Slashdot Mirror
Eric Schmidt: Teens' Mistakes Will Never Go Away
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking at the Hay Festival in the U.K. this weekend, Google's Eric Schmidt spoke about the permanence of your online presence, and how that will affect kids growing up in an online world. 'We have never had a generation with a full photographic, digital record of what they did. We have a point at which we [Google] forget information we know about you because it is the right thing to do.' He makes the point that a lot of respectable, upstanding adults today had dubious incidents as kids and teenagers. They were able to grow up and move past those events, and society eventually forgot — but today, every notable misdeed is just a Google search away. CNET's coverage points out that 'mistakes' can often be events that put somebody's life on track. 'A word or an act can seem like a mistake when it happens — and even shortly afterward. In years to come, though, you might look back on it and see that, though it created friction and even hurt at the time, it served a higher and more character-forming purpose in the long run.' Of course, it's also true that some mistakes a simply indicators that somebody's a schmuck."
Schmidt also made an interesting comment in an interview with The Telegraph while he was in the U.K. He said, "You have to fight for your privacy, or you will lose it." This is quite different from his infamous 2009 remark: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
is many of them don't realize the long term ramifications of what they are making readily available online. They think that simply because they limit access to a few friends or don't tag the pictures with their names they are keeping things private. Coupled with a belief "people won't or don't care" makes them somewhat oblivious to the privacy issues. Unfortunately, when they don't get / lose a job because of something that was found online they will realize the importance; but it will be too late. Granted, people make mistakes and shouldn't bear the burden of them forever; but if given the choice between candidate A, where you can find those mistakes on line, and B, where you can't, B will generally win.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Kids of today will simply grow up to hold the attitude that literally everyone has made mistakes in their past, especially so while young, and most things a person did won't be held against them.
It will really be our generation that has the hardest time with this.
Both in expecting out of others what you are unable and unwilling to do yourself, as well as "losing out" due to the consequences of doing so.
Once that kid grows up and looks for a job, it will be those of us who are older who will still hold childhood mistakes against them and miss out of any and all benefits they would bring to the company.
At the same time that grown kid will not have similar issues applying for work with their peers, so those companies will gain and move ahead.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
It's not my quote, but Ghandi's, and it perfectly fits the current digital age. It's not the things that go well and without effort that make you, but it's the mistakes that make a difference, if you learn from them at least. And if you don't, well they make a difference as well of course, but not for the better.
On the other hand, online mistakes maybe follow you along. If you can handle them at a later age, it might be no different than now. Pictures are another thing however. They make an impression that is not easily forgotten.
What he said is true, information doesn't just disappear, but this is hardly news. We've known that information is persistent since before social networking was a thing.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Bill Gates and to a large extent MS is now harmless, I propose Slashdot make Schmidt and/or a google logo the new Borge story icon...
The people doing the hiring probably did something stupid as kids or in college, and given a few years, the kids doing job searches now will b hiring managers and HR people and the system will learn to adapt and what to ignore and what to take seriously...everybody fucks up once in a while but we just put our dirty laundry on youtube now.
so nobody will give a crap about "minor" stuff in 10 years. it's crap overload.
nobody gives a crap about pamela anderson sex vid even now, mind you. that's not what defines her.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
When social networking was getting started with Myspace, Webshots, and Facebook around 2005 and 2006, the sentiment of most of the people involved was that society would adopt a new standard of acceptance. The idea was that since virtually every teenager was posting photos of drinking and sex, that society would come to understand that these are normal behaviors that are not to be considered shameful or "mistakes".
Unfortunately, that's not how things worked out. Society refused to change its standards. The teens were forced to close their webshots accounts. Facebook pages became largely private. And parents resorted to authoritarian threats like "if you post drinking photos online then you'll never get a good job". Schmidt's comments strike me as just another one of these authoritarian threats...
Everyone is expected to be perfect all of the time.
...I just don't get how holding a smartphone during a bong session is not the ultimate party foul.
