"No, It's Not Your Opinion. You're Just Wrong"

An excellent oldie-but-goldie from Jef Rouner. It begins with this quote:

I have had so many conversations or email exchanges with students in the last few years wherein I anger them by indicating that simply saying, "This is my opinion" does not preclude a connected statement from being dead wrong. It still baffles me that some feel those four words somehow give them carte blanche to spout batshit oratory or prose. And it really scares me that some of those students think education that challenges their ideas is equivalent to an attack on their beliefs.

...

There’s a common conception that an opinion cannot be wrong. My dad said it. Hell, everyone’s dad probably said it and in the strictest terms it is true. However, before you crouch behind your Shield of Opinion you need to ask yourself two questions.

1. Is this actually an opinion?
2. If it is an opinion how informed is it and why do I hold it? ...

--Mick Cullen

Rouner continues:

You can be wrong or ignorant. It will happen. Reality does not care about your feelings. Education does not exist to persecute you. The misinformed are not an ethnic minority being oppressed. ... No, it’s not your opinion. You’re just wrong.

...

To quote John Oliver, who on his show Last Week Tonight referenced a Gallup poll showing one in four Americans believe climate change isn’t real:

Who gives a shit? You don’t need people’s opinion on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking: “Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?” or “Do owls exist?” or “Are there hats?”

http://www.houstonpress.com/arts/no-it-s-not-your-opinion-you-re-just-wrong-7611752

See also "On Being Wrong" by Kathryn Schultz:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QleRgTBMX88

Key takeaway: there's no shame in being wrong, discovering you're mistaken, and then correcting the error.

Doubling down on bullshit, though... Yeah, nah.

Denial and Identity

The psychology of being wrong, both individual and group, has been much mused on. There's a credible argument that this is strongly based on both denial, most especially of inconvenient truths or of the invalidation of beliefs which have come to define one's own worldview, and of a set of beliefs and behaviours or rituals which have come to define group identity. If your chief reasons for a belief, or a rejection of a statement or model, are that it makes you feel uncomfortable or that your own designated group (family, tribe, community, religion, political party) rejects that belief ... odds are high that you're grounding your belief system in ideology rather than empiricism and pragmatic tests of truth. Note that strongly held, strongly contourfactual beliefs are especially effective as strong and credible signalling devices within groups.

Previously

Based on an old Ello rant: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/YXkR941EKbv-Ho-m4gssDQ

And see also my "On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness" at the Dreddit.

#Bullshit #opinion #OnBeingWrong #Nonsense #Denial #Signalling #Dogwhistle #Shibboleth #CredibleSignal #GroupAffinity #psychology #sociology #GroupPsychology #Dreddit

Reddit stands for disinformation. Fuck Reddit.

Reddit CEO /u/spez dismisses rampant and motivated disinformation campaigns with "Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy".

There's a mythological belief, unsupported by evidence, that some "free marketplace of ideas" will arrive at truth. When examined, this is revealed to be, as much of what is transacted in that marketplace, nothing more than propaganda, here selling the idea of the free market itself. [1] The process by which truths come to be known and established is not debate, but experience: empirical study, the pragmatic recognition of models of ever-greater usefulness and accuracy, of observation and experiment. At best the marketplace trades on that commodity against the competing goods of attractive and self-serving myths, lies, legends, and distortions. Markets reward the shallow, short-term, convenient, and readily-expressed. Truth is often none of these, most especially complex and inconvenient truths. ...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/pby7de/reddit_stands_for_disinformation_fuck_reddit/

#dreddit #disinformation #reddit #FuckReddit #FakeNews #covid19

Reuters is going Paywall. A hyperbundled content syndication would be preferable

The Reuters News Agency (part of Thompson-Reuters Publishing) is throwing up a registration wall around its news service, as a prelude to a $35/mo subscription service.

None of the three primary news financing models presently in use or vogue are viable: advertising, subscriptions, or the perennial technology favourite, micropayments.

Advertising leads to low-quality, sensational, and often propagandistic clickbait.

Subscriptions wall off a huge portion of the addressable public. One of the most-widely subscribed-to publications is the New York Times, with (5 million online subscribers according to Statista). Given about 150 million household units in the US, 96.67% of the US population does not have access to the Times.

Four-plus decades of micropayments advocacy have failed to poduce a viable system that works and people will use.

People are drowning in accounts (well over 100/person in a 2015 survey[1]) and subscription services. Offerings are fragmented amongst these, and control battles lead to withdrawal of or blocking of materials during inter-corporate wars.

