Not for the first time in the last 13 months I wonder why I decided to incorporate my business in Nevada.
Talk about the epitome of a law designed to make it harder for small businesses to survive. Do the idiots that passed this law realize that 99 percent of businesses in the United States are small business with 20 employees or less? Small businesses who live on the knife edge of financial survival and who don't have the financial luxury of IT departments with nothing better to do with their time than network with $250/hour legal counselors to help them wade through the technical and legal questions of ensuring this kind of security.
And how many of that 99 percent are too damn busy doing 1001 other things that they aren't going to be know how to set up an RSS feed to get the latest from Slashdot and similar places.
Much less keep up with the 100,000 or so pages of federal, state, regulations put into play every frigging year.
I incorporated in Nevada in part because I thought Nevada was slightly less insane than other states in this regard.
Silly me. The only thing I was right about was the "slightly."
Is this really something you want to outright *teach*? I think it's best to let some learn for themselves but give them "encouragement" along the way. I think if you teach it you end up with people who are overly skeptical because they seem to never develop the key ingredient of skepticism: critical thinking. It seems, at least from my experience, that people who have the "take everything with a grain of salt" line of reasoning pounded into them lose the ability to know when they have crossed the line from being a skeptic to someone to whom no amount of reasoning, facts or other data can move from their position as they will dismiss it due to their continuing to follow their teaching beyond the letter. If they learn on their own and build it up with experience then the seem less likely to fall into this mode.
Well put.
The real question is whether the tools of higher-order judgment can be taught. The issue isn't whether people are skeptical or not, credulous or not, optimistic or not, pessimisistic or not. The question is "how much" of each of these things people are. No one has time to take everything to first principles. Everyone must trust someone about something, whether it's the received view of books published by Harvard and Oxford, the abilities of a colleague in a lab, or the person who wrote the "help" files for your computer file or your tax return software.
Or to go back to the title of the original thread, can figuring out what a "healthy dose" is actually be taught?
Yes and no. If I didn't believe that some of this was possible I wouldn't be wasting my time right now writing a book on the subject. However, it is very easy for those of us who would have "critical thinking" or "skepticism" or whatever be "taught," to fool ourselves about the role the "teacher" plays.
Because true judgment means being "properly" skeptical not just of President Bush or crank scientists or my mother's opinions on Mexican-Americans -- those parts are easy. True judgment means being properly skeptical about those who are telling you to be skeptical and giving you the tools of critical thinking and the scientific method.
Because so much of judgment comes out of experience, we tend to forget that experience is not always a transferable good. Just because I've been teaching for 20 years, or because you've been an engineer or a highly acclaimed scientist with a Nobel prize, doesn't mean I or your judgment should be cloned by my students.
Indeed, our experience -- even our "skepticism" experience -- can be particularly blinding. Holders of PhDs are not immune to the distraction of what Captain Renault called "rounding up the usual suspects"; in fact they especially susceptible to it.
I firmly believe that four years of quality "higher education" can yield 22-year-olds who have better judgment (i.e., not just possessing more thinking skills, but thinking better) than they had at age 18, and do so regardless of how much the 18-year-olds prior education/socialization sucked. But I don't believe the route to doing so lies in attempting to make them into little clones of me.
Because this isn't about choosing reason over faith. Its about choosing which moments to be thinking and applying a particular critical method, and which moments to be trusting and "having faith". And THAT includes choosing when to listen to the "voice of greater experience", and when to tell that voice to get stuffed.
I agree with much of what you say, but I should point out that I've had the dubious privilege of (directly) witnessing a friend's genuinely cutting edge research suffer at the hands of her PhD supervisor and his similarly politically aligned cronies, all of whom shared vested interests in burying her research. This isn't sour grapes - she tried again, ten years later, and succeeded. The contribution made by her original work was noted.
However, politics is a genuine issue in academia, particularly in high-status environments where a lot of research funding is available.
Another factor is that, if the research is genuinely original, your 'expert' peers may not, in fact, be so. It takes effort to understand any complex body of information, even when the system under scrutiny stays within mainstream boundaries. Good points all. Well said.
When interpretation is costly (as it always is), that makes for opportunities for the corrupt, the incompetent, the vested interests, and all the rest to get in the way. Why won't junk mail (or junk science, or junk academics) go away any time soon? Partly because the costs of information interpretation mean some of us will always end up listening (giving power to) those corrupt, incompetent, etc. And partly because we ought to listen to some of our unsolicited mail.
Your friend's example is not an isolated one. Alas. I wish I had a solution -- my only suggestion is that we focus on making as much as possible as transparent as possible -- sharing the stories like those of your friend, shedding as bright lights as possible on those who are corrupt, incompetent, and vested. That way, maybe, instead of your friend having to wait 10 years for her deserved recognition, she might only have to wait 5-7.
As you say, the more original you are, the harder it is to find "expert peers". Despite my multitude of advanced degrees and published papers, and 20 years as a teacher, i've never been comfortable with those who would call me "expert". I sometimes wonder if we put too much emphasis on creating (and then worshipping) experts...and not enough on creating more peers.
Some might ask, but isn't that what education is about? Not often. Almost all of our current educational system is joined at the hip with the "expert" model. A model that sees information as something that trickles down from those who have it (experts and teachers) to those who haven't (students and other ignoramati). Whereas the better model is one that sees information as something that increases via exchange and all its associated messiness.
Sorry, I've gone off on my hobby horse again, haven't I?
Printing may have been cheap for centuries but distribution is another matter. Information on the web is indexed by search engines and accessible to anyone with an uncensored net connection, ie, most of us. This is one rather large change.
The internet has made the transmission and distribution of information cheap. I would go so far as to say nearly free.
However, there remains one very large barrier to the use of that information: the recipient still bears the burden of evaluating and interpreting it. Access is cheap. Assessment is still expensive. Search engines, broadband, all the amazing technology of my MacBookPro and its software haven't solved the real problem: How the heck do I decide which information matters?
In fact, if anything, the glut of cheap information makes it harder for effective assessment, not easier. Ever try to concentrate when fifty people are shouting at you?
