The Web Is Making People Stupid, TWIMPS And Getting TWIMPSER Options Rating

[Jon Awbrey]

It's all a plot by Alien Wiki-Φungi …

Or maybe Ripofflichens …

Or Groople …

Some truly evil force like that …

The fact that Sarah Palin gets any press at all is proof that the condition is terminal …

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)

[Text]

The web is just facilitating things for those who don't want to check facts in a library.

Obviously many people don't even stay 2 minutes on a page to read something, maybe they read the first 3 lines and then change page. TL;DR

Internet is making people lazy, not necessarily stupid. Although there are people who believe things without checking in depth. But the same goes for other media, the radio, the television.

But without doubt, reading books helps absorb more information, as opposed to the net where things circulate quickly and are more graphic.

[Cedric]

(IMG:http://i527.photobucket.com/albums/cc358/WRCedric/successoryinternet400.jpg)

[Jon Awbrey]

The web is just facilitating things for those who don't want to check facts in a library.

Obviously many people don't even stay 2 minutes on a page to read something, maybe they read the first 3 lines and then change page. TL;DR

Internet is making people lazy, not necessarily stupid. Although there are people who believe things without checking in depth. But the same goes for other media, the radio, the television.

But without doubt, reading books helps absorb more information, as opposed to the net where things circulate quickly and are more graphic.

Plausible things to say — in 2002 maybe — but it's gone far beyond that today.

I actually considered saying it this way —

The Web Is Letting People Become As Stupid As They Secretly Hope In Their Heart Of Hearts To Ever Become

TWILPBASATSHITHOHTEB

And that does contain an almost-truism or two —

• You can't sell a sucker what a sucker ain't buying.
• You can't con a person with rational expectations.

Those truisms apply to the single player — at the beginning of play.

But the sad fact is that you can play a mass of players in such a way that the options of each single player are gradually reduced to the lowest common dumbinator of them all.

And that is what we are seeing on Dubya³ today.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)

[GlassBeadGame]

The web is just facilitating things for those who don't want to check facts in a library.

Obviously many people don't even stay 2 minutes on a page to read something, maybe they read the first 3 lines and then change page. TL;DR

Internet is making people lazy, not necessarily stupid. Although there are people who believe things without checking in depth. But the same goes for other media, the radio, the television.

But without doubt, reading books helps absorb more information, as opposed to the net where things circulate quickly and are more graphic.

Odd that I would be saying this to someone with your username, but I disagree. Radio was a move away from text. So was the telephone (but not the telegraph.) Television was a move away from text. The internet, and especially web 2.0 is resurgent text. The videos, images and sounds are ephemeral and tangential. The core of this technology is based on the digital computer's hand-glove type of relationship with the manipulation of text. Because this parallels the human minds hand-glove relationship between thought and language/writing it is going to last after your uncle puts away his video camcorder, your daughter gets bored with the digital camera in her phone and Durova tires of whatever it is she does with images.

The problem is that internet culture has placed this gift into the hands of idiots. There are reasons for this. Most likely it has much to do with first placing the technology into the hands of geeky nerds with skills needed to access the first clunky applications such as BB and Usenet. They basically have nothing to say but lots of ability to say it.

[Moulton]

The Internet also tends to make some people intolerant, rude, and combative. As more and more people engage in episodes of intolerance, rudeness, and combativeness, it lures others into imitating such incivil behavior. On balance, online antisocial behavior grows like a cancer.

[Somey]

What I see happening is that the interwebs are taking away the financial, and to some extent the career-advancement, incentives to document general knowledge and either not replacing them at all, or replacing them with political, ideological, or narcissistic incentives. None of these replacement incentives are long-term, and all of them are likely to attract people who are biased and, frankly, care little about the truth.

Moreover, as reference information becomes more easily and freely accessible, you might actually have a slight short-term increase in knowledge acquisition by the average person, but IMO you also foster a culture in which people get out of the habit of acquiring knowledge for its own sake, simply because the need to have it "at the ready" is lessened, or even eliminated.

Another point that isn't often made is that reading information on a computer screen is inherently more distracting than reading it out of a book. You've constantly got e-mails and other alerts popping up, you might have MP3's or videos playing at the same time, you're almost certainly playing Freecell in a background window, and in general you're probably thinking you should be doing something else (i.e., work). And even with a website like Wikipedia, which doesn't have advertising, there are still links everywhere, and you're thinking "should I click this?" when you should be trying to retain facts.

Finally, I think we can mostly grant the idea that writing and researching a fake-encyclopedia article has a positive effect on one's own knowledge-retention and thought-organization capacity, at least with regard to the subject being written about. (Editing alone, not so much.) But the result of that is that the people "building" sites like Wikipedia get a false idea of the effects of their own efforts - it's making them smarter, so it must be making everyone else smarter too, right?

Ehh, maybe not.

[Jon Awbrey]

The Internet also tends to make some people intolerant, rude, and combative. As more and more people engage in episodes of intolerance, rudeness, and combativeness, it lures others into imitating such incivil behavior. On balance, online antisocial behavior grows like a cancer.

It's the same dynamics in either case —

Lowest Common Dumbinator = Lowest Common Dominator

It is not just the instinct to imitate — Monkey See Monkey Do — otherwise people could just as easily imitate the best among them.

The mass action, and the forces that control it, are biased toward the worst that is possible.

That can happen only because people see the worst content and the worst conduct being rewarded.

So they increasingly imitate the worst.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)

[Text]

The Internet also tends to make some people intolerant, rude, and combative.

Remember that these behaviours may also be fake... someone who acts like a guy with antisocial personality disorder on the net may be a very calm person in the real world, and just uses the net to play that role for fun to pull people's legs. And through text, it's impossible to tell whether one is faking or being serious.

[Text]

That can happen only because people see the worst content and the worst conduct being rewarded.

So they increasingly imitate the worst.

