Slashdot Mirror
New Project To End Stupidity Online
mrneutron2003 writes to tell us that StupidFilter, a new Open Source project started by Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr, plans to provide an intellectual prophylactic for memetically transmitted diseases. "Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point. It's time to fight back."
... no wonder it's so quiet here.
From the project FAQ:
It brings up an interesting question, though. On my blog, I have two layers of filtering against spam, and I'll delete any spam that gets through. I'll also delete the insults and obvious trolls. But sometimes I'll leave the dumb comments intact. I don't know if it's pity, or the kind of amusement one gets out of, say, lolcats, or what.
What I want to know is who this evil Dr. Noone is and why she is allowed to deny things we mere mortals cannot.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
You AOL whores
StupidFilter promises to leverage techniques such as Beyesian filtering
And with that mistake, I'm now filtering out FastSilicon.
Never as now, has the phrase, "Nothing to see here. Move along" been more appropriate.
Ryan Fenton
Finally something that will prove the stupidity of that man-made global warming theory and remove it from the liberal religion!
"the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people"
First, BWAHAAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Second, it's not 1978 anymore.
-Rich Cook
Excuse me while I gather the virgin sacrifice and assemble the pentagram required to solve your problem
This just in: Natalie Portman, on behalf of the Hot Grits Council of America and in conjunction with the Reversalmasters of Soviet Russia, has released a statement crying out to end this First Postian genocide. "They are comments just like all the rest. Just because they were born in the mind of a less intelligent person does take away their inalienable rights of commentality."
I got a catholic block.
So, basically, this is going to compare every post against 4chan, and if it finds a match, delete it.
Great idea.
tits or GTFO.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I for one welcome ..[FILTERED]..
Perhaps slashdot should implement a requirement for writing a cogent, unique paragraph before it allows a user to have mod points. Then, if they also change the moderation to be accountable (no longer anonymous, and no longer scarce -- see Kuro5in.org for moderation technology that actually works), it might have a chance at being useful in the sense that one could actually use it to filter messages, instead of being relegated to endlessly observe people use mod points in place of actually expressing a counter opinion.
Then again, slashdot could continue on with completely broken moderation. I could see that as a possibility, given the existing sample set.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
They are going to unplug the internet.
Imagine an outbound firewall that poses a series of questions to anyone who tries to use it.
If you can't solve a grammar problem that requires you to know the difference between "their", "there", and "they're" you don't get to use email.
If you can't choose the correct definitions from multiple choices for "intellectual property", "piracy", "flame", and "rtfm" you don't get to use the web.
If you can't solve a quadratic equation, your computer is set to inbound traffic only.
Problem solved.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
The server at www.fastsilicon.com is taking too long to respond.
:(
Apparently not as fast as someone thought it was
Ok who is the wiseguy that is actually reading the article.
... too bad it'll never be able to detect irony. As a sarcastic person, I rely on savage mockery to let my hatred of idiocy show.
OMG U CN'T BLOCK M3!!!!!!!1111 I R SMARTER THAN U GHEYFAGS
I have this really funny quote that I like to put here. Unfortunately, there's this really annoying thing called a char
First they came for the cliches, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a cliche. Then they came for the memes...
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
So who gets to decide whats funny or not? You? Or me? Lots of people find "MOAR" to be funny. Suddenly their opinions are worthless because you don't? Isn't thinking like that whats really stupid?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I for one, welcome our stupid filt.......
[This post censored by StupidFilter v0.1 - Topic: Slashdot Memes.]
My blog
I hope they are very successful in their efforts. That's certainly a project I'll gladly contribute to.
"In case of emergency, break glass. Scream. Bleed to death."
To one side of the 'getting online safely test' are a bunch of random Google ads. One is for a "See Natalie Portman Naked! Click here! (requires installation of viewer software)" link.
We'll be nice and give them the benefit of the doubt -- they have to click on both that *and* the subsequent screen, that says, "install natalie.exe? Y/N" and only then does the shaped charge in the keyboard go off and blow off both their hands.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Looks like they managed to filter themselves...
Dvorak seen in New York City just outside Wall Street shoeless and holding a sign: "Will make wild, unsupported predictions for food."
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Not only does the stupidity filter help you rise to a higher echelon of intelligence, but it'll save you money, too! Your ISP will be happy to install the stupidity filter on your connection, and it's easy to sign up. Simply stop paying your Internet service bill, and your ISP will add the stupidity filter to your connection in no time! (Allow four to six weeks for delivery.)
In the case of this particular project, it's more about the manner of expression rather than the ideas expressed. A short comment consisting of OMGs, LOL's and emoticions, with "ur k3wl i lik ur site" would trip the filter, but (to quote the page again) it "will cheerfully approve an eloquent, properly-capitalized defense of mandatory, state-subsidized rocket-launcher ownership for all schoolchildren."
In theory, if the filter is trained properly, it should also be able to distinguish between non-native speakers who have only a smattering of English (or another target language) and those who write in 1337-5p3@k and SMS-style abbreviations. But that requires the people training it to make that distinction.
And it didn't even make the top 10 list!
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. (Oh dear, I wonder if any proponents of Intelligent Design have ever read Hitchhikers?)