Where does this leave the academic journal? I'm not sure, but I'm skeptical. The academic journal and, more importantly, the institutions of the larger academic system which use it as an indicator of intellectual worth, are profoundly limited. Every discipline I know has examples of what would eventually become foundational articles that get rejected over and over again by the arbiters of mainstream intellectual and scientific fashion. More seriously, thousands of valuable assistant professors have likely had their careers and ideals misshaped by the pursuit of publish-or-perish. And perhaps most importantly of all, there is the real problem of timely responsiveness. When the world and its needs are changing, and accelerating, as fast as today's, institutions of interpretation -- must move and adapt fast.
And quick adaptation is not something that the academic world is at all good at.
Yet, the marketplace of ideas does still require filters. I have a great deal of faith in markets, especially as the cheap information of the Internet age makes those markets more and more responsive to people's desires and needs. Yet the effectiveness of markets remains constrained by the limits of those very desires and needs. Deference to peer review when all of your peers are sophomores ("sophisticated morons") is not going to help very much. Ignorance shared is still ignorance.
In its editors and referees, the current journal system has a group of people with very high level filtering expertise. Whatever new institutions that replace the academic journal must replace that filtering expertise. Search engines, etc., can't do that. Sophomores can't do that.
I don't mean to deify those editors and referees. They aren't the only ones with the expertise, or even necessarily the ones with the most expertise. But its sometimes hard for people outside the system to understand how much of their time and effort those editors and referees have to allocate, to do that filtering, to to develop the skills that make their filtering expert, and to assess and evaluate their fellow filterers.
True "deep" peer review requires all three things, and all three things take a lot of time and expense. Time and expense that aren't significantly reduced just because the cost of information transmission has started to approach zero.
Pedantry?
I have no illusions who would lose a group of 100 armed men came to harm me. I would.
But who is going to protect me from the group of armed men that the modern state can send against me?
Slashdotters' penchant for pendantry strikes again. If a 100 armed men came to harm you or your family, your.45 colt would be worthless. Only the military and police would be able to handle them. In case they are not on time to defend you, the offenders will be punished on your behalf. It works like this: you pay taxes and in return, the govt protects you and your right to control your property through law. If you don't believe me, read up some history of life of common people in the 1400s or so.
It's only through govt force, humans are able to prevent other humans and animals from encroaching on their property.
And who is more likely to attempt to exercise force against me? Hint: Which group feels comfortable passing something like 70,000 pages of small-print text every year to regulate it's "people's" conduct, every last one of which it has the power to enforce with force? And sets up most of those 70,000 pages so they require a waiver of "sovereign immunity" or some such before they apply to it and its agents? And at the same time sets up most of those rules so that neither you nor I can claim "ignorance of the law" as an excuse.
Last I knew, none of these were the random action of 100 armed bandits existing outside the government.
Oh yes, regarding your sneer at my knowledge of the past. During work on my PhD in history, I seem to recall more than a few books and articles noting that the life of "common people" c. 1400 or so was less in danger from force exerted by private bandits than it was from force exerted by the legitimated governments of the day (kings, nobles, lords of the manor, and the like).
Were I a "common person" from rural Europe somewhere c. 1400, I would have been less worried about the depredations of bandits than about my lord's willingness to make war on his own or his lord's behalf. War that typically not only offered me lots of extra ways to get killed violently, but invariably destroyed my fields and food supplies and put my female relatives at extra risk.
Do we need police? Yes. Do we need a government apparatus that publishes the Code of Federal Regulations in a few hundred extra volumes every year, plus state and local laws/ordinances/regulations to enable that police protection?
Call me pedant or other names if you must. But I think not.
Property - any kind of property - isn't a natural right. It can be enforced only by force. which either means you have a government to enforce property rights, or else that the guy with the bigger gun takes your property off you.
Huh? My neighbors are going to be surprised that the only way they can keep me out of their yard or their teenage daughter's bedrooms are by force. Is it the government's threat of force that stops me from taking my.45 Colt Commander and guzzling booze obnoxiously on one elderly neighbor's deck at 3 a.m. or stopping by another for a little fun with that cute little 16-year-old down the block?
I think not.
Oh, to be sure, having the police power of the State behind them will help protect them against some obnoxious louts and child molestors. But most of us are neither lout nor molestors. We respect each other's property "rights" a great deal regardless of the threat of force.
An anarchist society cannot survive much inequity. If people can accumulate property, what happens is that the most ruthless just grab everything, leaving everyone else with nothing. And because the ruthless started out by grabbing all the weapons, there isn't much anyone else can do about it. The word for that is 'feudalism' or 'tyrrany', not 'anarchism'.
Funny thing about tyranny. It requires collaboration to succeed. If Bill Gates owned all the property in the world, and all the guns, could he really do anything he wants?
If 6 billion unarmed people are on one side and one person and 6 billion guns are on the other side, does the one person really have all the power? For some reason I don't think so.
Having a monopoly over instruments of force certainly makes it easier to accumulate property. But there are limits.
The question is, where and when do those limits start to come into play? Can an anarchic society survive (or, perhaps a better way to put it, tolerate) more inequity than a non-anarchic one?
This doesn't mean that I think you can't have a stable anarchist society, or that I don't believe a stable anarchist society would be a good thing; but you can't say 'there aren't any laws except the law of property'. That doesn't work. You need a whole government infrastructure just to enforce that, and once you've got a government infrastructure it will aggregate more power to itself - that's the nature of government.
Agree mostly, at least on the nature of government power to increase and on the need for something more than "the law of property" for a stable society. Though, obviously with my handle, I'm unlikely to agree about the necessity of "a whole government infrastructure.":)
Land without people belongs to that state of constant warfare called "nature" where territory is marked with urine and feces - in other words, the Anarchist Utopia.
Land is without value until a human does something with it. Sets it aside as a park, parks a tank on it to keep Anarchists out of the park, grows a garden beside the park, digs a mine under the park, or otherwise uses the land.
To avoid running short of urine and feces, humans have invented various methods of marking territory. "Nebo, protect my boundary stone" is the meaning of the name "Nebuchadnezzar." Moving a boundary stone was punishable by death!
This was an early and brutal reflection of a fundamental truth, good fences make good neighbors. The fences don't have to be physical unless some agents human or animal cannot respect Property.
Even the Berlin Wall was built to make people respect property rights: the State owned the people and could not have them wandering away like errant livestock.
The alternative to Property is the alternative to Civilization, that is constant warfare and death liberally strewn with urine and feces. Purely animal existence.
It should be legal to shoot adult Anarchists. And obviously I am talking about the capital-A variety not jazz musicians! Children should at least be exposed to History to prevent their becoming dead meat^H^H^H^H adult Anarchists.