Since in a hobby the most tangible reward is the fun that comes with it, people will drift away from what they perceive as annoying or boring. On Wikipedia, someone may start making a page and putting it on the site. Then as time passes he will notice that things change, and generally the pages don't improve and get worse, and at that point where's the fun in making pages and maintaining them in a "cooperational project"? Therefore, if that someone decides to continue by his free choice, another way to have fun can derive from "grinding", repeating the same action over and over to attain more "power" (or cookies, brownies, bronze stars, ribbons, wikitutnum books, wikipetan dolls, shiny medal of the supreme master editor...). Even more fun in being an abusive character to others, spamming death threats, faking his credentials, moving pages to random titles...

[Jon Awbrey]

Text,

You provide a few examples of different ways that the truth of my thesis is actualized in practice. Your scenarios are exemplary but far from exhaustive or even very explanatory.

The phenomenon is far more widespread than what we see in Wikipedia alone, though I would hardly deny the near supremacy of Wikipediot stupidity in all matters of both content and conduct, especially when you consider the scale and stubbornness of it.

The question we have to keep asking is why — what is there about the current SocTech Architecture of the Web that is making it such a race to the bottom of human potential on almost every front?

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)

[Text]

The question we have to keep asking is why - what is there about the current SocTech Architecture of the Web that is making it such a race to the bottom of human potential on almost every front?

The "why" people do things at the bottom of human potential with the web architecture... maybe boredom, narcissism, lust for power, something that hits their psyche and that makes them feel well?

[Jon Awbrey]

The question we have to keep asking is why - what is there about the current SocTech Architecture of the Web that is making it such a race to the bottom of human potential on almost every front?

The "why" people do things at the bottom of human potential with the web architecture … maybe boredom, narcissism, lust for power, something that hits their psyche and that makes them feel well?

The thrust of my assertion is not merely that Dubya³ allows isolated individuals to becomes as vapid as they wish to be — I am saying that there is an amplified entropism, a grubitational distraction, a selective devolutionary pressure that is dragging the whole mass of participants down into the depths, even those who are governed by other wishes, even those who resist as best they can.

That is the systematic part of the dynamics that demands to be explained.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)

[RDH(Ghost In The Machine)]

How can you possibly think weez bein stupified by the infobahn, when it contains such jewels of enlightenment as this?!

Actually das Internet is more like unto a garbage dump; tons o trash, some odd, interesting junk...but if you dig through it long enough, you might find the occasional, rare treasure.
It could, and should, be so much more...so much better.

Indeed, I think it was, back before it became (circa 2001) a mass medium cum corporate cesspool.
As a result today, it is far richer in refuse but poorer in real, quality content.

WP is, in many ways, a microcosm of this, as well as one of its major symptoms.

But the interwebs still beats the hell outta TV IMHO.
(Except for Turner Classic Movies, of course...first Lion In Winter followed by The Mouse That Roared, I could not have planned a better double feature!)

This post has been edited by RDH(Ghost In The Machine):

[Cock-up-over-conspiracy]

They are all in league with the Devil. Its Satan's Plot to distract and unintegentalize humanity.{{WP:OR}}

It started with Texas Instruments making personal calculators, in order to destroy basic arithmetic skills, and now His Dark Majesty has moved on to possessing ex-pornographing bond traders and boy scout masters in order to erode and destroy humanity's capacity of intellectual comprehension and collectively coordinative abilities by filling it full of errors and kinky pictures.

Jimbo and the Wikipedia Foundation are the Anti-Christ's fluffers.{{WP:POV}}

It is a three step programme.

1) The sum of the world's knowledge is removed from the effort of being sustained in the collective consciousness and physical objects by being transfered to digital form.
2) Humanity is seduced into believing it does not need to think, remember, or work collectively any more because "all knowledge" is all safe on some server or another and instantly accessible from anywhere; and instead spends its time enjoying kinky pictures.
3) The energy grid fails, the servers are unplugged, the network collapses, all knowledge is lost, and humanity is plunged back into the dark ages.

It is basically a high tech re-run of the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria where Satan, working through his primary instrument of the Church of Rome {{fact}}, set back the evolution of humanity hundreds of years.

[thekohser]

Wasn't there talk of an Internet II, which would be just for universities to populate with content? Or something? What happened to that?

[Random832]

Wasn't there talk of an Internet II, which would be just for universities to populate with content? Or something? What happened to that?

No, it was to replace the normal IP backbones, and was for universities to use to share research data (and for dorm residents to use to share pirated copyrighted data) - nothing to do with content.

[Jon Awbrey]

Wasn't there talk of an Internet II, which would be just for universities to populate with content? Or something? What happened to that?

Oh, you remember, don't you?

That was back when all the scientists and other smart people uploaded the Sum Of Civilized Knowledge (SOCK) into Internet 2.0 —

It was just in time to down-givvy the whole darn SOCK into cryomagnetic storage on a rag-tag fleet of spaceships so that the Alpha Intelligentsia of Planet Earth could escape the coming comet and reseed the galaxy with the remains of humane civilization —

Only they decided not to tell the great masses of dumb people who got left behind people because …

Oh wait …

Nevermind …

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif)

[dogbiscuit]

The thrust of my assertion is not merely that Dubya³ allows isolated individuals to becomes as vapid as they wish to be — I am saying that there is an amplified entropism, a grubitational distraction, a selective devolutionary pressure that is dragging the whole mass of participants down into the depths, even those who are governed by other wishes, even those who resist as best they can.

That is the systematic part of the dynamics that demands to be explained.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)

It is interesting, and I agree that it is not Teh InterWeb per se that is the problem, it just makes it all rather obvious.

I can see the same thing on TV, where once there was a creative zeal and it was seen that TV was an important medium of education and entertainment, but now - well, we don't do documentaries because there is no demand, people want to watch manufactured X-Factor pap, even though they know it is manufactured X-Factor pap and so on, people have time in their lives to watch several nightly soaps of despair & ignorance with no redeeming features.