As if anyone with any intelligence uses Google, that's why he is that neck of the woods
Grow up google you are just garbage collectors, i.e. garbo's
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...at least judging by the admittedly small pool of middle schoolers that my kids are friends with.
They flat out think it is stupid, and for old people. Don't know any high schoolers except for the former baby sitter - she seemed to indicate that high school kids were only using Facebook due to peer pressure.
While highly unscientific, *if* this is a general trend it does not indicate a long term growth path for Facebook in their current incarnation. I guess at that point they simply drop the social networking facade for their data collection activities and reveal themselves to be the massive advertising targeting and analytics firm that they really are, plus they start to sell off the impressive portfolio of technology they have developed (which alone is worth billions).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Attitudes will have to adjust. The days of firing someone because you find a youthful indiscretion online will end with gen Y EXCEPT where there is political motivation to crucify someone.
Actually, this might be a good thing. See, up until now, human beings have engaged repeatedly in trying to cover up their mistakes; this would not be such an issue if it did not require making more mistakes.
By allowing for a more accurate record of mistakes, society will be forced to evolve beyond its current idiotic game of 'hide the sin, then seize the moral high ground' which many of its officers currently engage in. The only potential problem are the paranoid powerful ones who think ghosts are chasing them seeking vengeance for their past actions -> they're the ones likely to set a match to civilization to try and burn any copies of their past mistakes. "Though no one is chasing them, they still run."
But then, the human ego is a delicate thing, and much of humanity has evolved to be a social species...like coral....so the thought of the scrutiny of the world, tempered like a blade, suddenly thrust upon a single person, is perhaps too much to bear.
I am John Hurt.
The digital record may fossilize kids reputation in adolescence. But the ability to reinvent oneself has always been somewhat limited. We have been putting kids in jail for a long time now for adolescent misbehavior. That criminal record has followed them for life. To some extent, protecting kids from the consequences of adolescent behavior has been a luxury for those with sufficient resources to do so. For many parents and children that has never really been possible. It may no longer be possible for anyone.
I have to respect Eric Schmidt for having sufficient character to change his position on people being able to protect their privacy.
I'm sure Steve Ballmer's quadrocopter buzzing his house several times a day had nothing to do with his change of heart ...
Kids of today will simply grow up to hold the attitude that literally everyone has made mistakes in their past, especially so while young, and most things a person did won't be held against them.
Everyone already considers mistakes done as a toddler irrelevant, and most do so for mistakes done as a preteen as well.
This will just push the age limit for acceptability of "sins of youth" further.
At the same time, it will shine some light on what we as a society are willing to forgive and forget on account of "being young and crazy".
My guess... Drinking, drugs, questionable fashion choices in the form of tattoos and piercings... maybe even some small crimes like shoplifting.
On the other hand, serious crimes probably won't be so easily forgiven.
But the most fun bit to watch will be what happens to the cases where one's old beliefs, ideas and words are brought back years later.
Will it be OK for a young boy/man to join a radical group based on some rather violent ideas he, as an angry teenager, believes to be true, and later realizing how nonsensical it all was to just move on - or will he have no other choice but to stick with that crowd his entire life as it's the only group that will accept him?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
All religions are belief systems (B.S.), but not all belief systems are religions.
(emacs vs. vi not withstanding) Endless wars are best fought with editors.
Set up an account for your children/teenagers with a variant of their last name. So if they're "Michael Johnson," use "Michael John" on Facebook. Their friends will still understand who it is. Your kids will thank you when they grow up.
As a parent, this has been my concern for some time. My wife and I have decided never to refer to our daughter by her real name online. We never post photos of her anywhere. As she grows older, we are going to teach her to minimize her online presence and warn her that future employers or colleges may request her passwords to various social media sites to learn more about her. However, you cannot completely control what other people post about you. In fact, if you post nothing about yourself online, then what other people post may have a disproportionate impact. However, it seems to me that people who have a common name (ie John Smith) will have an advantage over other people. This leads me to believe that, in the future, a lot of people will be changing their names to something more common to restore some of their privacy.