Well, I guess I'm stupid.
Anarchy-as-chaos is a straw man.
People too often confuse the need for order with the need for law (or worse, the need for the state).
Now, order does require mechanisms/institutions for enforcement. There are bad guys and gals out there who will do nasty things if we let them. Order requires police or some other institution that serves the policing and adjudicatory functions (a Godfather, competing for-profit protection agencies and courts, arbitration and mediation, the "Coordinator" of Modesitt's Adiamante, etc etc).
And those who do the policing and adjudicating need some rules to guide them. I agree there, too. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that some of those rules are rules must be rules of "property" (more about that in a paragraph or two).
Most anarchists (other than the ones who throw little round black bombs in old cartoons) agree with the need for order. And we also agree with the need for policing and adjudicating institutions. However we tend to trust order that develops spontaneously over that which arises from the State's monopoly force or the threat of force. I for one reject the vision of a world without Leviathan as a world where life will be solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.
It is by no means empirically shown that concentrating power in a "democratic" state "of the people" leads to better order. How many deaths and maimings and destroyed families and wasted resources have accompanied the "participatory" governments in the twentieth century? How can people be so certain that anarchy would have been worse than our collective legitimation of governments that gave us the battle of the Somme, the Holocaust, Stalin, apartheid, and all the rest.
Even the cliche-ed anarchist with the little black bomb can't do the damage that the real fascists have. Which was worse, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand? Or the Battle of the Somme? Which was worse, 9/11... or the wars/state-supported-conflict of the world since 9/11? Should the possibility that a loon like Osama bin Laden gets a briefcase bomb cause us more fear than the world had when the US and USSR held it hostage under the doctrines of MAD?
Bah.
Which brings me to the issue at hand, that of property....Here, anarchists are as divided as everyone else. Because, like everyone else, they seem to spend a lot of time talking about "rights", when in fact the question of property is a question about power.
When we talk about rights we usually end up emphasizing entitlement. E.g.,the right of free sp
Both impossible. You cannot "get rid" of the fact that some people are good at convincing others to do this instead of that (rhetorics, ergo politics, ergo state), and you also cannot "get rid" of the fact A will do 'x' for B so long as B does 'y' to A (goods and services exchanges, ergo capitalism, which happens with or without a currency system).
You can switch from individuals to collective committees doing this, or from collective committees to even bigger groups, but things will stay the same: the member who doesn't comply with the group decision is obliged by their peers to comply (police force, thus state); a group representative will try to convince other groups representatives (politics); a group will make deals with other groups towards the exchange of mutually beneficial goods and services (capitalism); and so on and so forth.
Anarchism is in practice nothing more than political power done in different, less clear ways. Everything is still there, only with different and much murkier names.
Nope.
That's like saying the vision of the 9th and 10th Amendments was equivalent to Bentham's. There is a difference between a system designed to enable people to have power and a system designed to limit people's ability to have power.
Insofar as "the group" insists on seeing the law as a way of "getting things done" (Bentham's vision), you are correct. Because then law is just about the projection of power.
But the group need not view the law in such a fashion. I'll go so far as to say that political power can be embedded in a matter of persuasion (pure democracy); but persuasion need not be based on power.
As Smith noticed in his best book (Theory of Moral Sentiments), persuasion can also be based on sympathy. Fellow feeling. Not just convincing someone to gang up with you on person #3.
Yes, public opinion can be tyrannical. Social stigma, shunning, gossip, all those things can make life uncomfortable, even miserable. But without the legitimation of coercion that comes with consent to the state, the oddball retains choice.
Add state power to the mix, however, and its another matter.
I grew up in a small village. They are far from the idyllic places that the senator "from" New York or similar twits claim. They can be hellish for anyone with a bit of creativity or interest in something different. But its a heckuva lot easier to run away from a village than it is to run away from the US Army and the Homeland Security and the Congress of the United States.
What America has lost sight of since the Madisonian experiment is that the solution to the misuse of power by some is not the increasing of power for others. It is keeping a limitation on the power of any. The flaw of democracy is the flaw of Magna Carta: you don't solve the problem by replacing one boss with another boss. You solve the problem by eliminating bosses.
And replacing them with contractual arrangements. Not that silly notion of a "social contract" -- you don't "agree" to a contractual obligation just by occupying a particular geographic location. Agreement requires some positive act or assertion on your part. A real contract, one where you and the other agree to incur specific opportunity costs in exchange for benefit that exceeds the value of those costs.
Sure, some people are better at persuading than others. But the persuasion of a contract is fundamentally different than the persuasion of an armored battalion.
When the armor gets involved, it gets real hard to be free about deciding on who you choose to have as "peers".
Murkiness can be a good thing. Battalions of tanks aren't murky. Microsoft isn't murky. Stalin wasn't murky. The Patriot Act isn't murky. Korematsu v. United States wasn't murky.
erp.. Had meant to add, "Wait a minute, I _am_ an anarchist." at the end.
But then I got distracted and hit submit.
You confused me with the "get rid of capitalism" part, I think. I never know quite what people mean by that. If it means get rid of the perpetual lives with which the corporate form entrenches particular "capitalists" in their power, I'm with you. If it means getting rid of market-based institutions, I'm not.
(And I've both practiced law and the teaching of economics, too.)
I'll take your word on the letter of the law -- I don't practice anymore and even when I did "competition" law wasn't my main shtick. But, whatever the letter might be, _interpretation_ of the law is not an equal opportunity endeavor.
The problem is that litigants don't come to the bar with the same bankroll. When the law requires a court to interpret it (by figuring out which piece of the law is fit by the facts, etc.), the advantage goes to the rich Mary Kay and her pink cadillacs. They can afford to push things through court, deal with the delays, vendors (E-bay) not dealing with you, etc etc in the meantime. The evil little salon can't.
Depend on the courts to define what constitutes competitive behavior and what constitutes naughtiness not to be allowed is like requiring the pit bull to be the one to prove Michael Vick is guilty of conspiracy to electrocute.
After all, a pit bull owner is not necessarily an abuser of his dog.
Were I an anarchist I'd be tempted to stamp QED in big red letters as my response.
The only thing that would have been better is had the author used the Patriot Act as an example of how government can get things done when it has to.
Others have talked about Sarbanes Oxley, so I'll skip the inanity of that in a world where Mega Corp can afford the extra accountants/consultants/lawyers/PR people to find loopholes and manipulate the damn thing.
