About the only part where your logic is sound is the last sentence, where you reasonably challenge the supposition that "money = speech."
However, once you accept that "money = speech," exactly how do you arbitrarily draw lines in modern corporate culture? Why do CNN, Fox News, etc., as well as every newspaper and magazine get to run as many editorials and opinions as they want, promoting whatever political ideologies that they want, even though most of them are as influenced by modern megacorporations (and their political interests) as anyone else? (Before you say "free press," you might want to consider what all your arguments about what the Founders intended might say about the difference between a guy running a newspaper press in his basement versus a modern megacorporation spewing out continuous information through television, internet, etc.)
I'm not saying we should restrict political speech of news sources. But can you actually draw a clear line between them and the rest of corporations? I don't think you can. The law before Citizens United favored some corporations over others -- just because some small part of a corporation pretended to be "news" means they can promote whatever political views they want to.
And, while you focus on evil corporate interests, have you ever stopped to think about the type of group that actually sued in Citizens United? They weren't a normal evil corporation, as much as a political action group. The same law that prevented them and ATT, etc. from airing political views also prevented the ACLU and any other reasonable NON-PROFIT groups not tied to larger corporate interests from sharing useful information with you before an election.
A system that allows Fox News to rant continuously while denying the ACLU from contacting voters before an election is flawed. Perhaps the flaw, as you point out, is ever equating money with speech in the first place. But once you decide that "money = speech," the system before Citizens United was not necessarily more fair.
As long as Citizens United is the law of the land, there will never, ever be another law enforced that protects consumers from anything a large corporations decides to do.
Oh, come off it. Before Citizens United, there were huge numbers of corporate lobbyists already doing a very good job at this. The antidote to bad speech is more speech.
I read what you're writing but one thing doesn't make sense to me. If all they want is money, why aren't they working in Finance.
They aren't working in finance because they find what they are doing to be more interesting.
And it's not at all true that "all they want is money," but they often have families to feed and will take an easier course when possible to get tenure or retain a position.
This easier course usually doesn't mean a grand conspiracy or collusion. It simply means that it's easier to get funding for an article and easier to get it published if it relates well to current theories, uses appropriate buzzwords that are in vogue, etc.
And to get to that end, there are various levels of bias that could enter the picture. Some things get studied, and others don't. Things that are within the current paradigm are more likely to be studied. When setting up a study, collecting data, etc., scientists are more likely to use accepted methods, look for particular things, collect data in particular ways, design experiments in particular ways, etc. In all of these steps, decisions are made that subtly can support what a scientist already believes or leads him/her in the direction of ultimately collecting data that is more likely to support existing theory.
Then we enter into the realm of more questionable practices. Scientists today make use of complex statistical software packages that use methods which most scientists don't really understand in detail. They can easily doing thousands of different statistical tests on data until they find something that seems "interesting." You do enough tests on even randomly generated data, and you'll find *something*. Again, if a scientist already has an idea of what to look for, it will bias the methods of analysis in small ways to make it more likely that he/she would choose an interpretation and analysis that supports what he/she believes "makes sense," which usually is more in line with what is accepted in the scientific community.
And that's before we get into the truly unethical stuff like randomly throwing out data you don't like for trumped up reasons, which studies have shown to be more prevalent than we might like to think. (I know of a few cases personally where conclusions in studies were affected and I knew the reason for ignoring some data wasn't quite justified.)
It's not that scientists are setting out to do things badly, but it's usually easier for most people to seek out data that supports what they already believe, often unconsciously biasing the way they conduct research. And when you put more pressure on the system so that success of research is part of a professor's livelihood (no matter how menial), it makes scientists more likely to try to come up with results that will be acceptable to those who grant funding and those who grant tenure.
The situation is not dire, but if you believe that scientists are completely unbiased truth-seekers, that's a bit naive.
Seriously? You think sitting on your ass in the safety of your mom's basement and using some sort of torrent software is "civil disobedience"?
Civil disobedience is a targeted act intended to draw attention to injustice. Not just being too lazy and too cheap to go buy something instead of pirating it. (Not that I'm in favor of current copyright laws, but the vast majority of file sharers are not violating copyright for political reasons -- they're doing it simply out of convenience.)
As for warrantless wiretapping, the only people who could be involved in civil disobedience to that law would be law enforcement officials who refused to make use of wiretapping or something. Civil disobedience must be targeted to break a particular law to show its injustice; I don't see how you as a regular citizen could break a law authorizing law enforcement to do wiretapping.
'When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,' said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski. 'Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.'
(1) There are ideas believed by the majority of the population.
(2) More than one of those ideas was, at one time, believed by less than 10% of the population.
(3) At many points in history, one majority idea was superseded by another majority idea.
(4) Since it takes "amount of time comparable to the age of the universe" for an idea to go from less than 10% agreement to majority belief, multiple "ages of the universe" have elapsed.
Conclusion: Multiple universes must have existed to account for all the elapsed time required for ideas to spread.
This seems to be a symptom of Facebook's lax security policies, more than anything else. By default, just about anything you ever post or do on Facebook should be restricted to authorized people (e.g., friends or even smaller groups). Posting something that is visible to the internet or to large numbers of people should be difficult unless you've explicitly tailored your settings to be more public than the defaults.
But, of course, Facebook wants everything to be as public as possible.
Politicians in TFA are proposing things like "internet drivers licenses." What about just saying -- Facebook, put in reasonable privacy protections and reasonable defaults, or get the f*** out of our country?
Agreed. This guy is bitching because he created the situation himself. It's like someone who never opens his snailmail or even moves it for years as it piles up so he can't get out of his door -- oh, and not recognizing his inability to deal with this mail, he signs up for dozens and dozens of magazine and newspaper subscriptions. And then he complains when he needs a bulldozer to get out of his house.
I'm pretty poor at managing email efficiently, and I've never ended up in a situation anything like this. Two things would have solved his problem without "hell":
(1) Send all mailing list subscriptions, random commercial emails, etc. to a second email account(s) somewhere. Either don't ever bother sorting or do anything else with that account, or spend a few moments periodically with a spam filter and a few other filters to sort the messages. Generally, I don't ever bother with such an account personally -- if I ever really need to find a message, I can do a keyword search for it.
(2) For your primary email account(s), you should only ever be receiving messages that you are either interested in reading immediately or must receive (for work, family, or other reasons). If you do get spam, filter it immediately. If you need to or want to receive an important newsletter or something here that you don't read immediately, put in a filter to get it out of your inbox. If you're required to receive messages from a certain list for work that hardly ever apply to you, put in a filter. With just an investment of a minute or so to create a filter, you save yourself from sorting the clutter from hundreds or thousands of individual messages ever again.
Problem solved. No hell required. I probably have to deal personally with less than a dozen messages each week, outside of work requirements.
The rest -- I don't need to read, and they are dealt with automatically. If I ever get curious, I can always browse the random crap in other accounts or folders/labels it was sorted into.
Bah -- I rarely write a reply to an old comment, but your self-righteous arrogance forces me to.
The situation you describe is not analogous at all. Personally, I believe most doctors are idiots (well, not quite true, but I don't believe most of them are as many standard devs above the population as most people -- and most doctors -- think they are), and I certainly don't trust them to do drug research.
If you spent even a few moments doing a cursory review of research done on doctors' ability to read, understand, and make recommendations based on studies, you would know that they're mostly not capable of making any good judgments on scientific matters. They just don't understand enough math and enough about how science works.
