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'There's No Good Way To Kill a Bad Idea' (qz.com)
The world is filled with bad, baseless, factually inaccurate ideas that refuse to die. From an article: Philosopher Russell Blackford, a lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia, tweeted about this phenomenon earlier this month: "The momentum behind bad ideas can be enormous -- they can plunge on, gathering force, long after receiving devastating criticism." If you've ever found yourself unable to halt someone else's idiotic plans once they were already in motion, you're not alone. Whether you're a politician trying to make congress see sense or simply a manager trying to halt an atrocious team-building plan, there's simply no foolproof way to kill a terrible idea. Blackford blames the momentum behind bad ideas on cascade effects. Yes, individuals are prone to making poor decisions for emotional or biased reasons (known as "cognitive heuristics") and this irrationality is part of the problem. But there's also a broader sociological issue, in that others' opinions carry a huge amount of weight in influencing our views. A cultural consensus -- even without proper evidence -- can form pretty quickly. If one person convinces a second, says Blackford, then a third person will be far more likely to agree with the majority view. This effect exponentially increases with each person who agrees with the others. "We soon have a sociological effect whereby everyone knows that, say, a certain movie is very good or very bad, even though everyone might have 'known' the exact opposite if only a few early voices had been different," says Blackford.
Like, for example, unicode?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The previous story about "Modern Languages"?
*cough* Global Warming Alarmism *cough*
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, we did derail the whole Clinton train for a while. That has to count for something. But whether we successfully killed it, time will tell.
BTW, it looks like the Internet Archive now has most of the "Shattered" book online if you're feeling ghoulish.
https://archive.org/details/ShatteredInsideHillaryClintonsDoomedCampaign
I don't know about you, but to me, 174 Petawatts of untapped energy seems like it should be able to power the planet. Sure, one has to determine how one stores-up energy to use when the planet's rotation obscures the sun, but given that fossil-fuel-based power required all sorts of intermediate steps to get where we are today anyway, this does not seem like an impossible task.
There are more ways of storing potential energy than chemical batteries.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Nope. We have great examples after great examples of people doing what "sounds good", which ends up fucking up everyone else. See Venezuela and Bernie's pride in that country's socialism (before it collapsed) ..
“These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger.”
Socialism is a proven failure, time and again.Yet it "sounds good" and that is enough to keep in propped up on college campuses and dens of Liberals everywhere.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It doesn't. Not at all.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Agile is a manifesto, nothing but good ideas, nothing to argue with really.
Agile as practiced is an excuse. Terrible idea to give management an excuse to just 'fake it'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There's a bit more to it. An alderman around here once said: "There is tremendous pressure to build concensus and get something going, and the effort to reach an agreement on how to proceed is considerable. Once that has happened there is no going back, even if everyone thinks the agreement is shit. And in politics, everyone is focused on passing motions, any motion, the contents do not matter all that much, let alone that we ever evaluate the effectiveness later on"
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Affordable compared to what? What's the cost difference between building a massive solar plant that stores energy in the form of some kind of superheated substrate to emit that heat back to generate power, plus the maintenance of that facility, compared to the cost to build and fuel a power plant that burns fossil fuel?
No one is expecting fossil fuel plants to just be switched off, what most expect is to build new plants of new types to replace old plants as they're increasingly nonviable.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Socialism always leads to collapse of the economy, as people figure out how to game the system. Because it hasn't collapsed everywhere yet, actually goes exactly to the article's premise.
Functioning society doesn't require socialism at all. It requires social contracts of approved behavior, and enforcement of those rules. The problem is, we have a bunch of people who think that rules don't apply to them because the rules are "oppressive". Well duh, rules are oppressive to people who don't want to be bound by them.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It depends on what that idea is.
If you're painting a wall, and a bunch of people want pale yellow and you want pale blue, then you're correct. There are lots of situations in this world where being exactly right, whatever that 'right' may be, is less important than simply coming to a consensus and moving forward.
However, if a bunch of people think vaccines cause autism or are otherwise far more dangerous than the illnesses that they prevent, that is unequivocally wrong. There isn't even a question. They are wrong. Period. And yet, these wrong people will dig in their heels and not change their mind no matter how much evidence you put in front of them.
The movie example is good as an illustration of the social pattern the author is trying to convey. However, the message gets lost if you focus too closely on the example itself. People have different opinions about movies, but no one truly gives a shit what anyone's given opinion is cause... well... it's just a movie. But if you extend the example to more serious problems, such as whether it's a good idea to build a ginormous wall spanning half the continent, then yes, whether the idea is 'good' or not becomes a heck of a lot more important.
