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Virus Scares and False Authority Syndrome
Fifth of Five writes: "Ran across this article on the IS-IT-TRUE.org site regarding False Authority Syndrome and the spread of virus misinformation by the media, users and Folks Who Probably Ought To Know Better. If you've ever watched the TV news and gritted your teeth over what is being presented as 'fact' this may shine some light on just how it got to be like this."
People keep on forgetting that public media is in the attention business ... it is in their economic interest to sensationalise news in order to flog those accompanying ads (a bit of a problem for CNN when there's no major wars going on). As such, manufactured fluff (ie press-releases) is easier to regurgitate than any in-depth research or second-hand opinions (syndicated columns). Historically public media was part and parcel of the lecture circuit (aka rubber chicken show) where you would invite real authorities and experts to come in and air their thoughts in a proper interview. However, two general trends mitigate against this ... the increasing complexity of real-world issues (anyone who thinks Middle-East is a simple case of good-guys/bad-guys is in deep trouble) which limits the potential audiences interested in understanding the issues, and the move to tabloid style audience capture which tends to confuse celebrity with fame. Why should sports-heros and actresses (apart from the convenience of recycling pre-existing studio contracts) be ask to comment on areas way outside their domain? Why should TV shows get people from the entertainment field to present business news (and you wonder why the stock market is irrational). Unfortunately those with real knowhow gained from the school of hard knocks tend to be people who charge for their services ... would you want a surgeon who has never practised on patients before so why are we willing to listen to highly filtered news passed along by talking heads? It's becoming nothing more than a massive Chinese whisper in a global cocktail party.
... the /. ask XYZ is a particularly good way for the plebs to touch some of the people involved in the thick of things.
... ultimately people have to realise there is a cost in misleading/diluted information (e.g. did anyone notice that the bard-wire concentration camp story that helped sparked the Balkans intervention and sundry bombings was filmed on the inside looking out?).
Fortunately we have some countervailing examples
LL
The economic models which are the equivalent of yelling "fire" as loudly as possible to rush people to newsfeeds are creating some really bad incentives
I must get warnings for "Wobbler" and "All Seeing Eye" sent to me by my [L]users all the time, but you know what? It's a fair cop.
.vbs files, I warn. And most of all, I know that many here will cringe when they read this, I actively encourage my [L]users to forward me all the warnings they get sent to them.
/dev/null.
I set up filters, I block the sending and receiving of all
Know why? After the 4th one I send back to them with an URL and a "Thanks, but that one was a hoax", they start to catch on (well... many of them do). Some also start to forward any and all messages with attached files to me if they weren't expecting them. Again, many here may cringe, my email box is huge and I spend hours each day weeding through false alarms sometimes. But IMHO it's worth it.
Do you know how many actual FULL outbreaks this company has seen in the last year? One. Back in November of last year. It was Navidad and it was sent to a Hispanic employee (the CFO actually... hehehehe) from a relative, and since it was near Xmas, well, I forgave him. AFTER I made HIM clean out his own machine and then lambasted him in front of the entire company. But when people first saw the SIRCAM virus come in, even users who had not read my warnings yet spotted it instantly and sent it to me. This was before I'd set our mail server to send all messages with "I hope you like the file that I sendo you" in the body to
All things considered, though, seeing as this office is almost entirely Windows, I think my methods work. Yes, it's time consuming. Yes, it can be annoying. BUT, I rarely have to restore from backup, and we haven't had any major outbreaks.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Being knowledgable of technical stuff like "what viruses can really do" is the specific domain of knowledge we slashdot readers have. This makes me wonder, not being an expert on many other things, just how much mis-information is propagated through the news. I never watch the news anymore. All you see are disaster reports and attempts to make 40-year-old, middle-class americans paranoid of something.
Possible TV News Headlines:"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
True - the trick is figuring out how to make the media cover the really important stories of our time (DCMA, censorship, etc) in a way that'll benefit us instead of hinder us. If they make $$ covering the really important stuff, cool. Yeah - its a dream , but hey you gotta dream! :)
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
False Authority Syndrome is hardly limited to computer technology and the Air Force. How many times have we seen some celebrity interviewed in the media or give testimony to congress on some topic that has nothing to do with their area of expertise. Why would anyone think that some actress knows anything about agribusiness because they played a farmer in a movie? Yet, the media eats such "celebrity experts" up. I know most of the sensible congressmen surely know that the celebrity "expert" congressional testimony is just a way to get free publicity for their committee, but why do so many people play along with that?
Scientists giving "expert opinions" outside their field of speciality is anouther common occurance (Carl Sagan comes to mind) in the media; perhaps because it is easier to know a handful of photogenic and cooperative scientists than to make a large number of contacts in different fields of research.
