Stephen Downes

This article is focused on emotions specifically, not the more general topic of 'feelings' as indicated in the title, and the central point is to make us wonder how we know whether an emotion we have is or is not genuine (and, indeed, what we even mean by a 'genuine' emotion). For example, we sometimes feel emotions that conflict with who we think we are. "Some emotions, like my fear of the mouse, can catch us completely off guard because they conflict with who we take ourselves to be. Call these alienated emotions." Are we really like that? "We have no way to know immediately which of our emotions are authentic - which ones tell us something about ourselves and which ones don't."

This article summarizes and discusses Robert Cialdini's 7 principles of persuasion: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity. You can read Cialdini's 1984 book here (279 page PDF). However as Jakob Nielsen argues, "Each principle is an appetite tuned for a world that no longer exists." So in user experience design, they have to be manufactured. For example, 'commitment and consistency' on the web is "progressive engagement, the art of asking for small steps before large ones." The problem is that on the web, "the same mechanism traps people. The negative option, where a free trial silently converts to a paid plan unless you cancel, exploits inertia dressed as consistency." So there's a need to apply these principles ethically, and Nielsen outlines how for each principle. Interesting article. I could do without the lavish AI-generated images, but the concept is well executed.

Right to Learn, along with its partners, provides a variety of programs supporting access to education for girls and women from Afghanistan. This article describes the process behind the creation of a course in one of those programs. The caption in the OEGlobal post drew me to it - the article "shares how listening first to refugee educators' lived experience reshaped a new open course on Pedagogy of Care." And, of course, the philosophy of care is ultimately about how providers and recipients come together, community, create a relationship, and design solutions together. The article said less about that than I would have liked, and I would have preferred to hear from the people actually developing the course but the executive director who actually authored the piece doesn't really bring them ino the story.

This is not for everyone, but for those inteerested could be a useful resource. Creator Doug Holton explains, "It's just meant to be a quick reference and to help keep up more easily with new research. The site is public domain (CC0), since it's generated by AI with my guidance. It ingests recent open-access research articles and also creates concept pages summarizing different topics/methods discussed in various research articles (see list below). The site is searchable or you can use AI to chat with the knowledge base, either by referencing the site's llms-full.txt file, or a pre-built Gemini Gem or Gemini Notebook (NotebookLM)."

I have a lot of respect for Rudolf Carnap, not because I agree with what he argues - I don't - but because of the way he carried out the program systematically to its logical conclusion. As a result, we have a crystal clear format through which we can investigate the real issues behind those contained in the words (as Wittgenstein might say). This is a short (5 page PDF) overview. "For Carnap, the creation of symbolic logic makes it possible to formally model the language of science - where 'language' here is meant to include both grammar and logic. The goal of Syntax is not to carry out this program in detail with respect to specific sciences, but to provide a template for this kind of theorizing, and to explain the philosophical upshot of looking at science from this perspective." If you really want to study Carnap, this whole book is open access (528 page PDF) and is about 50-50 German-English.

This is another item with a familiar theme. Smart TVs and now computer monitors have increasingly been surveilling customers and pushing advertisements where they're not expected - or wanted. "LG's and Samsung's smart monitors use the same ad-serving OSes that their respective smart TVs do, meaning they're poised to use automatic content recognition (ACR)." It's easy enough to say that we shouldn't buy them, but if history is any guide, the objective is to ensure there are no other alternatives on the market. "It would be outrageous if dumb monitors were one day as rare as dumb TVs."