OECD per-capita spend on all publishing runs about $100/person, roughly the same as per-capita ads spend within the same countries, itself a tax of sorts. Annual spend on books in the US are about $18/capita. On cable TV $217.42/mo. (compare $205/mo for all utilities). As of 2008, 87% of US newspaper revenues were advertising, not subscriptions/newsstand sales.

A natural gateway exists --- not a perfect one, but good enough, at the level of the ISP provider.

Aggregation, not dis-integrations, is the general trend in payment systems. Both buyers and sellers benefit from predictable flows, income or revenues.

Regionally-pro-rated payments allocate costs according to ability to pay, which for information goods is a net social benefit.

Rolling an information access fee into fixed line and mobile Internet service, with an indexing of content accessed and a tier-and-bid based reimbursement schedule for publishers, seems to me the most viable path forward to something vaguely resembling a content tax, without actually going through a content tax mechanism. It would ensure universal access to readers and the public, compensation for creators, and the ability for those actually engaged in the process of creating new works to access the materials they need, legally and lawfully, answering in part the “why should I pay for information I don’t use” objection: the inforation you do use is itself predicated on information you don’t access directly yourself. The other answer to this rather tired objection is that you live in the world created by information access or denial of access, and in general, access to high-quality, relevant, useful information should be a net positive.

(Yes, events of the past decade temper my enthusiasm for that belief somewhat, though information rather than propaganda still seems likely a net positive.)

The concept could be trialed on a regional basis, rather than globally. It should offer any willing publication within a set of quality and bias tiers (there are third-party rating services, such as Ad Fontes Media, amongst others, which might serve as arbiters). A bidding process in which given tiers are compensated at specific rates, subject to competitive alternatives, should help address the “who gets paid and how much” question — high-bias low-accuracy clickbait is a cheap-to-produce product, but would also be compensated at a low rate.

See Also

• Content syndication at the Dreddit
• HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26820053

---

Notes:

1. Dashlane came up with this number in 2015, archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20150919202348/https://blog.dashlane.com/infographic-online-overload-its-worse-than-you-thought/ Experian cites a similar number, without source, in a 2019 identity fraud report https://www.experian.com/blogs/news/2019/01/30/global-identity-and-fraud-report/ A NordPass study finds > 100 passwords/person on average https://tech.co/news/average-person-100-passwords HN readers report upwards of 700 accounts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488899 Data quality here are poor, but the general scope is clearly large. Whether its increasing on an annual basis or if 100 accounts/person represents a metastable plateau is unclear.

#media #paywalls #subscription #UniversalContentSyndication #DeathOfNewspapers #advertising #Reuters #dreddit #InformationIsAPublicGood

On the value of and importance of linking

A discussion yesterday, spanned a half-dozen or so comments exchanged over nearly six hours trying to come to a common understanding of a claim, in which my interlocutor insisted on not providing URL link(s) or screenshot(s) supporting or clarifying their claim. The problem wasn't one of not agreeing, it was of a failure to clearly articulate (by the writer) or grasp (by at least this reader) what the point was.

I manage my threads and discussions with several aims in mind. For substantive threads, this includes having an eye not just to the direct current participants, but the silent readers and the future. (And no, not all threads are substantive.) The repeated request to just look at some current state of a constantly-updated user-selected discussion site might have been sufficient for a few minutes or hours. It won't provide insight today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year... A few specific links, a screenshot with marked or circled items, or similar, does serve as a clear and durable reference.

This results in a few general principles for participation. One of those long-standing principles is to provide clear references on request rather than argue for … now, hours, over the point. Or whether or not to comply. As my interlocutor did for for much of the past day. I'd included that in my #dreddit Lair Rules somes years back:

I’ll often request references and citations. The policy here is much as for /r/AskScience or /r/AskHistorians: if you make a claim, you should be able to back it up. If you can not back it up, it will be considered moot. Arguing over whether or not you need to do so is very strongly discouraged.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/lair_rules

The failure to provide links is bad enough. The insistance on not doing so, over multiple exchanges and hours (or days), and the wining about the point ... bores me and has no broader or durable value. As with other forms of epistemic noise, I'll prune it. As noted in the Lair Rules: Moderation battles are short and boring: the moderator wins.

Mind that if you don’t have the time or a suitable device capable of copying and pasting links, wait until such time as you do or are at a sufficiently capable system. Silence is preferable to noise.

