexa starts training us. How does it do this? It begins with soft nudges to provide it with more information about our whims, which it then tailors into access to videos, texts and music that we appreciate. Once it has won us over in this manner, we become more suggestible to its guidance. In other words, Alexa trains us to train it better. The next step is spookier: having impressed us with its capacity to appeal to our tastes, it proceeds to curate them. This it does by exposing us to images, texts and video experiences that it selects in order subtly to condition our whims. Before long, it is training us to train it to train us to train it to train us … ad infinitum.

what exactly is a device like Alexa? What does it actually do? If you ask Alexa, it will tell you it is a home-based virtual assistant technology, ready to accept your commands – to switch on the lights, order more milk, take down a note, call a friend, search the internet, tell jokes – to be, in short, your dedicated, eager mechanical servant. All true. Except that Alexa will never, ever tell you what it truly is: a tiny cog in a vast cloud-based network of power within which you are a mere node, a speck of digital dust, at best a plaything of forces beyond your comprehension or control.

ي بعض الحالات، يتحول التشخيص الذاتي إلى هوية نفسية، فيبدأ الفرد يعرّف نفسه بالمرض الذي ظنّ أنه يعاني منه: “أنا مكتئب”، “أنا مصاب باضطراب الشخصية الحدّية”، بدل أن يرى نفسه كشخص يمرّ بتجربة عابرة قابلة للعلاج. هذا يعمّق الشعور بالعجز ويجعل الشفاء أكثر صعوبة.

قراءة الأعراض النفسية ومحاولة مطابقتها مع الذات تؤدي أحيانًا إلى ما يسمى بـ القلق الصحي النفسي؛ أي أن الشخص يبدأ بتخيل الأعراض أو تضخيمها حتى يقتنع أنه مريض فعلًا، فيعيش في دائرة من الخوف والتوتر الدائمين دون سبب حقيقي.