Look at the music industry - if you went back to the hey-day of music creativity in the 60s and 70s, although there were cynical money making operations, a lot of bands were really in it because they felt it was important in its own right. I don't think Led Zep, Pink Floyd, Moody Blues, The Who, The Beatles or whatever were driven by financial motives so much as the desire to make music. It was fascinating to see a documentary on the German Krautrock movement to see how much it was politically driven. That creative urge seems to have been much diluted. There are still talented musicians, but they get subverted into the industry.

I think it comes down to a fundamental loss of direction of being unable to cope with leisure time. Perhaps we need a good world war or something (bring on that Global Warming!), but I think in the first world, the population has it fairly easy and is just looking for ways to fritter away the time. If life was more challenging, people would value their time more and be more demanding.

[Milton Roe]

I think it comes down to a fundamental loss of direction of being unable to cope with leisure time. Perhaps we need a good world war or something (bring on that Global Warming!), but I think in the first world, the population has it fairly easy and is just looking for ways to fritter away the time. If life was more challenging, people would value their time more and be more demanding.

I mentioned Farm Town on facebook which might be the posterchild site for this. People laboriously planting and harvesting electronic crops for electronic money to buy electronic farm implements. It approaches mental illness.

As for societies, they do seem to have more problems when they lack a clear unified national war. They go looking for wars in times of peace. Poor Bill Clinton. And poor GW Bush for his first 8 months in office. No good wars. The best we could do between Gulf Wars, was turn back to the old War On Drugs (see War on Our Underclass). We tried the War on Cancer and the War on Povery, but they certainly weren't very exciting, since they didn't involve the Bread and Circuses of Dallas SWAT and Bad Boys, or the Smart Bombing or Preditor-drone-zapping of Sand People (a great videogame; it's better than Farm Town). In fact, there wasn't anybody to shoot or catch (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/unhappy.gif) Killing a tumor or vaccinating some kid? That's never going to make prime time.

[dogbiscuit]

I mentioned Farm Town on facebook which might be the posterchild site for this. People laboriously planting and harvesting electronic crops for electronic money to buy electronic farm implements. It approaches mental illness.

As for societies, they do seem to have more problems when they lack a clear unified national war. They go looking for wars in times of peace. Poor Bill Clinton. And poor GW Bush for his first 8 months in office. No good wars. The best we could do between Gulf Wars, was turn back to the old War On Drugs (see War on Our Underclass). We tried the War on Cancer and the War on Povery, but they certainly weren't very exciting, since they didn't involve the Bread and Circuses of Dallas SWAT and Bad Boys, or the Smart Bombing or Preditor-zapping of Sand People (a great vidogame-- it's better than Farm Town). In fact, there wasn't anybody to shoot or catch (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/unhappy.gif) Killing a tumor or vaccinating some kid? That's never going to make prime time.

Perhaps cinema and TV is too passive for people to feel fulfilled, and in some demented way playing these multi-player trading games make people feel fulfilled.

There is something of fulfilment being sought in Wikipedia. The man in the street probably feels pretty useless in the grand scheme of things. If they are not fulfilled in their personal life, they perhaps aspire to changing the world, and of course, Wikipedia offers a small stake in being part of that vision - all these amateur scientists able to contribute when they are not left near the large thingumybob collider, or become a brain surgeon. Still a delusion though. I suspect the route of it is trying to feel valued in a world of 6 billion people isn't easy. 100 years ago, you generally only had a few 1000 people to compete with.

[Jon Awbrey]

I would probably put more importance on the amount or level of information a person encounters, in such a way as may challenge their preconceptions, or spark their interests to look further.

Happenings that challenge a person's preconceptions are the sparks that ignite inquiry.

And Wikipedia is the wet security blanket that Wikipediots use to extinguish those sparks.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)

[Jon Awbrey]

In Other Snooz …

AAAI-2010 Workshop on Collaboratively-Built Knowledge Sources and Artificial Intelligence

I tried to register, but (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hmmm.gif)

[CharlotteWebb]

You do not have permission to create this user account, for the following reason:

The action you have requested is limited to users in the group: Administrators.

You see, the Workshop on Collaboratively-Built Knowledge Sources does not itself aspire to be a collaboratively-built knowledge source.

I'll say it seems odd to install a wiki while only publishing one page. However their sole founder has added a few other accounts so maybe more content will be forthcoming.

But don't worry, kids: NLP in this context refers to natural-language processing and does not stand for what everyone here would first guess!

Mr. Navigli's e-mail address can be found on this page, if you are still (or ever were) actually interested in joining this site—since, well… we've established that he's not FT2. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

This post has been edited by CharlotteWebb:

[Jon Awbrey]

Like virtually everything else, this is an area where society's interest is best served by a moderate, balanced position. However, of late our tendency has been to allow public discourse to be dominated by the spectral extremes. When you let this happen, you usually end up with the position favored by whichever extreme group can shout the loudest. Which suits them just great, and everyone else not well at all.

Finally !

Someone actually returns to the Original Topic !!

This may be an event that borders on a historical first !!!

Callooh! Callay! O frabjous day!

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif)

[Jon Awbrey]

The Writing on the Wall — Suitable for Framing

It is clear that Google made WP into a force to be reckoned with, instead of an expensive blog for Jimbo. But why? It is clearly a Soapbox for Propaganda (see WP:NOT:NOT!) but it's a rather sloppy and amateurish one. They could have backed some sort of state-of-the-art propaganda project. I'd like to get Daniel's take on this.

Well, since you asked …

Get rid of professional journalism, and turn it all into crowd-sourced, lowest common denominator gibberish. Emphasize sports, entertainment, and popular culture. Jack up the rankings on Wikipedia, which passes for an "encyclopedia," and bury independent thought and historical perspective under a forest of one-liner tweets and snippets, spam, advertising, and blog comments. Dumb down the population. The distinction between social ethics and the lessons of history, on the one hand, and contemporary propaganda on the other, becomes obscured. The rich will now have an easier time getting richer. The poor will get poorer, but that's okay because the poor will be too stupid to notice.