Socialism always leads to collapse of the economy, as people figure out how to game the system. Because it hasn't collapsed everywhere yet, actually goes exactly to the article's premise.
That's an assertion that has been made un-falsifiable by weasel-wording. You could say the same thing about anything. Democracy. Speaking French. Taxing liquor sales.
"Democracy always leads to collapse of the economy, as people figure out how to game the system. Because it hasn't collapsed everywhere yet, actually goes exactly to the article's premise." What, some democracies haven't collapsed? That just proves my point!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I use this example when talking to people about anti-vaxxers. You can't just say vaccines don't cause autism. You are much better off talking about how bad the diseases are that can be cured by vaccines. Alternatively, you could talk about the research on the efficacy of vaccines in preventing diseases, or even just discuss the history of vaccines and Jonas Salk. What you can't do, is tell somebody "not X." All they hear is "X." Then I tell my friend who I am explaining this to, "Did you know that JFK was not a homosexual?" And whoever I'm talking to, no matter their political bent, instantly starts thinking, "wait... was he?"
By stating the opposite of a thing, you reinforce the original thing -- even if they weren't thinking about it in the first place! Imagine how much stronger that reinforcement is, if they already had that notion.
I forget where I first learned this trick. Probably on this godforsaken forum. But it always causes people to realize they have been arguing with others the wrong way. If you know somebody is wrong, you can deflect to something you know is right. You can ask them to elaborate on exactly how they know the thing they say they know. You can try to find common ground. You can state facts that support a counterargument, and let them connect the dots. But if you just say the opposite of their argument, you will not succeed.
It's a hard lesson to remember and use in real life, because human nature is to say "nu-uh." But if you can do a little verbal jujitsu, you are much more likely to succeed in getting people to see your point of view.
(I just noticed this whole post is sort of meta, since I'm disagreeing with the premise of the article without actually saying so.)
religious brainwashing early in life. Innocent children are taught that they should be unquestioningly accepting of wacky ideas just because their elders seem to believe them. Their natural scepticism is denounced as heresy.
The whole idea that anything should just be accepted as a matter of faith is a threat to democracy. Sunday school is clearly a form of child abuse. (even when it's done on Saturday)
... the gods themselves contend in vain, Schiller said.
But maybe not. I just finished Hanah Arendt's famous Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, about the abduction and trial of the former SS officer who was in charge of "evacuating" Jews to the death camps. Eichmann claimed -- probably truthfully -- to be horrified and distressed when he saw what was happening in the extermination camps. But his horror was greatly mollified at the a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee in which many important and respectable people discussed the Final Solution frankly and unabashedly, as if it were no big deal.
Arendt also points out something interesting about Denmark, a country which was under total military domination by the Third Reich but in which society from the King down resisted the expulsion of Jews. Not only were the Germans unable to expel even stateless Jews from Denmark, confirmed SS officers posted to Denmark would suddenly become unreliable on the Jewish Question.
This suggests to me that when you feel like you're powerless against stupid or even evil ideas, there is always something you can do that can be very powerful: you can set an example.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Socialism always leads to collapse of the economy, as people figure out how to game the system.
That might just be an example of a bad idea that there's no good way to kill. :)
Modern humans have been around for somewhere around 200,000 years and human civilization has been around for a few thousand years depending how you count. But can you point to any "economy" at all that has existed unchanged from anywhere near that long?
Will the economy of, say, Denmark collapse eventually? Maybe. Or maybe Denmark's economy will survive until we all link up our separate consciousnesses into a single collective consciousness at which point the kinds of economies that exist now may no longer be relevant.
Certainly, it would be wonderful to live in a world where essentially no one was trapped in poverty. As it is, somewhere around 20,000 children die of poverty - everything from malnutrition to lack of childhood vaccinations. What if that number could be much lower?
What if we could create a socialist economy (where no one was trapped in poverty) that lasted for a hundred years. And then once that economy collapsed we could create a new economy that lasted for another hundred years, etc? Or maybe, fifty years from now we'll finally have accumulated enough knowledge about human sociology that we could create a socialist economy that would never collapse.
Fundamentally, we just don't know whether it would be possible for the whole world to be like Denmark - now or sometime in the future. Anyone who claims to know with absolute certainty whether it would be possible is deluding themselves - and others.