3 thoughts on “”

1. In the last few months I came across Derek’s side of the story and so I dug back into archives (literally archive.org) to find the original show and catch the blog post conversation around this controversy. I particularly recall Ira and Jeff Jarvis’ conversations. Somehow I didn’t see Kevin’s portion of the conversation in the comments sections of the others, but I’m glad to have it pop up just a few weeks later to complete the circle.
   Of the group, Kevin, as usual, provides some of the best analysis, but he also adds in a huge amount of additional context by way of links.
   Society seems to have ripped itself open recently and I can’t help but think that we’re going to need some strong tummelers and heavy work to allow everyone to speak, be heard, and create some change. Kevin’s piece here may be a good starting point.
   Perhaps this is the piece some of our mainstream media have been missing from a journalistic perspective? For too long they’ve acted as aggregators and filters, but perhaps they should be spending a larger portion of their time doing some tummeling work on our behalf?

   Syndicated copies:

   Reply

2. Derek Powazek – Depression is a Loaded Gun

   When you sell confidence, you can’t admit that you’re broken.

   I have known a lot of addicts. I like hanging out with people in recovery because they understand something very important about the human condition. They know, if they continue to do the things they’ve always done, the things that feel the most natural, they will continue to fuck up their lives in all the ways they always have. So they choose a new reaction. They decide to do something else, something that is not their first instinct, and they have to keep choosing every day to make it stick.

   I cannot keep doing the things I always have done. I can’t let depression define me, I can’t fight it, I can’t pretend it away. I have choose to do something else.

   Having depression isn’t the same as being sad. I’m sad sometimes, too. But depression is different. Depression is being empty. Being nothing. Sometimes it’s loud and sometimes it’s quiet but it’s never completely gone. It’s part of me but it isn’t me.

   My depression is like that gun. You can’t leave it on the table unattended. If you do, someone will get hurt. Probably me, but maybe somebody else.

   But most importantly, I must consciously choose to point the gun at something. Every day. If I don’t, it’ll wind up pointed at me.

   There are times when a gun is a tool you need to use for a job. My depression can be like that. I visualize pointing my depression at things. Things I need to do. Using that dark energy to accomplish something light.

   You never, ever point a gun at someone else unless you intend to use it. This is a reminder that the people around me aren’t responsible for my depression. They’re not the cause of it, or the solution to it. Never point it at them.

   The gun must be cared for. Taken apart, pieces examined, cleaned, and put back together. If I ignore it, it will become unstable. More dangerous.

   If you hang out with gun people, you learn quickly that they have an intense understanding of how dangerous the things are. They have rituals around the guns – cleaning them, locking them up when not in use, where your fingers go when you touch them, where you point the gun and when – there are rules and they’re life and death important.

   Anyplace I can point the gun that’s not a loved one or my own head.

   Now I walk the property with my loaded depression gun and look for other things to point it at.

   On The Media

   Who is Ira Glass kidding? Himself? He’s the one who through the manipulative methods of confessional journalism got the teens in his story to air their private gory details. It’s HE who opened them up for focused ridicule by offering up HIS website to be the unmoderated forum where any anonymous nitwit could spew.
   In his swipes at Bob Garfield for being “royalty” or “anti-democratic” he needs to look in the mirror. His shutting down of HIS forums reminds me of what happens when an authoritarian or royalist regime liberalizes freedoms then takes draconian measures to withdraw those freedoms for all because of a predictable few anarchists or merely embarrassing commentators.
   Kinda like China’s ongoing yin-yang dance with freedom of expression. And like China, just because a forum in Glassistan is shut down does nothing to prevent commentators outside his borders from dumping on the him or is subjects. These days anyone can start a dumponthisamericanlifestorytellers blog or Google group.
   BTW Ira. As of the moment I write this anti-democrat, royalist Bob Garfield hasn’t shut down this forum.

   Shutting down comments is undemocratic, eh Ira? Okay, but to paraphrase Carlin, if your democracy is made up selfish, ignorant, judgmental people, then your comment threads will likely be filled with the selfish, ignorant, judgmental sentiments.
   Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

   Obama writes chaper on community organizing

   In theory,
   community organizing provides a way to merge various strategies
   for neighborhood empowerment.

   Joseph Henrich on Cultural Evolution and WEIRD Societies (Ep. 16 — Live at Mason)

   What would be an example of something you try to explain with that framework that’s much harder to explain using only economics and biology?

   Tags: [Qs]

   To anthropologist Joseph Henrich, intelligence is overrated. Social learning, and its ability to influence biological evolution over time, is what really sets our species apart.

   social learning
   Tags: [learning]

   Corante: Boston

   I’ve been a party to many conversations on weblogs, and they have always always always ended with one of the protagonists blanking the opposing view. They just don’t link to them. They delete trackbacks. They remove comments. They don’t show technorati or referrer information.
   After this, the conversation always fractures into two sides, and invariably the two sides cease to have any contact at all and you end up with an echo chamber. On a mailing list, this just can’t happen. You don’t get flame wars on weblogs, true, but you don’t get any meaningful discussion either.

   hm. good point. it’s like arguing with your neighbor across the street, while standing inside, with the door open. you end up shutting the door when you’re pissed

   A couple of additional remarks: as to comment spamming, I am sure that blog vendors will provide proper solutions to automatically block or remove a good portion of these. Second, I would enforce the usage of login and mechanisms like typekey to avoid anonymous ranting, so that people can stand by their comments.

   If instead of commenting, you write a response on your blog, you are standing behind your words, and associating them with the rest of your writing. The social dynamics are very different; you think more before responding instead of posting a quick flame. You can’t really spam, as you are only soiling your own garden.

   You can’t really spam, as you are only soiling your own garden.

   Clay discusses flame wars rather than spam, but the issues are similar – people taking advantage of others’ resources without recompense.

   When comments are turned on on blogs, they eventually fill up with flames and spam too, unless they are carefully maintained.

   blogs work better for discussion than mailing lists, because the blogs are owned

   Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015: Indie Ed-Tech

   Perhaps this is the piece some of our mainstream media have been missing from a journalistic perspective? For too long they’ve acted as aggregators and filters, but perhaps they should be spending a larger portion of their time doing some tummeling work on our behalf?

   Of the group, Kevin, as usual, provides some of the best analysis, but he also adds in a huge amount of additional context by way of links.

   r/samharris – Making Sense #163 – RICKY GERVAIS

   The other point he made about hate speech was great. It’s pretty strange how simple it is, but it really makes sense (pun intended). We can’t agree what being hateful is. Giving someone else the authority to make those decisions is clearly a terrible idea.

