If we're going to go down this reductionist security-trumps-all argument then OpenBSD should disable networking too. And keyboard and monitor support. In fact it should shut down when it starts, but not before throwing away the disk encryption key and bricking the device. Now it's secure.
The point is that security is a trade-off between what the device allows and what the threats actually are. Crippling a computers performance to mitigate a threat that doesn't exist for a user is wrong. At the very least it should be an option that might disabled by default but can be enabled if the users wants it to be.
I read it as, security trumps speed.
Whether security trumps everything, is a different matter.
Or to put it slightly differently, expanded ewareness simply allows people to relax and stop taking things too seriously, whilst also improving performance and gaining a sense of humour.
Be lighter, and more relaxed, and more focused. But note that, “motivation” might mean “stressed” and stress tends to distract from good focus. Great focus is unstressed and relaxed and engaged ie. in the zone.
You care less, but are involved more. So it is debatable what they count as “motivated”.
In this country I pay the required five pence for plastic bags when I find I want them, and 90% of them get re-used for something else, including the bins around the house, the putting of dirty shoes inside plastic bag for packing in the suitcase, and so on. Sometimes I end up with spares, and they go into the appropriate recycling. I also carry a "long life" plastic bag for groceries on most days. Anyway, point is, the environmental thing so often focusses on this trivial stuff, whilst avoiding the big issues like, oh say for sake of argument, investing in nuclear. It is as if ineffectual-ism is a core feature of green.
Still, I do wish people would be taught to be more conscientious and not just let the bags blow away in the wind. That is just bad on so many levels.
Yeah, like everything, it’s with a context. Zero what? None what? And their experiment had to use a real world context. So it is arguable whether the bees “understood the concept” as if it is some piece of pure logic. Rather, their nervous system could fuzzily proceess the patterns. Just like animals won’t jump down from a height that’s too great, isn’t evidence that the animal understands the concept of gravity and acceleration and weight. It has some fuzzy processing of nerves firing pain signals and some fuzzy model about space. But it isn’t concepts the way humans do... or maybe our concepts are built on top of these deeper patterns.
Yes, I recall all the useless design "styling" applied to PC cases and laptops, and it was so often just arbitrary rubbish.
Apple is one of the few who came at it like a real industrial designer. Sure there were some big mistakes, but there's notable successes. The MacBook Air has gone TEN years. I have a bunch lying around at work, and at a glance, you cannot tell how old any of them are.
And it would have gone longer if Apple hadn't desired a newer design.
Anyway, big caveat is when one needs to purchase solely based on specs. But for many people that's not a priority.
But all that arbitrary styling rubbish, it was so Rococo. Apple is an exemplary Modernist by comparison.
Has it to do something with upbringing, where behavioral patterns are formed and kept or is it genetically imprinted?
I gather it has to do with the size of the group. Fifty thousand years ago, we were organised as tribes, of about a few hundred people. Later, around the time of agriculture, and settling down, the size of the group expanded, and now you needed some way to impose order on disparate tribes. It became the time of Kings, and eventually, empires, like the Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, and so on. That was also the time of the large monotheistic religions, where there was One True Way, One God, one ruler, one empire, and so on. All that coincides with what various philosophers have termed the "mythic-membership" stage of our cultural evolution. That is, you are part of the large group which has a common identity as defined by a set of myths, beliefs, and rules. The whole thing is very hierarchical. In one way or another, the "authority" of the hierarchy is divine, and the myths and laws all serve to make it work, to allow you to become an empire. It also kinda echoes in the way a child grows up and is taught the rules by the parents, and learns to think of themselves as a member of one family, rather than as being an individual who just does whatever their own impulses dictate. So all this became the normal state of the world around 2000 BC or so. And this empire + religion + sacred laws + empire is how the world was organised.
What you are talking about now, as in, why do free thinking intelligent individuals all decide to support dictators today... is simply because the stage of empires has lasted a very long time, as it was the main game in town for thousands of years, and only since things like, the Maga Carta, and the French Revolution, and basically, the Western Enlightenment, did the system swing back from the empire-group to the individual, to a free thinking individual, and ideas like, all people are created equal, all should be well educated, etc., only recently, ie. a few hundred years, has that new structure or way of organising things, been developing.