This is where it's headed. Whether it's fully conscious, or just tacitly driven by monopoly capitalism, doesn't really matter. The end result is approximately the same. The role of total digital surveillance is not now a crucial part of this trend, but will become more important as the new culture becomes more pervasive. At that point this surveillance will anticipate any potholes on the highway to hell, and steer around them so that they don't impede "progress."

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Somey, what makes you so certain that 1984 was not a "how-to"? There were some that thought Brave New World was "a warning, not a how-to," but from what we know about Huxley's personal views, that is clearly not the case.

[Jon Awbrey]

Somey, what makes you so certain that 1984 was not a "how-to"? There were some that thought Brave New World was "a warning, not a how-to", but from what we know about Huxley's personal views, that is clearly not the case.

Well, the original title was supposedly 1948. He was talking about the post-war situation that had already developed at that time. C.S. Lewis wrote similar things about the ominous changes that had taken place during the war.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ph34r.gif)

[RMHED]

The web isn't making people stupid, people have always been stupid, it's hardwired into humanity (and thus will ensure our timely destruction.)

[The Joy]

The web isn't making people stupid, people have always been stupid, it's hardwired into humanity (and thus will ensure our timely destruction.)

Indeed. The Internet acts as a megaphone for people, both the stupid and the smart. It doesn't help that the quantity of information has increased with the help of the Internet, but at the expense of good quality information. You have to be a good detective with great information literacy to find the diamonds in the rough.

[Rhindle]

Somey, what makes you so certain that 1984 was not a "how-to"? There were some that thought Brave New World was "a warning, not a how-to," but from what we know about Huxley's personal views, that is clearly not the case.

Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death stated that he believed the world was more like Brave New World rather than 1984 in that we are oppressed more by pleasure than pain. In other words, if we are all kept entertained, we won't care what the big bad governments are doing.

[Jon Awbrey]

Somey, what makes you so certain that 1984 was not a "how-to"? There were some that thought Brave New World was "a warning, not a how-to", but from what we know about Huxley's personal views, that is clearly not the case.

Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death stated that he believed the world was more like Brave New World rather than 1984 in that we are oppressed more by pleasure than pain. In other words, if we are all kept entertained, we won't care what the big bad governments are doing.

Oddly enough, this brings us back to a point that I've been trying make about the economic and psychosocial dynamics that are common to all forms of addictive behavior, including conspicuous consumption and dissipative entertainment. What keeps coming back to mind here are the penetrating insights of Max Weber and William S. Burroughs.

Under conditions of health, pleasure drives are always self-terminating — this makes them intermittent and periodic in nature — you reach a state of satisfaction and then you are done with that drive for a while.

Continuous drivenness is a morbid condition. It occurs in situations where the superficial seeking of goods or pleasure disguises an effort to avoid a deeper-lying anxiety or pain, one for which the displacement activity is no balm, and thus appears infinite and unquenchable.

Jon Awbrey

[RMHED]

Oddly enough, this brings us back to a point that I've been trying make about the economic and psychosocial dynamics that are common to all forms of addictive behavior, including conspicuous consumption and dissipative entertainment. What keeps coming back to mind here are the penetrating insights of Max Weber and William S. Burroughs.

Under conditions of health, pleasure drives are always self-terminating — this makes them intermittent and periodic in nature — you reach a state of satisfaction and then you are done with that drive for a while.

Continuous drivenness is a morbid condition. It occurs in situations where the superficial seeking of goods or pleasure disguises an effort to avoid a deeper-lying anxiety or pain, one for which the displacement activity is no balm, and thus appears infinite and unquenchable.

Jon Awbrey

And the cure is?

[Somey]

I'd probably still rather live in a pleasure-based oppressive society than a pain/torture-based oppressive society, but I suppose I'd agree that the pleasure-based approach is probably more successful at being oppressive, at least in the long term.

At what point does Web 2.0-related activity go from being mere distraction to actually being pleasurable, though? I've always believed that you had to have a psychological predilection for addictive behavior before you could gain pleasure from something like Wikipedia, which doesn't provide a direct physical stimulus just from participating (i.e., just looking at the porn doesn't count). I don't think we can just overlook the fact that many, and almost certainly most, people find Wikipedia participation to be anything but pleasurable.

Then again, even if we grant that WP is potentially a tool for oppression via people's addiction to editing, etc., it's hardly an either-or thing, is it? They can always reserve the truckloads of soma pills for folks who can't be easily addicted to various forms of "cyberactivity."

[Jon Awbrey]

Oddly enough, this brings us back to a point that I've been trying make about the economic and psychosocial dynamics that are common to all forms of addictive behavior, including conspicuous consumption and dissipative entertainment. What keeps coming back to mind here are the penetrating insights of Max Weber and William S. Burroughs.

Under conditions of health, pleasure drives are always self-terminating — this makes them intermittent and periodic in nature — you reach a state of satisfaction and then you are done with that drive for a while.

Continuous drivenness is a morbid condition. It occurs in situations where the superficial seeking of goods or pleasure disguises an effort to avoid a deeper-lying anxiety or pain, one for which the displacement activity is no balm, and thus appears infinite and unquenchable.

Jon Awbrey

And the cure is?

There's a bit of ambiguity in the phrase "to avoid a deeper-lying anxiety or pain". It's partly an effort to relieve the condition itself and partly an effort to avoid awareness of its cause. Those two efforts are at cross-purposes, since the condition continues until the true cause is addressed. The person who drinks beyond the point of genuine enjoyment — to the point of unconsciousness and painful consequence — is doing that to blot out some painful issue the he or she is refusing to face in the light of consciousness.

Jon Awbrey

[RMHED]

Oddly enough, this brings us back to a point that I've been trying make about the economic and psychosocial dynamics that are common to all forms of addictive behavior, including conspicuous consumption and dissipative entertainment. What keeps coming back to mind here are the penetrating insights of Max Weber and William S. Burroughs.

Under conditions of health, pleasure drives are always self-terminating — this makes them intermittent and periodic in nature — you reach a state of satisfaction and then you are done with that drive for a while.

