Category: musing

Simpler times, news edition

The other evening, I was relaxing in my special coffin filled with semiconductors salvaged from 1980’s-era consumer electronics, when I was thinking about how tired I am of hearing about a certain self-funded presidential candidate, or guns, or terrorism … and my mind wondered to simpler times. Not simpler times without fascists and an easily manipulated populace, but simpler times where you could more easily avoid pointless and dumb news, while still getting normal news.

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It wasn’t long ago that I read news, or at least “social media” on Usenet, a system for posting on message boards that predates the web and even the Internet. My favorite “news reader” (software for reading Usenet) was called trn. I learned all it’s clever single-key commands and mastered a feature common to most serious news readers: the kill file.

Kill files are conceptually simple. They contain a list of rules, usually specified as regular expressions, that determine which posts on the message board you will see. Usenet was the wild west, and it always had a lot of garbage on it, so this was a useful feature. Someone is being rude, or making ridiculous, illogical arguments? <plonk> Into the kill file goes their name. Enough hearing about terrorism? <plonk> All such discussions disappear.

Serious users of Usenet maintained carefully curated kill files, and the result was generally a pleasurable reading experience.

Of course, technology moves on. Most people don’t use text-based news readers anymore, and Facebook is the de-facto replacement for Usenet. And in fact, Facebook is doing curation of our news feed – we just don’t know what it is they’re doing.

All of which brings me to musing about why Facebook doesn’t support kill files, or any sophisticated system for controlling the content you see. We live in more advanced times, so we should have more advanced software, right?

More advanced, almost certainly, but better for you? Maybe not. trn ran on your computer, and the authors (its open source) had no pecuniary interest in your behavior. Facebook, of course, is a media company, not a software company, and in any case, you are not the customer. The actual customers do not want you to have kill files, so you don’t.

Though I enjoy a good Facebook bash more than most people, I must also admit that Usenet died under a pile of its own garbage content. It was an open system and, after, a gajillion automated spam posts, even aggressive kill files could not keep up. Most users abandoned it. Perhaps if there had been someone with a pecuniary interest in making it “work,” things would have been different. Also, if it could had better support for cat pictures.

On BS detection

Coming after my last post, which took aim at Vox, I am hereby directing you to an interesting interview on Vox in which a researcher discusses his work on bullshit. Bullshit, as the researcher defines it is:

Bullshit is different from nonsense. It’s not just random words put together. The words we use have a syntactic structure, which implies they should mean something.

The difference between bullshit and lying is that bullshit is constructed without any concern for the truth. It’s designed to impress rather than inform. And then lying, of course, is very concerned with the truth — but subverting it.

This a pretty fascinating category, no? What is it for? The first thing that springs to mind is establishing authority, which, though distinct from lying, seems to be the basic groundwork for slipping in lies by shutting down critical faculties. Bullshit is like the viral protein coat necessary to deliver some RNA lie payload.

It seems to me that bullshit is particularly rampant these days, but perhaps someone with more knowledge of history will correct me. We live in a very complex, dynamic world, and simple heuristics built into our wetware seem rather outgunned when confronted with modern, well-engineered, state-of-the-art BS. Furthermore, I notice more and more people — not just those in the business of propaganda — who make their living, in part or wholly, by spinning bullshit. Bullshit about guns, vaccines, education, politics, food, religion, terrorism, how your dotcom is helping the world — you name it.

Bullshit arising from the San Bernadino killings angered me over the last few days. Gun control advocates filled my FB feed with pleas for gun control, but the facts of the situation seem to imply that these people would have been able to perpetrate their murder under any conceivable gun control regime, except, perhaps, for a total ban with confiscation. (Which I think we can all agree is not going to happen and probably shouldn’t.) The conservative media, of course, seems aflame with innuendo about Islam and violence, justifying fear of Muslim refugees and discrimination against them. Overall, it’s too early to make much sense of this tragedy, but whether you like gun control or restrictions on refugee immigration, there’s not much in this event to support a serious argument for either. Which is to say, everything on your Facebook feed that links this story to pretty much any cause is 100% pure bullshit.

I believe traditional thinking about bullshit is that, first, people who hear bullshit that confirms their priors just let it go unprocessed because, well, why not? And second, that processing everything you hear critically is work, and most people quite rationally avoid work when they can.

I (and this researcher) wonder, though, because some people have highly sensitive bullshit detectors and can sniff it out instantly, without consulting snopes.com or WebMD. And I know plenty of people who get angry about bullshit, even when it aligns with what they already believe.

Is this some kind of immunity? Is it natural or can people be inoculated? And if the latter is possible, how do we go about it?

 

What the other guys believe

How well do you understand the beliefs of those at the opposite political spectrum as yourself?

Being a semiprofessional policy nerd, so I thought I had a good handle on this. I know, for example, most of the conservative and liberal arguments for this or that policy proposal, and can (and do) rank them on their credibility all the time, constantly adjusting those  rankings as I learn more about the world. That’s a wonk’s life.

But here’s a different question: which of those arguments do they believe and feel are the most compelling?

Some JMU researchers have devised a little experiment to determine just that. It’s a short questionnaire. You should take it! They ask you a few questions about the best policy arguments from conservative and liberal viewpoints and then they ask you your own political orientation.

I learned something from my results. I was able to correctly identify the favored argument of political conservatives approximately zero percent of the time. 0 for 5!

Paul Krugman thinks liberals understand conservative reasoning better than conservatives do liberal reasoning. Well, he might be true with respect to the logic of the arguments, but at least for this guy, he’s dead wrong regarding the beliefs about the strengths of the arguments.

h/t Baseline Scenario

When is it okay to age?

I was reading an article written by a venture capitalist the other day, in which he made it clear that any company developing software for a desktop computer was a dinosaur, and the future was absolutely, 100% mobile.

It caused neurons to fire in a region of my brain that I’ve been trying hard to suppress for the past few years. Call it to the medulla getoffmylawngotta.

I started thinking that smart phones are great when I’m, you know, on the move, but for 99% of my computing needs, I strongly prefer to sit in front of my computer with Gibibytes of memory, a huge SSD, many-cored many-issue out-of-order processor, 30″ monitor, and Apple keyboard. It’s just better.

Here’s another thing: CD’s. I liked CD’s. I bought a lot of them when I was young. I had tapes, too. CD’s were better than tapes. I never said, “oh, those CD’s aren’t as good as tapes,” but I do think it sometimes with file based music. Why? I’m smart enough to come up with solid reasons, like the fact that with a CD you really do control the music. You want to sell it or lend it to a friend? Done. Or that the CD has physical properties, which is sort of nice in and of itself. Are these arguments bogus?

Does it even matter if they’re bogus or not? They’re a sure sign that I’m starting to get old.

It all begs the question, must I continue to fight this impulse? Hiring managers in Silicon Valley hiring say hell effing yes, I must. But I’m getting tired of them, too, because I’ve seen their bullshit cult of newness for decades now, and it’s old too.

Better and new are not the same. And composing anything OVER 140 characters on a phone is pure punishment.