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How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment

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Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment

#81

Post by sp332 »

jessaustin wrote: post #70
sp332 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liars, not trolls. I mean I guess there's overlap but it's the lying I'm calling out. The author seems continually surprised and concerned that people would believe lies about history, but that's not new or surprising or even interesting. In fact that's why we each have a responsibility to tell the truth.

Everyone who communicates, lies. One who doesn't expect that, won't be able to make much sense of the world. It's not useful to draw bright lines around the category of "lies". It would be pretty awful to lie to your boyfriend about whether you had an STD, or to your kid about the existence of imaginary holiday characters. Making up shit about some forgotten TV show just ain't the same thing. The best trolling may no…

I get that, and I'm not really upset about this particular lie. But the author tries to generalize this to "history is malleable now that it's online", and I just don't think it does generalize. Because as you said, people are going to distrust sketchy sources for information that's more important.

Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment

#83

Post by nommm-nommm »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #78
JackFr wrote: post #25

I don't think it's the internet's fault. In 1941 a couple of friends made a few phone calls to newspaper sports desks and concocted a college football team: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/sports/ncaafootball/the-41...

In Tampa we have an annual celebration each year, in the style of New Orlean's Mardi Gras, of the notorious pirate José Gaspar capturing the city more than a century ago. Of course its all made-up nonsense. None of it ever happened. We still have a great party for it.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame is located in Cooperstown, NY, a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. Cooperstown was chosen because a man named Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown in 1839. A baseball field, Doubleday Field, stands on the exact location where baseball was invented.

Of course, that is a totally made up story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubleday_myth

Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment

#86

Post by grkvlt »

jessaustin wrote: post #70
sp332 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liars, not trolls. I mean I guess there's overlap but it's the lying I'm calling out. The author seems continually surprised and concerned that people would believe lies about history, but that's not new or surprising or even interesting. In fact that's why we each have a responsibility to tell the truth.

Everyone who communicates, lies. One who doesn't expect that, won't be able to make much sense of the world. It's not useful to draw bright lines around the category of "lies". It would be pretty awful to lie to your boyfriend about whether you had an STD, or to your kid about the existence of imaginary holiday characters. Making up shit about some forgotten TV show just ain't the same thing. The best trolling may no…

> It would be pretty awful to lie [...] to your kid about the existence of imaginary holiday characters

True. But people do it, regularly and consistently, and in fact protect their children from finding out about said lies, with ever more complex mechanisms. But, strangely, most people who do this seem to think it's a good thing to lie like this. Not sure why, and I suspect it sets a bad example to children that adults are not to be trusted, as they make things up. And that it is OK to do it, since there are no bad consequences for the adults, so why not lie themselves?

Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment

#87

Post by GrumpyYoungMan »

mangeletti wrote: post #28
tryitnow wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It's more like he was swinging a foam bat and is warning us how easy it would be for someone more malicious to swing a spiked bat. Seriously, I don't really care if some teenager creates a non-sense fanfic world on poorly monitored sites. However, it is noteworthy how the utter lack of quality control on so many Internet properties can propagate falsehoods. This undermines the claim that the Internet was supposed…

I think the problems you're bringing up cannot be solved. Information (re: "Information Superhighway") is information. In this utopian idea of "quality control", who does the quality control? Houghton Mifflin[1]? If history is just a set of lies agreed upon[2], I'd rather have the consensus of the Internet than whoever it is you purport should be in control of quality. 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sh…

Not necessarily. The key problem is that primary sources are either in non-searchable hardcopy format (books, etc.) or inaccessible behind paywalls, making it impractical to do wide-ranging research outside of the academic libraries maintained by by large universities.

It would take quite a major revision to copyright law but it's not impossible to imagine some future version of a library where one can search digitized versions of all known works and correlate between them.

Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment

#88

Post by euyyn »

nkrisc wrote: post #53
knodi123 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many articles have had the premise "You can't trust wikipedia, because it's full of lies! Why, just look at this handful of lies I've put on there!"

The difference is these lies survived for years and were repurposed all the while no one actually bothered to verify them.

Yeah and why would anyone bother?

Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment

#89

Post by fixermark »

conradfr wrote: post #55

That's great. I love how myths can still be created and spread in this Internet age. Another example : around 2005 someone made a playlist for himself of some Mars Volta b-sides and called it "A Missing Chromosome" [1]. Somehow it spread on P2P networks, was even listed on Wikipedia in the band's discography section with a back story etc. I still have it in my collection under that name with the art etc and don't see…

Consider the Slender Man story, which was concocted more-or-less whole-cloth on Somethingawful.com's fora. Two young people stabbed a third ostensibly to sacrifice her to this character, and one of the editors of somethingawful.com posted an article [http://www.somethingawful.com/news/slenderman-not-real/] reminding people that the story was 100% fabrication.

Re: How I turned “Street Sharks” into an online social experiment

#90

Post by toss1 »

MollyR wrote: post #76
munificent wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little from column A and a little from column B. I have young kids and it's fascinating watching them talk about half-remembered stuff from the past. They'll start off not really remembering much and taking guesses. Then the other takes that guess as gospel and repeats it back. Now the first has more confident. Soon they are both fully convinced of a whole pile of fabrications. It made me realize how much of our me…

Not sure I understand. Isn't memory of experience different than our believing it ? Or is it something like there isn't "truth" in our memory ?

Excellent question, and the answer is that human memory is generally highly fallible, malleable, and unreliable.

We all have the naive impression that memory is somehow like a video recording and we can just access it to find out what happened. Indeed, we all have some very vivid and probably quite accurate memories about some exceptional events, or can recall exactly what page and what part of the page we read some specific item. There area also examples of amazing memory stunts and records, and even memory contests and championships.

But we cannot assume that just because we have some very good memories, memory is generally good, indeed, it is mostly pretty bad, especially compared to any kind of recording system.

This is supported by several areas of research demonstrating how easy it is to plant fake memories, reshape memories, and get people to be completely convinced that they are describing are exact and real.

One area of research is eyewitness testimony, which has pretty much been the standard in courts since courts existed, yet when eyewitness accounts are compared, they almost always come up with a variety of contradictions.

There's also been research into the phenomena of "found" or "recovered" memories often used to convict accused child abusers. Again, it turns out that suggestion and guidance on the part of the investigator can create things our or whole cloth, so it must be very carefully guarded against.

There's also several other research areas in which this is relevant, but the outcome is pretty consistent -- human memory is generally pretty bad (sorry I haven't got the time to track down the references).

I've found that it's best to just treat memory as merely a good hint about what might have happened (or where I might have left that tool or the keys), and then look for actual evidence of what really happened.

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