But really, six hours of “nuh-uh, I don’t feel like it” is about 5h55m more tolerance than I’m inclined to give. Huffing over the request afterward does even less to impress me.

This is where I stand and why.

#LairRules #administrivia

Forty-Five: A Republic, if you can keep it (2016)

I don't like commenting on current politics, I don't think I'm good at it, things move far too quickly for my preference of considered commentary, the topic itself (and the inevitable discussions) tends to annoy me, and there's far too much superior competition.

Still, with many others I'm absorbing in a state of shock the news of Donald John Trump, 45th president-elect of the United States of America. And am wondering, how did we get here? ...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5c88gg/fortyfive_a_republic_if_you_can_keep_it/

A piece from four years ago. I had my doubts when I hit "publish", though it seems to have weathered well. And be worth revisiting.

Here's to a 46 in 2021.

#vote #election2020 #BidenHarris2020 #uspol #politics #dreddit

"A Republic, if you can keep it."

Listening to Nancy Pelosi's announcement opening impeachment proceedings against the incumbant president, her use of Franklin's phrase resonates strongly. I'd used the same as the title of my pre-election 2016 essay at the #Dreddit:

Forty-Five: A Republic if You Can Keep It

Written in a haze, that's aged well.

The US is very much under a test of its principles, values, institutions, and Constitution.

#impeachment #trump #politics

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5c88gg/fortyfive_a_republic_if_you_can_keep_it/

With the demise of Mr. Jingles, my plans and suggestions

I'd posted this to the rapidly-fading PLOOS, though some of the information applies here as well.

I'll be checking the Google+ Notifications page periodically, at least twice a day if possible. That's not as slick as the Notifications pane was, so expect slower responses to anything.

I'm trying to keep on top of the Google+ Mass Migration community, as well as the (much less active) Plexodus: The Beginning is Near community.

I've had a fair bit of personal stuff going on for the past few weeks which is making online time both less available and productive. My apologies.

The Plexodus Subreddit is an excellent place to get ongoing and post-sunset information. That would be on Google+, data migration (focusing much more on data import), contacts, where people are, and yes, yet more discussions about the past and future of social, online, and user-generated media.

https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus

There's far too much updating to do at the #PlexodusWiki. So I'll try to tend to that garden as well:

https://social.antefriguserat.de

(It means "before it was cool", in Latin, if you're wondering.)

I'm still working on my future personal blog home. That'll be at GitLab, as a continuation of the Lair of the Id. Plan is to post original longer-form content there, then syndicate it elsewhere -- Mastodon, Diaspora, and the Lair subreddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius).

The New Lair blog will be: https://gitlab.com/dredmorbius/lair-of-the-id.git

For those of you who were Mirandans (or want to find out what the hell that was), there's still the /r/MKaTH and /r/MKaTS subreddits. I'm open to posting a bit more content there. MKaTH -- Miranda's Knitting and Tea House, is public, MKaTS -- Miranda's Knitting and Tea Society, is a related private forum:

https://old.reddit.com/r/MKaTH

For more on what that's about:

https://old.reddit.com/r/MKaTH/wiki/faq

There's also a more general Plusser's subreddit, /r/PLOOS:

https://old.reddit.com/r/ploos/

Otherwise, I'm posting at Mastodon, Diaspora, Tildes, Reddit, Hacker News, and a few other haunts, generally as "dredmorbius", as promised.

---

https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus

#googleplus #GPlusRefugees #dreddit #plexodus #plexodusReddit #plexodusWiki

Tracking the Conversation revisited

I've had a long interest in trying to find intelligent and informed discussions, online and elsewhere.

After doing my Google+ user estimate, I started thinking about how to even measure what "intelligent conversation" might be. I'd been running some quick and periodic searches, just looking at the number of results found, for topics or authors' names of interest to me, against different sites. Those were revealing.

Eventually I ran across the Foreign Policy list of Top 100 Global Thinkers. Which is, in some ways, about as pretentious as it sounds. On the other, it was a list compiled by someone other than me of currently-living people whose ideas were generally considered to have merit.

And they are (almost) all very googleable.

So I wrote a Very Simple Script to run Google searches on the 100 names, across about 100 websites, domains, and/or TLDs. And in about 5 minutes discovered that Google really doesn't like you doing that and starts sending you to CAPTCHA pages. So the 10,0000 queries got spread out over a few weeks.