But the "stop telemarketers law"? That was really great, wasn't it. We don't have to listen to a zillion ads for scam products by enterprises who at least are constrained by the price mechanism.
Instead, we get to listen to a zillion-squared ads for scam artist politicians who cant get a day job other than lobbying other scam artist politicians to steal our money in taxes for their stupid ideas that they couldn't get us to pay for otherwise.
Neat wasn't it, how the law to end obtrusive telemarketing had this minor little exception for "not-for-profits."
I can't help remembering a fragment of Robert Heinlein's _Expanded Universe_, something lik "can you remember anything of value coming out the Washington Beltway in the last 40 years?" Only problem is -- he wrote the darn thing 27 years ago. No one was listening then, Saint Robert. And, alas, no one is listening now. Though I suppose we Heinlein fans could start telemarketing. Hmm.
No. Better not. Can't afford the accountants to make sure my company accounting is all straight or the lawyers to keep me out of Gitmo.
Yeah, I know. I'm just bitter... for being too damn stupid to be a good enough con man to have political influence.
Pre- 1990 or so (the Econ 101 story): 1. Information, valuable or crap, was relatively expensive to acquire. 2. Advertising served a useful function of reducing the cost of information acquisition. (Relative to, e.g., going to a mall and comparison shopping at X>1 stores.
Post-1995 or so: 3. Information is virtually free to acquire. 4. Crap information is a lot cheaper to provide than valuable information. (The latter requires research, for example, or long conversations with techies trying to translate tech into terms rest of us can understand.) 5. Interpreting information (figuring out whether information is crap or not) is more expensive than just being a sponge for crap while staring at pictures of women with great legs. Result: advertising much more likely to be useless, pain-in-the-ass crap.
Sigh.
On the positive side, we do get to see a lot of pictures of women with great legs.
>quote> and as a result every day more and more people are falling for faith healers and the like. /begin rant
And more and more scientists/technologists (they aren't the same, after all) are forgetting that faith in something is an unavoidable part of living, working, and playing.
It might be faith in reason, in the "scientific" method, and "empirical" evidence. But it is still faith. No scientist, and no engineer, can take every assumption back to first principles. Or does. No empirical evidence is more than a sample from the larger, perhaps more varying, universe.
Don't get me wrong. The capacity of people to be deluded by charlatans (/see, generally, much of the programming on the Trinity Network) is doubtless growing. But its a problem far bigger than mere ignorance of science. And far, far bigger, than a failure to access scientific journals.
And, while I share your dismay about the inaccessibility of those scientific journals, even did we make them all freely available it wouldn't significantly reduce the ignorance. Because those who write for scientific journals are so caught up with their intellectual superiority and their disciplinary expertise, that they don't bother trying to write for a larger educated audience (much less try toconnect with the masses). Except in the abysmally written literary institution called a "textbook", which no one in their right mind would spend time on except insofar as they can't avoid it (because it is required by their teacher or for a job).
You want to know why no one reads any more? Because their damn teachers have been talking out of both sides of their mouths since they were in first grade (and for today's young, since pre-school). We (the teachers) have been ranting all these years about how important it is to read, have quantitative skils, etc etc, all the while emphasizing reading of that which is horribly written. And rightly, they stopped listening to us.
I've been a teacher for 20 years. I have a bachelors degree, a masters degree, and two degrees that allow me to call myself "doctor." Big effing deal.
I've also been a reader of non-textbooks and non-university press books and non-scholarly journals for more than twice that period. I've been a fan and reader of science since, well, since I could read. But not because of my exposure to the scientific method in elementary, secondary, or higher "education." But because I was lucky enough, somehow, to fall into the pages of Heinlein and Niven and Gibson and Sterling and dozens of other science fiction readers. And because no one stopped me from reading the crap (whose names fortunately are largely forgotten) along the way in my "free" time.
Along the way I've been duped by charlatans of "faith" and charlatans of "science." (I know at least one L. Ron Hubbard novel I've read multiple times!) Alas. But those charlatans have done far less damage to me, or to others, than I and my teaching and researching colleagues have done with all our degrees and our scientific pomposity.
If you want to know the cause of the dupability (is that a word, I wonder?) of the "people," don't blame libraries and don't blame the greedy journals and don't even blame the stupid politicians and funding agencies. Blame the teachers and the other pretentious, arrogant "experts".
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You may not believe, as I do, in a god that "passes all understanding" (Phillipians 4:7), but put it in scientific terms: Compared to what we don't know about the universe, all the knowledge of all the Nobel Laureates and all the understanding reflected in the existing archives of scientific journals can't be seen under our most powerful electron microscope.
We of the degreed classes have gotten so caught up in the little bit of our understanding, that we have forgotten the cosmic scale of our ignorance./end rant
The myth is that we choose between "republicans" and "democrats", or between "liberals" and "conservatives.
The reality is that our choice has morphed. The only real alternatives remaining are anarchism and fascism. And my money would be on fascism. Cheap information plus majoritarianism that gives the franchise to the mob means less and less check on the "there oughta be a law" impulse. As long as the mob sees the state as the source of bread and circuses, it will be conned by the Hillarys and Dubyas of the world. As long as we give our attention -- and our money -- to those who would improve our lives by restricting our choices, we will be susceptible to the fascist.
The key, ISTM, is how long we trust the state. We make much noise about how untrustworthy, corrupt, venal, disgusting (add adjectives as needed here) politicians are. The fact of the matter, however, is that "we, the people" continue to trust politicians. We bitched and moaned about Bill, but our solution was George? We may bitch and moan about George, but our solution to George is Hlilary?
I'm a copywriter. Did you know 12.5 percent of all junk mail sent out in this country is fundraising. And the bulk of that is for "political action". All good mail copy appeals to one or more emotions of the recipient. But there are a lot of emotions out there to appeal from. Why, then, do you suppose the great majority of political junk mail is based on the single emotion of fear?
Because, I am sad to say, it's the one that works best: We must be afraid. Very afraid. Because "we, the people" can't be trusted to eat or shit without the help of blonde (Hillary), brunette (Dubya), or redhead (Departments of Social Services/Homeland Security) nannies.
The same nannies whose abuse record is worse than Roman Catholic priests and the porn industry combined.
"Somebody has to do something"? -- _That_ is not the solution. It is the problem.
