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My previous job was at the U.S. Department of Energy, where I did web programming for them. Mostly placing huge databases on-line using Cold Fusion. For the last year I've also been a slashdot author/editor part-time, mostly posting YRO stories - encryption, free speech, privacy, etc. Prior that I was studying engineering; prior to that I was in the U.S. military. I turn 27 in a few days.
This job is not a programming job. Although I am fairly familiar with perl, the people working on slashcode and other projects for Andover/VA Linux/OSDN (even we don't know what to call it - OSDN is probably the current official name, but the stationery still says Andover on it...) would run rings around me, so it's doubtful that I could make much of a contribution right now.
Instead, and against all odds, this is a journalism job. This may seem odd for someone who has a partial quote from Kierkagaard as one of my random .sig quotes:
"The demoralization which comes from the press can be seen from this fact: There are not ten men in every generation who, socratically, are afraid of having a wrong opinion; but there are thousands and millions who are more frightened of standing alone, even with an opinion which is quite right, than of anything else. But when something is in the papers, it is eo ipso certain that there is always a good number of people having that opinion or about to express it.
Indeed, if the press were to hang a sign out like every other trade, it would have to read: Here men are demoralized in the shortest possible time on the largest possible scale for the smallest possible price.
What we need is Pythagorean silence. There is a far greater need for total-abstaining societies which would not read newspapers than for ones which do not drink alcohol.
When truth conquers with the help of 10 000 yelling men --even supposing that that which is victorious is a truth: with the form and manner of the victory a far greater untruth is victorious.
The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word "Journalist." ... If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced, I should not despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist, and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up."
Kierkagaard doesn't have a whole lot of faith in the press. Honestly, neither do I. Since I started paying attention to net-activism and politics (circa 1995), I've seen that most journalism is incredibly biased, based on lies and innuendo and press releases and product promotion. Any controversial issue is surrounded by at least two different sides telling stories that are, for the most part, entirely fabricated. Reporters are sometimes complicit in this, and sometimes simply lazy or misled. But the result is the same either way: readers get total crap, and are told it is unbiased reporting.
I hope to change that. Not by shooting all the other reporters in the world; that's too big of a job. Nor by trying to set a good example by being unbiased and impartial myself; that too is too big of a job. Instead I think what I will try to avoid is any suggestion that I am unbiased. Here, let's make it clear: I AM BIASED .
Here are some of my biases (partial list only, the slashdot database couldn't hold a full listing, nor could this keyboard withstand that many keystrokes):
- pro free speech - there's no substitute.
- pro encryption - see above item. Encrypted speech is speech.
- pro privacy - and pro privacy legislation, since self-help solutions are inadequate.
- pro Linux - but only because I think it's a good OS with lots of potential, I'm not a fanatic about it. I'm typing this on Win 98 right now.
- anti corporations - the mega-corps hate democracy, and they hate human rights. That's their nature - those things tend to get in the way of maximizing profits. The screwy thing is that many people are convinced we have to let them behave that way, like it's some kind of natural law. No. We don't.
- anti copyright, patents, and other forms of government monopolies - these do very little good in today's world. They need to be scaled back or eliminated. The original purpose of these monopolies was to make sure useful information was disseminated widely - that objective is now trivial with the advent of the internet. Yet copyright and patent laws keep expanding, not contracting. Why? Because if you make a fortune from a government monopoly, you have the money to lobby for a larger monopoly. It's a very dangerous feedback loop that must be broken.
- pro science, in all its forms - interesting science is interesting on its face and independent of what they're actually trying to achieve. I think I've given up on my boyhood dream of trying to go to space, but you never know - there's still enough time for me to make it out there if we got our act together.
I hope that's enough for a small taste. I'm trying to dispel all notion that I'm unbiased, or that I'll be presenting everything in an entirely unbiased fashion. If my biases totally offend you, you might want to go right now to your user preferences and check the box to block stories posted by me.
I do hope to avoid the worst excesses - the hatchet jobs, the total lies, the made-up stories. But I won't avoid those because I'm trying to be unbiased, I'll avoid those because they aren't fucking true. I'm a stickler for accuracy; it comes of being an INTP.
I took this job for a number of reasons. I had been at the DOE for three years; time for a change. I enjoyed the stuff I was doing part-time as a net activist and slashdot editor. They pay better than the DOE. It's a full-time telecommute job - I live in New York City, Andover is headquartered outside Boston. They're all good reasons. But probably the main reason is that I think this stuff is important. The next few years are going to determine the shape of the internet to come. It is quite possible that we could end up with a net that looks a lot like, say, cable television. A fair number of choices, but not one of them is anything other than mass-market pablum. Like most people, I want to make a difference in the world. I think that the opportunity exists here.