So, when it comes to selecting a drug they haven't prescribed before, they're going off of some half-assed recommendation anyway, which is either based on some inadequate summary in a drug manual, or some friends' recommendation, or some freebies from a drug company. The last one is, as you rightly point out, an evil influence... but since I don't trust doctors to be able to make good choices on their own anyway, I'm not sure it's that much worse than the alternatives. I wouldn't take any drug I hadn't thoroughly investigated myself anyway (including a thorough search of research studies).
Anyhow, I agree that pharma companies are clearly influencing doctors. Duh. Let's move back to the question at hand.
Your analogy fails for a number of reasons. Amazon reviewers are not expected to be trusted authorities, unlike doctors. They are just stating their opinion. Vine reviewers aren't in a position where they must make recommendations; they can just refuse to participate in the program. Doctors, however, must decide on a course of action. Why is this relevant? Because it's not like Vine reviewers are sent a bunch of stuff they may or may not be interested in, and they then have to make a knowledgeable recommendation to someone else whose life might depend on it. Instead, Vine reviewers are given an option to have something sent to them which they choose, and then they decide whether it works for them. It's their opinion. A doctor doesn't generally try out all the medication from the drug company to see it if it works for him.
In sum, a Vine reviewer has a personal experience with an item and is not supposed to be an expert. That's the same as to be expected for any Amazon reviewer. A doctor generally has no personal experience with the drug and claims to be an expert with special power to recommend that drug. It seems like it should be much easier to influence the opinion of someone who doesn't have personal experience, and the ramifications are much greater because of doctors' supposed expert status.
If anything, Vine reviewers are only biased in two ways -- and in two ways only. They may not have a good sense of cost analysis, since they didn't pay (as you pointed out). Okay, but most of the time I don't depend on Amazon reviewers to recommend a deal to me anyway; I want to know whether the product is actually any good, regardless of cost. (And, the more expensive the item, the less I'm likely to just trust Amazon reviewers, so I'm not sure the cost problem would ever be a significant issue for me.)
The other thing is that Vine reviewers are perhaps likely to review things that they wouldn't review otherwise because they wouldn't buy it. That may be true, though most Vine reviewers probably wouldn't choose to receive something they weren't interested in at least somewhat. So, in the end, they are more likely to write a review for a particular item that was offered to them, which might perhaps skew the number of reviews for a particular item, but you haven't shown why it would skew the quality of that review.
With doctors, it matters because doctors rely too much on third parties (like pharma companies) to give them information on drugs, which means they might be recomme
That minimalism doesn't always work in academic settings
I'm not sure what your field is or what the expectations are, but I find minimalism in academic presentations and slides is often a signal for the very best talks by the very best presenters. The minute I see anything flashy, I suspect it's hiding inferior content; the minute I see slides cluttered with too much content, I doubt the confidence of the speaker to convey information.
Slides in academic situations are just like any other situation -- use them primarily for visual aids (graphs, charts, etc. that you are actually discussing in your talk). Otherwise, most things on slides are a distraction. Using short bits of text to "punch" some idea or concept can occasionally work, but I find it a bit hokey in most contexts -- it's kind of like shouting or making "air quotes" to draw attention to something that you could often do better through better rhetoric and subtle body language.
I've occasionally seen a very smooth and slick-looking set of slides used by a good speaker at an academic conference, but in those cases, usually what made the slides superior was not more content (or more complex content) but rather a good simple (and efficient) slide design and good timing.
I can't think of a single good academic talk I've ever been to that had complicated slides other than actual visual aids.
By the way, the only thing I might disagree with you about (or maybe just clarify) is the use of "lots of pictures." Unless you're giving a presentation on art history or architecture or something, I find pictures are distracting. The exception is when they are actually being discussed or are directly tied to the content in such a way that the photos actually give the viewer more information about what I am saying, not just serving as a pretty background that is vaguely complementary to the talk (as I think photos do for many non-academics using Powerpoint). If people are not confident enough for the audience to be focused on them and interesting enough in their rhetoric for the audience to be paying attention without pretty background pictures or words, chances are they could be communicating much more effectively... visual aids are probably not helping (other than to potentially decrease boredom in the audience, which is not a good sign of an effective presentation).
where the slides merely augment, while the presenter (Jobs, etc.) is the primary focus.
It's a bit sad that you even need to make an argument like this. This isn't just an "Apple style" that was developed by Apple -- it's imitating the best speakers who have been around ever since slide projectors were developed.
The focus should almost always be on the speaker. Otherwise, why bother having a speaker? If the presentation is all in the projected document, it should just be sent around by email and not waste everyone's time in a meeting.
For me, slides are only for things that can be conveyed more effectively or efficiently in a visual form. Again, that seems like an obvious point -- why bother with slides otherwise? If it's not necessary, it's just scenery and should be treated as such -- in the same way that a set shouldn't distract from the actors in a play.
If I have a photo or a video or a diagram or a chart or a graph that I'm actually discussing, it gets a slide. If I have a long quotation by someone else that I'm actually discussing, it might get a slide to allow listeners to engage with it better (it helps to navigate things too, since they differentiate it from me and my voice). Occasionally, I might use a short bulleted list that appears periodically to track the general progress of an argument, though I generally view that as a crutch -- a good speaker should be able to convey argument structure by adequate verbal transitions and signposts, as well as body language and even planned movement around the stage area (when possible). When I'm not using any explicit visual aids, the slide is blank and usually black -- anything there would just distract the listeners from the actual content of the presentation, which is coming from the speaker.
Rhetoric used to be a required part of any liberal arts curriculum. Any decent speaker would realize that visual aids, handouts, etc. are often distracting unless they are necessary to show something that can't be effectively conveyed aloud, or for the sake of proper discussion, or for some other important purpose.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of presentations given today are not focused on the rhetoric. In that case, as I've already said, skip the forced meeting and send out an email. There's no point listening to someone talk if they're not going to bother focusing on what they're saying and how they're saying it.
This puts Google in the position of being mommy and daddy. What I consider "inappropriate" is unlikely to be the same as the next parent; what this suggests, though, is that everyone gets to deal with what Google decides, and frankly... that's not an appropriate role for a third party.
A bookstore is not stepping outside of its "appropriate role for a third party" by offering a section of children's books. It's simply classifying materials in a useful well to serve its patrons well. Some patrons want mystery, some want sci-fi, and some are children who are best suited in the children's book section.
Please stop with the "everyone's a censor, third parties' opinions are evil" pseudo-libertarian bullshit. TFA is not proposing that anyone censor material in a way that we are forced to live with the results, merely classifying material in a way that might be useful to some segment of the population, much as it might classify news under sports or science news or whatever for the person who might be interested in such things and want to find appropriate material. If a particular parent doesn't like what this third party is doing, they can come up with their own scheme, just as a parent could guide their child to walk out of the children's section in a book store and go to the sci-fi section, for example, if the parent wants.
Not everyone will "have to deal" with the results -- only the people who find it useful.
That's the parent's job. If you don't have time for guiding your kids, and you can't seem to come up with rules and behaviors, or use a white-list facility competently, then perhaps you shouldn't be spawning anyway, rather than begging for a third party to do your job for you.
Bah. One of the most important elements of parenting is allowing your child to explore appropriately. But parents can often use help from other knowledgeable adults in setting general boundaries where the parents are unexperienced or haven't had time or opportunity to vet everything ahead of time.