Give me an effin' break. Pogo was right. We have met the enemy and he is us.
What I think is regrettable is that organisations with a lot of information to share about their products -- and Microsoft is just a single, high-profile example -- already seem to be giving up on maintaining high quality, comprehensive reference sites, as if the trend to allow staff to write their own blogs somehow provides an adequate replacement. Agreed.
It reflects a very cynical attitude toward the consumer that is all too prevalent in the powers that be in corporate America.
Quality customer "service"? Who needs it? The sheep will keep grazing without it, after all.
Quality product information? Better to disclose as little as possible, and make sure you only disclose what reinforces the impulse to buy.
Its the same way of thinking that has a "FAQ" that does nothing but laud the product's benefits, even if they have nothing to do with the "question" the clicker on the FAQ button wants answered.
By its nature, ideal reference material is easy to find. That typically means that there are only a few places to look, and it's easy to search for what you need in those places. Once you get there, the material needs to be comprehensive and authoritative. No-one likes looking around for the same bit of information all day, and winding up with three half-baked, semi-contradictory versions of it in the end.
Blogs are the very antithesis of this ideal. There are a zillion of them. In any given field, there are typically a few really good ones, but the average quality is usually quite poor. The most organised search facilities you'll find are tagging (fine for locating related content within the same blog, but generally not much use for searching across blogs) and web search engines (which I use less and less as certain types of page get ever better at gaming the system and getting their stuff up-top when I don't really want to see it). This makes the recent push by many companies, Microsoft prominently among them, to disseminate technical reference information via blogs a pretty bad idea.
Well, using Microsoft as an example of what is deficient about the blogosphere seems a bit weird to me.
For some reason this thread reminds me of my traditionalist academic colleagues ragging about Wikipedia not being up to the standards of the great Britannicas, and forgetting that it took several decades for the Britannicas to reach their highest level of quality.
The fact of the matter is that blogging and search technologies probably have a few generations of morphing to do yet.
It's way too early to tell.
Me, I'd put my money on the search people figuring out new and cheaper logics for digging through the mass of worthless blogs for both nuggets and detailed tech info.
With this administration so blatent with it's lies and contempt for the rule of law and the Constitution and with FOX pundits who often say they wish they could imprison or even kill Democrats or "lefties", I am convinced this nation is under the control of anarchists who wish to push this nation to civil war. And it's not Repubilicans vs Democrat... because the Democrats are hardly a better choice, but a division vbetween those who believe in the Constitution and individual rights, and those who want a Statist system where there is no longer any accountability. Well, I'm not sure pushing a nation toward civil war can be reconciled with anarchism -- we tend not to believe in nations as sovereign entities, and only sovereign entities make war. (The rest of us commit assaults and frauds in tort.)
Now, admittedly, anarchists, especially the communitarian sort and perhaps the occasional Randian, are just as likely as the rest of us to end up being control freaks underneath.
But your last sentence -- well, it is just wholly inconsistent with any sort of anarchist belief. People who are anarchist are about as anti-Statist as you can get (that's what the word means. And one of the reason a lot of anarchists are such is they believe that it *increases* accountability over the so-called "democratic" system.
All the while improving the odds of our getting rich.
Call us fruitcakes or loony tunes if you wish. Or deluded. But please don't call us civil war-mongerers or statists.
How can we exploit you economically if we kill you?
I wonder when you'll recognise which President has truly let down his nation. Isn't that the job of the President?
Even the Democrats and the Republicans recognize that./see current options under "Presidential Wannabes".
Slashdot Mirror
Not for the first time in the last 13 months I wonder why I decided to incorporate my business in Nevada.
Talk about the epitome of a law designed to make it harder for small businesses to survive. Do the idiots that passed this law realize that 99 percent of businesses in the United States are small business with 20 employees or less? Small businesses who live on the knife edge of financial survival and who don't have the financial luxury of IT departments with nothing better to do with their time than network with $250/hour legal counselors to help them wade through the technical and legal questions of ensuring this kind of security.
And how many of that 99 percent are too damn busy doing 1001 other things that they aren't going to be know how to set up an RSS feed to get the latest from Slashdot and similar places.
Much less keep up with the 100,000 or so pages of federal, state, regulations put into play every frigging year.
I incorporated in Nevada in part because I thought Nevada was slightly less insane than other states in this regard.
Silly me. The only thing I was right about was the "slightly."
Well put.
The real question is whether the tools of higher-order judgment can be taught. The issue isn't whether people are skeptical or not, credulous or not, optimistic or not, pessimisistic or not. The question is "how much" of each of these things people are. No one has time to take everything to first principles. Everyone must trust someone about something, whether it's the received view of books published by Harvard and Oxford, the abilities of a colleague in a lab, or the person who wrote the "help" files for your computer file or your tax return software.
Or to go back to the title of the original thread, can figuring out what a "healthy dose" is actually be taught?
Yes and no. If I didn't believe that some of this was possible I wouldn't be wasting my time right now writing a book on the subject. However, it is very easy for those of us who would have "critical thinking" or "skepticism" or whatever be "taught," to fool ourselves about the role the "teacher" plays.
Because true judgment means being "properly" skeptical not just of President Bush or crank scientists or my mother's opinions on Mexican-Americans -- those parts are easy. True judgment means being properly skeptical about those who are telling you to be skeptical and giving you the tools of critical thinking and the scientific method.
Because so much of judgment comes out of experience, we tend to forget that experience is not always a transferable good. Just because I've been teaching for 20 years, or because you've been an engineer or a highly acclaimed scientist with a Nobel prize, doesn't mean I or your judgment should be cloned by my students.
Indeed, our experience -- even our "skepticism" experience -- can be particularly blinding. Holders of PhDs are not immune to the distraction of what Captain Renault called "rounding up the usual suspects"; in fact they especially susceptible to it.
I firmly believe that four years of quality "higher education" can yield 22-year-olds who have better judgment (i.e., not just possessing more thinking skills, but thinking better) than they had at age 18, and do so regardless of how much the 18-year-olds prior education/socialization sucked. But I don't believe the route to doing so lies in attempting to make them into little clones of me.
Because this isn't about choosing reason over faith. Its about choosing which moments to be thinking and applying a particular critical method, and which moments to be trusting and "having faith". And THAT includes choosing when to listen to the "voice of greater experience", and when to tell that voice to get stuffed.
This I, ahem, believe.