   Great episode, but am I the only one who wishes that Sam would stop bringing up the latest cancel culture controversy on every single episode? I mean, I wouldn’t have known about any of these things if it wasn’t for this podcast. He complains (rightly) about tiny minorities getting all the attention, but then all he does to support his talking points of PC and cancel culture is bring up the firing of some sub-manager at Netflix, without substantiating why this is more than just an anomaly.What I’m trying to say is: it feels like Sam’s not being a part of the solution here. A tiny minority of entitled millennials gets angry over the words people use, and then a second tiny minority gets angry over the fact that a tiny minority of entitled millennials gets angry over the words people use.I guess there’s a bubble that I’m not a part of, to be missing out on all of this. Is it the USA-bubble? The Twitter bubble? The news bubble?

   cancel culture
   political correctness
   miscontrued
   out of context
   appropriation
   outrage machines
   misinformation
   fake news
   the twitter bubble
   echo chamber
   out of proportion

   he has a sense of humor and a way with words

   I’d love to be called this

   PC

   political correctness
   Tags: [til]

   When you clash with people who also have a whole lot of followers and potentially can influence your reputation/career it becomes a lot more real than what Gervais means. Gervais is like South Park. Nobody will say ‘Did you see that offense stuff on South Park’. People say ‘That’s South Park for ya’. Same goes for Gervais on social media. But not for Sam.I don’t agree with your statement that he describes Sam there.Sam does seem to have a weakness for Twitter drama belying of his intelligence and patience in other things though, I’ll give you that.

   “the trouble with twitter is you go in, click a few buttons and you think it’s world war 3 – or game of thrones, that the whole world is full of Nazis and Anti – Nazis. But you step outside and no one gives a shit, no one cares, it’s not real. If I’m walking down the street and a tramp in a bin covered in shit calls me a wanker, I’m not hurt by that, because he’s an idiot”

   Jared Diamond

   It doesn’t exist in his world.

   he has absolutely no conception of any of this drama

   It’s all magnified because the ones who are most extreme have the most sway on social media platforms, but its not REAL.

   Tags: [perspective]

   Might be that he’s doing it because it’s filled with morons. Preaching to your own bubble has a mediocre return-on-investment — at best you strengthen some convictions and at worst you will lose some.

   He responds with clear-headed criticisms and reasoning, and often over-reasoning, and over-thinking.

   well shit
   Tags: [gpoy]

   It’s Sam’s personality more than anything. I know Myers Briggs is deeply flawed, but he fits very well into the description of someone who is INTJ.It’s a disposition than is passionate about things making sense (lol), and even if Sam knows in principle that Twitter is full of idiots, his instincts demands he get to the bottom of it. It’s a lot harder for someone like Sam to let something like this fly.But I don’t think this is evidence of him being thin-skinned or reactionary. He’s really not – Twitter just makes him seem that way. But he never responds with anger or other emotional outbursts, or in tirades of abuse at his assailants. He responds with clear-headed criticisms and reasoning, and often over-reasoning, and over-thinking.Such attitudes and behavior, while incredibly endearing to many (i.e. us, his fans) are incredibly irritating and infuriating to many others. I suspect much of the hate he gets comes down more to clashes of personality than any facts on the ground.

   an everyman who pretends to be above the everyman

   For a public person, Sam has very thin skin. He gets into a lot of personal feuds largely of his own doing…and then publicizes them.

   The interview felt like two hours of Sam asking Ricky “how do I learn not to care about what people say?”. Ricky’s answer is “it’s easy. Twitter is not real life. Everyone on Twitter is a moron”.I wonder why Ricky Gervais and Richard Dawkins get it, and Sam has such a hard time realizing it.

   The arguments have all been made but until the arguments actually prevail they have not warn out their welcome imo.

   Tags: [articulation]

   Derek Powazek – 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments

   School your writers in the ways of online community. If someone is trying to get a rise out of you, don’t fight back, no matter how tempting. A good Community Manager can help train writers on how, and when, to join the fray.

   give them the ability to moderate comments on their own stories

   People chill out a lot when they know they’re being listened to by the writer (and they act out a lot more when they think no one’s listening).

   If you’d like to say this privately, go over here.

   enable the community to help. Give every post a “This is Bad” button

   constantly tweaking the form’s automated responses

   If you can’t name your community manager, it’s probably you.

   Write a human-readable set of community guidelines

   Anonymity is important in journalism, but not for comments.

   Newsrooms are top-down places, but the internet is not. Get used to the fact that people online won’t do things just because you told them to.

   The Social Life of Information

   The sociological insights are still valid and useful, but the actual examples are painfully out of date.

   I find it strange to read, in 2010, a book written in 2000 about the effect of the Internet on human behavior with information. I can see places where the authors were quite prescient, and areas where they got it wrong – in particular, their prediction that newspapers will continue to be relevant and successful. I think in that case it’s a matter of incomplete understanding of the business model of newspapers; craigslist and ebay have largely destroyed classified advertising, and that’s a big revenue loss.

   “So documents do not merely carry information, they help make it, structure it, and validate it. More intriguing, perhaps, documents also help structure society, enabling social groups to form, develop, and maintain a sense of shared identity” (189).

   Acting as individuals, using only their training, they wouldn’t have been able to do their jobs. The training was, in fact, only information. Tried and tested against copiers “in the real world,” then shared within an unofficial “community of practice,” information became knowledge.

   You may read something in a manual or book or newspaper. It may seem like you’re doing something by yourself. Just collecting information. But what you read was first made sense of by other people — writers and editors.

   They used their own judgment and experience to decide what was worth putting into words and then how to organize it for your consumption. This is all the work of knowledge.

   We forget that communication involves negotiation and then don’t understand why others can’t always accept what we say at face value.

   Brown and Duguid suggest that information technology’s enthusiasts don’t honor the difference between information and knowledge. Some people “know” what they’re talking about; some don’t. Knowledge is information with a context, which includes the person or people who have it. As Brown and Duguid say, you can’t separate knowledge from the knower.