I suppose you're also opposed to putting up a guard-rail and warning signs at a nature preserve where the terrain is a little rough for kids, but adult hikers might be interested in it.
Also, white lists aren't necessarily the best solution if you want your kids to be able to explore beyond what you already know is "safe." Parents can try their best, but they can't (and shouldn't) be peeking over the shoulders of their kids 24 hours/day, nor should they expect to have exhaustive knowledge of everything their child might potentially encounter so they could set exact limits ahead of time.
Exactly what sort of world do you want, where third parties are never supposed to "interfere" with anything, but parents need to be the dictators in the worst kind of authoritarian regime, discouraging their kids from ever trusting other adults' perspectives on what might be good/interesting/appropriate for kids?
If your job requires you to be on call, YES THAT MEANS YOU CAN'T GO TO A MOVIE THEATER! Holy shit, how could you possibly think otherwise?
You cannot have both.
This is not a reasonable position, either. Some people have to be on-call, at least for emergencies -- some of them are doctors... one of them might be the surgeon who might save your life.
The reasonable answer is that the patron puts his/her device on vibrate, informs employers that he/she is available only for absolute emergencies during that time, and if the device vibrates, he/she exits the theater temporarily in an unobtrusive manner to check and see what the emergency is.
she's no longer allowed to watch the movie, so they no longer keep her money. It's not the 'escorting out' which is obnoxious, it's the 'without refund' bit.
Umm... except she didn't just pay to watch the movie. She paid for a seat to sit in and watch the movie. Sure, most movies aren't completely full except on opening night, but the fact is that she bought a seat that was then unavailable to other customers, thereby potentially costing the theater revenue if it was a sold-out show.
Same thing would go if you bought a reserved ticket for a bus or train or whatever. If you then show up drunk and disorderly enough that you make the bus driver unable to concentrate (for example), you could be thrown off. And If you are thrown off (in violation of a pre-existing contract), the bus company has no obligation to refund the ticket, since (a) you violated the contract and have no legal basis if those were the terms, and (b) you already cost them money because they couldn't sell your ticket to someone else.
Yup - people look strangely at me when I have a meeting with somebody in my office at work, the phone rings, I glance at it, and then I don't answer it and proceed with the meeting.
Indeed. It was one of the best lessons I learned from a mentor as an undergrad. She was an eminent professor and a scholar with an international reputation, but she wouldn't answer the phone when I had a scheduled meeting with her. Perhaps after two or three times, I think I said something like "do you need to get that," at which point she explained the same philosophy that you did. Unless you are aware that you are expecting an urgent and very important phone call (in which case, you inform the person you are meeting with when he/she arrives), the people who meet face-to-face get priority.
Same goes (if not more so) for emails, texting, etc.
Duh. It's the most basic respect you can show for someone else's time.
I'm sure there's an objective, non-sensationalist, just-the-facts reporter working somewhere
Where?? And, more importantly, when??
Look back over the history of newspapers. There has never been a time in history when media has been "objective, non-sensationalist, just-the-facts." Why? Because it's boring as hell to most of the population. People want to read about dramatic events, tragedies, horrors, tales of deception, even the occasional outrageous muckraking article. That's what sells media today, and that's what sold them a century ago, or two centuries ago. Ben Franklin and other publishers of his time weren't unbiased either -- "serious" news, whenever it existed, usually had an agenda, which got people worked up. The rest was all sensationalist, designed to entertain.
The idea that journalism was "pure" before the internet is ridiculous, and a holdover from this mythology that was created by mid-20th century national news organizations (to combat the perception of "yellow journalism" that pervaded the previous generations of media conglomerates), who had their own agendas in the way they structured "news," however noble they might seem to some.
a citizen journalist is going to be less careful about sources and fact checking
Often stated, rarely proven.
Here's a recent story that might support your view, where the international got all excited over dozens of bodies supposedly discovered in a house in Texas, even though the only evidence was a psychic who called in a police tip.
On the other hand, from what I've read in the aftermath of this story, what caused this story to spread initially was lax standards about who could post to a Twitter feed at a local news organization; Reuters read the Twitter feed, and the rest is history. By the time the local news station had checked its sources and decided not to run with the story on the air, the story was everywhere.
If relying on a Twitter feed that didn't go through official approval channels at a local news station could cause this much crap, do we really think that relying on random Twitter and blog posts by a group of unvetted people many times as large will result in greater accuracy?
The point is, while you may gain a superficial understanding, you will not ever be an expert in the subject to understand some of the more complex (and often, worthwhile) problems.
It depends on what you mean by "complex" problems, which I think you are using as a synonym for specialized problems. In that case, your argument is a bit circular -- specialists will only ever have the capacity to understand and solve specialist problems.
But "complex" problems are often ones that may not even be seen as "problems" by the specialist, or they may be assumptions that are just taken for granted or even assumptions that are admitted to be limitations, but everyone in a field uses them, so no one looks beyond them. Basically, a specialist may have the focus to work out the intricacies of some "problem" that has been identified as critical importance to the specialists in a given field, but yet not be able "to see the forest from the trees," as it were. If you look at many of the major advances of science over the years, they often involved some thinker questioning some fundamental assumption (often not from a very "specialized" perspective) or tackling a problem from a perspective or using a methodology that all the specialists in a field (working on their own complex problems) would find problematic or even ludicrous.
I'm not saying this happens all the time. But it is a fundamental way that science actually solves truly complex problems, some of which are known problems to specialists and some of which aren't even identified as problems to specialists until it is pointed out by someone with a broader perspective.
Renaissance men are great -- and we all aspire to be that way. But the reality is that we can only focus on any one thing. We may be able to dabble in many others (as distractions, nothing more), but our real dedication can only be in one area, unless you're a polymath and a savant.
I think if most people were actually honest with themselves, they actually understand a much smaller segment of knowledge than they would like to admit. And they are usually actively fluent in an even smaller subset that they can actively call up and use at a given time without preparation. One sees this often when very bright specialists (e.g., university professors) try to teach a survey course or a fundamentals course and stumble over details. They aren't just a specialist in their discipline, or even in a subdiscipline, but often a large segment of their active knowledge is only material that they need to know for their specific research.
This is only reasonable, given the limitations most people have on memory, time to become familiar with very specialized literature and research, etc. In my view, the specialist already is often even much more specialized than we like to pretend, and one can already make broader leaps in a discipline by having a little bit of knowledge in a number of subdisciplines, rather than having all one's knowledge focused on a few related research projects.
The "generalist" is merely an extension of this trend. The generalist can never know all the literature and research in three or four or more disciplines any more than the average specialist can actually know all the literature and research in his/her own discipline. But the generalist has the advantage of being familiar with different methodologies and approaches from different disciplines, which are often much more useful for solving complex intractable problems than a lot of narrowly focused experience in only one discipline.
Nothing would change. The "news" is a soap opera that most people watch everyday. Stop reading the paper and watching the news for a few weeks, then come back. You'll find that you haven't missed much. There are probably a few scandals still going on dealing with some congressman or governor or whatever. There are still a few wars going on. Some of the stories are similar, but the names have been changed.
Not much is "swept under the rug" in old news, because you don't have to. It wasn't meant to mean anything beyond a day or two. People move on, because the news is, at its heart, entertainment to sell ads. Tomorrow you want something else, or perhaps you might keep watching the plotline if it's sensational enough.
