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Gersande La Flèche

gersande@millefeuilles.cloud

Joined 2 years, 6 months ago

Why can't I read all these books!? 🍋‍🟩

🍵 Lots of nonfiction, literary fiction, poetry, classical literature, speculative fiction, magical realism, etc.

📖 Beaucoup de non-fiction et de fiction, de poésie, des classiques, du spéculatif, du réalisme magique, etc.

💬 they/them ; iel/lo 💌 Find me on Mastodon: silvan.cloud/@gersande

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2025 Reading Goal

75% complete! Gersande La Flèche has read 9 of 12 books.

Maya Dusenbery: Doing Harm (2018, HarperCollins Publishers) No rating

"In this shocking, hard-hitting expose in the tradition of Naomi Klein and Barbara Ehrenreich, the …

Whether or not they're deliberately being misleading, more often than not, researchers still don't do a gender analysis. In the review of federally funded trials mentioned above, 75 percent of the studies did not report any outcomes by gender, and 64 percent did not provide any analysis by racial or ethnic groups. In 2010, a review of 150 recent studies of treatments for depression found that only half the studies analyzed the results by gender. Of over 700 ongoing studies, nearly 90 percent of researchers said they planned to include women, but less than 1 percent said they planned to analyze their results by gender. A 2011 review of 750 studies focused on emergency medicine between 2006 and 2009 found that while the majority reported gender as a variable, less than one-fifth examined health outcomes by gender. Advocates often describe what's happened as the "add women and stir" approach. There was a sense in the nineties that just getting women enrolled in studies would "take care of the problem," explains Dr. Jan Webinski, executive director of the Sex and Gender Women's Health Collaborative. "But it's been twenty-five years and we now have a lot of research that includes women but women are still invisible. Researchers [..]. weren't required to report their research by sex, so women's side effets and responses to medications and diseases were still invisible.

Doing Harm by  (7%)

So there is "inclusion" of a sort, but absolutely no analysis.

Part-biography, part-political thriller, The Unaccountability Machine is a rousing exposé of how management failures lead …

This part of the book is a lot more theoretical, which is very interesting apart from the fact that I'm exhausted and nothing is sticking to my cortex. Hopefully, I will be able to revisit this book one day (it's a library text, and I have to bring it back soon!)

Maya Dusenbery: Doing Harm (2018, HarperCollins Publishers) No rating

"In this shocking, hard-hitting expose in the tradition of Naomi Klein and Barbara Ehrenreich, the …

There is research to back up these anecdotes, though not as much as you might imagine, only because, I came to learn, there's little research on diagnostic errors in general, which are described by experts as an enormous blind spot within the profession. But where it exists, it paints a fairly consistent picture: women are often not taken as seriously as their male counterparts when they enter the medical system. Women wait sixty-five minutes to men's forty-nine before getting treatment for abdominal pain in the emergency room. Young women are seven times more likely to be sent home from the hospital in the middle of having a heart attack. Women face long delays, often years long, to get diagnosed even with diseases that are quite common in women. And they experience longer diagnostic delays in comparison to men for nearly everything, from brain tumors to rare genetic disorders.

Doing Harm by  (1%)

Based on my personal research into endometriosis, all of this is almost understating the severity of the situation.

Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Hardcover, 2019, Public Affairs) 4 stars

"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has …

Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, the corporation's scientists are not recruited to solve world hunger or eliminate carbon-based fuels. Instead, their genius is meant to storm the gates of human experience, transforming it into data and translating it into a new market colossus that creates wealth by predicting, influencing, and controlling human behavior.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by  (22%)

Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Hardcover, 2019, Public Affairs) 4 stars

"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has …

Global revenue for AI products and services is expected to increase 56-fold, from $644 million in 2016 to $36 billion in 2025. The science required to exploit this vast opportunity and the material infrastructure that makes it possible have ignited an arms race among tech companies for the 10,000 or so professionals on the planet who know how to wield the technologies of machine intelligence to coax knowledge from an otherwise cacophonous data continent. Google/Alphabet is the most aggressive acquirer of AI technology and talent. [..]. As one scholar described it, "The real problem is these people are not dispersed throughout society. The intellect and expertise is concentrated in a small number of companies."

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by  (22%)

Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Hardcover, 2019, Public Affairs) 4 stars

"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has …

Scientists warn that the world's capacity to produce information has substantially exceeded its ability to process and store information. [..]. Information is digital, but its volume exceeds our ability to discern its meaning. As the solution to this problem, information scholar Martin Hilbert counsels, "The only option we have left to make sense of all sense of all the data is to fight fire with fire," using "artificially intelligent computers" to "sift through the vast amounts of information... Facebook, Amazon, and Google have promised to... create value out of vast amounts of data through intelligent computational analysis." The rise of surveillance capitalism necessarily turns Hilbert's advice into a dangerous proposition. Although he does not mean to, Hilbert merely confirms the privileged position of the surveillance capitalists and the asymmetrical power that enables them to bend the division of learning to their interests.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by  (22%)

Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019, Public Affairs) 4 stars

"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has …

Push and pull, suggest, nudge, cajole, shame, seduce: Google wants to be your copilot for life itself. Each human response to each commercial prompt yields more data to refine into better prediction products. (..). The stakes are high in this market frontier, where unpredictable behavior is the equivalent of lost revenue.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by  (18%)

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Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019, Public Affairs) 4 stars

"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has …

I knew it was bad, but ... wow

5 stars

I had no idea this book was this large when I borrowed it from a library. It somehow hit my list and came up in rotation. It's 700 pages, but just over 500 pages of content. The rest is reference material, notes and bibliography.

The author does a fantastic way of describing the recent history of data surveillance and how it's been monetized. We aren't really the product, but are the objects where raw material is mined for prediction engines that attempt to figure out how we will act or nudge us to act.

The first part deals with big tech. There's a part about totalitarianism, then moving into recent psychology and how all these are tied together.

Expect 10-15+ hours of reading with this. Value!

This made me and keeps me thinking. Wonderful book, but probably not for all.

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Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019, Public Affairs) 4 stars

"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has …

Vital Analysis; Uninspiring Dreaming

3 stars

I've been making my way through this (audio)book for a year or so. I realised some 15 hours in that it didn't make sense because the files weren't organised correctly (my bad). Because I listened to bits and pieces out of order, I had to work extra hard to get the concepts, which I'm glad for now even though it sucked. Zuboff's analysis here is fantastic. Her breakdown of the machinations of "surveillance capitalism" is one of the most significant contributions to understanding how this particular "species" of capitalism works that I think we are likely to get this half of the twenty-first century. And "we" sure need it.

The book falls short on political solutions however, and the way it's written was frustrating to say the least. Zuboff's faith in markets, even market capitalism, knocks more creative solutions out of her grasp reacting to attacks on liberal democracy, rather …