   The Eat Watch

   Management in isolation struggles with constraints that can frequently
   be eliminated. Engineering in isolation seeks permanent fixes
   which sometimes don’t exist and, even when found, often require an
   ongoing effort to put into place and maintain. Each needs the other
   to truly solve a problem.

   engineer to eliminate constraints, manage to put in places and maintain the fixes and improvements

   The engineers, likewise, realised that while they could fix a large
   part of the problem, they couldn’t do it all. Had they sought to
   eliminate operators entirely, they would never have found a workable
   system. Instead, they automated what they could and relied on a
   well-managed organisation of human beings to handle the balance.

   werk it together

   No amount of management could overcome this limitation. But a series
   of incremental engineering fixes, starting with automated switchboards
   for human operators, then direct dial telephones, and finally direct
   worldwide dialing reduced the demand for operators to a level where
   universal telephone service became a reality.

   identify bottleneck, assess resource, scale of issue, extrapolate, plan and execute accordingly. in this case iteratively

   Once that’s known, a remedy may become apparent
   which eliminates the need to manage the problem

   solve it until you don’t need to manage it
   hm. just realised this is the right way to frame my own loop. I managed my burnout instead of solving it.

   Many difficult and complicated problems require a combination of the
   skills of management and the insights of engineering. Yet often, the
   difficulty managers and engineers have in understanding each other’s
   view of the world thwarts the melding of their skills to truly solve a
   problem.

   In isolation, a manager can feel rewarded watching the
   organisation he created to “work the problem” grow larger and
   more important. Rewardingly occupied too, is the engineer who finds “fix”
   after “fix,” each revealing another aspect of the problem that requires
   yet another fix. Neither realises, in their absorption in doing what they
   love, that the problem is still there and continues to cause
   difficulties.

   interesting loop

   inside

   very reductionistically framed

   Engineers, derided as “nerds” and “techies” in the age of
   management, are taught not to manage problems but to fix them. Faced
   with a problem, an engineer strives to determine its cause and
   find ways to make the problem go away, once and for all.

   Tags: [eatwatch]

   it’s important to
   distinguish managing a problem from fixing it, for these
   are very different acts: one is a process, the other an event.
   Solving a problem often requires a bit of both.

   sounds like a profound framing but it doesn’t really make sense. fixing and problem solving are also process. fixed OTOH is an event
   Tags: [problem solving]

   Once you possess the power to circumvent limitations, to control
   things most people consider immutable, you’re liberated from the
   tyranny of events. You’re no longer an observer; you’re in command.
   You’ve become a hacker.

   gotta laugh at the way this is phrased
   Tags: [cheesy] [funny] [inspo shiz] [test]

   Most extraordinary things are done by ordinary people who never knew
   what they were attempting was “impossible.” Hackers have seen this
   happen again and again; many of the most significant innovations in
   computing have been made by individuals or small groups, working
   alone, attempting tasks the mainstream considered impossible or
   not worth trying.

   Tags: [inspo shiz]

   Bob
   Bickford, computer and video guru, defined
   the true essence of the hacker as “Any
   person who derives joy from discovering ways to circumvent
   limitations.”

   Tags: [definitions]

   blogtank

   UNless you want us all to have online identities tied to massive databses that verify that so-and-so doesn’t have a criminal record, possesses a social security number, has a decent credit rating, and never said “fuck you” to his grandmother.
   I for one don’t want myself tied to any such database.
   Yes, the interpersonal trust issue is one we confront every day online. But I think the only workable solution resides in ourselves. The only way to push through such a “problem” is to come to understand both the strengths and limitations of the medium and operate accordingly.

   Trust is something many still find trouble with in the real world, and the seemingly anonymity of the Internet is a dangerous allure to many. And the best way to combat poor trust on the Internet is through the education of the naive of the dangers of the Internet, and how to combat them.
   If only people knew not to open unexpected attachments, or if they knew tech support would not ask for their password, or if kids knew the person on the other side may not be a nice man.
   Each may seem obvious to us, but there are many who at least one of those would ring news to their ears. And so it comes down to the education of the public and the ability to trust others only after being informed on the ways in which they may be fooled.

   The Missing Building Blocks of the Web – Anil Dash – Medium

   There’s no reason it has to be that way, though. There are no technical barriers for why we couldn’t share our photos to our own sites instead of to Instagram, or why we couldn’t post stupid memes to our own web address instead of on Facebook or Reddit. There are social barriers, of course — if we stubbornly used our own websites right now, none of our family or friends would see our stuff. Yet there’s been a dogged community of web nerds working on that problem for a decade or two, trying to see if they can get the ease or convenience of sharing on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram to work across a distributed network where everyone has their own websites.

   we can but will we?
   in the era of misinformation, having independent sites / deplatforming / decentralising would be throwing gasolene to the fire no?
   in some ways it’s better to have people “create” on select platforms, that can be policed, despite all the political and business incentives behind it
   distributed spam and fake news
   sure the signals will be weaker in that situation but social media platforms aren’t going anywhere, so the amplifiers will still be there, with a lot more smaller pebbles and clusters where things can spark, grow, and proliferate

   blogtank

   blogtank is an experimental team weblog the purpose of which is to determine whether a group of bloggers from various professions and backgrounds can form a new kind of self-organizing consulting group for debate, research and discussion.

   blogtank™ is a new kind of team blog (a clusterblog?) where an amazing collection of the best minds in blogdom can get together to brainstorm, develop solutions to problems, give birth to ideas and generally read the riot act to the rest of the world.

   Here Comes Everybody – Tummlers, Geishas, Animateurs and Chief Conversation Officers help us listen

   In the meantime, if your newspaper, social media initiative or website isn’t working right, you need to find your tummler, geisha, animateur or conversational catalyst, but you should consider giving them a big name title like ‘Chief Conversation Officer’.

   they get called ‘Moderators’ (as Tom Coates thoroughly described) or ‘Community Managers’, and because when they’re doing it right you see everyone’s conversation, not their carefully crafted atmosphere, their role is often ignored.

   The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don’t have someone there cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage.

   Tummling, SideWiki, Twitter and the Tragedy of the Comments revisited

   This hints at a greater possibility for SideWiki – to weave the web together by better by showing commentary across the web from all places that quote and cite each other, correlating by textual quotation and adding annotated links to the commentary from people we trust most.This is a way Google could use it’s scale of indexing to weave a better web for us to read, through our own chosen trusted sources, rather than funneling commentary into being hosted on its own pages.

   Google attempts to show the ‘most important’ comments first, using a combination of voting and other ranking algorithms, but it is still attempting to show everyone the same comment ordering, not taking personal ‘following’ into account. For SideWiki to succeed, I think this will need to change.Sidewiki does another interesting thing – it matches comments to the same words elsewhere on the web. For example, my comment on Douglas Adams excellent 1999 piece also shows up in SideWiki on JP Rangiswami’s blog where he quotes Douglas Adams too.