When interpretation is costly (as it always is), that makes for opportunities for the corrupt, the incompetent, the vested interests, and all the rest to get in the way. Why won't junk mail (or junk science, or junk academics) go away any time soon? Partly because the costs of information interpretation mean some of us will always end up listening (giving power to) those corrupt, incompetent, etc. And partly because we ought to listen to some of our unsolicited mail.
Your friend's example is not an isolated one. Alas. I wish I had a solution -- my only suggestion is that we focus on making as much as possible as transparent as possible -- sharing the stories like those of your friend, shedding as bright lights as possible on those who are corrupt, incompetent, and vested. That way, maybe, instead of your friend having to wait 10 years for her deserved recognition, she might only have to wait 5-7.
As you say, the more original you are, the harder it is to find "expert peers". Despite my multitude of advanced degrees and published papers, and 20 years as a teacher, i've never been comfortable with those who would call me "expert". I sometimes wonder if we put too much emphasis on creating (and then worshipping) experts...and not enough on creating more peers.
Some might ask, but isn't that what education is about? Not often. Almost all of our current educational system is joined at the hip with the "expert" model. A model that sees information as something that trickles down from those who have it (experts and teachers) to those who haven't (students and other ignoramati). Whereas the better model is one that sees information as something that increases via exchange and all its associated messiness.
Sorry, I've gone off on my hobby horse again, haven't I?
The internet has made the transmission and distribution of information cheap. I would go so far as to say nearly free.
However, there remains one very large barrier to the use of that information: the recipient still bears the burden of evaluating and interpreting it. Access is cheap. Assessment is still expensive. Search engines, broadband, all the amazing technology of my MacBookPro and its software haven't solved the real problem: How the heck do I decide which information matters?
In fact, if anything, the glut of cheap information makes it harder for effective assessment, not easier. Ever try to concentrate when fifty people are shouting at you?
Where does this leave the academic journal? I'm not sure, but I'm skeptical. The academic journal and, more importantly, the institutions of the larger academic system which use it as an indicator of intellectual worth, are profoundly limited. Every discipline I know has examples of what would eventually become foundational articles that get rejected over and over again by the arbiters of mainstream intellectual and scientific fashion. More seriously, thousands of valuable assistant professors have likely had their careers and ideals misshaped by the pursuit of publish-or-perish. And perhaps most importantly of all, there is the real problem of timely responsiveness. When the world and its needs are changing, and accelerating, as fast as today's, institutions of interpretation -- must move and adapt fast.
And quick adaptation is not something that the academic world is at all good at.
Yet, the marketplace of ideas does still require filters. I have a great deal of faith in markets, especially as the cheap information of the Internet age makes those markets more and more responsive to people's desires and needs. Yet the effectiveness of markets remains constrained by the limits of those very desires and needs. Deference to peer review when all of your peers are sophomores ("sophisticated morons") is not going to help very much. Ignorance shared is still ignorance.
In its editors and referees, the current journal system has a group of people with very high level filtering expertise. Whatever new institutions that replace the academic journal must replace that filtering expertise. Search engines, etc., can't do that. Sophomores can't do that.
I don't mean to deify those editors and referees. They aren't the only ones with the expertise, or even necessarily the ones with the most expertise. But its sometimes hard for people outside the system to understand how much of their time and effort those editors and referees have to allocate, to do that filtering, to to develop the skills that make their filtering expert, and to assess and evaluate their fellow filterers.
True "deep" peer review requires all three things, and all three things take a lot of time and expense. Time and expense that aren't significantly reduced just because the cost of information transmission has started to approach zero.
Last I knew, none of these were the random action of 100 armed bandits existing outside the government.
Oh yes, regarding your sneer at my knowledge of the past. During work on my PhD in history, I seem to recall more than a few books and articles noting that the life of "common people" c. 1400 or so was less in danger from force exerted by private bandits than it was from force exerted by the legitimated governments of the day (kings, nobles, lords of the manor, and the like).
Were I a "common person" from rural Europe somewhere c. 1400, I would have been less worried about the depredations of bandits than about my lord's willingness to make war on his own or his lord's behalf. War that typically not only offered me lots of extra ways to get killed violently, but invariably destroyed my fields and food supplies and put my female relatives at extra risk.
Do we need police? Yes. Do we need a government apparatus that publishes the Code of Federal Regulations in a few hundred extra volumes every year, plus state and local laws/ordinances/regulations to enable that police protection?
Call me pedant or other names if you must. But I think not.
Huh? My neighbors are going to be surprised that the only way they can keep me out of their yard or their teenage daughter's bedrooms are by force. Is it the government's threat of force that stops me from taking my
I think not.
Oh, to be sure, having the police power of the State behind them will help protect them against some obnoxious louts and child molestors. But most of us are neither lout nor molestors. We respect each other's property "rights" a great deal regardless of the threat of force.
Funny thing about tyranny. It requires collaboration to succeed. If Bill Gates owned all the property in the world, and all the guns, could he really do anything he wants?
If 6 billion unarmed people are on one side and one person and 6 billion guns are on the other side, does the one person really have all the power? For some reason I don't think so.
Having a monopoly over instruments of force certainly makes it easier to accumulate property. But there are limits.
The question is, where and when do those limits start to come into play? Can an anarchic society survive (or, perhaps a better way to put it, tolerate) more inequity than a non-anarchic one?
Agree mostly, at least on the nature of government power to increase and on the need for something more than "the law of property" for a stable society. Though, obviously with my handle, I'm unlikely to agree about the necessity of "a whole government infrastructure."
Well, I guess I'm stupid.
... or the wars/state-supported-conflict of the world since 9/11? Should the possibility that a loon like Osama bin Laden gets a briefcase bomb cause us more fear than the world had when the US and USSR held it hostage under the doctrines of MAD?
Anarchy-as-chaos is a straw man.
People too often confuse the need for order with the need for law (or worse, the need for the state).
Now, order does require mechanisms/institutions for enforcement. There are bad guys and gals out there who will do nasty things if we let them. Order requires police or some other institution that serves the policing and adjudicatory functions (a Godfather, competing for-profit protection agencies and courts, arbitration and mediation, the "Coordinator" of Modesitt's Adiamante, etc etc).
And those who do the policing and adjudicating need some rules to guide them. I agree there, too. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that some of those rules are rules must be rules of "property" (more about that in a paragraph or two).