It seems to happen alot on slashdot, too.
Perhaps we should put useful biographical information in our sigs instead of cute sayings so that when someone with a degree in cognitive sciences is arguing with an aerospace engineer over spacecraft problems or adaptive behavior, we know which one to listen to at the time. I guess, perhaps that is what the User Info is for; but it doesn't seem to be used for that very often. Of course, if we get overly focused on "meatspace" identities, that might dampen otherwise productive discussions. Maybe different karma for different topics? Anyone have any ideas on how to minimize False Authority Syndrome on slashdot w/o introducing unneeded complexity or dampening useful dialog? Does it need worrying about?
Remember that the subjects of the experiment weren't lead to any actual wrong act. I've always heard this referred to as if it indicated exactly the same thing as it would when someone was really being tortured to death.
Whatever criteria the subjects actually used, the compliant ones came to the correct conclusion that it was okay to keep pressing the buttons. The disobedient ones either came to the incorrect conclusion that they would commit some crime, or the correct conclusion that this is what was truly expected of them from the experimenters. Too little is known to draw any valid conclusions from this, especially since it was obviously a psychological experiment to the subjects themselves (it just wasn't clear which experiment it was).
At any rate, this experiment was torture of its subjects as much as it would be if they were really giving the shocks. "Psychological experiments" like these are crimes, pure and simple, not to mention scientifically invalid smartass cracks about human nature.
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You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
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Before anyone posts some rant along the lines of ["They should have been smarter"|"They should have known better"|"Why are people so stupid as to fall for this all the time"], they should read this essay on Milgram's studies of authority. It's frightening.
The number was at Los Alamos national laboratory, and I decided that with my shiny new cell-phone with free long distance I would call the number.
Haha, much to my surprise, the woman picked up the phone, and I asked her if the email was true. She said it was and asked me to take the number off the mail if I sent it to anyone, because ever since that mail had gone out her phone had been ringing off the hook.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
ultracrepidarian: (n., adj.) a person who gives opinions beyond his scope of knowledge.
I'll have to add this to my top ten words to use when talking over somebody's head.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
You can't. Not only am I a geek, I'm a geek who flies planes. For both computer related stuff AND aviation related stuff, they get it completely and totally wrong. With aviation, they sensationalize even more than they do with anything to do with the 'net or computers, spouting opinions based on zero knowledge (and it shows).
I no longer watch the news on TV. Print news I feel is a little better depending on the source - it's not nearly as sensationalistic - but I still take everything with a big enough grain of salt that you could make a large livestock salt-lick out of it.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
A friend of mine in High School loved to ride BMX bicycles and worked in the local shop. Lots of young kids used to come in and ask him stupid questions and bug him to try to be cool like they though he was. One day a particular kid was really obnoxious asking all sorts of questions about how he wanted his bike to work just so, to which my friend, getting sick of this kid, finally said, "I know the problem, but we can't fix it. Go to XXX bike shop and tell them there's a nut loose behind the handlebars". Shop XXX was about 3 miles away down very busy roads. The next day he gets a realy nasty call from Shop XXX because apparently the kid didn't catch the joke and went up there to bug those guys.
Does the False Authority Syndrome include accepting Slashdot stories as fact too?
A few days ago, I was involved in a conversation with a computer neophyte after I had been off the net for a few days.
She told me she had heard of a new CD format that was supposed to copy-protect CD's by making them damage your stereo speakers.
Knowing quite a bit about the Red-book standard, I told her that such a format was impossible and that it was almost certainly a hoax.
Once I got back on the net and read about the Macro-vision scheme now in use in thousands of CD's, I had to call her and tell her that I was mistaken.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
"The media is always accurate, except when they're talking about things I know."
It's always a source of amazement to me how many people are capable of maintaining this perspective towards the media. I always try to think back to every single teeth-grinding, knee-gripping instance of media inaccuracy in a tech story whenever I'm exposed to a story on a subject on a topic which is unfamiliar to me.
Why do I say this? I work in a tech center. We do a lot of nifty complicated work usually involving a lot of computers and/or math. It's neat stuff, but not that hard to understand what it is even if you don't understand the details of it. (part prototyping, databases, 3d computer graphics, etc) Because of the kind of work we do, we are something of a showpiece for the company. We get reporters and TV crews coming through all the time. The visits usually go something like this:
Us: Here's this nifty complicated new piece of equipment that is going to help us make widgets faster, better and cheaper.
Then: Uh-huh. Can you turn the lights in the room down and stand over by the blinking lights? We need a picture.
Us: But those lights are the air conditioning system.