   Twitter’s ‘Following’ model is powerful here for both its first-order and second-order effects. The first order effect is that by default we see interesting and friendly comments from people we have chosen to follow, which makes us more likely to want to read on. That people favour and retweet and repeat what they find interesting helps us expand our circles of trust outward to new people. The second-order effect is that as what we see is mostly interesting, funny, polite and so on, we respond in that vein too (assuming that is what we are reading; certainly there can be self-reinforcing intolerance too, but it is more contained).

   Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn | Hacker News

   advertising-based business models

   all investigations of “how tf did we end up here” comes down to one Q: “what is the game we’re playing and what are the incentives driving the rules”. keep going through all the layers of games. repeat.
   [[yeah i really like media]]
   Tags: [seewater] [incentives]

   the focus is not on getting more users and clicks

   answer: advertising-based business models. hm. only now I begun to “get” this. see why it IS such a problem. it’s a problem because it’s costing us our sanity.
   been hearing about how toxic ad-based business models are.
   I get that it’s toxic, encouraging certain behavior that’s unhelpful, but haven’t experienced the effect, not personally affected yet. it’s not real yet. aha…
   Tags: [human] [social infrastructure]

   I wonder how the positive and respectful space here may be reproduced in other social media platforms.It’s very simple once you stop chasing growth and engagement metrics. The main reasons the other social media platforms are cesspools is because outrage generates engagement so the platform is designed to encourage it as well as encouraging users to join and stay regardless of the quality of their contributions, where as here the design itself acts as a small barrier to entry, in addition to a karma system and competent, human moderation that discourages (and eventually bans) bad behavior.

   Tags: [incentives] [seewater]

   I always exit HN with a positive mental head space.The discussion is generally informed, balanced and insightful . I wonder how the positive and respectful space here may be reproduced in other social media platforms.

   RE: what would a well-designed digital social space / media look like?
   what does HN do right?
   how does reddit, quora, IG, FB, Twitter, LI, Youtube compare?
   Tags: [social infrastructure] [product design]

   good professional network that twitter can help maintain connections with (but not passively)

   permeated by influencer culture

   I also tend to stay a lot at a given job (e.g. slightly more than 10y at the last one) but still found the current job through LinkedIn. I do 2 things:1. connect to all recruiters, politely decline with a standard message if obviously not interested2. when I get a potentially-interesting offer, I reply with “that’s all fine and well, but I make now; do you want to continue the discussion?”. (note: I’m not lying).I used to ignore recruiters at point 1, until I realized it costs me almost nothing to politely decline and earns goodwill; today’s junior recruiter that works for a crappy company might be in 10 years the HR director at a company you want to work for. Why not be in touch?Over the years, this adds up, a handful of opportunities actually said “yes” at point 2, and for one of them I actually went to interviews & got the job (and the very-good-offer).

   a good script to use and way to use LI
   Tags: [heuristics] [articulation]

   I guess when I stop to think about it, I do get a lot of use out of it.I use LinkedIn to contact professional colleagues when I don’t have their email addresses. I’ve met 95%+ of the people on my contact list at some point in my career, and it’s easy to send them a message to catch up. That’s especially useful if they’ve switched jobs and they lose their work emails.I also sometimes search people I meet at events or job applicants to find out a bit more about their backgrounds and see if we’re connected with anyone.Sometimes when I’m researching a company or hedge fund for work I’ll search LinkedIn to get some information about the firm below the senior-most executives.It also lets me know when some of my colleagues are mentioned in the media or have TV/print interviews. I like following up with people about those.I never post or like anything. My employer actually forbids it due to securities regulations. I had to give our Compliance Department access to my account through a special program so they can monitor & log everything.

   this person is very well spoken

   Both my current job and my previous job were initiated by recruiters who contacted me on LinkedIn.LinkedIn has been extremely valuable to me. The recruiters who contact me are usually from professional executive search firms and highly relevant, though I only get a few a year.I think the level of relevance depends on the industry though. I’m in finance/banking and fairly senior.

   balanced take, fresh

   The value I see in LinkedIn:1. My linkedin contact list is >300 people that I worked closely with over the years and all have seen me kick ass. I have actual email addresses for <10% of them.2. I can browse my list and see where they are currently working. “oh gee, Mary works at coolCo, I should reach out to her because I’ like to work for/with coolCo.”3. When I want to let them know that I started a new business venture, I can send them a message that is less obtrusive than an email.4. If I give a prospective client my linkedin, they can see a) a brief summary of my resume, b) that I have a lot of contacts in x space, and c) that they may know some of the people I have worked with over the years. These all give me some measure of credibility.

   +1
   my experience as well

   Despite this, some people are still surprisingly listening and engaging

   really?

   everyone tries to push their agenda all of the time, it is just noise

   spambots see me look at me listen to me buy my product. promote promote promote comment sections almost everywhere. blogs FB IG news portals

   The marketing side, which is part of its business model

   I kind of wish there was an HN like job site that was widely used in corporate America but didn’t have all the ‘content’. Just an online resume

   wondering what’s the original purpose of adding the news feed to LI, the product decision.
   lack of understanding I think. to drive “engagements” and keep eyeballs? what’s the incentives and how do they relate to LI’s biz model?
   Tags: [incentives] [product design]

   I never scroll through the news feed

   fine as a way of keeping track of people and potentially contacting those you’re not directly connected to elsewhere

   multidimensional

   The recruiter asks for your cv as a way to get paid

   Tags: [seewater]

   cesspool

   rolodex

   almost feels engineered by design

   permanent un-follow thing is legit,

   a bug to me at the time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s fixed now

   honor

   These feeds do not exist to inform you, they exist to keep a death grip on your attention

   poison ivy

   systematically suppressed in my feed because they didn’t drive as much “engagement”

   they actively try to make your feed controversial.

   The Paradox of Abundance: The average quality of information is getting worse and worse. But the best stuff is getting better and better. Markets of abundance are simultaneously bad for the median consumer but good for conscious consumers

   Tags: [to look up]

   turning platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn into a tool, not a vice. You need to curate

   Nobody is a prophet in their own land

   lea michele, the police kneeling and pushing le 75 y/o the next day. words and actions don’t sync. in both directions. the disconnect. to reflect
   Tags: [people watching]

   content in my feed is from my connections or interactions by my connections

   wannabe thought leaders

   the same phenomenon observed to be part of the root cause of “Tech content is BS”

   The “verified” badge on there is a good heuristic for who not to follow (if not outright block them) because those are not people anymore, but marketing/PR operations.