They'll be the only ones without an online record of all the stupid stuff they did as teens.
in his 1999 comment: "Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching." --Thomas Jefferson
The digital age really doesn't change how our history follows us around. Ask anyone from a small town in North America, they will tell you that all their neighbours and potential employers know about the mistakes and pranks they participated in when they were young. For generations people have remarked, "Oh, there goes Jimmy, the kid who stole my apples," or "Sally, here, once broke my window." The community doesn't forget.
The digital age may have expanded coverage to a wider audience, but it's essentially the same thing.
Schmidt also made an interesting comment in an interview with The Telegraph while he was in the U.K. He said, "You have to fight for your privacy, or you will lose it." This is quite different from his infamous 2009 remark: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
sounds like a passing google maps car must have caught him flashing in a public park
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
He said, "You have to fight for your privacy, or you will lose it." This is quite different from his infamous 2009 remark: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Different and yet the same. These two statements are simply reflections of the current reality.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Drones, spying and hacking, data leaks and data dumps all can affect him and he's realising that he's just as vulnerable as the pleb and, being more wealthy, a bigger target whose acts WILL be spread far and wide to denigrate him.
So maybe he's realising that privacy is something HE values and that telling people "you shouldn't have anything to hide" is not in his personal best interests.
That's right we must all be careful about what we say and who knows a good event from a mistake. I mean honest to god before I dropped that sugar cube and saw the blinding white light and spoke directly to god and new all of the absolute truths I couldn't even see through concrete and draw the steel beams that compose the core of the building. Now everything is so clear. And it is so quick compared to scientology. And I do regret killing those people but once one has seen the absolute truth common folk are so annoying that I just snap now and then. May the great hum of the universe be within your socks at all times.
Back when the Internet was a new thing, I remember the cartoon of the dogs on a computer with the caption, On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog.
Unfortunately, this is not true any more. The hive mind of the Internet never seems to forget and this may have consequences we can not even imagine yet. I am now in my mid sixties and have seen the world change from where the mistakes of youth did not come back to haunt you in latter life. I doubt that this will be true for anyone growing up now.
One of the things not often appreciated is just how much my country, The United States, owes to people who came here in order to leave their past behind and start over. Even in our country, until very recently, it was possible to begin anew and leave the past behind. Yes, there were some negative aspects of this. I am sure that there are unsolved crimes committed by the ones that "got away". One of the popular genres of TV shows is that of solving cold cases. However, the benefit of being able to "start over" seems to outweigh the risk of those that get away. Even in law there are Statute of Limitations for most crimes and sometimes I think the Internet needs a statute of limitations on how long it "remembers" some things.
Making mistakes is a part of learning and growing up. A person in their teens is not the same person in their late twenties, and by the time they are in their fifties or beyond they have probably changed again. Giving people the room and freedom to grow and start over is as important to society as almost anything.
As the engineers I used to work with often said about a failed rocket launch, "we learn the most from our mistakes - they blow up."
For those of us who worked on some of the old "Big Iron" mainframe systems we can remember that most forms of storage required specifying a retention date or retention period. After which time the data would be deleted. If one needed the data the owner could change the date before it was deleted. I think that some sort of retention period should be applied to all social media sites, and other sites that hold personal information. Perhaps we should start a Give the Internet Amnesia movement!
Bad experiences can be character-forming, but character forming goes both ways.
Employers look at a person's history while hiring. A person with a clear history or a history of positive contributions is going to have a leg up when it comes to securing employment. A person which has a history of negative decisions is going to have less success securing employment.
Making everyone's life an open book doesn't solve that problem because it is based upon a bunch of false premisses. It is based upon the make-believe notion that everyone makes mistakes, and the fictional notion that everyone makes similar types of mistakes.