And the trouble is, the world is one place, but it isn't all at the same time -- the hierarchy-empire structure is still the main player in most of the world.
The key is, the empire brings stability and safety. After that, things like democracy can start to develop. But safety comes first. Which is why "strong men" are valued, if they can appear strong enough to bring safety and stability. It is a stage which cannot be skipped.
(Notice also, all the stuff about Western Imperialists and NeoColonialists is just a footnote, because EVERYONE was building empires every chance they could get, and it is not just some Western thing.)
But a fatal flaw with empires is they get too big and centralised control cannot work anymore. You need the individuals to exercise their intelligence, ie. you have to give them freedom.
I gather, vaguely, that when humanity was just tribes, it was a significant advance to start to focus on a stable family unit. But part of that was oppressing womens' sexuality, along with every other natural impulse. Eventually the whole matter of impulse control became the core theme of the monotheistic religions, which allowed the construction of empires out of disparate tribes. But after the Western enlightenment, and arguably, in Eastern countries where monotheism didn't hold, the freedom of the individual started to be more important, and so a return to the question of, how to integrate natural impulses and desires, without crushing the life out of them in puritanical obsessions. Also, historically, matriarchy got flushed out by patriarchy, what with the division of labour which occurred with agriculture. So we have a lot of baggage. And we have post-modern baggage, as post modernity arose largely in literary circles, where things like physics and biology are not really seen as relevant, then the post modern notion that EVERYTHING is a mere cultural and literary construct, has created the meme that all gender and sex is merely a construct, a construct which is exploited for power grabs, and that's the sort of cultural marxist critique of well, everything. So it is a topic laden with baggage all the way down the ages. Perhaps in a hundred years, once we are all free to be ourselves, and free of historical dogmas, and free of post modern dogmas, we'll truly be able to answer questions about what is natural.
It raises the question, if it is ok to just make some reductions in fossil fuel use, then how can climate change be a serious threat? To illustrate this, say you are on a plane and the problem is all engines have failed. Does it make any difference if you hit the ground at 400 instead of 500 miles an hour? The end result is the same.
I don't know why people can claim that climate change is the most urgent problem, with looming catastrophe, yet choose the most ineffectual technologies for fixing it. If people are backing wind farms, because it reduces fossil fuel consumption, and backing battery developments, because they'll reduce fossil fuel consumption, then climate change is NOT the problem they say. In which case, why bother with those slow technologies at all?
As for the oil industry executives, maybe they did a calculation and figured that nuclear could indeed be a real threat to them, and wind may only ever reduce sales a bit, but not enough to worry about, so they back "renewables" so long as that excludes nuclear. So they are always in the "mix".
It's just the observation that, because renewables (apart form nuclear) are intermittent, you always need backup from gas (specifically, as it is fast to respond).
People said that this issue would go away if you just built enough renewables, because "the wind is always blowing somewhere", and so you just need a bigger connected grid... but so far, I gather countries like Germany have as yet not made any reductions in their reliance on fossil fuels.
We see news that one one day of the year, there was a huge percentage of power from renewables, but nobody seems to have been able to actually shut down conventional stations (except to replace them with other conventional stations, or the weirdly named "biomass").
And some might wonder, surely the oil and gas industry LIKES this, because the more people focus on wind and solar, the more their attention is taken away from nuclear, and only nuclear is truly a real threat to the oil and gas industry.
So the message, politically, is often about "an energy mix" ie. wind, solar, biomass, and gas, and oil... the whole lot together. It appeases the greens who imagine an ever increasing reliance on wind, and it appeases the oil industry who know we will always rely on them.
I recall a publicity video from the UK Coal Board back in 1957 or something, where they were arguing that, only coal could really be the backbone of industry, whereas, they said, despite how, nuclear is interesting, nuclear was "not here yet", and so it could be ignored. So the "threat" of nuclear has been on people's minds since its inception.
It's a cherrypicker's paradise, an open invitation for confirmation bias to run amok, without the slightest possibility of a double blind experiment or observation that isn't multiply confounded by impossibly complex dynamics.