Most anarchists (other than the ones who throw little round black bombs in old cartoons) agree with the need for order. And we also agree with the need for policing and adjudicating institutions. However we tend to trust order that develops spontaneously over that which arises from the State's monopoly force or the threat of force. I for one reject the vision of a world without Leviathan as a world where life will be solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.
It is by no means empirically shown that concentrating power in a "democratic" state "of the people" leads to better order. How many deaths and maimings and destroyed families and wasted resources have accompanied the "participatory" governments in the twentieth century? How can people be so certain that anarchy would have been worse than our collective legitimation of governments that gave us the battle of the Somme, the Holocaust, Stalin, apartheid, and all the rest.
Even the cliche-ed anarchist with the little black bomb can't do the damage that the real fascists have. Which was worse, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand? Or the Battle of the Somme? Which was worse, 9/11
Bah.
Which brings me to the issue at hand, that of property....Here, anarchists are as divided as everyone else. Because, like everyone else, they seem to spend a lot of time talking about "rights", when in fact the question of property is a question about power.
When we talk about rights we usually end up emphasizing entitlement. E.g.,the right of free sp
Nope.
That's like saying the vision of the 9th and 10th Amendments was equivalent to Bentham's. There is a difference between a system designed to enable people to have power and a system designed to limit people's ability to have power.
Insofar as "the group" insists on seeing the law as a way of "getting things done" (Bentham's vision), you are correct. Because then law is just about the projection of power.
But the group need not view the law in such a fashion. I'll go so far as to say that political power can be embedded in a matter of persuasion (pure democracy); but persuasion need not be based on power.
As Smith noticed in his best book (Theory of Moral Sentiments), persuasion can also be based on sympathy. Fellow feeling. Not just convincing someone to gang up with you on person #3.
Yes, public opinion can be tyrannical. Social stigma, shunning, gossip, all those things can make life uncomfortable, even miserable. But without the legitimation of coercion that comes with consent to the state, the oddball retains choice.
Add state power to the mix, however, and its another matter.
I grew up in a small village. They are far from the idyllic places that the senator "from" New York or similar twits claim. They can be hellish for anyone with a bit of creativity or interest in something different. But its a heckuva lot easier to run away from a village than it is to run away from the US Army and the Homeland Security and the Congress of the United States.
What America has lost sight of since the Madisonian experiment is that the solution to the misuse of power by some is not the increasing of power for others. It is keeping a limitation on the power of any. The flaw of democracy is the flaw of Magna Carta: you don't solve the problem by replacing one boss with another boss. You solve the problem by eliminating bosses.
And replacing them with contractual arrangements. Not that silly notion of a "social contract" -- you don't "agree" to a contractual obligation just by occupying a particular geographic location. Agreement requires some positive act or assertion on your part. A real contract, one where you and the other agree to incur specific opportunity costs in exchange for benefit that exceeds the value of those costs.
Sure, some people are better at persuading than others. But the persuasion of a contract is fundamentally different than the persuasion of an armored battalion.
When the armor gets involved, it gets real hard to be free about deciding on who you choose to have as "peers".
Murkiness can be a good thing. Battalions of tanks aren't murky. Microsoft isn't murky. Stalin wasn't murky. The Patriot Act isn't murky. Korematsu v. United States wasn't murky.
erp.. Had meant to add, "Wait a minute, I _am_ an anarchist." at the end.
But then I got distracted and hit submit.
You confused me with the "get rid of capitalism" part, I think. I never know quite what people mean by that. If it means get rid of the perpetual lives with which the corporate form entrenches particular "capitalists" in their power, I'm with you. If it means getting rid of market-based institutions, I'm not.
And thanks for the link.
So the problem is not "communism", merely "statism"?
Hokay.
But then again, that's the way my knee jerks anyway.
(insert favorite annoying emoticon here)
Sorry, hawk, but I must respectfully disagree.
(And I've both practiced law and the teaching of economics, too.)
I'll take your word on the letter of the law -- I don't practice anymore and even when I did "competition" law wasn't my main shtick. But, whatever the letter might be, _interpretation_ of the law is not an equal opportunity endeavor.
The problem is that litigants don't come to the bar with the same bankroll. When the law requires a court to interpret it (by figuring out which piece of the law is fit by the facts, etc.), the advantage goes to the rich Mary Kay and her pink cadillacs. They can afford to push things through court, deal with the delays, vendors (E-bay) not dealing with you, etc etc in the meantime. The evil little salon can't.
Depend on the courts to define what constitutes competitive behavior and what constitutes naughtiness not to be allowed is like requiring the pit bull to be the one to prove Michael Vick is guilty of conspiracy to electrocute.
After all, a pit bull owner is not necessarily an abuser of his dog.
Oh yes, and mine isn't legal advice either.
JD, 1983, PhD, 1999
Were I an anarchist I'd be tempted to stamp QED in big red letters as my response.
... for being too damn stupid to be a good enough con man to have political influence.
The only thing that would have been better is had the author used the Patriot Act as an example of how government can get things done when it has to.
Others have talked about Sarbanes Oxley, so I'll skip the inanity of that in a world where Mega Corp can afford the extra accountants/consultants/lawyers/PR people to find loopholes and manipulate the damn thing.
But the "stop telemarketers law"? That was really great, wasn't it. We don't have to listen to a zillion ads for scam products by enterprises who at least are constrained by the price mechanism.
Instead, we get to listen to a zillion-squared ads for scam artist politicians who cant get a day job other than lobbying other scam artist politicians to steal our money in taxes for their stupid ideas that they couldn't get us to pay for otherwise.
Neat wasn't it, how the law to end obtrusive telemarketing had this minor little exception for "not-for-profits."
I can't help remembering a fragment of Robert Heinlein's _Expanded Universe_, something lik "can you remember anything of value coming out the Washington Beltway in the last 40 years?" Only problem is -- he wrote the darn thing 27 years ago. No one was listening then, Saint Robert. And, alas, no one is listening now. Though I suppose we Heinlein fans could start telemarketing. Hmm.
No. Better not. Can't afford the accountants to make sure my company accounting is all straight or the lawyers to keep me out of Gitmo.
Yeah, I know. I'm just bitter
Pre- 1990 or so (the Econ 101 story):
1. Information, valuable or crap, was relatively expensive to acquire.
2. Advertising served a useful function of reducing the cost of information acquisition. (Relative to, e.g., going to a mall and comparison shopping at X>1 stores.