I threw in a few other queries to try to get a sense of general content. The word "this" (one of the most common English language words) was a proxy for "how many pages are there -- almost every English language page will contain "this", and the distribution should be fairly uniform across sites. The arbitrarily selected string "kim kardashian" was chosen as an exemplar of non-intellectual content, giving rise to the concept of the FP:KK ratio -- the relative frequency of pages mentioning any of the FP100 versus those mentioning a certain societal member.

The selection of sites was somewhat arbitrary, though I tried to at least get representative samples. I broke up the reporting by social sites (Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, etc.), media sites (further subdivided), top colleges, international educational sites, and more.

Blogs were the knock-out surprise. There is a lot of substantive content, especially at Wordpress. In part that's because many other sites, including academic (much of Harvard) and media, run on Wordpress, and are indexed as "wordpress.com".

Metafilter has amazingly high signal:noise ratio. The site is tiny, about 369k pages, compared to Facebook's 2,660,000k pages. But the FP:KK was 32.75, versus 2.1 for Facebook.

Google+, which so many people tout as higher quality than Facebook? 0.39.

(Higher FP:KK is "more intellectual", on this scale).

Reddit and Quora also did well.

Alternative media generally fared better than mainstream, though The Economist and Financial Times are both excellent. Surprisingly, NPR's website did far worse than PBS -- TV beat radio on quality.

Mother Jones, The Nation, TruthDig_, Jacobin, Alternet, and The Real News all posted very high ratios.

(Many media scores were highly skewed by single individuals, notably The New York Times, by its columnist, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman. Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, the Pope (Benedict, at the time), and a few other names also proved to be strongly popular at specific sites.

If this post isn't enough for you, an even longer write-up, and tables, at "the Dreddit": https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/

#mediaQuality
#mediaAnalysis
#dreddit
#media

Paul Mason, Capitalism, and Post-Capitalism

Paul Mason, Channel 4 (public broadcasting/UK) Economics Editor, is working on a book titled Postcapitalism, to be published in January, 2015. I've been watching his 18 minute presentation at FutureFest, The Future of Capitalism / Post-Capitalism.

Mason seems to focus on a few major points, which I'm using as the basis for some riffs in a bit of a meandering post.

Continued at the dreddit.

#capitalism #postcapitalism #dreddit #PaulMason #kondratiev

http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2ixnqm/paul_mason_capitalism_and_postcapitalism/

The intractable problem of biomass for fuels is HANNP / photosynthetic ceiling

The US Department of Energy is promoting its biofuels research at the Other Place with the message:

DidYouKnow: Biomass is the most abundant biological material on the planet. It is renewable grows almost everywhere, and provides fuel, power, chemicals and many other products. In total the industry has a $1 billion impact on the U.S. economy. A new documentary video tells the story of the future of the bioenergy and some of the individuals who are helping drive #biofuels forward. Watch it now → http://go.usa.gov/NQgm

The link leads to "Biomass 2014: Growing The Future Bioeconomy" with a video highlighting several projects. There's little if any efficiency, quantity, or cost information presented. Nor of the elephant in the room of any biofuels proposal: biological limits of availability...

Continued at the Dreddit: http://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius

http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_intractable_problem_of_biomass_for_fuels_is/

#biofuels #energy #alternativeenergy #sustainableenergy #debunking #skeptic #dreddit

Tabbed browsing as a band-aid over poor UI, and the Tabs Outliner Extension for Chrome*

I posted a long rant on a number of browser frustrations yesterday over at the dreddit, result of which is I may have found a solution to many frustrations (below). The rant: http://redd.it/256lxu

Among the topics explored:

• There are emerging roles for the browser which likely should be split: a documents management and reading client, an applications platform, a commerce client, and (mostly addressed through existing tools) multimedia access. As is often the case (and has happened with browsers already), I suspect that the new paradigm may emerge not by evolution of existing tools but by the emergence of new ones.

• Tabbed browsing is a crutch used to provide for state management which fails miserably due to the memory overhead of keeping tabs actively open in memory, as well as failing to provide sufficient context.

• The joys of Readability (or similar site simplification tools). The very sorry state of Web styling: more often than not, site styling is a net detriment to readability and utility, not a benefit.

• A slew of other feature requests.

---

From a related discussion on Hacker News I was pointed at something which, on an hours or so's use, looks like it may actually address numerous of my concerns: Chrome's Tab Outliner Extension

I'm still evaluating it, and it's not quite the solution I was looking for, but this could well be the most revolutionary change to browsing I've seen since tabs first appeared (Firefox's Vimperator being the other contestant).

#browser #extensions #productivity #dreddit #chrome #firefox #readability