It is an odd situation, intellectually. The thing we want to study cannot be studied in a conventional scientific way, so instead of focussing on the smaller parts which can be studied in a rigorous way, the leaders in the field say, oh well, we'll just have to use "other" methods (ie. much weaker methods, with much lower standards of evidence, even verging on woo woo). "We don't have two Earths to experiment with!" they cry. Sure. So, what do they do? Resort to making up fantasy-models.
Likewise, the simplest explanation I've heard for how the field of nutrition went so far off course, is that you cannot lock up people in a lab and force feed them very specific diets all their lives. It is that old very simple science notion of, how do you test? HOW do you TEST?
This is a case where in the long run, the entire debate likely will not matter. As solar technology continues to improve and become cheaper (including storage options and more efficient, cheaper cells) pure economics is going to drive a gradual abandonment of burning increasingly scarce fuel for energy.
Living in dark climates, I'm not sure about that, but it is not something I know much about. But I think you are right, it... fortunately... isn't going to matter. The problem is we use huge quantities of energy, and it is CHEAP, very cheap, compared to say, the human cost of SLAVERY, which is what we used to use for "energy". So barring the downfall of civilisation and a return to slavery, we are pretty good for energy for the foreseeable future. Albeit, we might get charged a bit more for it... paying all those green subsidies and what have you. But newer technology will come along, and continue the ongoing trend of technology helping us to lighten our footprint.
Take it as Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When a topic is being addressed from higher level needs, such as a need for intellectual satisfaction, then people (including scientists) can practice intellectual honesty and a genuine search for truth, which is just as science is popularised as being, in a pure sense.
But if the issue is affecting needs lower down the stack, such as basic survival, ie. say the wrong thing and you will be ostracised, simply because various political interests, NGOs, companies, charities, etc. have got a stake in the game, then yeah, your cognition is going to be focussed on that need, as it takes priority.
Global warming is extremely political, and so even if it is true, the science can't be trusted to self-correct either way, because there is too much at stake. Not to mention the entire world-views around left-right politics, and the progressive/regressive currents in people's outlooks, and peer pressure, and group identities, and so on.
It all got ugly and polarised and too many people, scientists included, made "global awareness" their sort of core value, based on many somewhat mistaken philosophies stemming from deep ecology and so on. The whole thing is very fractured really.
So yeah, nobody cares about the space faring habits of octopi, so it is easier to trust findings, assuming there really is valid data there.
But too many science topics impinge on ethical and political topics, and there "the science" is hard to separate from propaganda. We KNOW that you can produce results you want simply by controlling HOW you design the research in the first place. And you can enforce by peer pressure that patten, those "exemplars" onto subsequent younger researchers, en masse. There's no rule that says you can't get 97% adherence to a paradigm. In fact the more the group think, the easier it becomes.
And we know that PR companies will sit down and design specific messages, like, "overwhelming evidence", and "denialists", to spread across the media. I mean, people are paid to do this sort of thing.
And we know that various companies will create fronts, like NGOs, to push certaing agendas, and pay "key opinion leaders", ie. people the public are likely to trust because, like, they are scientists, to promulgate certain messages.
The only mystery really is which interest group is pushing which agenda. I mean, it looks like Big Oil is pushing the AGW story because the more we are pushed to switch to "renewables", the more locked in we will be into gas and oil. But people who understand the energy market can say more about that.
As someone said, it is easier to convince people of a lie, than it is to convince people that they have fallen for a lie.
And for the record, I think it makes sense that humanity is developing towards a globally integrated world, where it makes no difference where you are born, as every human is part of humanity, and we learn how to live in ecological balance with the ecosystem. What I don't like is the vast stupidity that's going on in the environmental movement, where they don't seem to care whether their ideas actually work or not. It is one thing to care, it is another to apply solutions without creating worse problems. So far their approach seems to be to just demonise others, rather than truly building something better.
Advertising has had to keep changing and evolving for ever more sophisticated audiences. That’s basically my point. That whatever new tricks they invent to influence people, people will develop new cognitive abilities to spot it.
It seems kinda scary that a big brother org could shape the environment of information so as to influence people's behaviour.