So, that should be enough about me. If you don't have a pretty good idea of where I'm coming from by now, you never will. Time for some questions to you.
What do you want out of slashdot? What would you like to see more of? What would you like to see less of? Again, my primary interests are in things loosely known as cyber-liberties and scientific endeavors - it is there that I'm most likely to be able and interested in making direct and meaningful changes in the content of slashdot.
I was about to do another list, of suggestions and what-not. But why put my thumb on the balance? I'll just ask again: what do you want to see out of slashdot, that you think I can do?
P.S.: Anyone in NYC want to get together and have a beer or something?
You seem to be focused on the granularity of the divisions. Clearly a balance is needed between 12 (horoscopes, generally useless) and 6 billion (pop. of Earth). Sure, everyone is unique, but everyone also shares common traits, often in predictable combinations.
But it still makes me uncomfortable. I mean, I don't mind classifying people as "men" or "women", or where there's some other clear distinction. But it seems that to fall into one MB pot or another might well depend on how you were feeling one particular day, or on exactly how the MB questions are phrased. Then there's the danger that people will make other judgements on you based on your MB result, which aren't entailed by the original answers you gave to the questions. Human nature makes this almost inevitable. This is the thing you mention about "being able to infer things about that person".
If there are 40 yes/no questions in the test, then you already throw away a lot of information by coallescing the answers. If you then map these 16 possibilities into "subversive" or "benign" ... I think you can see where I'm going. Sheer paranoia, but it makes me interested in people's views on this. And there's some semi-scientific backing for my viewpoint, in information theory.
In statistical terms, it would be much better to leave the results in the abstract space of 40 binary digits. You can then compare people statistically, and it may turn out that actually only half the "analysis" questions are correlated between people known a priori to be skilled with analysis, whereas the other half are not. Then you might learn something, not only about the people involved, but also about how people in a specific group might affect each other's personalities.
I'm going off on a tangent now, though ;) Did Meyers-Brigg do this sort of analysis to determine which questions belonged in the different categories, or did they just "decide" what the categories were and then "design" questions to place people into those categories?
.88 magnum -- it goes through schools.
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-- Danny Vermin
What would you like to see more of?
-- I would like to see more political stories.
What would you like to see less of?
-- FUD coming from our camp.
I think this is called Kuro5hin.
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Trying to use something like MB to drive HR decisions in a company, say, is asking for trouble. I've come across efforts of this kind - I was once even asked to work on a software project which involved developing interactive tests for certain kinds of financial trading skills, which I refused to do. The enormous problem with these tests is that they're only as good as the people who conceive, administer and interpret them. Also, anything like this being used in a business or government environment is invariably being pushed by someone with a financial interest, so it's not uncommon to see snake-oil tactics used to promote the systems, and that misinformation gets blindly incorporated into management's attitudes towards the testing system, resulting in further abuse and distortion.
But, also in my experience, people's bullshit detectors are usually good enough to prevent this kind of thing being taken too far, so I don't see these systems as much of a danger.
I don't know how Meyers-Brigg came up with their system. I'm sure they must have done some analysis! Social sciences and especially psychology don't easily lend themselves to rigorous solutions, though. Even the most basic assumptions can be questioned, you usually end up having to create some axioms, typically based on a combination of intuition, guesswork, and prevailing fashion. (The postmodernists would like that last part!)
What used to be great about slashdot was that Rob kept the users involved in the features he implemented. Now, he adds shit like bitchslapping and karma caps without giving a fuck whether or not the community approves of it. Sure, it's his site and people will keep coming back to read it, but he ought to be a little more considerate.
Also, I just noticed that you don't read comments under 1. I asked you a question posting as AC a few days ago, not a big deal but I'd be interested if you had an answer.
What do you want out of slashdot?
.. we are so busy pushing the technical limits of our world.. we may let it get legislated away. I am reminded of this slashdot article of Tim O'Reilly debating Q. Todd Dickinson and the thing that stuck with me about the debate(conversation?) was a statement by Dickinson where he basically said "Tim, I agree with you, where was your voice when we needed it to convince others." We had the Patent Office Director on our side, and he didn't hear a peep of support from us. Right or wrong, the responsibility for the problems in our realm of expertise may be our fault because WE DIDN'T STOP IT.