Post-1995 or so:
3. Information is virtually free to acquire.
4. Crap information is a lot cheaper to provide than valuable information. (The latter requires research, for example, or long conversations with techies trying to translate tech into terms rest of us can understand.)
5. Interpreting information (figuring out whether information is crap or not) is more expensive than just being a sponge for crap while staring at pictures of women with great legs.
Result: advertising much more likely to be useless, pain-in-the-ass crap.
Sigh.
On the positive side, we do get to see a lot of pictures of women with great legs.
And as evidence of the extent of that ignorance, and of the problem I claimed, I submit to you the formatting of my previous post.
I was so caught up in the superiority of my educated understanding, I made a newbie's error and forgot some basics of how HTML-formatted text works.
The capacity of the educated to be unaware of their moronitude knows no bounds!
Ahem.
(And yes, moronitude is not a word, I'm sure.)
>quote> and as a result every day more and more people are falling for faith healers and the like. /begin rant And more and more scientists/technologists (they aren't the same, after all) are forgetting that faith in something is an unavoidable part of living, working, and playing. It might be faith in reason, in the "scientific" method, and "empirical" evidence. But it is still faith. No scientist, and no engineer, can take every assumption back to first principles. Or does. No empirical evidence is more than a sample from the larger, perhaps more varying, universe. Don't get me wrong. The capacity of people to be deluded by charlatans (/see, generally, much of the programming on the Trinity Network) is doubtless growing. But its a problem far bigger than mere ignorance of science. And far, far bigger, than a failure to access scientific journals. And, while I share your dismay about the inaccessibility of those scientific journals, even did we make them all freely available it wouldn't significantly reduce the ignorance. Because those who write for scientific journals are so caught up with their intellectual superiority and their disciplinary expertise, that they don't bother trying to write for a larger educated audience (much less try toconnect with the masses). Except in the abysmally written literary institution called a "textbook", which no one in their right mind would spend time on except insofar as they can't avoid it (because it is required by their teacher or for a job). You want to know why no one reads any more? Because their damn teachers have been talking out of both sides of their mouths since they were in first grade (and for today's young, since pre-school). We (the teachers) have been ranting all these years about how important it is to read, have quantitative skils, etc etc, all the while emphasizing reading of that which is horribly written. And rightly, they stopped listening to us. I've been a teacher for 20 years. I have a bachelors degree, a masters degree, and two degrees that allow me to call myself "doctor." Big effing deal. I've also been a reader of non-textbooks and non-university press books and non-scholarly journals for more than twice that period. I've been a fan and reader of science since, well, since I could read. But not because of my exposure to the scientific method in elementary, secondary, or higher "education." But because I was lucky enough, somehow, to fall into the pages of Heinlein and Niven and Gibson and Sterling and dozens of other science fiction readers. And because no one stopped me from reading the crap (whose names fortunately are largely forgotten) along the way in my "free" time. Along the way I've been duped by charlatans of "faith" and charlatans of "science." (I know at least one L. Ron Hubbard novel I've read multiple times!) Alas. But those charlatans have done far less damage to me, or to others, than I and my teaching and researching colleagues have done with all our degrees and our scientific pomposity. If you want to know the cause of the dupability (is that a word, I wonder?) of the "people," don't blame libraries and don't blame the greedy journals and don't even blame the stupid politicians and funding agencies. Blame the teachers and the other pretentious, arrogant "experts". A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You may not believe, as I do, in a god that "passes all understanding" (Phillipians 4:7), but put it in scientific terms: Compared to what we don't know about the universe, all the knowledge of all the Nobel Laureates and all the understanding reflected in the existing archives of scientific journals can't be seen under our most powerful electron microscope. We of the degreed classes have gotten so caught up in the little bit of our understanding, that we have forgotten the cosmic scale of our ignorance. /end rant
The myth is that we choose between "republicans" and "democrats", or between "liberals" and "conservatives.
The reality is that our choice has morphed. The only real alternatives remaining are anarchism and fascism. And my money would be on fascism. Cheap information plus majoritarianism that gives the franchise to the mob means less and less check on the "there oughta be a law" impulse. As long as the mob sees the state as the source of bread and circuses, it will be conned by the Hillarys and Dubyas of the world. As long as we give our attention -- and our money -- to those who would improve our lives by restricting our choices, we will be susceptible to the fascist.
The key, ISTM, is how long we trust the state. We make much noise about how untrustworthy, corrupt, venal, disgusting (add adjectives as needed here) politicians are. The fact of the matter, however, is that "we, the people" continue to trust politicians. We bitched and moaned about Bill, but our solution was George? We may bitch and moan about George, but our solution to George is Hlilary?
I'm a copywriter. Did you know 12.5 percent of all junk mail sent out in this country is fundraising. And the bulk of that is for "political action". All good mail copy appeals to one or more emotions of the recipient. But there are a lot of emotions out there to appeal from. Why, then, do you suppose the great majority of political junk mail is based on the single emotion of fear?
Because, I am sad to say, it's the one that works best: We must be afraid. Very afraid. Because "we, the people" can't be trusted to eat or shit without the help of blonde (Hillary), brunette (Dubya), or redhead (Departments of Social Services/Homeland Security) nannies.
The same nannies whose abuse record is worse than Roman Catholic priests and the porn industry combined.
"Somebody has to do something"? -- _That_ is not the solution. It is the problem.
Give me an effin' break. Pogo was right. We have met the enemy and he is us.
It reflects a very cynical attitude toward the consumer that is all too prevalent in the powers that be in corporate America.
Quality customer "service"? Who needs it? The sheep will keep grazing without it, after all.
Quality product information? Better to disclose as little as possible, and make sure you only disclose what reinforces the impulse to buy.
Its the same way of thinking that has a "FAQ" that does nothing but laud the product's benefits, even if they have nothing to do with the "question" the clicker on the FAQ button wants answered.
Well, using Microsoft as an example of what is deficient about the blogosphere seems a bit weird to me.
For some reason this thread reminds me of my traditionalist academic colleagues ragging about Wikipedia not being up to the standards of the great Britannicas, and forgetting that it took several decades for the Britannicas to reach their highest level of quality.
The fact of the matter is that blogging and search technologies probably have a few generations of morphing to do yet.
It's way too early to tell.
Me, I'd put my money on the search people figuring out new and cheaper logics for digging through the mass of worthless blogs for both nuggets and detailed tech info.