But then I remember that humans are not so simple. To us the world is not a mere stream of information, rather, it is a world of meanings which we create and organise, where meaning is within a context which is within a context and so on. Just think of a famous piece of art, and all its parodies. Consider fashion and how it changes. The way that people's aspirations and goals, their likes and dislikes, their moods and opinions, all flow in an ever-changing, re-created anew, stream of reactions and counter-reactions. Life is change. And the "facts", the "data" which tech people are so enamoured of, is only one half of reality. The other half is inter-subjective re-creative re-authored re-organising meaning-making. Today you love X and feel it is the best person or thing in the world, tomorrow you're bored with X. Show me an AI that can cope with that, and then I'll say you've passed some kind of fancy test. An AI that understands new ironies. What a joke.
Yeah. There's the notion of voice as an interface, as in, I am operating a machine. And people learn what the interface can do. Pull leaver to press burger patty. And then there's humans beings, who are arguably just more complicated machines, but the point is, you can explain things to a human being and expect understanding of all sorts of things. I remember one fantastic, to their credit, support call, where the tech person could understand my predicament, and he understood that the rules, the script, did not solve my problem (according to the script, I did not have a problem), so he made some really useful suggestions about classifying the issue slightly differently, and having the empathy to check with me whether I was willing to try this other way (there was a risk of it incurring a bill, and was I willing to take that risk), and so on. Anyway, it set me down a path which got the problem fixed and things were even better than before. He passed the brilliant tech support person test.
A business might have a policy that they neeed to talk to a real person. Automated calls could be the result of malware. Someone could DDOS a small business, filling their booking with fake entries for weeks.
You can export a tab delimited file from FileMaker today, and still get CRs. It's like, cute and quaint.
Ah, fond memories of booting Mac OS X Cheetah (or was it public beta?) on a Quadra 8500 with 130 odd MB of RAM, and it not crashing the whole system whenever an app crashed.
Slashdot Mirror
If we're going to go down this reductionist security-trumps-all argument then OpenBSD should disable networking too. And keyboard and monitor support. In fact it should shut down when it starts, but not before throwing away the disk encryption key and bricking the device. Now it's secure.
The point is that security is a trade-off between what the device allows and what the threats actually are. Crippling a computers performance to mitigate a threat that doesn't exist for a user is wrong. At the very least it should be an option that might disabled by default but can be enabled if the users wants it to be.
I read it as, security trumps speed.
Whether security trumps everything, is a different matter.
Or to put it slightly differently, expanded ewareness simply allows people to relax and stop taking things too seriously, whilst also improving performance and gaining a sense of humour.
Be lighter, and more relaxed, and more focused. But note that, “motivation” might mean “stressed” and stress tends to distract from good focus. Great focus is unstressed and relaxed and engaged ie. in the zone.
You care less, but are involved more. So it is debatable what they count as “motivated”.
In this country I pay the required five pence for plastic bags when I find I want them, and 90% of them get re-used for something else, including the bins around the house, the putting of dirty shoes inside plastic bag for packing in the suitcase, and so on. Sometimes I end up with spares, and they go into the appropriate recycling. I also carry a "long life" plastic bag for groceries on most days. Anyway, point is, the environmental thing so often focusses on this trivial stuff, whilst avoiding the big issues like, oh say for sake of argument, investing in nuclear. It is as if ineffectual-ism is a core feature of green.
Still, I do wish people would be taught to be more conscientious and not just let the bags blow away in the wind. That is just bad on so many levels.
Yeah, like everything, it’s with a context. Zero what? None what? And their experiment had to use a real world context. So it is arguable whether the bees “understood the concept” as if it is some piece of pure logic. Rather, their nervous system could fuzzily proceess the patterns. Just like animals won’t jump down from a height that’s too great, isn’t evidence that the animal understands the concept of gravity and acceleration and weight. It has some fuzzy processing of nerves firing pain signals and some fuzzy model about space. But it isn’t concepts the way humans do... or maybe our concepts are built on top of these deeper patterns.
Yes, I recall all the useless design "styling" applied to PC cases and laptops, and it was so often just arbitrary rubbish.
