#dreddit — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #dreddit, aggregated by home.social.
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On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness
I'd begun worrying about the resilience of truth and countermeasures to bullshit particularly online well over a decade ago.
This is an early compilation of heuristics and resources which came up in discussion elsewhere recently, and may be helpful to others.
Among conspicuous omissions, Aristotle's "Sophistical Refutations" (Sophistikoi Elenchoi in the original Greek), one of the earliest recorded (or surviving) guides to countering bullshit:
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sophist_refut.1.1.html
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On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness
I'd begun worrying about the resilience of truth and countermeasures to bullshit particularly online well over a decade ago.
This is an early compilation of heuristics and resources which came up in discussion elsewhere recently, and may be helpful to others.
Among conspicuous omissions, Aristotle's "Sophistical Refutations" (Sophistikoi Elenchoi in the original Greek), one of the earliest recorded (or surviving) guides to countering bullshit:
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sophist_refut.1.1.html
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On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness
I'd begun worrying about the resilience of truth and countermeasures to bullshit particularly online well over a decade ago.
This is an early compilation of heuristics and resources which came up in discussion elsewhere recently, and may be helpful to others.
Among conspicuous omissions, Aristotle's "Sophistical Refutations" (Sophistikoi Elenchoi in the original Greek), one of the earliest recorded (or surviving) guides to countering bullshit:
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sophist_refut.1.1.html
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On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness
I'd begun worrying about the resilience of truth and countermeasures to bullshit particularly online well over a decade ago.
This is an early compilation of heuristics and resources which came up in discussion elsewhere recently, and may be helpful to others.
Among conspicuous omissions, Aristotle's "Sophistical Refutations" (Sophistikoi Elenchoi in the original Greek), one of the earliest recorded (or surviving) guides to countering bullshit:
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sophist_refut.1.1.html
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On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness
I'd begun worrying about the resilience of truth and countermeasures to bullshit particularly online well over a decade ago.
This is an early compilation of heuristics and resources which came up in discussion elsewhere recently, and may be helpful to others.
Among conspicuous omissions, Aristotle's "Sophistical Refutations" (Sophistikoi Elenchoi in the original Greek), one of the earliest recorded (or surviving) guides to countering bullshit:
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sophist_refut.1.1.html
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Just realised I’m down to my last two small Middle Management Dino stickers.
2012-2016 was a proper defining time of my life.
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I just had a random Reddit message from someone who lives local to me, as it turns out they play #eveonline and are in #dreddit
This sent me down a little reminisce of my time playing the game and all the work I put into Auth. Nine years ago... wow.
Of course, I'd do it all again, I've found some real good friends through the game (many of which I need to catchup with after COVID stopped the world)
Also, Dreddit/TEST are to thank for my current IT role. Crazy.
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@alakest And speaking of Usenet, I've posted my own piece on why it died. I'm not claiming to be right, though it's been generally well-received. I'd be happy to see cogent critiques.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/
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@Dave_von_s Yes, they (SASOL) did, and as of at least 2005, still do:
I thought I'd mentioned that on the #dreddit, though search says otherwise.
The US also attempted to develop a coal-based synfuels technology between 1928--1953, and there was even a Synthetic Liquid Fuels Act (1944). History here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120111183405/http://fossil.energy.gov/aboutus/history/syntheticfuels_history.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Liquid_Fuels_Program
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I usually delete subreddit "Cakeday" posts.
This one I think actually captures the Zeitgeist perfectly.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/quxwoo/happy_cakeday_rdredmorbius_today_youre_8/
#Reddit #Dreddit #Cakeday #TheAlgorithmIsAware #ButNotSelfAware
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I usually delete subreddit "Cakeday" posts.
This one I think actually captures the Zeitgeist perfectly.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/quxwoo/happy_cakeday_rdredmorbius_today_youre_8/
#Reddit #Dreddit #Cakeday #TheAlgorithmIsAware #ButNotSelfAware
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Reddit stands for disinformation. Fuck Reddit.
Reddit CEO /u/spez dismisses rampant and motivated disinformation campaigns with "Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy".
There's a mythological belief, unsupported by evidence, that some "free marketplace of ideas" will arrive at truth. When examined, this is revealed to be, as much of what is transacted in that marketplace, nothing more than propaganda, here selling the idea of the free market itself. [1] The process by which truths come to be known and established is not debate, but experience: empirical study, the pragmatic recognition of models of ever-greater usefulness and accuracy, of observation and experiment. At best the marketplace trades on that commodity against the competing goods of attractive and self-serving myths, lies, legends, and distortions. Markets reward the shallow, short-term, convenient, and readily-expressed. Truth is often none of these, most especially complex and inconvenient truths. ...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/pby7de/reddit_stands_for_disinformation_fuck_reddit/
#dreddit #disinformation #reddit #FuckReddit #FakeNews #covid19
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@vortex_egg Somewhat paradoxically, the infoglut is in large part a consequence of the loss of gatekeepers.
The total amount of information being created hasn't actually changed ... all that much (a huge explosion in population and literacy over, say, the past 200 years notwithstanding). But the amount of information generated from, say, 2001 to 2021 is ... within reason, about the same.
What's changed is that people can now publish far more. Publishers previously served multiple roles, a key one being gatekeeping. Queue Clay Shirky: it's not information overload, it's filter failure".
(Cory Doctorow writes on this a whole lot.)
