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The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

christianheilmann.com

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Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#41

Post by istinetz »

Lammy wrote: post #9
istinetz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nowadays, you can just ask about astrology. It's both obviously wrong and socially acceptable to believe in. It filters a solid 30% of the population, at least in my country.

Quoted post unavailable.

>I dunno, I'm willing to believe the timing of birth can influence a child's development

That's a post-hoc justification for an obviously ridiculous belief.

1) Astrology makes much stronger claims. "Today, you will be lucky in love, but avoid conflicts at work". You're committing a motte-and-bailey.

2) If that's the justification, say "winter babies" and "summer babies", not virgo and capricorn.

3) If that's the justification, there should be much stronger effects, such as "born in an ex-communist state, so different nutrition", "born in colder climate, so less sun" that absolutely dwarf that effect. Yet you don't see idiots making intricate psychological profiles based on what latitude you were born in.

>I don't hate women; I just hate everything women like

It's a retarded belief regardless of who holds it.

>There are many reasons that the gender gap in modern astrology belief exists, but some sociologists say that it is, like most things, a result of the patriarchy.

Well, this is something else people say that makes me immediately lose respect for them.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#42

Post by Astrology_Dumb »

Planktonne wrote: post #28
emptyfile wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so infuriated by your link I'm at a loss for words. EDIT: This is an UNIVERSITY newspaper? I thought it would be some kind of british tabloid or something... depressing

The article makes an important point. Astrology isn't meaningful or rational. However, the level of contempt shown for people who are believers in astrology is wildly out of proportion. There are lots of equally dumb things that don't get the same level of vitriol. It's valid to dismiss astrology, but that doesn't mean that all dismissal of astrology is based on high-minded scientific ideals. A lot of it is based on…

No post body was provided.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#44

Post by istinetz »

Planktonne wrote: post #28
emptyfile wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so infuriated by your link I'm at a loss for words. EDIT: This is an UNIVERSITY newspaper? I thought it would be some kind of british tabloid or something... depressing

The article makes an important point. Astrology isn't meaningful or rational. However, the level of contempt shown for people who are believers in astrology is wildly out of proportion. There are lots of equally dumb things that don't get the same level of vitriol. It's valid to dismiss astrology, but that doesn't mean that all dismissal of astrology is based on high-minded scientific ideals. A lot of it is based on…

Really? What equally dumb things are believed by 40% of women and 20% of men (as per the article) and are a constant topic of conversation?

I'm really struggling to think of any.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#45

Post by morpheos137 »

mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #6

IMO the worst side effect of current web of knowledge is what I'd call the illusion of knowledge. When it was more difficult to access and publish information, that imposed a much higher bar on what was being consumed. These days, people watch a 10-minute YouTube video or read a reddit comment or twitter thread and believe (perhaps unconsciously) that makes them knowledgeable in said topic. They will then, in an abso…

What is the most bizarre thing to me about the online zeitgeist is how so many people will allow comments of anonymous or pseudonymous strangers on places like Reddit or Twitter to shape their world view. Including journalists. An extreme or inaccurate view may start on social media and be normalised through repetition on social media and subsequent validation by main stream journalist.

In the case of Reddit in particular what is it that gets people to trust anonymous strangers? It is bizarre and seems like a mind virus. If an anonymous stranger tells you what you want to hear then you are apt to ingest it uncritically.

For example on social media there is a notion that nuclear brinksmanship with Russia over Crimea is acceptable.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#46

Post by morpheos137 »

imiric wrote: post #10
nicbou wrote: post #5

It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. Encyclopaedia Britannica is still there, and it's great . But there's also an army of content creators are there to teach you just about anything. If one source doesn't do it, you have more to choose from. Yesterday, I read an article about North Africa that mentioned in passing Qaddafi's underground river. A few…

> It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. It's also never been easier to share disinformation, and pollute the vast sea of actual knowledge that exists on the internet. Sources of information are silo'd into proprietary closed off gardens run by large corporations who only serve their shareholders. Searching for information has been corrupted by adverti…

Wikipedia can be show to be biased or unbalanced about political issues. Since wikipedia views newspapers as reliable sources their articles are often skewed by whatever is the conventions of the day.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#47