I view almost all "news" sources the same way I view Slashdot. I go here for amusement -- to read others' opinions and to get some new insight. The insight usually comes from discussion more than from the actual stories, which are often either mundane tech stories or "shocking" revelations that generate a lot of arguments. People watch the news so that they can have something to bitch about at the water cooler.
Try giving up the "news" for a while. I haven't listened to or read the news every day in many years, but by checking in briefly every few weeks, I seem to be about as "informed" as most people I know... probably more so, since I spend my time reading substantial documents dealing with issues that seem important, rather than a few paragraphs of junk with a sensational headline slapped on top.
Quite a few years back, I read a book entitled "How the News Makes Us Dumb" (or something like that). My favorite account from that book was of a major, very respectable newspaper, quite a few years ago (in the heyday of supposedly "serious" journalism). In the newsroom one day, the editor stormed in, furious, and threw the newspaper from that morning onto the table. There were stories on the stock market, ongoing wars, etc. on the front page. His comment was on a photo on the front page: "Next time when we put a nice-looking Midwest girl on the front page, can we please be sure to keep her tits above the fold?!?"
So, I don't think reliving the news is going to change much -- it, like this Usenet thing, would be mostly about entertainment for people who like old news.
If it has a second hand, there are (24 x 60 x 60 =) 86400 seconds in a day. Twice in those 86400 seconds the clock will be correct, so it is right 2/86400 (0.0023148148...%) of the time.
Except by this definition, many of the clocks in the world are wrong all the time, specifically almost all that are set manually. Almost no one I know (and I know some pretty nerdy folk) bothers to set the seconds correctly on their clocks (setting aside the issue that most such clocks also drift by many seconds each month), so according to your definition, their clocks are worse than a broken clock.
the sad part is that wikipedia is actually a very good reference when looking up non-political stuff (and even most political stuff).
Wikipedia is actually not a very good reference overall. Except for a few topics, I trust it as much as I'd trust a World Book encyclopedia set from 1960 at my grandparents' house. The good articles are those that are in fields that are interesting to nerds (science, math, etc.). Step out into the humanities, however, and you'll rapidly find yourself dealing with scholarship that is mostly 50 years out of date, if not more. That's good enough for a quick overview most of the time, but not very reliable. And I'm speaking here of major articles on, for example, biographies of major historical figures in the humanities. Go to more obscure topics and articles, and you often find yourself confronted with whatever skewed perspective is favored by the few editors who police such articles.
And the political problem is not confined to political articles. Anything that could be vaguely controversial will be the source of problems. For example, try looking at obscure religious articles, and you will find editors doing battle between liberal and conservative camps in whatever religion, often over seemingly subtle aspects of nomenclature or interpretation that are trying to push an agenda. Worse are the articles that only get the attention from one side.
The only thing that seems to stop most of Wikipedia outside of mainstream science and math articles from self-destructing is the trend of the past few years to revert edits by anons and less-active editors, thereby at least introducing stability. It's harder to fight for changes in such a system, but at least it keeps new problems from creeping in. Thus, instead of the traditional authorities that traditional encyclopedias relied on, Wikipedia relies on the good faith of the early editors that pasted the thing together in the early days (and the continuing efforts from mostly those who worked their way up the Wikipedia admin hierarchy in those days)... and its accuracy and reliability is largely dependent on how well that job was done.
This is not a corner case at all, though it may be more extreme. Wikipedia tends to favor mainstream media accounts over actual research, particularly in controversial articles. This includes, for example, mainstream media accounts of research and researchers accounts of their own research in mainstream media (which may be spun a lot more than what they explicitly say in their peer-reviewed research).
All of this is to say that media attention is by definition sensationalist, because its primary function is to sell advertising, not to provide news. Any reference source that depends primarily on mainstream media sources over peer-reviewed will inevitably distort things, ranging from small exaggerations to outright lies that are reported to get media attention.
But Wikipedia currently relies mostly on online sources, and the media is convenient. Making a reference to a paper book or journal, or even an article in an electronic academic journal that requires a (expensive) subscription, is viewed with suspicion (even though these are in general far more reliable on most topics), since Wikipedians can't as easily check your sources.
I'm a casual reader of the classics, and it's amazing how pervasive beautiful writing was even at the lowest tiers of education; e.g. Civil War-era letters from soldiers to their loved ones (lol).
Wouldn't a dash or a parenthesis be more appropriate than a semi-colon in this sentence?
Indeed. A comma would be the most common choice. It seems odd to nitpick punctuation in a post highlighting the power of punctuation. Nevertheless, a semicolon is most often used to connect two independent clauses that lack a conjunction. There are few other less-common uses for semicolons these days, but this sentence doesn't really fit any of them.
To introduce an example or set of examples (as in the sentence in question), one would generally use a colon or dash. However, since the example is preceded by "e.g." here, a comma or perhaps parentheses would be more appropriate. (In older punctuation styles, the e.g. would be surrounded by commas, since it literally means "for example." So, in this case, "...lowest tiers or education, e.g., Civil War-era letters....")
I can't even read Shakespeare without having to sit and think on every page for about an hour
Cheer up. The medium is the problem.
Umm, no. You do make a good point: I've certainly been to performances of Shakespeare where many obscure words and idioms were made reasonably clear through good acting.
But that isn't the main problem. Try reading the script from a Broadway musical of the past few decades; you may not get all the nuance immediately, but it is a lot easier to comprehend than Shakespeare.
The problem is that most people who aren't scholars of Early Modern English (including the vast majority of actors) think that they can just "figure it out" by looking up a few archaic words. But that is generally insufficient for full understanding. Individual words carry all sorts of connotations that have changed in sometimes subtle and sometimes significant ways, while idiomatic uses of those words may carry further meaning. Over a century ago, some scholars were already pointing out how large the gap is and how much audiences (and readers) are missing, as in the example in the "Botching Shakespeare" article here which analyzes a well-known Polonius speech
The language has changed a lot in 400 years. Pretending that it hasn't and all you need is a decent actor to fix that means that you probably aren't getting a lot of the subtleties from the plays... unless you're the kind of person who spends hours each day sifting through arcane shifts in meaning in the OED.
Great, so you've shown that 80% of the population in 1870 was literate. The upper middle class and rich (commonly defined as having household incomes greater than $100,000) are about 15% of the population today. Since you are assuming some sort of socioeconomic structure equivalence, that means we can assume that roughly 65% of the literate adults in the U.S. in 1870 would not be the equivalent of "upper middle class" or above. Chances are that many of those 65% wrote letters in the Civil War.
Also, many recent detailed literacy studies have shown that 15-25% of adults in the U.S. today are functionally illiterate, a number that hasn't really changed since the first fairly reliable literacy tests were given to much of the population during the WWI draft -- this despite the fact that the average number of years of education has more than doubled over the past century. There's little reason to suppose that those numbers were significantly different during Civil War times, especially given that literacy rates dropped in the late 19th and early 20th century due to immigration. (Literacy in most other countries was markedly lower than the U.S. during the 19th century, so most immigration tended to lower literacy.) Thus, the overall percentage of people literate enough to write letters probably hasn't changed much since the Civil War, though the racial trends have changed quite a bit.
Lastly -- anecdotally, both of my grandfathers wrote letters and kept journals during WWII (which I've recently come upon). Neither of them had more than a 6th-grade education (common for that generation) and were hardly upper middle class. They wrote significantly better than the college students whose essays I have graded at fairly elite institutions. They also both had very legible handwriting, which would today be expected of only calligraphers.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice rant.