First of all, some people make far fewer mistakes than other people. A person who studied hard in college is probably going to frown upon a person who partied hard in college. A person who steered clear of drugs is probably going to look down upon a person who got sucked in by drugs. Even if the person who made irresponsible decisions turned their life around, the person who demonstrated responsibility throughout their life may still hold a dim view of them.
Even if people made mistakes in similar quantities, different types of mistakes have different social stigmas. A teenager caught DUI may be branded, but a lot of people will overlook that 10 years down the road because a lot of teenagers do stupid things. If that teenager killed a person while DUI they will be branded for life. Same mistake, different outcome, different social stigma. Don't think that stuff like that is posted online? Think again. People post videos of assaults and rapes online then harass the victim over it (a teen in my area recently killed herself because of that).
So yeah, posting mistakes online is an issue.
The people doing the hiring probably did something stupid as kids or in college, and given a few years, the kids doing job searches now will b hiring managers and HR people and the system will learn to adapt and what to ignore and what to take seriously...everybody fucks up once in a while but we just put our dirty laundry on youtube now.
A more likely outcome is that upper echelon positions would be recruited from socially conservative groups who are not only socially conservative in public, but also socially conservative in private.
These could be ex-employees or early retirement employees of agencies known for strongly vetting their employees backgrounds. For example, there's a reason that the CIA and FBI tend to disproportionately recruit from socially conservative groups like the LDS church. The primary reason for this is they don't want anything in their employees past that the agency or the employees family doesn't already know about being potentially used as leverage and.or blackmail material which could then be used to compromise the agency.
After the scandals of prior years, it's no error that Sharlene Wells was crowned Miss America in 1985 to have at least term of someone socially conservative enough to avoid causing a new scandal before the pageant repaired its ailing reputation from the Vanessa Williams scandal of 1984. They wanted a "Good Mormon Girl" who wouldn't make waves.
Make a mistake as a teen, and you could find yourself barred from the upper reached of money-based power, especially if you compound the mistake by recording it in publicly visible social media.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Like so many, he is mistaking "anyone" for "everyone".
I have tons of things I don't want everyone to know, though I don't mind of some specific people do.
We all have.
And then there's degrees. I don't mind telling people about some of the mistakes I made. I don't see why I should go into the details. I don't make a secret of who I'm with or who I've been with, but I wouldn't want to have a list published somewhere. I'm sure even Schmidt or Zuckerberg don't want videos of their last night of sex online for the world to see, even though they'll probably have no problem saying that they've had sex that night on public TV. But there are degrees of disclosure and privacy.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
... just think about their policy of enforcing real name accounts on G+, youtube ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
[Schmidt] said, "You have to fight for your privacy, or you will lose it." This is quite different from his infamous 2009 remark: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Explanation: Schmidt did something in the intervening time that he doesn't want anyone to know about.
...get to 40 years old, then get over yourself.
The stuff in my life is of deep interest and importance to me, I don't for one minute believe any of it is of much interest to anyone else.
There's far too many talentless schmucks already parading themselves in front of me constantly vying for my attention on TV, advertising billboards and just about anywhere else I rest my eyes these days. Everyone else can get to the queue behind them, I'll get around to them at the point when my life becomes so boring that I have to poke my snout into the lives of others in order to feel I'm achieving something.
I actually take great pride in anonymity and having enough self-confidence just to go do what makes me happy without giving a flying f*ck what anyone else thinks - yep, it took middle age to discover that fully.
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.
"You have to fight for your privacy or you will lose it," to my enormous corporation that I built on the premise of collecting as much private information about you as I can, so I can sell it to the highest bidder.
If Eric cares so much about privacy (and I promise you he doesn't), he wouldn't be part of Google.
not only what we did will be on record forever but also what others said we had done.
"This is quite different from his infamous 2009 remark"
Maybe that was the event to put his life back on track.