Continuous drivenness is a morbid condition. It occurs in situations where the superficial seeking of goods or pleasure disguises an effort to avoid a deeper-lying anxiety or pain, one for which the displacement activity is no balm, and thus appears infinite and unquenchable.

Jon Awbrey

And the cure is?

There's a bit of ambiguity in the phrase "to avoid a deeper-lying anxiety or pain". It's partly an effort to relieve the condition itself and partly an effort to avoid awareness of its cause. Those two efforts are at cross-purposes, since the condition continues until the true cause is addressed. The person who drinks beyond the point of genuine enjoyment — to the point of unconsciousness and painful consequence — is doing that to blot out some painful issue the he or she is refusing to face in the light of consciousness.

Jon Awbrey

So the cure is a hot bath + electrical appliance + butter fingers = shocking outcome.

This post has been edited by RMHED:

[Jon Awbrey]

So the cure is a hot bath + electrical appliance + butter fingers = shocking outcome.

True, some people fear consciousness more than death itself.

Jon Awbrey

[RMHED]

Oddly enough, this brings us back to a point that I've been trying make about the economic and psychosocial dynamics that are common to all forms of addictive behavior, including conspicuous consumption and dissipative entertainment. What keeps coming back to mind here are the penetrating insights of Max Weber and William S. Burroughs.

Under conditions of health, pleasure drives are always self-terminating — this makes them intermittent and periodic in nature — you reach a state of satisfaction and then you are done with that drive for a while.

Continuous drivenness is a morbid condition. It occurs in situations where the superficial seeking of goods or pleasure disguises an effort to avoid a deeper-lying anxiety or pain, one for which the displacement activity is no balm, and thus appears infinite and unquenchable.

Jon Awbrey

And the cure is?

There's a bit of ambiguity in the phrase "to avoid a deeper-lying anxiety or pain". It's partly an effort to relieve the condition itself and partly an effort to avoid awareness of its cause. Those two efforts are at cross-purposes, since the condition continues until the true cause is addressed. The person who drinks beyond the point of genuine enjoyment — to the point of unconsciousness and painful consequence — is doing that to blot out some painful issue the he or she is refusing to face in the light of consciousness.

Jon Awbrey

So the cure is a hot bath + electical appliance + butter fingers = shocking outcome.

True, some people fear consciousness more than death itself.

Jon Awbrey

The unconscious soul is solely conscious of its lack of conscience.

[Jon Awbrey]

The unconscious soul is solely conscious of its lack of conscience.

Not everyone would agree with that. Freud, for instance, in some of his thinking, thought that the adamantine core of the super-ego, the part of our psyche that is conscientious frequently to a fault, was necessarily unconscious.

Jon Awbrey

[RMHED]

The unconscious soul is solely conscious of its lack of conscience.

Not everyone would agree with that. Freud, for instance, in some of his thinking, thought that the adamantine core of the super-ego, the part of our psyche that is conscientious to a fault, was necessarily unconscious.

Jon Awbrey

That of course required conscious thinking by Freud and he was thus negating his unconscious thoughts. This conscious thought was therefore tainted by awareness of the self and distorted by his super-ego.

[Zoloft]

The unconscious soul is solely conscious of its lack of conscience.

Not everyone would agree with that. Freud, for instance, in some of his thinking, thought that the adamantine core of the super-ego, the part of our psyche that is conscientious to a fault, was necessarily unconscious.

Jon Awbrey

That of course required conscious thinking by Freud and he was thus negating his unconscious thoughts. This conscious thought was therefore tainted by awareness of the self and distorted by his super-ego.

The Heisenberg Theory of psychoanalysis? (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hmmm.gif)

[MZMcBride]

The web isn't making people stupid, people have always been stupid, it's hardwired into humanity (and thus will ensure our timely destruction.)

Indeed. The Internet acts as a megaphone for people, both the stupid and the smart. It doesn't help that the quantity of information has increased with the help of the Internet, but at the expense of good quality information. You have to be a good detective with great information literacy to find the diamonds in the rough.

The issue I have with a good portion of the criticism on this site is that, as you say, it's a symptom of the Internet (or the Information Age, I guess), while many people here blame individual components like Wikipedia. Wikipedia may be an example case, but it's hardly to blame for the giant shift that's been witnessed over the past fifteen to twenty years.

[Jon Awbrey]

The web isn't making people stupid, people have always been stupid, it's hardwired into humanity (and thus will ensure our timely destruction.)

Indeed. The Internet acts as a megaphone for people, both the stupid and the smart. It doesn't help that the quantity of information has increased with the help of the Internet, but at the expense of good quality information. You have to be a good detective with great information literacy to find the diamonds in the rough.

The issue I have with a good portion of the criticism on this site is that, as you say, it's a symptom of the Internet (or the Information Age, I guess), while many people here blame individual components like Wikipedia. Wikipedia may be an example case, but it's hardly to blame for the giant shift that's been witnessed over the past fifteen to twenty years.

¤ sigh ¤

I can't say it any better than this —

George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

[SB_Johnny]

The web isn't making people stupid, people have always been stupid, it's hardwired into humanity (and thus will ensure our timely destruction.)

Indeed. The Internet acts as a megaphone for people, both the stupid and the smart. It doesn't help that the quantity of information has increased with the help of the Internet, but at the expense of good quality information. You have to be a good detective with great information literacy to find the diamonds in the rough.

The issue I have with a good portion of the criticism on this site is that, as you say, it's a symptom of the Internet (or the Information Age, I guess), while many people here blame individual components like Wikipedia. Wikipedia may be an example case, but it's hardly to blame for the giant shift that's been witnessed over the past fifteen to twenty years.

Right, but this is Wikipedia Review. "Act local, think global".

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Somey, what makes you so certain that 1984 was not a "how-to"? There were some that thought Brave New World was "a warning, not a how-to," but from what we know about Huxley's personal views, that is clearly not the case.

Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death stated that he believed the world was more like Brave New World rather than 1984 in that we are oppressed more by pleasure than pain. In other words, if we are all kept entertained, we won't care what the big bad governments are doing.