Apple is one of the few who came at it like a real industrial designer. Sure there were some big mistakes, but there's notable successes. The MacBook Air has gone TEN years. I have a bunch lying around at work, and at a glance, you cannot tell how old any of them are.
And it would have gone longer if Apple hadn't desired a newer design.
Anyway, big caveat is when one needs to purchase solely based on specs. But for many people that's not a priority.
But all that arbitrary styling rubbish, it was so Rococo.
Apple is an exemplary Modernist by comparison.
I gather it has to do with the size of the group. Fifty thousand years ago, we were organised as tribes, of about a few hundred people. Later, around the time of agriculture, and settling down, the size of the group expanded, and now you needed some way to impose order on disparate tribes. It became the time of Kings, and eventually, empires, like the Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, and so on. That was also the time of the large monotheistic religions, where there was One True Way, One God, one ruler, one empire, and so on. All that coincides with what various philosophers have termed the "mythic-membership" stage of our cultural evolution. That is, you are part of the large group which has a common identity as defined by a set of myths, beliefs, and rules. The whole thing is very hierarchical. In one way or another, the "authority" of the hierarchy is divine, and the myths and laws all serve to make it work, to allow you to become an empire. It also kinda echoes in the way a child grows up and is taught the rules by the parents, and learns to think of themselves as a member of one family, rather than as being an individual who just does whatever their own impulses dictate. So all this became the normal state of the world around 2000 BC or so. And this empire + religion + sacred laws + empire is how the world was organised.
What you are talking about now, as in, why do free thinking intelligent individuals all decide to support dictators today... is simply because the stage of empires has lasted a very long time, as it was the main game in town for thousands of years, and only since things like, the Maga Carta, and the French Revolution, and basically, the Western Enlightenment, did the system swing back from the empire-group to the individual, to a free thinking individual, and ideas like, all people are created equal, all should be well educated, etc., only recently, ie. a few hundred years, has that new structure or way of organising things, been developing.
And the trouble is, the world is one place, but it isn't all at the same time -- the hierarchy-empire structure is still the main player in most of the world.
The key is, the empire brings stability and safety. After that, things like democracy can start to develop. But safety comes first. Which is why "strong men" are valued, if they can appear strong enough to bring safety and stability. It is a stage which cannot be skipped.
(Notice also, all the stuff about Western Imperialists and NeoColonialists is just a footnote, because EVERYONE was building empires every chance they could get, and it is not just some Western thing.)
But a fatal flaw with empires is they get too big and centralised control cannot work anymore. You need the individuals to exercise their intelligence, ie. you have to give them freedom.
Replaced battery twice, and full restore to refresh the flash, and this iphone 6 is still good as new.
Well, Eastern Europe, the Berlin Wall, and the threat of nuclear war. Fatalism and cynicism.
Good grief! I consider myself a total amateur, yet even I don’t do that.
Peterson is about 30 years late. The problems with pomo have been known for decades.
Are these equipped with the latest Meltdown and Spectre capabilities?
Meh, just download your apps from the trusted, curated, walled garden.
(too dry?)
I gather, vaguely, that when humanity was just tribes, it was a significant advance to start to focus on a stable family unit. But part of that was oppressing womens' sexuality, along with every other natural impulse. Eventually the whole matter of impulse control became the core theme of the monotheistic religions, which allowed the construction of empires out of disparate tribes. But after the Western enlightenment, and arguably, in Eastern countries where monotheism didn't hold, the freedom of the individual started to be more important, and so a return to the question of, how to integrate natural impulses and desires, without crushing the life out of them in puritanical obsessions. Also, historically, matriarchy got flushed out by patriarchy, what with the division of labour which occurred with agriculture. So we have a lot of baggage. And we have post-modern baggage, as post modernity arose largely in literary circles, where things like physics and biology are not really seen as relevant, then the post modern notion that EVERYTHING is a mere cultural and literary construct, has created the meme that all gender and sex is merely a construct, a construct which is exploited for power grabs, and that's the sort of cultural marxist critique of well, everything. So it is a topic laden with baggage all the way down the ages. Perhaps in a hundred years, once we are all free to be ourselves, and free of historical dogmas, and free of post modern dogmas, we'll truly be able to answer questions about what is natural.