Them: Yeah but it looks cool and I didn't understand a word you said anyway.
They also have this peculiar fascination with taking pictures in low light conditions with glowing things. My wife worked in a lab where they used radioactive chemical markers for testing. They wanted to turn the lights down to get a picture of the spectrometer (which wasn't even in use) while showing someone handling radioactive chemicals in the dark. Very safe...
Needless to say, I don't watch the evening news anymore...
I love you google cache!
o :www.vmyths.com/fas/fas1.cfm+&hl=en (remove the space that /. so helpfully adds. ;)
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:ahVwga1Oq1
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
Does this ever happen where you work or go to school? I can count on one hand the number of times I have gathered around co-workers (only on one side, wouldn't want to block the camera) while they pointed at a screen. Yet this image has become almost universal in the media's coverage of computers and science!
The Boston Globe did a feature on a place I used to work. They tore the place up, taking pictures and disrupting everything.. and then people read the story thinking they just took candid pictures while everyone was working!
Hmm, being a physicist i even know how that superheated water thing works, you can heat water a little above the boiling point without it becoming steam. Only when you disturb it it will boil. Until then it's in an instable equilibrium state. The effect is even used in Bubble chambers: the disturbance by a charged particle is enough to result in a track of bubbles, thus making the particle visible (but be sure to get the timing of that photo right, or you could as well take a photo of your teapot). In chemistry we even learned to put something with an irregular surface in a testing tube before heating it, because it doesn't need a microwave for the effect, nor water. Any liquid being heated 'carefully' enough (and in a container with smooth enough surfaces e.g. glass) will do.
So i wouldn't have discounted that superheated water story anyway. But that also means, before accepting or discounting such a story one should think if one has expertise on the subject. By dismissing it all as a hoax you became the false authority. It's rather better to say "Well i don't know about that, i have to know more before making a statement", maybe followed by "but i don't believe in it". It's ok to have an opinion about the credibility of a statement, but it should be marked thus.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Or maybe this is that even more insidious virus/worm I've been hearing about, the /. effect...
I got the email about superheated water from your microwave, and how it could explode. Wrote back explaining, "No, mom. It's just another one of those hoaxes I keep telling you about." Sheesh, when will she learn.
Fast forward two weeks, I'm watching TV and see this interesting video ...
Well damn, how about that. [dial dial dial ... ring ... ring ]
Umm yeah, Mom? Sorry. You were right ...
Nope, no sig
The fact that the "teachers" in this experiment thought they were truly inflicting pain
That was exactly what I was calling into question. They hesitated and protested because they thought they might have been causing damage. The fact was that they weren't causing damage, and you can't say with certainty that they believed, in the balance of things, that they were causing damage.
They had many reasons to believe they weren't causing damage. First of all, it's a psychological experiment run by a reputable university. You expect all manner of wierdness, you don't expect maiming and killing; normal standards of recognizing an emergency would be suspended. Secondly, the torture scenario makes no sense at all. If the experimenter wanted to torture the subject, he could simply press the button himself, he didn't need help, and he was certainly in a better position to judge whether the subject was in danger. Evil is not sufficient to explain the situation, it would take a very bizarre, unheard-of form of insanity (have you ever heard of anything remotely like a maniac who hired someone and stood by them and tricked them into activating a device which tortures or kills their victim?); even a practical joke is a thousand times more likely. In the board-operator's mind, we're really looking at a dilemma: it sounds like the person's being hurt, but nothing else about the situation allows the possibility that the person is really being hurt (the readings on the intensity scale are subject to many interpretations; it only sounds ominous because it is presented as such).
However, the root reason to doubt that they believed they were causing damage is that there was no damage. Deception is hard. People take in hundreds of subtle indicators when evaluating the honesty of a claim, and they were taking direction from a person who knew exactly what was going on. The above reasons are just two more particularly obvious flaws of a poorly planned deception, there would unavoidably be many more, when trying to create such a ridiculous perception in the mind of the subjects.
Those who quit didn't do so because they were certain that they would cause serious damage to someone, and decided they didn't want to contribute to it. Instead, they knew something very weird was going on, knew that they were being deceived in one way or another, and didn't want to play along any more.
Note: damage. A little non-damaging pain is not a big deal. We put up with it when we get a needle or when we exercise or for a hundred other routine things. If your doctor told you to hold your child's arm while he inserted the needle, you'd do it, and not worry because it was a little pain for a good reason. If these people could be offended at the idea of causing mere pain in a consenting individual, they would have left as soon as their role was revealed, and the decision to ever press the button would be the big .
This is simply not science. It's a political statement at best, psychological torture at worst.
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You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.