About the only part where your logic is sound is the last sentence, where you reasonably challenge the supposition that "money = speech."
However, once you accept that "money = speech," exactly how do you arbitrarily draw lines in modern corporate culture? Why do CNN, Fox News, etc., as well as every newspaper and magazine get to run as many editorials and opinions as they want, promoting whatever political ideologies that they want, even though most of them are as influenced by modern megacorporations (and their political interests) as anyone else? (Before you say "free press," you might want to consider what all your arguments about what the Founders intended might say about the difference between a guy running a newspaper press in his basement versus a modern megacorporation spewing out continuous information through television, internet, etc.)
I'm not saying we should restrict political speech of news sources. But can you actually draw a clear line between them and the rest of corporations? I don't think you can. The law before Citizens United favored some corporations over others -- just because some small part of a corporation pretended to be "news" means they can promote whatever political views they want to.
And, while you focus on evil corporate interests, have you ever stopped to think about the type of group that actually sued in Citizens United? They weren't a normal evil corporation, as much as a political action group. The same law that prevented them and ATT, etc. from airing political views also prevented the ACLU and any other reasonable NON-PROFIT groups not tied to larger corporate interests from sharing useful information with you before an election.
A system that allows Fox News to rant continuously while denying the ACLU from contacting voters before an election is flawed. Perhaps the flaw, as you point out, is ever equating money with speech in the first place. But once you decide that "money = speech," the system before Citizens United was not necessarily more fair.
As long as Citizens United is the law of the land, there will never, ever be another law enforced that protects consumers from anything a large corporations decides to do.
Oh, come off it. Before Citizens United, there were huge numbers of corporate lobbyists already doing a very good job at this. The antidote to bad speech is more speech.
I read what you're writing but one thing doesn't make sense to me. If all they want is money, why aren't they working in Finance.
They aren't working in finance because they find what they are doing to be more interesting.
And it's not at all true that "all they want is money," but they often have families to feed and will take an easier course when possible to get tenure or retain a position.
This easier course usually doesn't mean a grand conspiracy or collusion. It simply means that it's easier to get funding for an article and easier to get it published if it relates well to current theories, uses appropriate buzzwords that are in vogue, etc.
And to get to that end, there are various levels of bias that could enter the picture. Some things get studied, and others don't. Things that are within the current paradigm are more likely to be studied. When setting up a study, collecting data, etc., scientists are more likely to use accepted methods, look for particular things, collect data in particular ways, design experiments in particular ways, etc. In all of these steps, decisions are made that subtly can support what a scientist already believes or leads him/her in the direction of ultimately collecting data that is more likely to support existing theory.
Then we enter into the realm of more questionable practices. Scientists today make use of complex statistical software packages that use methods which most scientists don't really understand in detail. They can easily doing thousands of different statistical tests on data until they find something that seems "interesting." You do enough tests on even randomly generated data, and you'll find *something*. Again, if a scientist already has an idea of what to look for, it will bias the methods of analysis in small ways to make it more likely that he/she would choose an interpretation and analysis that supports what he/she believes "makes sense," which usually is more in line with what is accepted in the scientific community.
And that's before we get into the truly unethical stuff like randomly throwing out data you don't like for trumped up reasons, which studies have shown to be more prevalent than we might like to think. (I know of a few cases personally where conclusions in studies were affected and I knew the reason for ignoring some data wasn't quite justified.)
It's not that scientists are setting out to do things badly, but it's usually easier for most people to seek out data that supports what they already believe, often unconsciously biasing the way they conduct research. And when you put more pressure on the system so that success of research is part of a professor's livelihood (no matter how menial), it makes scientists more likely to try to come up with results that will be acceptable to those who grant funding and those who grant tenure.
The situation is not dire, but if you believe that scientists are completely unbiased truth-seekers, that's a bit naive.
Civil disobedience is a targeted act intended to draw attention to injustice. Not just being too lazy and too cheap to go buy something instead of pirating it. (Not that I'm in favor of current copyright laws, but the vast majority of file sharers are not violating copyright for political reasons -- they're doing it simply out of convenience.)
As for warrantless wiretapping, the only people who could be involved in civil disobedience to that law would be law enforcement officials who refused to make use of wiretapping or something. Civil disobedience must be targeted to break a particular law to show its injustice; I don't see how you as a regular citizen could break a law authorizing law enforcement to do wiretapping.
So if I start with an audience of nine, my ideas will surely spread?
Precisely. Then target an audience of 90 more, then 900, etc. Repeat until you've conquered the world.
Oh, and while you're at it, convince each person that the more people they bring in, the higher status they'll achieve and the greater their rewards.
These scientists have "discovered" the secret to direct marketing schemes, religions, political movements, etc.
'When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,' said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski. 'Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.'
(1) There are ideas believed by the majority of the population.
(2) More than one of those ideas was, at one time, believed by less than 10% of the population.
(3) At many points in history, one majority idea was superseded by another majority idea.
(4) Since it takes "amount of time comparable to the age of the universe" for an idea to go from less than 10% agreement to majority belief, multiple "ages of the universe" have elapsed.
Conclusion: Multiple universes must have existed to account for all the elapsed time required for ideas to spread.
QED.
This seems to be a symptom of Facebook's lax security policies, more than anything else. By default, just about anything you ever post or do on Facebook should be restricted to authorized people (e.g., friends or even smaller groups). Posting something that is visible to the internet or to large numbers of people should be difficult unless you've explicitly tailored your settings to be more public than the defaults.
But, of course, Facebook wants everything to be as public as possible.
Politicians in TFA are proposing things like "internet drivers licenses." What about just saying -- Facebook, put in reasonable privacy protections and reasonable defaults, or get the f*** out of our country?
I'm pretty poor at managing email efficiently, and I've never ended up in a situation anything like this. Two things would have solved his problem without "hell":
(1) Send all mailing list subscriptions, random commercial emails, etc. to a second email account(s) somewhere. Either don't ever bother sorting or do anything else with that account, or spend a few moments periodically with a spam filter and a few other filters to sort the messages. Generally, I don't ever bother with such an account personally -- if I ever really need to find a message, I can do a keyword search for it.
(2) For your primary email account(s), you should only ever be receiving messages that you are either interested in reading immediately or must receive (for work, family, or other reasons). If you do get spam, filter it immediately. If you need to or want to receive an important newsletter or something here that you don't read immediately, put in a filter to get it out of your inbox. If you're required to receive messages from a certain list for work that hardly ever apply to you, put in a filter. With just an investment of a minute or so to create a filter, you save yourself from sorting the clutter from hundreds or thousands of individual messages ever again.
Problem solved. No hell required. I probably have to deal personally with less than a dozen messages each week, outside of work requirements.
The rest -- I don't need to read, and they are dealt with automatically. If I ever get curious, I can always browse the random crap in other accounts or folders/labels it was sorted into.
Bah -- I rarely write a reply to an old comment, but your self-righteous arrogance forces me to.
The situation you describe is not analogous at all. Personally, I believe most doctors are idiots (well, not quite true, but I don't believe most of them are as many standard devs above the population as most people -- and most doctors -- think they are), and I certainly don't trust them to do drug research.
If you spent even a few moments doing a cursory review of research done on doctors' ability to read, understand, and make recommendations based on studies, you would know that they're mostly not capable of making any good judgments on scientific matters. They just don't understand enough math and enough about how science works.