-- More than news!
What would you like to see more of?
-- I would like to see more political stories. I would love to see Slashdot used as a mobilization force for the geek voters of the world. With many geek disinterested and feeling that vote or not vote, not much will change, maybe it is time we flexed our muscle as a community. Nader anybody? Debates anybody?
What would you like to see less of?
-- FUD coming from our camp. I use linux on a daily basis, but if the day ever comes where I am spreading FUD about Windows - that may be the day I should be using Windows. (Just cause it is from our side, doesn't make it right)
Robert
^ This was all posted by a 19 year old - so feel free to dismiss it as silly. You may also feel free to plan your life around my posts.
It means that the test was unable to discern what you are. It may mean the test is broken, or that you are broken, or that you are "undifferentiated" (which is a fancy Jungian word for "immature". :)
The test, relying as it does on self-reporting, is not terribly robust. It is often thwarted and comes up with wrong or inconclusive answers.
If you are interested in understanding yourself from a MB Type perspective, I recommend reading Type profiles and/or getting skilled help. When a professional councillor does a Typing, they do not rely on the test alone: they have the subject read the associated profile to validate whether or not it's them. And it's reasonable common for someone to say "No, that's not me, try again."
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Yes. *yawn*.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
The quintissential example is pharmacuticals (drugs, for those of you in Rio Linda). You (or your company) spend 7 years and 100 Million dollars finding a drug which cures the common cold. It works in 99.44% of cases, and the FDA likes it. Producing this drug only costs (random guess) $0.01 per pill, and one pill will cure your cold for good.
So competitor company, let's call them MicroDrug, makes the same drug and sells it for $0.10 per pill. Consumers will gladly pay a dime (or quarter after middle-man and retail markup) to be rid of a cold at Christmas. But you have to charge a dollar a pill to make back the money you spent on research. So people don't buy your pills ('A buck, MicroDrug charges $0.15!!!! I'm not buying from that greedy bastard anymore, I'm sticking with MicroDrug.').
They buy MicroDrug's pills. And you go bankrupt. Which is too bad because you had some good ideas for a drug which might cure Alzheimer's disease, you just needed a few years and ten million dollars to make it work.
Yes, I know that drug companies aren't all saintly, I doubt if any are saintly. But it makes good business sense to do research on new drugs if you can recover those expenses and make a little money when you sell the researched drugs. Without a patent, or some way to restrict 'embrace and extend' by generic drug companies, the big researchers will not do research. Period. No more new drugs. The only research will be done in universities, and those wonderful people will not be able to do as much work as an entire company.
This is one example of why we need protection for the solutions of the second type of problem you noted, the ones where all the work is done up front in brains and computers, and the actual gains can be had quite easily.
Books are a good example too. Tom Clancy needs an economic incentive to write a sequel to The Bear and The Dragon. He does great amounts of work in creating the book, and I get the benefit in a few days by reading it. I don't like paying $20 for it, but the other options are illegal or take a few years.
If I am to pay less, and others are allowed to use it as the basis of their own work (GPL for books?), Mr. Clancy will still need a monetary incentive to write the book in the first place. How do we solve these problems? What ways are their to inexpensively obtain these works (drugs, books, software, engineering designs, music, etc.) while still providing an appropriate incentive to the people who do the hardest part of creating these things?
The only idea I have which might help solve this would have to be a small part of an overall solution, but we could have a Creation Cost (which could be amortized over the first production run) which the 'creator' would be guarantteed to receive. There would also be a Profit Sharing percentage, much like the residuals actors get when their shows run in syndication. (Trivia: the contracts the Star Wars cast signed for the first movie didn't have much in the way of provisions for residuals, which was fixed for the second and third movies. Um, fifth and sixth movies? Whatever. It seems that they saw the popularity the movies would have in the future.) So if your creation was immensely successful, you would get paid in proportion to how successful it was. Put both Creation Cost and Profit Sharing together, and you let a programmer sell her software for money she can count on, and if she did a good job and it get's really popular, she'll get more money.
I don't know if it would work, but it seems reasonable before holes have been shot all through it.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
The reason I ask is that many (smart) people rubbish horoscopes because they say "there are more than 12 types of people in the world". With 10 questions in 4 groups, that's still only - what - 10,000 types of people. I guess you need to map many onto one if you want to try and draw conclusions about personality types, but it's still not enough bits to make everybody unique.