   Tags: [heuristics]

   spam is now distributed

   business networking sites such as LinkedIn may be considered fair game, platforms used for more personal purposes, such as Facebook and Instagram, are possibly not relevant.”

   GDPR #til
   Tags: [GDPR] [TIL]

   witch hunts

   How to combine respect for privacy and freedom of expression with protecting a company from undeserved harm? Maybe this the problem LinkedIn was trying to solve until it became a giant spam ground for annoying recruiters and influencer wannabes.

   i like seeing how this discussion is an exercise in refining the right question for the problem

   Never say or write anything in public that you wouldn’t want to appear on the front page of the newspaper

   another mantra to chew and reflect on

   Sure, play stupid games/get stupid prizes but we are all human and go through phases of self-discovery. Turning social media into a saccharine, superficial cat pics trading ground where everyone is fearful of losing friendships over, say, well-intentioned analysis and opinions seems like a pathetic outcome for humanity overall. Not to mention how easy it is to miss sarcasm or other thought subtleties that can’t be easily conveyed on international multimedia social networks

   misconstrued, out-of-context quote

   people on social media who have ever in their lives said anything that could be construed as “seriously questionable” (whose definition changes according to the times).

   re:how do you redeem yourself in this era of permanent documenting

   dedicated herself to destroying lives

   free speech MUST ALSO be a cultural value that is protected and defended FIRST and the content of the speech judged SECOND

   no company wants either internal dissent or an external PR hit because someone they hired ranted online about something that’s outside the scope of “civilized” discourse as determined by the standards of the arbiters of appropriate public discussion.

   Tags: [seewater] [incentives]

   blogtank

   A Pattern Language is a superb book on defining the ways that architectural spaces facilitate human interaction. It’s not directly applicable to the Web, but neither is Tufte. I think you have to have a certain amount of 2D design background to “get” Tufte.

   Derek Powazek – AI is Not a Community Management Strategy

   You can’t create a system for everyone, where everything goes, not communicate the rules, not design for community, and then say it’s just too hard to protect everyone. This end state is the outcome of all of those decisions. And AI is not going to be the patch that fixes all the bugs.

   While there’s a community for everyone, not everyone is welcome in every community, and that’s okay. That’s how communities work.

   Of course humans need tools to help manage community. I’ve built systems to do this. And, sure, machine learning can be part of that. But I fear the leaders of Twitter and Facebook are depending too much on technology (again), and overlooking the kinds of systems that are great at this kind of empathetic flexible pattern recognition: humans.

   Anyone who’s ever managed a community knows how complicated people are. A reasonable community member can suddenly have a bad day. Sometimes things that look like bad contributions are honest mistakes. Other times things that look reasonable to a bystander are known to be abusive to the sender and recipient. (Nazis are using milk as a hate symbol. MILK.) When one person tells another to die on Twitter, it’s a threat. But when David Simon says it, he’s making a point. Abusers can use liking to remind their victims that they’re watching. And abuse isn’t limited to one system – just ask Kelly Marie Tran. Point is, we’re complicated critters.

   AI is just computers doing what they do. It’s not a solution to everything. And if we’re using it to avoid making hard decisions, then it’s part of the problem.

   I’m old enough to remember when search engines were dumb. Alta Vista, HotBot, Lycos, Web Crawler. Names nobody remembers anymore. They were dumb because all they did was crawl the web and make indexes. Lists of which words appeared on which pages. So you’d type in a word and you’d get a list of pages that included that word. This was exciting at the time.

   Four Components of Free Speech Risk — Analysis of Sam Harris’ Podcast With Roger McNamee | Daniel Miessler

   elements of risk in free speech

   Shirky: Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software

   Social interactions are far more complex and unpredictable than human/computer interaction, and that unpredictability defeats classic user-centric design.

   We have grown quite adept at designing interfaces and interactions between computers and machines, but our social tools — the software the users actually use most often — remain badly misfit to their task.

   The practice of
   software design is shot through with computer-as-box assumptions,
   while our actual behavior is closer to computer-as-door, treating the
   device as an entrance to a social space.

   Much of the current literature and
   practice of software design — feature requirements, UI design,
   usability testing — targets the individual user, functioning in
   isolation.

   When we hear the word “software,” most of us think of things like
   Word, Powerpoint, or Photoshop, tools for individual users. These
   tools treat the computer as a box, a self-contained environment in
   which the user does things.

   Non Zero

   I think we should start practicing with collective intelligence first. This may sound rather similar, but it’s something quite familiar. Whenever a group of people solve a problem no one individual would have been capable of solving, it is in a sense an act of collective intelligence. Some of the most interesting acts of collective intelligence involve computers and the internet, perhaps because they often have the most unexplored potential.

   The technology we might need for a literal global consciousness is still in the realm of science fiction, which is probably just as well. The mechanism of the brain which directs our conscious attention is not really part of our consciousness itself. Are we really ready to have that power over other people’s brains – and trust them with it over ours? Neurons seem prone to certain unwarranted intimacies with each other.

   I don’t see the Web as socratic. I see it as connective, and socratic dialogue is only one form of connecting, and a pretty paltry one at that. Yelling, joking, teasing, provoking, criticizing, grieving, and flirting are all forms of connecting. So is simultaneous masturbation (no, I don’t mean blogging). What makes the Web utopian (in some sense) is that it’s connective, not that it’s polite, rational or even intelligent. At least that’s what I meant to say. If I threw off the estimable Kevin Marks, I must have put it badly.

   The fitful but relentless tendency of invisible social brains to hook up with each other, and eventually submerge themselves into a larger brain, is a central theme of history. The culmination of that process— the construction of a single, planetary brain—is what we are witnessing today, with all its disruptive yet ultimately integrative effects…

   Of course, through cultural evolution, the settings for non-zero-sum games have gotten much less intimate than a hunter-gatherer society. Chances are you’ve never met the person who made your shoes. In fact, chances are that any one person who had a hand in making your shoes has never met all the other people who had a hand in it. A key feature of cultural evolution has been to make it possible for such non-zero-sum games to get played over great distances, among a large number of players. And in these kinds of situations, typically, there does need to be explicit communication (however circuitous), and there do need to be explicit means of sustaining trust. Hence the importance of evolving information technology in expanding the scope and complexity of social organization. Hence, too, the importance of evolving “technologies of trust” (often, though not always, in the form of laws enforced by a government) in helping to realize the non-zero-sum potential that new information technologies (and other technologies) create.