If there were such a thing as an Online Stupid Filter, it would have filtered itself out of existence.
Due to many/most of its pages being references to suchlike aforementioned stupidity. A blue-light filter works by absorbing blue-light, a coffee-filter works by absorbing coffee (well, the grounds, at least) - any guess what a Stupid Filter absorbs?
Due to the vast majority of The Internet being not much more than stupidity, and in much the same way as a Black Hole will absorb all light and therefore be essentially invisible (we have never *found* a black hole, just a whole bunch of conditions which theory predicts would be "caused by black holes").
Seriously folks, The Stupidity Filter obviously doesn't work - the proof is in most comments on this page (present company excepted, naturally).
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
And you didn't link the actual website in the post. It's http://stupidfilter.org
Go ahead, slashdot me. I dare ya.
n savyet rusha, a chezbergur can has a lolcats!
Please stop stalking me, bro.
I think the internet is already full of test subjects... That's the whole point :)
Make SELinux enforcing again!
Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to XXXdangerXXX Stupidity. At the first hint of trouble, they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you. Ya know...Like comments from
Stupid people are so ingenious.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Yup. I thought that there might be a problem with trying to implement stupidity filters. I thought that if it actually worked at all, its first victim would be the stupidity filter itself.
'We have met the enemy...'
Best regards.
In a Moebius strip kind of way, this is on topic.
Why is there a big rectangle around parent's post? I don't recall that feature more than a month ago and I can't begin to figure out what FAQ it is under.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Skip the ad-laden overloaded blogodreck site and go directly to StupidFilter. The concept is straightforward - they're training a naive Bayesian classifier, like a spam filter, on a set of text excerpts rated by humans. You can look at random samples from the training set for amusement.
Wikipedia already has some 'bots that do somewhat similar things, looking for totally bogus edits and reverting them. Yahoo's "commercial intent" filter also does something like that, to separate commercial and non-commercial sites. We considered something like that for SiteTruth, where we need to distinguish non-commercial sites so we don't rate them by business criteria.
This approach to filtering will probably need domain-dependent filters. A political site, a social site, a sports site, and a game site all need different training sets. I'd go for a two-stage classifier, one that divided sites into about ten to twenty major categories, and then a stupidity filter trained for each of those categories.
Applying such a filter at blog posting time should be interesting.
And the characters in these books, and plays, and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate the very least he can do is to shut up. - Tom Lehrer.
We don't need to filter stupidity. That's easy. Both Slashdot and Wikipedia systems (albeit very different ones) do it very well. We need to filter misinformation, omissions, lies and logical fallacies instead. That's the hard part; because these often appear quite logical.
To verify this:
First, the rumours passed around from urban legends.
Now his SAT scores from CNN were 566 verbal and 640 math.
And from here we have a setup of pre-1974 SAT scores against IQ.
His score of 1206 combined sets him up with an IQ of about 130.
Now, from the IQ we can look at a distrubution of IQ versus percentage of people with such an IQ to see where a 130 IQ puts you, and it's in the top 2.5% of people.
Bush has been a terrible president and will probably be the first president to preside over 2 recessions but he isn't stupid.
This whole idea is just begging for the Rod Serling treatment.
... the Twilight Zone.
Meet Mssers. Ortiz and Starr, self-proclaimed protectors of members of society from their own stupidity. If they aren't careful, they may find that the only way to escape the negative characteristics to be found in all men is a trip to
1. This project is online
2. It's aim is to end stupidity online
3. But ending stupidity online would require the removal of this project.
4. Repeat, Recurse And Profit!!!
My brain hurts.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
For example Collaborative Filtering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering
A simple thumbs up or thumbs down for any particular link would be all that's needed to move the user further away from one statistical grouping and closer to another. Then everyone will be in a group of similarly intelligent people. Each page and each link on a page could be given and display for example, a likely percentage match (12%) with your preferences (89%).
It would require a shit load of servers to run the backend and a preference bar which can integrate with the browser. However, with billions of people in the world it's highly unlikely that any individual would end up in a grouping of 1.
Deleted
Anonymous moderation is subject to its own sets of abuses, but "accountable" moderation is no panacea.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I bailed on kuro5hin.org a couple of years ago. Basically, it had become popular enough and let people vote on enough things (what got published to what pages, etc), that it seemed that the teaming masses of idiots were running the place. And basically they were.
/. may suck, mostly the crap sinks to the bottom, and good responses float to the top. Especially if you change your modifiers so that responses marked mostly "Funny" are given -2 in your personal filter.
As much as some of the editors here are idiots. As much as they fail to edit. As much as they abuse their editorship (quips in the article, changing article text), they are also answerable to someone. And I think that's probably a good and important thing.
And as much as the mod system here at
When people will get this that Bush isn't that stupid. However, his and his "elite" reasoning seems very wrong to us. Why? Because they simply think and therefore act different. They are shortsighted, and this is a catch - lot of clever people have been. Cleverness and high IQ have nothing to do with skill of insight, skill of understanding balance of the world, skill of knowing how to vet out our opinion and not to be so righteous about it. Skill of understanding of giving something good and getting it back.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!