But there we go - as for biases - I believe that everybody is unique. Not everybody does.
.88 magnum -- it goes through schools.
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-- Danny Vermin
It must be great to be so sure of yourself that you don't even have to consider dissenting views. I wish the world was as black and white from where I sit.
.88 magnum -- it goes through schools.
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It's a
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-- Danny Vermin
...provided you have an account.
<O
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
About the bias: anti-patents.
I understand the thought on ensuring wide disemination of information, but what about protecting the idea that took huge amounts of time, energy and money to generate? I'm not talking about One-Click shopping. I'm interested in drug research, specific genomic protocols, etc. Non-vague, specific patents on ideas and implementations that are non-obvious and take a lot of work to develop. How can your investment be protected without patents?
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
A few reasons. First, no two of the slashdot editors are in the same office (most of the time) - even Hemos has left the Geek Compound. Second, people resubmit the same stories dozens or hundreds of times - the typical scenario is that slashdot is quick on a story, all the other online media reports it the next day, and the newspapers report it the day after that - and we gets waves of submissions for each. For instance, the news about Rijndael being chosen for the AES (we posted it less than an hour after the announcement) will get resubmitted many, many times over the next few days as people discover it in various places and don't see a story on the homepage. Will one of the slashdot editors repost it, not having read the first story? I hope not! But I can't guarantee it.
Your first example is actually a good one. CmdrTaco's story doesn't use the word "Colossus", which I what I searched on before posting the story myself (to look for repeats, because it seemed vaguely familiar), nor is the URL identical (because the site puts tracking information in the URL). So it would be very difficult to discover the repetition through automated means, I needed to have actually *seen* the previous article and remembered it, which I hadn't.
We do usually try to make sure it isn't a duplicate. But no system is perfect. It's really a choice: you could have an editor which diligently checks all stories for duplicates (actually, you'd probably need three people working in shifts), but it would add a great deal of lag time to most stories. I think we'd rather cut things a little closer to the edge and accept the occasional duplicate.
*Shrug*. Other places post lots of duplicate stories, they just change the wording a little bit. Read about 20 stories from one news source regarding, say, Monica's dress, and you'll see how similar they are, how little new content is involved. Here, if we ever link to the same story twice, even years later, we've committed a grievous sin. It's not something we try to do, but I'm not going to get all upset about it either.
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
[for the humor-impaired: I'm joking, I know Cold Fusion is an application]
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We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
First off, Welcome.
Second, YRO is sort of odd category when you're not American, since a lot of the info doesn't really apply to me. I can comment and pat myself on the back for not moving there, but that's about it.
I realize that more readers here are probably from the US, but a little attention for the non-Yanks would be cool.
Actually, the one article I really love to see is one that compares all the internet-related/free speech laws in as many countries as realistically possible.
I can spell. I just can't type.
I think a distinction needs to be made here, and I congratulate you for making it. Slashdot doesn't exist to be a "general interest" news site, designed solely for getting the facts out. It is, as its tagline says, News for Nerds. Stuff that matters [to them]. You are rightfully biased, because that's what Slashdot exists for.
I write news shorts, based on the AP wire and Reuters reports, for our local newspaper. This job depends on being able to condense two pages worth of text into about 3 paragraphs, and I must still do it in an unbiased fashion (preserving the original author's meaning as well). This requires that I be unbiased, shrinking a story about Windows ME being released into the same balanced clump as I'd also shrink a story about a new Linux security hole.
In short, you're biased because you can be. Newswriters, in my [biased] opinion, should be unbiased because they have to be.
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I took the test at the site linked to from the INTP site and I was rated an INXP does the X mean that it just couldn't classify me, or am I just wierd :)
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Michael for President!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You asked if it seemed reasonable. You got an answer as silly as your question.
Look, there are many valid bases on which to criticise MB theory. Why don't you go find one?
And if you have a dissenting view, state it, don't frame it as a snarky question. Or at least realize that if you ask a snarky vapid question, you will get a snarky vapid answer.
Oops, I missed the ad hominem: "Heck, for your personality, I bet we could make do with only 3."
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I'm interested in this Meyers-Brigg stuff you mention. If you're an INTP that seems to imply (from the site you linked to) that you're highly analytical. So when you analyze the Meyers-Brigg stuff does it seem reasonable to you that a personality type can be encoded in this many bits? Information theory requires at least 33.
.88 magnum -- it goes through schools.
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It's a
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-- Danny Vermin