11–20 of 84 posts
EVGENY MOROZOV thinks that Tim O'Reilly is a self promoter who uses his clout to convince people that being skilled at promoting ideas via the Internet will be critical to success in the future. Being able to effectively use buzzwords is empty and bad; Coming up with words such as "epistemes" is clever and good.
Frank Luntz didn't rebrand "global warming" as "climate change", the climate science community did. The phrase gives a more accurate impression of what is happening: while global mean surface temperature is rising, climate change may cause cooling in other areas. If people were to accept the phrase "climate change", perhaps it would help end comments like "scientists say the earth is getting hotter... why have our wi…
This is part of why science communicators keep losing policy battles to Luntz and others like him -- you're right that "climate change" is a more scientifically accurate term, but it's also a less scary term, and therefore if you think that something needs to be done about the problem anytime soon you would be better served to avoid it than to embrace it.
EDIT: If you want more examples of how science communicators fail and guidance on how to do better, Randy Olson's book Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/15...) is a good place to start.
Good God. I enjoy long prose (in fact, I crave long form writing), but this is interminable. The author treads, and re-treads, and re-treads, the exact same ground paragraph after paragraph, from a slightly different angle each time, making strange, unsubstantiated character attacks each time. I'm pretty sure that ground is just mud now. If anyone has had the stomach to finish this, please let me know if there was ac…
LOL. After skimming a few pages, I was hoping to just skip it and find the discussion about what this article is actually accusing O'Reilly of. I can see why the author may feel threatened by anyone who actually has communication skills.
It is for articles like these, that TL,DR was created. EVGENY MOROZOV thinks that Tim O'Reilly is a self promoter who uses his clout to convince people that being skilled at promoting ideas via the Internet will be critical to success in the future. Being able to effectively use buzzwords is empty and bad; Coming up with words such as "epistemes" is clever and good.
If you read it as a critique of tech culture generally (and not Tim personally) it's interesting. The critique about polluting language is the crux of it. This is a critique worth diving into more. But the author didn't do a good job of it.
It reads like the author got a whiff of some Philosophy, and then rather than expand the ideas and connect them to the larger culture, he just found a convenient figurehead and wrote some link-bait. He could have easily targeted Richard Dawkins (inventer of the term meme) or any number of others.
The reason I think the article wasn't as bad as some is because I'm just so hungry for philosophical thought in the tech world. Maybe this will make some hackers think critically.
If you like philosophy and want to delve into the discussion about the value of language and it's intersection with software, there's a mailing list here you should check out: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/philosophy-in-a-time...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess the whole point is that O'Reilly is rebranding propaganda as "meme-engineering" even though they are technically the same.
I read the article and think the point is deeper than that. I would summarize it like this: Tim O'Reilly's business has changed from selling things (books, conferences) to selling ideologies ("Web 2.0", "government as a framework"). This is a relationship that goes both ways: the books and conferences provide crucial support for the ideologies he sells (the existence of a "Web 2.0" conference can be cited as proof th…
It is for articles like these, that TL,DR was created. EVGENY MOROZOV thinks that Tim O'Reilly is a self promoter who uses his clout to convince people that being skilled at promoting ideas via the Internet will be critical to success in the future. Being able to effectively use buzzwords is empty and bad; Coming up with words such as "epistemes" is clever and good.
I didn't think it was so bad. I don't have time to go into detail, but briefly: If you read it as a critique of tech culture generally (and not Tim personally) it's interesting. The critique about polluting language is the crux of it. This is a critique worth diving into more. But the author didn't do a good job of it. It reads like the author got a whiff of some Philosophy, and then rather than expand the ideas and…
"A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
LOL. After skimming a few pages, I was hoping to just skip it and find the discussion about what this article is actually accusing O'Reilly of. I can see why the author may feel threatened by anyone who actually has communication skills.
In fairness to the author, this piece was written for a print publication, The Baffler, and included in that magazine's most recent print issue. Longer-form articles fit better in print than they do online.