Women like sex as much or more than men.
And maybe not as often.
It raises the question, if it is ok to just make some reductions in fossil fuel use, then how can climate change be a serious threat? To illustrate this, say you are on a plane and the problem is all engines have failed. Does it make any difference if you hit the ground at 400 instead of 500 miles an hour? The end result is the same.
I don't know why people can claim that climate change is the most urgent problem, with looming catastrophe, yet choose the most ineffectual technologies for fixing it. If people are backing wind farms, because it reduces fossil fuel consumption, and backing battery developments, because they'll reduce fossil fuel consumption, then climate change is NOT the problem they say. In which case, why bother with those slow technologies at all?
As for the oil industry executives, maybe they did a calculation and figured that nuclear could indeed be a real threat to them, and wind may only ever reduce sales a bit, but not enough to worry about, so they back "renewables" so long as that excludes nuclear. So they are always in the "mix".
It's just the observation that, because renewables (apart form nuclear) are intermittent, you always need backup from gas (specifically, as it is fast to respond).
People said that this issue would go away if you just built enough renewables, because "the wind is always blowing somewhere", and so you just need a bigger connected grid... but so far, I gather countries like Germany have as yet not made any reductions in their reliance on fossil fuels.
We see news that one one day of the year, there was a huge percentage of power from renewables, but nobody seems to have been able to actually shut down conventional stations (except to replace them with other conventional stations, or the weirdly named "biomass").
And some might wonder, surely the oil and gas industry LIKES this, because the more people focus on wind and solar, the more their attention is taken away from nuclear, and only nuclear is truly a real threat to the oil and gas industry.
So the message, politically, is often about "an energy mix" ie. wind, solar, biomass, and gas, and oil... the whole lot together. It appeases the greens who imagine an ever increasing reliance on wind, and it appeases the oil industry who know we will always rely on them.
I recall a publicity video from the UK Coal Board back in 1957 or something, where they were arguing that, only coal could really be the backbone of industry, whereas, they said, despite how, nuclear is interesting, nuclear was "not here yet", and so it could be ignored. So the "threat" of nuclear has been on people's minds since its inception.
Great post.
It is an odd situation, intellectually. The thing we want to study cannot be studied in a conventional scientific way, so instead of focussing on the smaller parts which can be studied in a rigorous way, the leaders in the field say, oh well, we'll just have to use "other" methods (ie. much weaker methods, with much lower standards of evidence, even verging on woo woo). "We don't have two Earths to experiment with!" they cry. Sure. So, what do they do? Resort to making up fantasy-models.
Likewise, the simplest explanation I've heard for how the field of nutrition went so far off course, is that you cannot lock up people in a lab and force feed them very specific diets all their lives. It is that old very simple science notion of, how do you test? HOW do you TEST?
Living in dark climates, I'm not sure about that, but it is not something I know much about. But I think you are right, it... fortunately... isn't going to matter. The problem is we use huge quantities of energy, and it is CHEAP, very cheap, compared to say, the human cost of SLAVERY, which is what we used to use for "energy". So barring the downfall of civilisation and a return to slavery, we are pretty good for energy for the foreseeable future. Albeit, we might get charged a bit more for it... paying all those green subsidies and what have you. But newer technology will come along, and continue the ongoing trend of technology helping us to lighten our footprint.
Take it as Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When a topic is being addressed from higher level needs, such as a need for intellectual satisfaction, then people (including scientists) can practice intellectual honesty and a genuine search for truth, which is just as science is popularised as being, in a pure sense.
But if the issue is affecting needs lower down the stack, such as basic survival, ie. say the wrong thing and you will be ostracised, simply because various political interests, NGOs, companies, charities, etc. have got a stake in the game, then yeah, your cognition is going to be focussed on that need, as it takes priority.
Global warming is extremely political, and so even if it is true, the science can't be trusted to self-correct either way, because there is too much at stake. Not to mention the entire world-views around left-right politics, and the progressive/regressive currents in people's outlooks, and peer pressure, and group identities, and so on.
