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

[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 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

[Jon Awbrey]

In Other Snooz …

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

I tried to register, but

[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.

This post has been edited by CharlotteWebb: Tue 15th December 2009, 5:58pm

[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

[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

[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: Sun 28th February 2010, 12:42am

[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.