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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

#61

Post by base698 »

dEnigma wrote: post #57
grumbel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abo…

Unfortunately when I look through my old Favourites playlist, which at some point reached the limit of 5000 videos, I can see how many of those videos are now private, deleted, or blocked in my country. The worst part is that in many cases I can't even recover the video title, so I have no idea what has been lost. A possible solution would be to store the titles separately, but I didn't think about this while I added…

Noticed this in a playlist of about 80 videos. It's now 55. I have no idea what it is that's missing.

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

#62

Post by base698 »

morpheos137 wrote: post #45
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 parti…

Lack of solid real world social networks. Religion used to be a solid defense but people are now less religious.

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

#63

Post by auggierose »

grumbel wrote: post #50
ricardobeat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abo…

Well, I once had a comment exchange with Sean Young (of Bladerunner fame) on YouTube, but that is gone now. So much for its archival qualities.

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

#64

Post by [deleted] »

vidaj wrote: post #17
Lammy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Seems like something that could be "easy" to validate. Compare children's development in the US with those in Australia and see if there's a 6 month difference. Note I put easy in quotes, because this should be provable, but I don't think it's trivial to do so due to all the different factors that contribute to a child's development. Edit: And by "6 month difference", I mean that if seasons have anything to do with c…

[deleted]

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

#65

Post by eimrine »

tiagod wrote: post #59
eimrine wrote: post #2

I use to ask people about the thing exposed in your photo (why the seasons change, what the moon phases means) to make a quick test about random interlocutor's intelligence to see is it worth to keep discussion. Your father passed this test in absentia.

Knowledge does not imply intelligence. Nor is the opposite true.

Since Astronomy is considered one of seven Liberal Arts, knowing the very bases of orbital mechanics is not about knowing for example difference between interfaces and abstract classes. Understanding this astronomical subject speaks to a general curiosity that in my opinion correlates with intelligence.

An interesting observation, this is not the first time I've talked about this little test on HN, but this time it was not upvoted for.

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

#66

Post by tgv »

trasz wrote: post #48
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…

> religion ... homophobia

Do you really consider that knowledge?

> homophobia - it got global, affected everyone, even non-Christian cultures like China

Do you think that aversion of homosexuality starts and ends with Christianity?

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

#67

Post by mountainb »

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…

Not really. There are vast archives of newspaper articles accessible through a web interface. You just need library access. The free, open web is mostly just a spam ocean, but if you make an effort to access the services that catalog useful information, it’s still very useful. The Google web is shit, though.

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

#68

Post by lmm »

mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #27
Tenoke wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also used to be confidently wrong all the time before the internet was ubiquitous, except then it was hard to quickly verify they were.

True, but a difference is that they could not spread their confidently wrong opinions globally, only locally, and that opinions were tied to their identity. Take my mom for example. She's 80 years old and doesn't use the internet that much. She is confidently wrong about a lot of things she sees on TV or hears on the radio. A recent example is COVID misinformation. The difference is that my mom can't easily influence…

Many true things about COVID were labelled "misinformation" at one point or another.

The publishing gatekeepers of a few decades ago projected an image of confidence, but I'm not sure they were actually any more accurate than random youtube videos. The media establishment of today certainly doesn't seem to be.

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

#69

Post by trasz »

tgv wrote: post #66
trasz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> religion ... homophobia Do you really consider that knowledge? > homophobia - it got global, affected everyone, even non-Christian cultures like China Do you think that aversion of homosexuality starts and ends with Christianity?

Homophobia generally spread throughout the world with Christianity, carried by colonialism. Again, China is a good example. And fixing homophobia in western societies strongly corresponds to decreasing importance of religion.

It’s not limited to homophobia of course - pretty much every single Catholic claim about human sexuality is antiscientific bull - but I think homophobia is a good enough example of a harmful, false belief that got more popular than anything post-internet.

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

#70

Post by denton-scratch »

morpheos137 wrote: post #46
imiric wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I second the call that WP is web done right. Yes, of course there's bias; it's not possible to produce bias-free content, and WP's particularly bad in the fields of politics and history, and really any field where facts aren't settled and feelings are strong.

Enter critical thinking. If you dig just a little (e.g. read the talk pages and the edit histories), you can soon learn that some topic has been taken over by POV-pushers and is unreliable. Anything to do with Israel/Palestine/West Bank is unreliable; the boss is a zionist, and so are a lot of the senior staff, so it's not surprising. But WP is a million times better than the web that search engines expose.

Incidentally, I usually search using DDG. But DDG seems to hate Wikipedia; WP results usually don't show up on DDG until page 2. Google surfaces WP results on page 1, if not at the top of the resultset.

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