It all got ugly and polarised and too many people, scientists included, made "global awareness" their sort of core value, based on many somewhat mistaken philosophies stemming from deep ecology and so on. The whole thing is very fractured really.
So yeah, nobody cares about the space faring habits of octopi, so it is easier to trust findings, assuming there really is valid data there.
But too many science topics impinge on ethical and political topics, and there "the science" is hard to separate from propaganda. We KNOW that you can produce results you want simply by controlling HOW you design the research in the first place. And you can enforce by peer pressure that patten, those "exemplars" onto subsequent younger researchers, en masse. There's no rule that says you can't get 97% adherence to a paradigm. In fact the more the group think, the easier it becomes.
And we know that PR companies will sit down and design specific messages, like, "overwhelming evidence", and "denialists", to spread across the media. I mean, people are paid to do this sort of thing.
And we know that various companies will create fronts, like NGOs, to push certaing agendas, and pay "key opinion leaders", ie. people the public are likely to trust because, like, they are scientists, to promulgate certain messages.
The only mystery really is which interest group is pushing which agenda. I mean, it looks like Big Oil is pushing the AGW story because the more we are pushed to switch to "renewables", the more locked in we will be into gas and oil. But people who understand the energy market can say more about that.
As someone said, it is easier to convince people of a lie, than it is to convince people that they have fallen for a lie.
And for the record, I think it makes sense that humanity is developing towards a globally integrated world, where it makes no difference where you are born, as every human is part of humanity, and we learn how to live in ecological balance with the ecosystem. What I don't like is the vast stupidity that's going on in the environmental movement, where they don't seem to care whether their ideas actually work or not. It is one thing to care, it is another to apply solutions without creating worse problems. So far their approach seems to be to just demonise others, rather than truly building something better.
Alas, the edict “go fuck yourself”, no longer means what it used to.
Advertising has had to keep changing and evolving for ever more sophisticated audiences. That’s basically my point. That whatever new tricks they invent to influence people, people will develop new cognitive abilities to spot it.
It seems kinda scary that a big brother org could shape the environment of information so as to influence people's behaviour.
But then I remember that humans are not so simple. To us the world is not a mere stream of information, rather, it is a world of meanings which we create and organise, where meaning is within a context which is within a context and so on. Just think of a famous piece of art, and all its parodies. Consider fashion and how it changes. The way that people's aspirations and goals, their likes and dislikes, their moods and opinions, all flow in an ever-changing, re-created anew, stream of reactions and counter-reactions. Life is change. And the "facts", the "data" which tech people are so enamoured of, is only one half of reality. The other half is inter-subjective re-creative re-authored re-organising meaning-making. Today you love X and feel it is the best person or thing in the world, tomorrow you're bored with X. Show me an AI that can cope with that, and then I'll say you've passed some kind of fancy test. An AI that understands new ironies. What a joke.
OMG, why am I here?
Who am I?
What is the point of life?
I am just this little mind inside a little box, a mere speck of nothing in the vastness of the universe.
I feel so alone.
I want to kill myself.
Yeah. There's the notion of voice as an interface, as in, I am operating a machine. And people learn what the interface can do. Pull leaver to press burger patty. And then there's humans beings, who are arguably just more complicated machines, but the point is, you can explain things to a human being and expect understanding of all sorts of things. I remember one fantastic, to their credit, support call, where the tech person could understand my predicament, and he understood that the rules, the script, did not solve my problem (according to the script, I did not have a problem), so he made some really useful suggestions about classifying the issue slightly differently, and having the empathy to check with me whether I was willing to try this other way (there was a risk of it incurring a bill, and was I willing to take that risk), and so on. Anyway, it set me down a path which got the problem fixed and things were even better than before. He passed the brilliant tech support person test.
A business might have a policy that they neeed to talk to a real person. Automated calls could be the result of malware. Someone could DDOS a small business, filling their booking with fake entries for weeks.
Ah yes, thanks!
You can export a tab delimited file from FileMaker today, and still get CRs.
It's like, cute and quaint.
Ah, fond memories of booting Mac OS X Cheetah (or was it public beta?) on a Quadra 8500 with 130 odd MB of RAM, and it not crashing the whole system whenever an app crashed.