   Listen

   I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum

   https://poets.org/poem/song-myself-51
   Song of Myself, 51
   Walt Whitman – 1819-1892
   The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
   And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
   Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
   Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
   (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
   Do I contradict myself?
   Very well then I contradict myself,
   (I am large, ==I contain multitudes.==)
   I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
   Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
   Who wishes to walk with me?
   Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
   Tags: [poems]

   the hum of assumed predictability

   people are hearing their own emotions

   >
   Tags: [heartstrings] [articulation]

   “I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.”

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   guilt about the way we feel

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   There are obviously ways of acting that aren’t allowable, but any emotion you and I might happen to feel, no matter how in or out of sync it is with the rest of the world, that’s a legitimate emotion.

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   they seem somehow out of tune with what we should be feeling right now

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   People talk about the way they hear birds sing in formerly busy city streets, but it is also true that people are hearing their own emotions sing out—sometimes shriek out—when they might once have been drowned out by the noise of the world, might have been lost alongside the hum of assumed predictability we used to have as white noise as we went through our busy days.

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   What is my pain or dislocation in the face of those who have had death and destruction tear through their worlds?

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   as if our own emotions aren’t allowed to be ours right now—they need to be compared to others, measured for appropriateness, and held out to public approval.

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   I feel guilty for giving into anxiety right now when so much in my life is still stable

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   I feel guilty about being sad right now because there are so many others who are so much worse off

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   I feel guilty about being happy right now, because so many are sad

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare? | Hacker News

   archiving their voice would’ve been useful

   Tags: [fyi]

   Ricky Gervais – Making Sense with Sam Harris • Podcast Notes
   >
   near the end ricky talked about being honest to yourself
   about what you want, what you’re trying to do, is it clear

   “A camel is a horse designed by a committee”In other words, too many opinions will result in a bad outcome

   I need to use this some time at work

   Media is supported by ads, ads want clicks, clicks come from outrage, so therefore – the media’s goal has shifted to create as much outrage as possible

   incentives incentives incentives

   A good question to ask: “Who determines what is hate speech?“Also, who determines cultural appropriation?

   context context context
   framing framing framing

   If you can’t joke about bad things, there is no need for humor because sometimes all you can do in a bad situation is laugh

   reminds me of a recent podcast episode I listened to. was it liz gilbert on tim ferriss? yeah I think so. the part where she talked about rayya’s death, and dying

   Comedy is an intellectual pursuit and if you’re pandering to get everyone to agree with you, then you’re losing part of the comedy

   Social media also doesn’t know international boundaries – the word “c*nt” in the US is seen as extremely offensive, while in the UK it’s used quite differently

   Just as journalists should be able to write about anything they want, comedians should be able to do the same and tell jokes about anything they please

   where’s the line though? every output generates a feedback loop with the hivemind, turning into input to ourselves with our cracking, overwhelmed, filters
   it’s unrealistic to wish everyone to see jokes are jokes, to rely on journalists to generate unbiased facts, and politicians as self serving leeches, err that’s my bias speaking
   Tags: [free speech] [hivemind] [collective intelligence] [feedback loop] [global social brain in the cloud] [extended brain] [extended noosphere] [memex] [information overload] [filter failure] [content platforms] [signal x noise] [fake news] [sensemaking]

   Media is supported by ads, ads want clicks, clicks come from outrage, so therefore – the media’s goal has shifted to create as much outrage as possible

   our social and media infrastructure are outrage machines, icentivised
   Tags: [social infrastructure] [incentives]

   More often than not, a comedian’s joke isn’t his real opinion and is very often an exaggeration of a belief

   art is observing and re-expressing the world. art is creation. art is self expression. art is living
   Tags: [art] [creation]

   Comedians say bad things that they don’t mean and get in trouble while world leaders say bad things they do mean and get away with it

   huh, never thought about it this way
   Tags: [perspective]

   Song of Myself, 51

   I am large, I contain multitudes.

   Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015: Indie Ed-Tech

   We’re a decade+ on and we still haven’t managed to improve on this problem. In fact, we may have actually made it worse.

   Digital publics, Conversations and Twitter

   Everyone who uses Twitter sees a different, semi-overlapping public, which maps closer to our individual idea of the digital public we are speaking to, and listening to; one that maps more closely what the socialogist and theorists have been describing for a while.

   We don’t all read the same web, we see our own reflections in what we seek through searches or filtered by our homophily-led reading.

   What I learned from talked to teens is that they are living in a world where things are “public by default, private when necessary.”

   The Rubber Bag

   As you’ll see in the
   next chapter, people who never get overweight have a mechanism in
   their bodies that tells them when to eat and when to stop. We who
   have trouble with weight either seem to have that mechanism broken, or
   else we’re eating too frequently or too much for other reasons; we’re
   eating not because our bodies need the food but to satisfy
   psychological needs the exposition of which in various bubbleheaded
   psychobabble diet books has leveled vast forests.

   Proposed Salmon Protocol Aims To Unify Conversations on the Web

   Many people believe that transporting comments from one site to another and making the conversations one could cause confusion, or even make potential commenters uncomfortable. With this in mind, John has suggested that users “be made aware of the publishing scope of the comments they leave,” adding “For some aggregators, this may be implied (all data is public), for others a warning or a checkbox may be necessary.” (See: Salmon Protocol (Draft) Protocol Summary)

   The debate over fractured conversations has risen and fallen over the last two years. In September, I essentially said I was done listening to people complain about the issue after hearing complaints regarding Google SideWiki – as I believe people will want to have conversations where they are comfortable, and that they shouldn’t be forced to come back to a single source.

   As comments on the Web become fragmented, conversations that occur on downstream aggregation sites often are taking place in a silo, disjointed from parallel discussions on the originating Web site. Over the last two years, many people have found this evolution controversial, hoping to unify the conversations in a central location – and some services, including JS-Kit’s Echo and Disqus, have taken the first step by pulling external discussions to the source. But a brand new proposal, authored by John Panzer of Blogger, called the Salmon Protocol, is looking to take advantage of Pubsubhubbub to unify the conversations in all places, both upstream and downstream. And yes… the name of Salmon comes because those fish manage to swim upstream, just like the comments.

   DNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

   These are
   cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we
   lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.

   But that is changing.

   who would’ve thought we’d cycle back to being at war and distance
   as divisive as ever (?)
   how technology is accused of bringing the faraway closer but distancing the nearby
   Tags: [internet] [technology] [social infrastructure]

   For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very
   small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually
   there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and
   disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were
   unequal to the task of drawing us together.