It looks to me like the preferred approach is a mixture of the two, a sort of hard cop/soft cop.

[Jon Awbrey]

The web isn't making people stupid, people have always been stupid, it's hardwired into humanity (and thus will ensure our timely destruction.)

Indeed. The Internet acts as a megaphone for people, both the stupid and the smart. It doesn't help that the quantity of information has increased with the help of the Internet, but at the expense of good quality information. You have to be a good detective with great information literacy to find the diamonds in the rough.

The issue I have with a good portion of the criticism on this site is that, as you say, it's a symptom of the Internet (or the Information Age, I guess), while many people here blame individual components like Wikipedia. Wikipedia may be an example case, but it's hardly to blame for the giant shift that's been witnessed over the past fifteen to twenty years.

¤ sigh ¤

I can't say it any better than this —

George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

A few spare ergs in my brain-basket this morning, so maybe I'll try to unscramble the entropy thereof.

There are indeed more general phenomena afoot here — that's the very reason for the existence of this Meta*Discussion Forum.

What led me to open this thread, specifically, was that I had started noticing similar developments taking place at many different fora and e-gora across the web. Nothing new under the sun as far as human nature goes, of course, but it looks like there are specific technical factors on the rise that are blocking the best and catalyzing the worst in the way of critical, reflective, independent thought.

So … what are those stupefying factors, exactly?

Jon Awbrey

[Milton Roe]

The web isn't making people stupid, people have always been stupid, it's hardwired into humanity (and thus will ensure our timely destruction.)

Indeed. The Internet acts as a megaphone for people, both the stupid and the smart. It doesn't help that the quantity of information has increased with the help of the Internet, but at the expense of good quality information. You have to be a good detective with great information literacy to find the diamonds in the rough.

The issue I have with a good portion of the criticism on this site is that, as you say, it's a symptom of the Internet (or the Information Age, I guess), while many people here blame individual components like Wikipedia. Wikipedia may be an example case, but it's hardly to blame for the giant shift that's been witnessed over the past fifteen to twenty years.

¤ sigh ¤

I can't say it any better than this —

George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

A few spare ergs in my brain-basket this morning, so maybe I'll try to unscramble the entropy thereof.

There are indeed more general phenomena afoot here — that's the very reason for the existence of this Meta*Discussion Forum.

What led me to open this thread, specifically, was that I had started noticing similar developments taking place at many different fora and e-gora across the web. Nothing new under the sun as far as human nature goes, of course, but it looks like there are specific technical factors on the rise that are blocking the best and catalyzing the worst in the way of critical, reflective, independent thought.

So … what are those stupefying factors, exactly?

Jon Awbrey

Well, besides the usual complaint about e-"publishing"? Once upon a time, publishing was intimately connected with EDITING, because publishing was intrinically expensive. Involving as it did materials like paper and ink, and requiring a lot of skilled work from typesetters, printers, and the like, and then needing distribution costs for newspapers, magazines, journals, and books.

Okay, so take away all the intrinsic material costs of publishing, or nearly all. Now suddenly, the EDITING becomes the most expensive part. So then, what happens that we start to get competition from e-published stuff that hasn't been edited at all, or has been inadequately edited? This would have been stupid or unlikely in the old days when good editing was only a fraction of publication costs, and was essential to picking out only the good stuff to publish, which was in turn intrinsically expensive to publish. Decouple these functions now, and you get replication of "printed" material, with no selection. The evolutionary process which once drove quality-improvement in the written word, now breaks down, because half the critical mechanism has been turned off. There's no selection of good material on the production end.

Okay, now e-Malthus demands that there must be selection SOMEWHERE, since we can't read the garbage as fast as it appears on teh web. So where does that selection happen, now? Well, Google does it. Bing wants to do it. In large part, the buzz from popular interest does it. But that sort of thing amplifies pop culture and doesn't work so well for academics and knowledge. Hence the little demo the other day about pop culture articles vs. articles about weightier things on wikipedia. That's true of everyplace on the web.

No solution for this do I see. It's been the case for thousands of years that people have resisted paying for pure information, even though information is actually most of what you buy, with most products. Instead, those who sold information were forced to package it up with something else, some material, and sell the material "thing." A book being the prime example-- you sell the physical book to get people to buy the novel, but if they can get the novel without having to buy the book, they'll steal the novel. It's the same with health advice. People will not pay what health advice is worth. If they would, doctors could make living talking to people on the phone, or sending them videotapes. Forget it. Even alternative people can't make a living doing that-- they have to sell fancy packaged nutritional supplements, or else go broke. Those supplements are basically information, but packed in a way that to get the information you have to buy the thing.

The internet, with its capacity to reproduce and transmit "information," for closer and closer to nothing, has become the ultimate counterfeiter for what used to be the currency of knowledge. And per Gresham's Law of the Information Jungle, bad information is in the process of driving out good. Information inflation has now set in, and the currency is devalued. Attempts to establish gold standards for knowledge are resisted on every side. The idea that not everybody can (or should) print $100 bills, is held to be elitist.

Ah, well. Back to making "things." If you think you're going to make a living by thinking, and selling your thoughts in print to somebody, you'd better think some more about that. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ermm.gif)

[Daniel Brandt]

There are indeed more general phenomena afoot here — that's the very reason for the existence of this Meta*Discussion Forum.

What led me to open this thread, specifically, was that I had started noticing similar developments taking place at many different fora and e-gora across the web. Nothing new under the sun as far as human nature goes, of course, but it looks like there are specific technical factors on the rise that are blocking the best and catalyzing the worst in the way of critical, reflective, independent thought.

So … what are those stupefying factors, exactly?

Jon Awbrey

Death by a thousand snippets.

[Milton Roe]

There are indeed more general phenomena afoot here — that's the very reason for the existence of this Meta*Discussion Forum.

What led me to open this thread, specifically, was that I had started noticing similar developments taking place at many different fora and e-gora across the web. Nothing new under the sun as far as human nature goes, of course, but it looks like there are specific technical factors on the rise that are blocking the best and catalyzing the worst in the way of critical, reflective, independent thought.