Post by zasdffaa »

ricardobeat wrote: post #11
nicbou wrote: post #5

It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. Encyclopaedia Britannica is still there, and it's great . But there's also an army of content creators are there to teach you just about anything. If one source doesn't do it, you have more to choose from. Yesterday, I read an article about North Africa that mentioned in passing Qaddafi's underground river. A few…

I’m not sure you and the author are talking about the same thing. He mentions the fact you can’t even read the news from 10 years ago, the content has simply disappeared. No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The problem is not “everything, everywhere” or a lack of filters but the extreme commercialization of all content available, closed networks, the short life of URLs…

https://www.scientificamerican.com/store/archive/?page=400

From August 30, 1856. Goes back even further but point mmade. Needs a payment to read but it's there.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#48

Post by trasz »

mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #6

IMO the worst side effect of current web of knowledge is what I'd call the illusion of knowledge. When it was more difficult to access and publish information, that imposed a much higher bar on what was being consumed. These days, people watch a 10-minute YouTube video or read a reddit comment or twitter thread and believe (perhaps unconsciously) that makes them knowledgeable in said topic. They will then, in an abso…

>When it was more difficult to access and publish information, that imposed a much higher bar on what was being consumed.

And yet fringe theories, from quack medicine to religions, weren’t any less widespread than now. They were just fewer of them.

EDIT: Now I think about it, they were more prevalent than now. Look at homophobia - it got global, affected everyone, even non-Christian cultures like China, for centuries.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#49

Post by _Algernon_ »

nicbou wrote: post #5

It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. Encyclopaedia Britannica is still there, and it's great . But there's also an army of content creators are there to teach you just about anything. If one source doesn't do it, you have more to choose from. Yesterday, I read an article about North Africa that mentioned in passing Qaddafi's underground river. A few…

It may never have been easier to share knowledge but it also hasn't ever been easier to share misinformation.

It also hasn't gotten easier to find information. Search results are worse now than 10 years ago because of Search Engine "Optimization". Google search needs uBlocklist[1] with a steadily growing list of manually curated domains just to poorly approximate usability.

Additionally, sites load slower every day. Why does every partial refresh of a site require 2 seconds, even though I'm on a decent computer? On phones sites are practically unusable.

The benefits you're touting for the web could be accomplished with Web 1.0 level of tech or even simpler protocols such as Gopher[2] or Gemini[3]. Everything else is an overall decrease in accessibility, usability, user experience, and the ease of finding or sharing knowledge.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#50

Post by grumbel »

ricardobeat wrote: post #11
nicbou wrote: post #5

It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. Encyclopaedia Britannica is still there, and it's great . But there's also an army of content creators are there to teach you just about anything. If one source doesn't do it, you have more to choose from. Yesterday, I read an article about North Africa that mentioned in passing Qaddafi's underground river. A few…

I’m not sure you and the author are talking about the same thing. He mentions the fact you can’t even read the news from 10 years ago, the content has simply disappeared. No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The problem is not “everything, everywhere” or a lack of filters but the extreme commercialization of all content available, closed networks, the short life of URLs…

> No amount of YouTube videos can replace that.

The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. As Youtube makes a much better places for publishing and archiving content than the rest of the Web. With Youtube you don't have to worry about URLs changing or domain names expiring or anything like that. You just publish your video once, get a unique video-id and don't have to worry about anything else. Google's monopoly worked here in our favor for once and they have been reasonably good in not breaking old content (not perfectly, as video annotation got crippled pretty badly).

I think that's where the rest of the Web fell short. The Web has no concept of "publishing". There is no ISBN when you write a blog, no library were you could look up that ISBN. It's all just a file on a server or an entry in a database, that will get mangled and lost in the coming years. Worse yet, the article itself isn't even accessible from the Web, it's mixed together with a user-interface, ads and other stuff or spread across multiple pages. All this makes it quite tricky to keep old content readable and archived for the future.

This also leads to a weird situation that a lot of publications are still avoiding the Web after 20+ years. They publish as ePub or PDFs instead, which you can somewhat access from the Web, but really aren't well integrated into it. But it's by far the easiest way to ensure that a text document published today will remain readable a decade down the line.

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