Can someone tell me? He didn't invent Google and while there he didn't invent squat at Google He was brought on ONLY because the VC behind Google insisted that Larry and Serge could not act as CEOs for Google when it was starting. Larry and Serge then went through a long list of candidates, rejecting them all, because they're, you know souless suits. Finally they took on Schmidt because time was running out and they had to take on someone. Before that, Schmidt had been a typical middle manager of no distinction.
While at Google Schmidt's main concern was to tell his longtime wife they were now in an open marriage and start dating hot girls with drug problems for whom he paid for drug rehab and jetting around to Burning Man and generally getting a second crack at being the cool kid everyone wanted to hang out with in high school. . When he wasn't thus engaged, he was saying things which Google had to back peddle on and which indicated that Schmidt was a shallow, coarse, unintelligent asshole.
So why when her talks does anyone care? He's a vacant careerist of no distinction and less character who through a stroke of enormous good luck fell very far upwards in life.
It's all publicly available information and anyone who knows the history of Google from just the popular press knows it's all true, never mind people who know the back story to all of the above who we can presume can't stand the site of the guy.
Please, Slashdot, no more Eric Schmidt said "blah" stories, OK?
She's an entertainer. Entertainers get away with shit that a corporate cube drone can't.
We drones have to deal with "fitting into the culture" or "having the right character" or "representing the company the right way"
Just look how many folks who have stated that Steve Jobs was unemployable. If he wasn't where he was, he'd be working at a coffee shop or something. Actually, most entrepreneurs can be described like that.
You want a job any of those companies on the S&P 500 - Google included, you better keep your online reputation squeaky clean.
The only solution to escaping the US paranoia is to emigrate to a free country such as Canada and upon arrival, change your name (and if you happen to be Canadian, just swap US and Canada around in the previous sentence).
So Google is going to become the new "Permanent Record" bogey-man... just like the arrest and mug-shot sites that put up names and photos of recent arrests and mug-shots and "offer" to make those photos go away if you pay a little something...
Or expedite the "going away" of those photos if you pay a little more.
Sad world. Sad concept.
Just because Schmidt 'the idiot' of Google sez forget about your privacy (and no matter how frequently he bleats it) is no reason to take him at his word. We have rights beyond those he believes in, inalienable rights. I read about them somewhere.
Maybe Mr. Scmidt could take responsibility for taking down defamatory posts and videos of youmg people's mistakes.
I have a stalker and You Tube refuses to take down a defamatory video that he posted.
The online record he bemoans is something he is creating. He doesn't have to. He can take moral responsibility for it.
All this information is being used to deny as much opportunity to as many people as the laws allow (read: get away with). After all, if opportunity werre truly equal, too many people will be on the top and the who system collapses..,.
That's right, true risk is that not wanting to have (or even "not willing to spill every moment to it") a Facebook page will be considered as "suspicious"
all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ (Romans 3:23-4)
How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? (Matthew 7:4)
Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire. (Revelation 20:11-55)
Search engines do weight more recent information. And they seem to drop older stuff. I had seme early usenet I posted under my full name (thats what college accoutns did back then). I cant really find it anymore. Nor little of my internet activities from the 1990s.
If anyone else had said "you have to fight for your privacy or you will lose it," it would have sounded like folksy advice. Coming from Schmidt, it sounds more like a threat or a challenge.
"You know, your girlfriend is hot. You should keep her happy or someone else might sweep her away. I'm just saying, you know, I wouldn't but someone might, it's just that she's really, really hot, I mean smoking. I mean, damn, you know? Just treat her right, that's all I'm saying. Yeah."
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
If we're right that most kids will share youthful indiscretions in a long-term way... then that will be the new normal. Employers that want to hire college kids 10-15 years from now will have essentially no choice but to hire people with pasts that have been made public.
The only real problem I see is that, at least for this generation of middle and high schoolers, decisions they make when they are too young to understand long-term consequences will be even higher stakes than they are now. The kids with the "cleanest" histories will perhaps tend to get the best jobs.