So, when it comes to selecting a drug they haven't prescribed before, they're going off of some half-assed recommendation anyway, which is either based on some inadequate summary in a drug manual, or some friends' recommendation, or some freebies from a drug company. The last one is, as you rightly point out, an evil influence... but since I don't trust doctors to be able to make good choices on their own anyway, I'm not sure it's that much worse than the alternatives. I wouldn't take any drug I hadn't thoroughly investigated myself anyway (including a thorough search of research studies).
Anyhow, I agree that pharma companies are clearly influencing doctors. Duh. Let's move back to the question at hand.
Your analogy fails for a number of reasons. Amazon reviewers are not expected to be trusted authorities, unlike doctors. They are just stating their opinion. Vine reviewers aren't in a position where they must make recommendations; they can just refuse to participate in the program. Doctors, however, must decide on a course of action. Why is this relevant? Because it's not like Vine reviewers are sent a bunch of stuff they may or may not be interested in, and they then have to make a knowledgeable recommendation to someone else whose life might depend on it. Instead, Vine reviewers are given an option to have something sent to them which they choose, and then they decide whether it works for them. It's their opinion. A doctor doesn't generally try out all the medication from the drug company to see it if it works for him.
In sum, a Vine reviewer has a personal experience with an item and is not supposed to be an expert. That's the same as to be expected for any Amazon reviewer. A doctor generally has no personal experience with the drug and claims to be an expert with special power to recommend that drug. It seems like it should be much easier to influence the opinion of someone who doesn't have personal experience, and the ramifications are much greater because of doctors' supposed expert status.
If anything, Vine reviewers are only biased in two ways -- and in two ways only. They may not have a good sense of cost analysis, since they didn't pay (as you pointed out). Okay, but most of the time I don't depend on Amazon reviewers to recommend a deal to me anyway; I want to know whether the product is actually any good, regardless of cost. (And, the more expensive the item, the less I'm likely to just trust Amazon reviewers, so I'm not sure the cost problem would ever be a significant issue for me.)
The other thing is that Vine reviewers are perhaps likely to review things that they wouldn't review otherwise because they wouldn't buy it. That may be true, though most Vine reviewers probably wouldn't choose to receive something they weren't interested in at least somewhat. So, in the end, they are more likely to write a review for a particular item that was offered to them, which might perhaps skew the number of reviews for a particular item, but you haven't shown why it would skew the quality of that review.
With doctors, it matters because doctors rely too much on third parties (like pharma companies) to give them information on drugs, which means they might be recomme
That minimalism doesn't always work in academic settings
I'm not sure what your field is or what the expectations are, but I find minimalism in academic presentations and slides is often a signal for the very best talks by the very best presenters. The minute I see anything flashy, I suspect it's hiding inferior content; the minute I see slides cluttered with too much content, I doubt the confidence of the speaker to convey information.
Slides in academic situations are just like any other situation -- use them primarily for visual aids (graphs, charts, etc. that you are actually discussing in your talk). Otherwise, most things on slides are a distraction. Using short bits of text to "punch" some idea or concept can occasionally work, but I find it a bit hokey in most contexts -- it's kind of like shouting or making "air quotes" to draw attention to something that you could often do better through better rhetoric and subtle body language.
I've occasionally seen a very smooth and slick-looking set of slides used by a good speaker at an academic conference, but in those cases, usually what made the slides superior was not more content (or more complex content) but rather a good simple (and efficient) slide design and good timing.
I can't think of a single good academic talk I've ever been to that had complicated slides other than actual visual aids.
By the way, the only thing I might disagree with you about (or maybe just clarify) is the use of "lots of pictures." Unless you're giving a presentation on art history or architecture or something, I find pictures are distracting. The exception is when they are actually being discussed or are directly tied to the content in such a way that the photos actually give the viewer more information about what I am saying, not just serving as a pretty background that is vaguely complementary to the talk (as I think photos do for many non-academics using Powerpoint). If people are not confident enough for the audience to be focused on them and interesting enough in their rhetoric for the audience to be paying attention without pretty background pictures or words, chances are they could be communicating much more effectively... visual aids are probably not helping (other than to potentially decrease boredom in the audience, which is not a good sign of an effective presentation).
where the slides merely augment, while the presenter (Jobs, etc.) is the primary focus.
It's a bit sad that you even need to make an argument like this. This isn't just an "Apple style" that was developed by Apple -- it's imitating the best speakers who have been around ever since slide projectors were developed.
The focus should almost always be on the speaker. Otherwise, why bother having a speaker? If the presentation is all in the projected document, it should just be sent around by email and not waste everyone's time in a meeting.
For me, slides are only for things that can be conveyed more effectively or efficiently in a visual form. Again, that seems like an obvious point -- why bother with slides otherwise? If it's not necessary, it's just scenery and should be treated as such -- in the same way that a set shouldn't distract from the actors in a play.
If I have a photo or a video or a diagram or a chart or a graph that I'm actually discussing, it gets a slide. If I have a long quotation by someone else that I'm actually discussing, it might get a slide to allow listeners to engage with it better (it helps to navigate things too, since they differentiate it from me and my voice). Occasionally, I might use a short bulleted list that appears periodically to track the general progress of an argument, though I generally view that as a crutch -- a good speaker should be able to convey argument structure by adequate verbal transitions and signposts, as well as body language and even planned movement around the stage area (when possible). When I'm not using any explicit visual aids, the slide is blank and usually black -- anything there would just distract the listeners from the actual content of the presentation, which is coming from the speaker.
Rhetoric used to be a required part of any liberal arts curriculum. Any decent speaker would realize that visual aids, handouts, etc. are often distracting unless they are necessary to show something that can't be effectively conveyed aloud, or for the sake of proper discussion, or for some other important purpose.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of presentations given today are not focused on the rhetoric. In that case, as I've already said, skip the forced meeting and send out an email. There's no point listening to someone talk if they're not going to bother focusing on what they're saying and how they're saying it.
This puts Google in the position of being mommy and daddy. What I consider "inappropriate" is unlikely to be the same as the next parent; what this suggests, though, is that everyone gets to deal with what Google decides, and frankly... that's not an appropriate role for a third party.
A bookstore is not stepping outside of its "appropriate role for a third party" by offering a section of children's books. It's simply classifying materials in a useful well to serve its patrons well. Some patrons want mystery, some want sci-fi, and some are children who are best suited in the children's book section.
Please stop with the "everyone's a censor, third parties' opinions are evil" pseudo-libertarian bullshit. TFA is not proposing that anyone censor material in a way that we are forced to live with the results, merely classifying material in a way that might be useful to some segment of the population, much as it might classify news under sports or science news or whatever for the person who might be interested in such things and want to find appropriate material. If a particular parent doesn't like what this third party is doing, they can come up with their own scheme, just as a parent could guide their child to walk out of the children's section in a book store and go to the sci-fi section, for example, if the parent wants.
Not everyone will "have to deal" with the results -- only the people who find it useful.
That's the parent's job. If you don't have time for guiding your kids, and you can't seem to come up with rules and behaviors, or use a white-list facility competently, then perhaps you shouldn't be spawning anyway, rather than begging for a third party to do your job for you.
Bah. One of the most important elements of parenting is allowing your child to explore appropriately. But parents can often use help from other knowledgeable adults in setting general boundaries where the parents are unexperienced or haven't had time or opportunity to vet everything ahead of time.