   These kids
   are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving

   Our children, however, are doing something
   completely different

   Most of us are stumbling
   along in a kind of pidgin version of it

   Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs
   (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand)
   and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back
   on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were
   doing with them for ‘productivity.’

   We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them
   as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs
   should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried
   to use them.

   Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’,
   as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t
   work yet.’

   the cost of connection is rapidly approaching
   zero, and for a very simple reason: the value of the web increases with every
   single additional person who joins it

   For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things
   in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which
   we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite.

   Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is.

   it’s just people talking

   One of the most important things you learn from
   the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of
   ‘us’.

   We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the
   same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

   Before
   they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport
   – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent
   audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama
   they were there for.

   during
   this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive
   forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television

   the way these
   things work, which is this:
   1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
   2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly
   exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
   3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order
   of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s
   been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

   In 1999, Douglas Adams got it right

   People are naturally skeptical about everything is my experience. Which is a very good thing.

   Share this:Click to print (Opens in new window)Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)

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3. Sections
   
   Derek Powazek – Depression is a Loaded GunOn The MediaObama writes chaper on community organizingJoseph Henrich on Cultural Evolution and WEIRD Societies (Ep. 16 — Live at Mason)Corante: BostonTop Ed-Tech Trends of 2015: Indie Ed-Techr/samharris – Making Sense #163 – RICKY GERVAISDerek Powazek – 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve CommentsThe Social Life of InformationThe Eat WatchblogtankThe Missing Building Blocks of the Web – Anil Dash – MediumblogtankHere Comes Everybody – Tummlers, Geishas, Animateurs and Chief Conversation Officers help us listenTummling, SideWiki, Twitter and the Tragedy of the Comments revisitedFinally, I Closed My LinkedIn | Hacker NewsblogtankDerek Powazek – AI is Not a Community Management StrategyFour Components of Free Speech Risk — Analysis of Sam Harris’ Podcast With Roger McNamee | Daniel MiesslerShirky: Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social SoftwareNon ZeroListenAsk HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare? | Hacker NewsRicky Gervais – Making Sense with Sam Harris • Podcast NotesSong of Myself, 51Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015: Indie Ed-TechDigital publics, Conversations and TwitterThe Rubber BagProposed Salmon Protocol Aims To Unify Conversations on the WebDNA/How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the InternetIn 1999, Douglas Adams got it right
   Derek Powazek – Depression is a Loaded Gun

   When you sell confidence, you can’t admit that you’re broken.

   I have known a lot of addicts. I like hanging out with people in recovery because they understand something very important about the human condition. They know, if they continue to do the things they’ve always done, the things that feel the most natural, they will continue to fuck up their lives in all the ways they always have. So they choose a new reaction. They decide to do something else, something that is not their first instinct, and they have to keep choosing every day to make it stick.

   I cannot keep doing the things I always have done. I can’t let depression define me, I can’t fight it, I can’t pretend it away. I have choose to do something else.

   Having depression isn’t the same as being sad. I’m sad sometimes, too. But depression is different. Depression is being empty. Being nothing. Sometimes it’s loud and sometimes it’s quiet but it’s never completely gone. It’s part of me but it isn’t me.

   My depression is like that gun. You can’t leave it on the table unattended. If you do, someone will get hurt. Probably me, but maybe somebody else.

   But most importantly, I must consciously choose to point the gun at something. Every day. If I don’t, it’ll wind up pointed at me.

   There are times when a gun is a tool you need to use for a job. My depression can be like that. I visualize pointing my depression at things. Things I need to do. Using that dark energy to accomplish something light.

   You never, ever point a gun at someone else unless you intend to use it. This is a reminder that the people around me aren’t responsible for my depression. They’re not the cause of it, or the solution to it. Never point it at them.

   The gun must be cared for. Taken apart, pieces examined, cleaned, and put back together. If I ignore it, it will become unstable. More dangerous.

   If you hang out with gun people, you learn quickly that they have an intense understanding of how dangerous the things are. They have rituals around the guns – cleaning them, locking them up when not in use, where your fingers go when you touch them, where you point the gun and when – there are rules and they’re life and death important.

   Anyplace I can point the gun that’s not a loved one or my own head.

   Now I walk the property with my loaded depression gun and look for other things to point it at.

   On The Media

   Who is Ira Glass kidding? Himself? He’s the one who through the manipulative methods of confessional journalism got the teens in his story to air their private gory details. It’s HE who opened them up for focused ridicule by offering up HIS website to be the unmoderated forum where any anonymous nitwit could spew.
   In his swipes at Bob Garfield for being “royalty” or “anti-democratic” he needs to look in the mirror. His shutting down of HIS forums reminds me of what happens when an authoritarian or royalist regime liberalizes freedoms then takes draconian measures to withdraw those freedoms for all because of a predictable few anarchists or merely embarrassing commentators.
   Kinda like China’s ongoing yin-yang dance with freedom of expression. And like China, just because a forum in Glassistan is shut down does nothing to prevent commentators outside his borders from dumping on the him or is subjects. These days anyone can start a dumponthisamericanlifestorytellers blog or Google group.
   BTW Ira. As of the moment I write this anti-democrat, royalist Bob Garfield hasn’t shut down this forum.

   Shutting down comments is undemocratic, eh Ira? Okay, but to paraphrase Carlin, if your democracy is made up selfish, ignorant, judgmental people, then your comment threads will likely be filled with the selfish, ignorant, judgmental sentiments.
   Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

   Obama writes chaper on community organizing

   In theory,
   community organizing provides a way to merge various strategies
   for neighborhood empowerment.

   Joseph Henrich on Cultural Evolution and WEIRD Societies (Ep. 16 — Live at Mason)

   What would be an example of something you try to explain with that framework that’s much harder to explain using only economics and biology?

   Tags: [Qs]

   To anthropologist Joseph Henrich, intelligence is overrated. Social learning, and its ability to influence biological evolution over time, is what really sets our species apart.

   social learning
   Tags: [learning]

   Corante: Boston

   I’ve been a party to many conversations on weblogs, and they have always always always ended with one of the protagonists blanking the opposing view. They just don’t link to them. They delete trackbacks. They remove comments. They don’t show technorati or referrer information.
   After this, the conversation always fractures into two sides, and invariably the two sides cease to have any contact at all and you end up with an echo chamber. On a mailing list, this just can’t happen. You don’t get flame wars on weblogs, true, but you don’t get any meaningful discussion either.

   hm. good point. it’s like arguing with your neighbor across the street, while standing inside, with the door open. you end up shutting the door when you’re pissed

   A couple of additional remarks: as to comment spamming, I am sure that blog vendors will provide proper solutions to automatically block or remove a good portion of these. Second, I would enforce the usage of login and mechanisms like typekey to avoid anonymous ranting, so that people can stand by their comments.