But as our collective memory improves, things we pretend are exceptional (kids who make stupid decisions, drink underage, or do other "socially unacceptable" things) will simply get re-examined. No company that wishes to compete will be able to make overmuch of such common things.
Cause yours is the second reply that got the point wrong.
But since I am lazy... I'll refer you to this post for most of it and just reply to things specific to your post here.
Sorry. It's late here and I'd like to get some sleep.
Personally, I do not have a problem with any of these. While I have done these in my past, (except the tattoos and piercing) and I still drink (but no longer to excess) They can now and in the future cost you a job; even at a future "young person" company. It is one thing to hire some of these people in the IT industry that most
Sometimes they will just be needed to meet with clients. Even as a developer, I have needed to do this... One ex-employer specifically told me (after I was hired) that after technical interviews I was essentially hired, and the face to face interview was only to prove that I "clean cut." If I had tats, noticeable piercing, or even body odor, it would have killed the deal. The fact is if you meet with clients you represent the company, and they want a professional image.
Remember, the professional image is more than skin deep. If a client or customer loses your business card and/or contact information, they may google your name to try to find it. (or may do this just because they can...) If they do not like what they see, they will contact the business owner, and you will be forced to work on a different account, or if there is not enough work, you will be let go. You are only employed to bring value to a company. If you can do this or if others do it much better, do not expect to be employed very long.
Read my reply I linked above? Good.
Now... think about a society where tattoos and piercings are ubiquitous, say... as being black or female.
Then, replace instances of tattoos or piercings being mentioned in your quote with nouns "black" or "woman" or "gay" or "handicapped".
Yeah... It's that kind of a thing.
On a side note, I have neither nor do I find them appealing (still talking about tattoos and piercings)... but looking around, both are considered perfectly normal and akin to jewelery today.
Not something reserved only for sailors and savages anymore.
If their clients are not as open-minded
Clients are as open minded as the society they come from is. Again... not today.
Generation or two down the road. Maybe sooner. Who knows.
Like I said... Today tattoos are like... pierced ears 20-30 years back. Short skirts on girls and long hair on guys before that.
Or oral sex today.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If you have ever stated this, online, then [url=http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/04/23/Feldmar/]all bets are off[/url].
"The only winning move is not to play."
The threat here is not that you won't be able to live down your past in a social context. Your childish antics will be remembered forever, but so what?
The real threat here is that your entire post history will be easily searchable and scrutinized by automated systems that will make decisions about whether or not to even bother passing your application along to the hiring manager, insurer, loan officer, etc... It removes your ability to lie about your past, and in many cases lying is a good thing to be able to do. In a world where your lies are instantly able to be fact-checked you need to be constantly assessing everything you say and do for PC compliance or risk being effectively banned from real life. Lies aside, it removes the ability for you to lay low and let your past be forgotten. Mankind did not evolve with perfect photographic memory for the masses. Perhaps because being unable to forget the past is not a survival trait. Likely it was our ability to forgive and forget that enabled us to form civilization in the first place.
To anyone reading this, bank on society changing to accept nude pics and drug use if you want, but the reality is that the people in power today will be in power tomorrow and for the next 20 to 60 years depending on if they are forced to retire or choose to work til they drop. Society might eventually adapt, but in many parts of the US seeing a black man with a white woman is still a spectacle worthy of speculation.
easier to retrain society to ignore OLD gossip, than to keep old deeds from becomming known through technology. If it can be done, it will be done.
One post on a random website -no matter the content- is woefully inadequate information by which to judge someone.
Exactly, and if a prospective employer decides it's appropriate to judge you on a soundbite you should make certain that the prying bastard is the one who ends up feeling embarrassed and awkward. Don't even bother trying to defend whatever past behavior they are accusing you of, turn it around and make them defend their current behavior. You probably won't get the job, but nobody ever said principles are cheap.