I suppose you're also opposed to putting up a guard-rail and warning signs at a nature preserve where the terrain is a little rough for kids, but adult hikers might be interested in it.
Also, white lists aren't necessarily the best solution if you want your kids to be able to explore beyond what you already know is "safe." Parents can try their best, but they can't (and shouldn't) be peeking over the shoulders of their kids 24 hours/day, nor should they expect to have exhaustive knowledge of everything their child might potentially encounter so they could set exact limits ahead of time.
Exactly what sort of world do you want, where third parties are never supposed to "interfere" with anything, but parents need to be the dictators in the worst kind of authoritarian regime, discouraging their kids from ever trusting other adults' perspectives on what might be good/interesting/appropriate for kids?
If your job requires you to be on call, YES THAT MEANS YOU CAN'T GO TO A MOVIE THEATER! Holy shit, how could you possibly think otherwise?
You cannot have both.
This is not a reasonable position, either. Some people have to be on-call, at least for emergencies -- some of them are doctors... one of them might be the surgeon who might save your life.
The reasonable answer is that the patron puts his/her device on vibrate, informs employers that he/she is available only for absolute emergencies during that time, and if the device vibrates, he/she exits the theater temporarily in an unobtrusive manner to check and see what the emergency is.
Everybody wins.
she's no longer allowed to watch the movie, so they no longer keep her money. It's not the 'escorting out' which is obnoxious, it's the 'without refund' bit.
Umm... except she didn't just pay to watch the movie. She paid for a seat to sit in and watch the movie. Sure, most movies aren't completely full except on opening night, but the fact is that she bought a seat that was then unavailable to other customers, thereby potentially costing the theater revenue if it was a sold-out show.
Same thing would go if you bought a reserved ticket for a bus or train or whatever. If you then show up drunk and disorderly enough that you make the bus driver unable to concentrate (for example), you could be thrown off. And If you are thrown off (in violation of a pre-existing contract), the bus company has no obligation to refund the ticket, since (a) you violated the contract and have no legal basis if those were the terms, and (b) you already cost them money because they couldn't sell your ticket to someone else.
Yup - people look strangely at me when I have a meeting with somebody in my office at work, the phone rings, I glance at it, and then I don't answer it and proceed with the meeting.
Indeed. It was one of the best lessons I learned from a mentor as an undergrad. She was an eminent professor and a scholar with an international reputation, but she wouldn't answer the phone when I had a scheduled meeting with her. Perhaps after two or three times, I think I said something like "do you need to get that," at which point she explained the same philosophy that you did. Unless you are aware that you are expecting an urgent and very important phone call (in which case, you inform the person you are meeting with when he/she arrives), the people who meet face-to-face get priority.
Same goes (if not more so) for emails, texting, etc. Duh. It's the most basic respect you can show for someone else's time.
I'm sure there's an objective, non-sensationalist, just-the-facts reporter working somewhere
Where?? And, more importantly, when??
Look back over the history of newspapers. There has never been a time in history when media has been "objective, non-sensationalist, just-the-facts." Why? Because it's boring as hell to most of the population. People want to read about dramatic events, tragedies, horrors, tales of deception, even the occasional outrageous muckraking article. That's what sells media today, and that's what sold them a century ago, or two centuries ago. Ben Franklin and other publishers of his time weren't unbiased either -- "serious" news, whenever it existed, usually had an agenda, which got people worked up. The rest was all sensationalist, designed to entertain.
The idea that journalism was "pure" before the internet is ridiculous, and a holdover from this mythology that was created by mid-20th century national news organizations (to combat the perception of "yellow journalism" that pervaded the previous generations of media conglomerates), who had their own agendas in the way they structured "news," however noble they might seem to some.
a citizen journalist is going to be less careful about sources and fact checking
Often stated, rarely proven.
Here's a recent story that might support your view, where the international got all excited over dozens of bodies supposedly discovered in a house in Texas, even though the only evidence was a psychic who called in a police tip.
On the other hand, from what I've read in the aftermath of this story, what caused this story to spread initially was lax standards about who could post to a Twitter feed at a local news organization; Reuters read the Twitter feed, and the rest is history. By the time the local news station had checked its sources and decided not to run with the story on the air, the story was everywhere.
If relying on a Twitter feed that didn't go through official approval channels at a local news station could cause this much crap, do we really think that relying on random Twitter and blog posts by a group of unvetted people many times as large will result in greater accuracy?
... has revealed that the council is not prepared for an unexpected zombie invasion.
Does that mean the council is prepared for zombie invasions in general, but just doesn't know how to deal with unexpected ones?
The point is, while you may gain a superficial understanding, you will not ever be an expert in the subject to understand some of the more complex (and often, worthwhile) problems.
It depends on what you mean by "complex" problems, which I think you are using as a synonym for specialized problems. In that case, your argument is a bit circular -- specialists will only ever have the capacity to understand and solve specialist problems.
But "complex" problems are often ones that may not even be seen as "problems" by the specialist, or they may be assumptions that are just taken for granted or even assumptions that are admitted to be limitations, but everyone in a field uses them, so no one looks beyond them. Basically, a specialist may have the focus to work out the intricacies of some "problem" that has been identified as critical importance to the specialists in a given field, but yet not be able "to see the forest from the trees," as it were. If you look at many of the major advances of science over the years, they often involved some thinker questioning some fundamental assumption (often not from a very "specialized" perspective) or tackling a problem from a perspective or using a methodology that all the specialists in a field (working on their own complex problems) would find problematic or even ludicrous.
I'm not saying this happens all the time. But it is a fundamental way that science actually solves truly complex problems, some of which are known problems to specialists and some of which aren't even identified as problems to specialists until it is pointed out by someone with a broader perspective.
Renaissance men are great -- and we all aspire to be that way. But the reality is that we can only focus on any one thing. We may be able to dabble in many others (as distractions, nothing more), but our real dedication can only be in one area, unless you're a polymath and a savant.
I think if most people were actually honest with themselves, they actually understand a much smaller segment of knowledge than they would like to admit. And they are usually actively fluent in an even smaller subset that they can actively call up and use at a given time without preparation. One sees this often when very bright specialists (e.g., university professors) try to teach a survey course or a fundamentals course and stumble over details. They aren't just a specialist in their discipline, or even in a subdiscipline, but often a large segment of their active knowledge is only material that they need to know for their specific research.
This is only reasonable, given the limitations most people have on memory, time to become familiar with very specialized literature and research, etc. In my view, the specialist already is often even much more specialized than we like to pretend, and one can already make broader leaps in a discipline by having a little bit of knowledge in a number of subdisciplines, rather than having all one's knowledge focused on a few related research projects.
The "generalist" is merely an extension of this trend. The generalist can never know all the literature and research in three or four or more disciplines any more than the average specialist can actually know all the literature and research in his/her own discipline. But the generalist has the advantage of being familiar with different methodologies and approaches from different disciplines, which are often much more useful for solving complex intractable problems than a lot of narrowly focused experience in only one discipline.
Nothing would change. The "news" is a soap opera that most people watch everyday. Stop reading the paper and watching the news for a few weeks, then come back. You'll find that you haven't missed much. There are probably a few scandals still going on dealing with some congressman or governor or whatever. There are still a few wars going on. Some of the stories are similar, but the names have been changed.