So … what are those stupefying factors, exactly?

Jon Awbrey

Death by a thousand snippets.

Cool illustration from a lawyer mag on that site:
(IMG:http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll191/Shrlocc/Google.jpg)

[Jon Awbrey]

A few spare ergs in my brain-basket this morning, so maybe I'll try to unscramble the entropy thereof.

There are indeed more general phenomena afoot here — that's the very reason for the existence of this Meta*Discussion Forum.

What led me to open this thread, specifically, was that I had started noticing similar developments taking place at many different fora and e-gora across the web. Nothing new under the sun as far as human nature goes, of course, but it looks like there are specific technical factors on the rise that are blocking the best and catalyzing the worst in the way of critical, reflective, independent thought.

So … what are those stupefying factors, exactly?

Jon Awbrey

Well, besides the usual complaint about e-"publishing"? Once upon a time, publishing was intimately connected with EDITING, because publishing was intrinsically expensive. Involving as it did materials like paper and ink, and requiring a lot of skilled work from typesetters, printers, and the like, and then needing distribution costs for newspapers, magazines, journals, and books.

Okay, so take away all the intrinsic material costs of publishing, or nearly all. Now suddenly, the EDITING becomes the most expensive part. So then, what happens that we start to get competition from e-published stuff that hasn't been edited at all, or has been inadequately edited? This would have been stupid or unlikely in the old days when good editing was only a fraction of publication costs, and was essential to picking out only the good stuff to publish, which was in turn intrinsically expensive to publish. Decouple these functions now, and you get replication of "printed" material, with no selection. The evolutionary process which once drove quality-improvement in the written word, now breaks down, because half the critical mechanism has been turned off. There's no selection of good material on the production end.

Okay, now e-Malthus demands that there must be selection SOMEWHERE, since we can't read the garbage as fast as it appears on teh web. So where does that selection happen, now? Well, Google does it. Bing wants to do it. In large part, the buzz from popular interest does it. But that sort of thing amplifies pop culture and doesn't work so well for academics and knowledge. Hence the little demo the other day about pop culture articles vs. articles about weightier things on wikipedia. That's true of everyplace on the web.

No solution for this do I see. It's been the case for thousands of years that people have resisted paying for pure information, even though information is actually most of what you buy, with most products. Instead, those who sold information were forced to package it up with something else, some material, and sell the material "thing." A book being the prime example — you sell the physical book to get people to buy the novel, but if they can get the novel without having to buy the book, they'll steal the novel. It's the same with health advice. People will not pay what health advice is worth. If they would, doctors could make living talking to people on the phone, or sending them videotapes. Forget it. Even alternative people can't make a living doing that — they have to sell fancy packaged nutritional supplements, or else go broke. Those supplements are basically information, but packed in a way that to get the information you have to buy the thing.

The internet, with its capacity to reproduce and transmit "information," for closer and closer to nothing, has become the ultimate counterfeiter for what used to be the currency of knowledge. And per Gresham's Law of the Information Jungle, bad information is in the process of driving out good. Information inflation has now set in, and the currency is devalued. Attempts to establish gold standards for knowledge are resisted on every side. The idea that not everybody can (or should) print $100 bills, is held to be elitist.

Ah, well. Back to making "things." If you think you're going to make a living by thinking, and selling your thoughts in print to somebody, you'd better think some more about that. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ermm.gif)

That's all, well, um, bad — but I was actually trying to talk about something else, something like the quality of communication in our so-called "community" sites. That's kind of what I meant by "fora and e-gora" — here I was searching for some word beside "discussion" since the owners of one site I had in mind go out of their way to stress that it's "not about discussion", even though they do have their own meta-discussion forum for doing just that.

So I'm looking for those bug/features of system accident/design that catalyze the catatonia of genuine collaborative inquiry.

Jon Awbrey

[dogbiscuit]

One aspect of online communication that does lead to poor debate is the art of the picky quote - I'm sure we all do it: scan a post, leap onto a particular comment and then extrapolate a whole bunch of unintended meaning from some minor throwaway point.

The chances are little thought went into that individual comment, even if the post as a whole was an attempt at some point.

The cycle repeats, and on each iteration, the protagonists feel compelled to defend some point that was perhaps in context correct, but by the time it has been extruded though partial quotation after partial quotation, the original point is lost.

Points are always lost for saying "that is not what I meant". You are never allowed to admit that all your internet posts are dashed off without thought (unless you are FT2 where every nuance was apparently carefully honed into senselessness).

[dogbiscuit]

Another little thought that I had this morning whilst walking the dog was about the complexity of the world and how there is a lot of stuff that is just too hard for people to deal with.

I deal with local planning issues, and you soon submerge into a Looking Glass World of Governmental logic. My local residents association took a specific line on not telling people what to think about a major application and then tried to get the residents to tell it what they thought.

The net result was that the residents association realised that a lot of apparently intelligent people were most aggrieved that they had not done their thinking for the people, or had not magically divined what their obvious opinion was and stepped in to represent it to the local authority as it was clearly obvious what needed to be said.

This got me to thinking that in a complex world, people have got into the habit of delegating their thinking to others, and the Web is just an extension of this - modern issues are far more complex than whether you can get the blacksmith to fix the horse and cart before harvest time, so people continually look for ways to delegate critical thinking that is beyond their knowledgebase to other places. They do not take kindly to this process not producing the right results, (which is even more interesting in the American context where there is a strong disposition to blame governmental bodies simply for existing it seems!).

It is here we get to the Wikipedia part of the problem - Wikipedia has many characteristics that superficially look like it is an authoritative source, so people uncritically delegate their thinking to it.