Having said that I can also see that if someone self-identifies as a YEC, it disqualifies them from certain tasks. If someone has preyed on children in the past, it disqualifies them from working with children. For many jobs background checks are in fact proper due diligence, unfortunately there are a lot of self-important people who turn that genuine need into a disingenuous and hypocritical witch hunt.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"If he/she keeps that private and nobody ever figures it out, and his math and physics is solid, no problem with it."
In all honesty, though, I rather doubt you will find many Young Earthers who otherwise demonstrate solid grasps of math and physics... since math and physics pretty much rule out the Young Earth hypothesis. In fairness I suppose that in large part it's more just a failure or refusal to examine the actual evidence. But in some ways that's just as bad.
I'm curious Jane, what's your job? - I only ask because on the subject of AGW your "grasp of math and physics" is just as far away from well established science as those of a YEC. I'm not trying to pick a fight here, I firmly believe nobody is immune to self delusion, 35yrs ago I was totally convinced Uri Geller was genuine, after all he "fixed my watch" by staring into the TV for 30 seconds. In 1980 I was interested enough in climate change to pick up a book (about tress) and start following the subject, due to a mixture of ignorance and deliberate misinformation campaigns I remained unconvinced CO2 was a serious problem for almost a decade after Hansen's now famous Senate testimony and the establishment of the IPCC.
Having been a victim of at least one case of severe self delusion, I can attest to the fact it is really easy to spot in others and really hard to see in yourself, this is especially true if you are a "smart person", most (honest) magicians will tell you "smart people" are counter-intuitively the easiest to fool, reason being they carry more prior assumptions than others as to how the universe ticks, it means the focus of their attention is more predictable and therefore more easily redirected.
As an independent observer who also feels obliged to pontificate on the social utility of the scientific method and the role of skepticism in it, I think that both yourself and the YEC cling to your contrarian views because you have neglected the most essential part of the art of skepticism, namely self-skepticism. The only scientific difference I see between a YEC's ideas on evolution and your ideas on AGW is the subject matter, but even that is similar since they are both heavily tilted towards geology and related Earth sciences.
Disclaimer: I offer this post as unwanted advice rather than an unwanted flame.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Someone will have none of that.
Agreeing. So... decadent.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it." -- Albert Einstein
Casteism
There is a simple solution, ban the use of real names.
No one is allowed to use their real name online or be identified.
Everyone must be an anonymous coward.
That picture may look like it is of you, but it was probably shopped, you did not do whatever naughty thing that video implies you did.
it's not just what you're doing online
120 drug arrests in the last twenty years what chance do I have for getting a job ,none so their is never any point in giving up I will live with poverty and homlessness 4the rest of made
my life shame the reason for my addiction is the police beat me up and caused me to lose the best job I eva had and
unemployable.ILive a life of eternal punishment because of their mistakes.
I think a lot of hiring processes end up rejecting good candidates and eventually hiring poor ones based on process at this point. I know this is asking too much of HR types, but at some point you have to realize that it's better to know that a person owns up to their actions rather than hiding them constantly.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Come up with a new form of socially available media that has a life expectancy. Built in bit rot. Stop making the cloud the cesspool for society's irresponsibility. You want a family archive, archive it at home. Also give people the right and power to purge any or all of their social content from the internet. With the advent of IPv6, give every piece of social media its own unique IP, and if the owner says its no longer available, poof, it goes away. A content owner should have that right. We have the technology, it would just take bucking controlling governments and avaricious corporations to make it so. Anyone for a really cool Open Source projects... a new Open Privacy standard... well who's interested?
The unfortunate thing is, *anything* we place online (including, for me, this post) can and will be used against us in some court of opinion. We have the right to be silent... And on, and on, blah, blah, blah. Because I heard again about the poor cruise ship aflame this morning, I searched Bing for stories of cruise ship safety. Bang! What'm I doing? Plotting against cruise ships? Well, heck, at least interested in ads for cruise ships. No stone left unturned.