The other side is that distribution has become far cheaper. So now instead of, say, a handful of broadcast TV channels, a local daily paper or two, and a few magazine subscriptions, 5 billioin people on Earth now have access to pretty much any serial stream anywhere. Mind that a lot of those simply re-publish the same stories. Or memes.
A daily paper would typically run ~100--500 original-content items (more in the Sunday edition, for English-langauge pubs). The news wieres -- AP, Reuters, UPI, AFP --- run about 1k--5k items/day. (I'd looked this up a few years back, on the #Dreddit).
Hacker News keeps a daily record of the top 100 items carried (https://news.ycombinator.com/front/), which makes an interesting time-capsule to go exploring. But there are thousands of items submitted per day.
Facebook IIRC sees on the order of a billion items posted per day. The vast majority of those are of course seen by nobody.
Attention is the inverse of content abundance. More content means less attention to each item.
(This is frequently lost on those promoting "new media" and noting how high-quality or exemplary it is in its initial stages. This too shall pass.)
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A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication
A constant challenge for any creative type is making a living. And it's hardly a new problem. In the case of broadcast media, commercial sponsorship has been the primary model for the past 94 years, along with a few others: public / membership model, pay-per-view, subscription, and sponsorship by a public or religious institution in the case of college and religious stations. A payment syndication model might address many existing frustrations of publishers, journalists, authors, musicians, and artists....
To my earlier suggestions, I'd say: roll an all-you-can-eat print media subscription to all broadband and mobile digital subscriptions. $100/yr broadband, $50/yr digital (quite possibly lower), scaled by wealth. All the books, news, and articles you can stand. Pro-rated payments on a quality metric scale to creators.
#UniversalContentSyndication #InformationIsAPublicGood #dreddit #advertising #micropayments
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@strypey See also; why information goods and markets are a poor match:
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@strypey You can add Nick Szabo to Shirkey and Odlyzko on micropayments.
I refer to all three here, also rebutting David Brin's pro-micropayments advocacy:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudiation_as_the_micropayments_killer_feature/ -
This is shares much (and overlaps strongly) with my earlier "Hierarchy of Failures in Problem Resolution", though that gets to a second stage after argument of advocacy as well:
Failures of awareness. Not registering that there is, in fact, a problem. "The first step is admitting you've got a problem".
Failures of diagnosis. Recognizing a problem, but failing to identify the type or symptoms....
Failures of etiology. Diagnosing symptoms, but failing to correctly identify the root cause....
Failures of objective. Having determined the cause, not determining a preferable (or attainable, or stable) resolved state....
Failures of redress. Having figured out where you are and where you want to be, how to get there....
Failures of communication. Having determined methods, convincing others....
Failures of execution.
Failures of assessment. Did you actually solve / address the situation effectively?...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarchy_of_failures_in_problem_resolution/
4/end/
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Is politics truly ideological? Or is this a 20th century misapprehension?
...It turns out that "political ideology" itself is largely a creation of the 1930s, with significant growth in the 1960s. Its first emergence, in the 1920s, suggests origins from either World War I or the Russian Revolution....
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Labour, markets, and complex information inflows at scale
...As a system scales, its capability to process complex informational inputs relative to smaller organisation decreases, due to the greater total informational load. That is, broadcast-mode systems are very good at transmitting complex signals, but they can generally only recieve simple, or at best, standardised, inputs. Executive attention and bandwidth are limited....
#dreddit #economics #labour #complexity #information #systems #MarketForLemons #GreshamsLaw
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The Axial Age: Co-emergence of universal empires, religions, and trade & commerce -- Trust
...It is no accident that universal religions appeared when both empires and exchange networks reached to the edge of the known universe. Nor is it an accident that one of the earliest religions of this type, Zoroastrianism, appeared ... at the hub of trade routes that were weaving Afro-Eurasia into a single world system....
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/71a3tx/the_axial_age_coemergence_of_universal_empires/
#dreddit #AxialAge #religion #empire #trust #BigHistory #DavidChristian
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Banks as feudal lords: how the financial system extracts monopoly rents through network dynamics
...Instead of capitalism based on democratic principles of trade, it’s more of a feudal system: The land is owned by the banking class and anyone using it has to pay the owners. The “land,” in this case, is the entire U.S. financial system of banking and credit....
-- Heidi N. Moore's observation, on which I comment.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/71r2hd/banks_as_feudal_lords_how_the_financial_system/
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Sean Blanda: How online media are reducing trust
...Most outlets chasing reach leverage social media (mostly Facebook) to get content read by as many people as possible. This changes the reward from “quality” and “originality” to getting content to spread virally. This decreases trust.... [L]ots of disposable stuff is written quickly, with little regard to what it adds to discourse. This decreases trust....
Something of a theme.
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The Rise, Decline, and Decapitation of Progress -- A metaphorical journey through the Monkey Ward
...not only was Progress celebrated, but she was unambiguously linked to the concept of Commerce.
(Or, perhaps, was a convenient rationalisation for placing the body of a naked woman atop one of the Great Manly Spires of Industry, if you prefer alternative symbology.)...
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Emergencies, Response, Notification, and Bootstrapping
...Survival can be a matter of feet or inches, or of seconds or minutes. Information is useful to the extent that it is delivered to those who can and will act on it. What also needs to be recognised is that not engaging those who don't need to be mobilised at a particular point in time is also critical. How do you accomplish this given a crudely-targeted and narrow-bandwidth channel?...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/77sb25/emergencies_response_notification_and/