Not much is "swept under the rug" in old news, because you don't have to. It wasn't meant to mean anything beyond a day or two. People move on, because the news is, at its heart, entertainment to sell ads. Tomorrow you want something else, or perhaps you might keep watching the plotline if it's sensational enough.
I view almost all "news" sources the same way I view Slashdot. I go here for amusement -- to read others' opinions and to get some new insight. The insight usually comes from discussion more than from the actual stories, which are often either mundane tech stories or "shocking" revelations that generate a lot of arguments. People watch the news so that they can have something to bitch about at the water cooler.
Try giving up the "news" for a while. I haven't listened to or read the news every day in many years, but by checking in briefly every few weeks, I seem to be about as "informed" as most people I know... probably more so, since I spend my time reading substantial documents dealing with issues that seem important, rather than a few paragraphs of junk with a sensational headline slapped on top.
Quite a few years back, I read a book entitled "How the News Makes Us Dumb" (or something like that). My favorite account from that book was of a major, very respectable newspaper, quite a few years ago (in the heyday of supposedly "serious" journalism). In the newsroom one day, the editor stormed in, furious, and threw the newspaper from that morning onto the table. There were stories on the stock market, ongoing wars, etc. on the front page. His comment was on a photo on the front page: "Next time when we put a nice-looking Midwest girl on the front page, can we please be sure to keep her tits above the fold?!?"
So, I don't think reliving the news is going to change much -- it, like this Usenet thing, would be mostly about entertainment for people who like old news.
If it has a second hand, there are (24 x 60 x 60 =) 86400 seconds in a day. Twice in those 86400 seconds the clock will be correct, so it is right 2/86400 (0.0023148148...%) of the time.
Except by this definition, many of the clocks in the world are wrong all the time, specifically almost all that are set manually. Almost no one I know (and I know some pretty nerdy folk) bothers to set the seconds correctly on their clocks (setting aside the issue that most such clocks also drift by many seconds each month), so according to your definition, their clocks are worse than a broken clock.
the sad part is that wikipedia is actually a very good reference when looking up non-political stuff (and even most political stuff).
Wikipedia is actually not a very good reference overall. Except for a few topics, I trust it as much as I'd trust a World Book encyclopedia set from 1960 at my grandparents' house. The good articles are those that are in fields that are interesting to nerds (science, math, etc.). Step out into the humanities, however, and you'll rapidly find yourself dealing with scholarship that is mostly 50 years out of date, if not more. That's good enough for a quick overview most of the time, but not very reliable. And I'm speaking here of major articles on, for example, biographies of major historical figures in the humanities. Go to more obscure topics and articles, and you often find yourself confronted with whatever skewed perspective is favored by the few editors who police such articles.
And the political problem is not confined to political articles. Anything that could be vaguely controversial will be the source of problems. For example, try looking at obscure religious articles, and you will find editors doing battle between liberal and conservative camps in whatever religion, often over seemingly subtle aspects of nomenclature or interpretation that are trying to push an agenda. Worse are the articles that only get the attention from one side.
The only thing that seems to stop most of Wikipedia outside of mainstream science and math articles from self-destructing is the trend of the past few years to revert edits by anons and less-active editors, thereby at least introducing stability. It's harder to fight for changes in such a system, but at least it keeps new problems from creeping in. Thus, instead of the traditional authorities that traditional encyclopedias relied on, Wikipedia relies on the good faith of the early editors that pasted the thing together in the early days (and the continuing efforts from mostly those who worked their way up the Wikipedia admin hierarchy in those days)... and its accuracy and reliability is largely dependent on how well that job was done.
All of this is to say that media attention is by definition sensationalist, because its primary function is to sell advertising, not to provide news. Any reference source that depends primarily on mainstream media sources over peer-reviewed will inevitably distort things, ranging from small exaggerations to outright lies that are reported to get media attention.
But Wikipedia currently relies mostly on online sources, and the media is convenient. Making a reference to a paper book or journal, or even an article in an electronic academic journal that requires a (expensive) subscription, is viewed with suspicion (even though these are in general far more reliable on most topics), since Wikipedians can't as easily check your sources.
I'm a casual reader of the classics, and it's amazing how pervasive beautiful writing was even at the lowest tiers of education; e.g. Civil War-era letters from soldiers to their loved ones (lol).
Wouldn't a dash or a parenthesis be more appropriate than a semi-colon in this sentence?
Indeed. A comma would be the most common choice. It seems odd to nitpick punctuation in a post highlighting the power of punctuation. Nevertheless, a semicolon is most often used to connect two independent clauses that lack a conjunction. There are few other less-common uses for semicolons these days, but this sentence doesn't really fit any of them. To introduce an example or set of examples (as in the sentence in question), one would generally use a colon or dash. However, since the example is preceded by "e.g." here, a comma or perhaps parentheses would be more appropriate. (In older punctuation styles, the e.g. would be surrounded by commas, since it literally means "for example." So, in this case, "...lowest tiers or education, e.g., Civil War-era letters....")
I can't even read Shakespeare without having to sit and think on every page for about an hour
Cheer up. The medium is the problem.
Umm, no. You do make a good point: I've certainly been to performances of Shakespeare where many obscure words and idioms were made reasonably clear through good acting.
But that isn't the main problem. Try reading the script from a Broadway musical of the past few decades; you may not get all the nuance immediately, but it is a lot easier to comprehend than Shakespeare.
The problem is that most people who aren't scholars of Early Modern English (including the vast majority of actors) think that they can just "figure it out" by looking up a few archaic words. But that is generally insufficient for full understanding. Individual words carry all sorts of connotations that have changed in sometimes subtle and sometimes significant ways, while idiomatic uses of those words may carry further meaning. Over a century ago, some scholars were already pointing out how large the gap is and how much audiences (and readers) are missing, as in the example in the "Botching Shakespeare" article here which analyzes a well-known Polonius speech
The language has changed a lot in 400 years. Pretending that it hasn't and all you need is a decent actor to fix that means that you probably aren't getting a lot of the subtleties from the plays... unless you're the kind of person who spends hours each day sifting through arcane shifts in meaning in the OED.
Great, so you've shown that 80% of the population in 1870 was literate. The upper middle class and rich (commonly defined as having household incomes greater than $100,000) are about 15% of the population today. Since you are assuming some sort of socioeconomic structure equivalence, that means we can assume that roughly 65% of the literate adults in the U.S. in 1870 would not be the equivalent of "upper middle class" or above. Chances are that many of those 65% wrote letters in the Civil War.
Also, many recent detailed literacy studies have shown that 15-25% of adults in the U.S. today are functionally illiterate, a number that hasn't really changed since the first fairly reliable literacy tests were given to much of the population during the WWI draft -- this despite the fact that the average number of years of education has more than doubled over the past century. There's little reason to suppose that those numbers were significantly different during Civil War times, especially given that literacy rates dropped in the late 19th and early 20th century due to immigration. (Literacy in most other countries was markedly lower than the U.S. during the 19th century, so most immigration tended to lower literacy.) Thus, the overall percentage of people literate enough to write letters probably hasn't changed much since the Civil War, though the racial trends have changed quite a bit.
Lastly -- anecdotally, both of my grandfathers wrote letters and kept journals during WWII (which I've recently come upon). Neither of them had more than a 6th-grade education (common for that generation) and were hardly upper middle class. They wrote significantly better than the college students whose essays I have graded at fairly elite institutions. They also both had very legible handwriting, which would today be expected of only calligraphers.
What was your point again?