[Jon Awbrey]

In a complex society, people making decisions and taking actions at places remote from you have the power to affect your life in significant ways. The only way you get a choice in that is if there are paths of feedback that allow you to affect the life of those decision makers and action takers in significant ways. That is what accountability, response-ability, and representative government are all about. Naturally, some people are against that. In the U.S. context that I know about, there has been a concerted campaign for as long as I can remember — but even more concerted since the Reagan Regime — to get The People to abdicate their hold on The Powers That Be and just let some anonymous corpseration send them the bill after the fact. The way I see it, Wikipedia is just another step down that road to perdition.

Jon Awbrey

[Milton Roe]

Another little thought that I had this morning whilst walking the dog was about the complexity of the world and how there is a lot of stuff that is just too hard for people to deal with.

I deal with local planning issues, and you soon submerge into a Looking Glass World of Governmental logic. My local residents association took a specific line on not telling people what to think about a major application and then tried to get the residents to tell it what they thought.

The net result was that the residents association realised that a lot of apparently intelligent people were most aggrieved that they had not done their thinking for the people, or had not magically divined what their obvious opinion was and stepped in to represent it to the local authority as it was clearly obvious what needed to be said.

This got me to thinking that in a complex world, people have got into the habit of delegating their thinking to others, and the Web is just an extension of this - modern issues are far more complex than whether you can get the blacksmith to fix the horse and cart before harvest time, so people continually look for ways to delegate critical thinking that is beyond their knowledgebase to other places. They do not take kindly to this process not producing the right results, (which is even more interesting in the American context where there is a strong disposition to blame governmental bodies simply for existing it seems!).

It is here we get to the Wikipedia part of the problem - Wikipedia has many characteristics that superficially look like it is an authoritative source, so people uncritically delegate their thinking to it.

There's always a tension between central and local control in any system. The decision of how much control to centralize vs. distribute, is impossible to make, since it's sort of a traveling salesman problem, but even harder. Worse still, in real life, such things are decided by "authority", which is central-by-definition, so even the meta-decision for deciding whether to shift decisions to central command vs. "foreward" command, is sticky, and tends to work well in one direction (toward centralization of authority), but not the other. Which is a shame.

The US, whose opinion on government you comment on, is a comparitively young country, and the farther west you go on the continent, the "younger" it gets (till you get to the west coast, where it starts to look a bit more eastern again). You can look at firearms ownership and carry laws as a proxy for that. At least half of US states allow concealed carry of pistols by citizens with no criminal record and varying amounts of training, but the two states that probably never will allow this are New York and California. The country is more leftist and urban on the coasts, and it gets more libertarian and conservative where the population (historically) thinned out in the heartland, and people had to live without good government contact more recently. This is not a minor phenomenon-- when the population in these interior mid-southern parts of the country filled in, those people managed to elect a lot of Republicans-- people who distrust government on principle, except when it's going to war against some other country.

The amount of residual self-directiveness of populations shows up most clearly in emergencies and in combat, in situations when central command almost always breaks down at some point, and you're left to see how the system self-organizes (if it can) and how well it does. I've seen citizens working alongside cops and firemen and paramedics in emergencies, delivering emergency care, medical care, and sometimes even law enforcement.

In WW II I know something of the combat history of Americans, and one of the things that stands out is how difficult it was to decapitate American forces by killing their commanders. In case after case when officers went down, and communications were broken, new commanders not only took over from the junior officers, but in many cases from the enlisted men. Nor did loss of central command stop fighting. Rather than dig in and/or give up, there are case after case where the enlisted men organized, solved local problems, and sometimes simply headed toward the sound of battle, all by themselves. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif) In the history of warfare this is not all that common. In very many actions such stuff made a huge difference for the Americans, whose kill-ratio wasn't *entirely* due to their superior supply-state.

It happens in all armies of course, but it's far more common in armies from countries that have recently had frontiers and the gun-toting people who came from them-- Australia, Canada, the US, and so on. As those countries grow older, the people from them will probably grow more "effete" and less able to solve their own problems when "authority" is missing. Australia and Canada are well down that road already, and I've watched the process happen to the US, even in my lifetime. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/yecch.gif) Adult people standing around waiting to be told what to do, always signals a failure of society of some kind. If nobody's giving you orders, you should be looking around to see what you can do on your own, and the hell with the government's policies. If something needs doing right now and can't wait, and there's nobody from the government to do it, that's their problem. If they show up later and compain about what you did to fix things, tough shit. Most Americans feel they should have been on the spot when needed, and if not, they give up their right to grouse. That also is far from a universal attitude.

All this actually applies to Wikipedia. Good or bad, there a reason it wasn't invented in the UK or Germany. They copied it once it got going, but the audacity of it, good or bad, is characteristically American. It's got "Invented in the US" (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/huh.gif) (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/blink.gif) written all over it.

[Jon Awbrey]

Good grief, Milton, you really gotta stop sniffin that banana oil …

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/sick.gif)

[Milton Roe]

Good grief, Milton, you really gotta stop sniffin that banana oil …

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/sick.gif)

Can't help it. Uncle "Raul" Duke has always been my favorite character.
(IMG:http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll191/Shrlocc/UncleRaulDuke.jpg)

[papaya]

You know, Jon: this is part of the internet too. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/evilgrin.gif)

[Jon Awbrey]

Let's face it, we are inundated with dullness — our capacity for metabolizing that dullness is very limited — and every time we absorb, without metabolizing, a bit of that dullness we become a bit duller ourselves.

Jon Awbrey

[ulsterman]

I really must reject the entire thesis implicit in this thread title. People are stupid already. As the saying goes, nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the general public. It isn't fair to blame the Internet.

Maybe what is true is that people know more that isn't true, because nonsense is more easily spread than it used to be.

[Jon Awbrey]

I really must reject the entire thesis implicit in this thread title. People are stupid already. As the saying goes, nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the general public. It isn't fair to blame the Internet.

Maybe what is true is that people know more that isn't true, because nonsense is more easily spread than it used to be.

Yes, we are all frail, but the promised hand that would lift us up by our bootstraps has yet to show itself — all we see are fickle fingers pointing the way down slippery slopes in every direction, yea, unto bottomless pits where all our piety and wits are washed out down to the very last drips.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ph34r.gif)