   If instead of commenting, you write a response on your blog, you are standing behind your words, and associating them with the rest of your writing. The social dynamics are very different; you think more before responding instead of posting a quick flame. You can’t really spam, as you are only soiling your own garden.

   You can’t really spam, as you are only soiling your own garden.

   Clay discusses flame wars rather than spam, but the issues are similar – people taking advantage of others’ resources without recompense.

   When comments are turned on on blogs, they eventually fill up with flames and spam too, unless they are carefully maintained.

   blogs work better for discussion than mailing lists, because the blogs are owned

   Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015: Indie Ed-Tech

   Perhaps this is the piece some of our mainstream media have been missing from a journalistic perspective? For too long they’ve acted as aggregators and filters, but perhaps they should be spending a larger portion of their time doing some tummeling work on our behalf?

   Of the group, Kevin, as usual, provides some of the best analysis, but he also adds in a huge amount of additional context by way of links.

   r/samharris – Making Sense #163 – RICKY GERVAIS

   The other point he made about hate speech was great. It’s pretty strange how simple it is, but it really makes sense (pun intended). We can’t agree what being hateful is. Giving someone else the authority to make those decisions is clearly a terrible idea.

   Great episode, but am I the only one who wishes that Sam would stop bringing up the latest cancel culture controversy on every single episode? I mean, I wouldn’t have known about any of these things if it wasn’t for this podcast. He complains (rightly) about tiny minorities getting all the attention, but then all he does to support his talking points of PC and cancel culture is bring up the firing of some sub-manager at Netflix, without substantiating why this is more than just an anomaly.What I’m trying to say is: it feels like Sam’s not being a part of the solution here. A tiny minority of entitled millennials gets angry over the words people use, and then a second tiny minority gets angry over the fact that a tiny minority of entitled millennials gets angry over the words people use.I guess there’s a bubble that I’m not a part of, to be missing out on all of this. Is it the USA-bubble? The Twitter bubble? The news bubble?

   cancel culture
   political correctness
   miscontrued
   out of context
   appropriation
   outrage machines
   misinformation
   fake news
   the twitter bubble
   echo chamber
   out of proportion

   he has a sense of humor and a way with words

   I’d love to be called this

   PC

   political correctness
   Tags: [til]

   When you clash with people who also have a whole lot of followers and potentially can influence your reputation/career it becomes a lot more real than what Gervais means. Gervais is like South Park. Nobody will say ‘Did you see that offense stuff on South Park’. People say ‘That’s South Park for ya’. Same goes for Gervais on social media. But not for Sam.I don’t agree with your statement that he describes Sam there.Sam does seem to have a weakness for Twitter drama belying of his intelligence and patience in other things though, I’ll give you that.

   “the trouble with twitter is you go in, click a few buttons and you think it’s world war 3 – or game of thrones, that the whole world is full of Nazis and Anti – Nazis. But you step outside and no one gives a shit, no one cares, it’s not real. If I’m walking down the street and a tramp in a bin covered in shit calls me a wanker, I’m not hurt by that, because he’s an idiot”

   Jared Diamond

   It doesn’t exist in his world.

   he has absolutely no conception of any of this drama

   It’s all magnified because the ones who are most extreme have the most sway on social media platforms, but its not REAL.

   Tags: [perspective]

   Might be that he’s doing it because it’s filled with morons. Preaching to your own bubble has a mediocre return-on-investment — at best you strengthen some convictions and at worst you will lose some.

   He responds with clear-headed criticisms and reasoning, and often over-reasoning, and over-thinking.

   well shit
   Tags: [gpoy]

   It’s Sam’s personality more than anything. I know Myers Briggs is deeply flawed, but he fits very well into the description of someone who is INTJ.It’s a disposition than is passionate about things making sense (lol), and even if Sam knows in principle that Twitter is full of idiots, his instincts demands he get to the bottom of it. It’s a lot harder for someone like Sam to let something like this fly.But I don’t think this is evidence of him being thin-skinned or reactionary. He’s really not – Twitter just makes him seem that way. But he never responds with anger or other emotional outbursts, or in tirades of abuse at his assailants. He responds with clear-headed criticisms and reasoning, and often over-reasoning, and over-thinking.Such attitudes and behavior, while incredibly endearing to many (i.e. us, his fans) are incredibly irritating and infuriating to many others. I suspect much of the hate he gets comes down more to clashes of personality than any facts on the ground.

   an everyman who pretends to be above the everyman

   For a public person, Sam has very thin skin. He gets into a lot of personal feuds largely of his own doing…and then publicizes them.

   The interview felt like two hours of Sam asking Ricky “how do I learn not to care about what people say?”. Ricky’s answer is “it’s easy. Twitter is not real life. Everyone on Twitter is a moron”.I wonder why Ricky Gervais and Richard Dawkins get it, and Sam has such a hard time realizing it.

   The arguments have all been made but until the arguments actually prevail they have not warn out their welcome imo.

   Tags: [articulation]

   Derek Powazek – 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments

   School your writers in the ways of online community. If someone is trying to get a rise out of you, don’t fight back, no matter how tempting. A good Community Manager can help train writers on how, and when, to join the fray.

   give them the ability to moderate comments on their own stories

   People chill out a lot when they know they’re being listened to by the writer (and they act out a lot more when they think no one’s listening).

   If you’d like to say this privately, go over here.

   enable the community to help. Give every post a “This is Bad” button

   constantly tweaking the form’s automated responses

   If you can’t name your community manager, it’s probably you.

   Write a human-readable set of community guidelines

   Anonymity is important in journalism, but not for comments.

   Newsrooms are top-down places, but the internet is not. Get used to the fact that people online won’t do things just because you told them to.

   The Social Life of Information

   The sociological insights are still valid and useful, but the actual examples are painfully out of date.

   I find it strange to read, in 2010, a book written in 2000 about the effect of the Internet on human behavior with information. I can see places where the authors were quite prescient, and areas where they got it wrong – in particular, their prediction that newspapers will continue to be relevant and successful. I think in that case it’s a matter of incomplete understanding of the business model of newspapers; craigslist and ebay have largely destroyed classified advertising, and that’s a big revenue loss.

   “So documents do not merely carry information, they help make it, structure it, and validate it. More intriguing, perhaps, documents also help structure society, enabling social groups to form, develop, and maintain a sense of shared identity” (189).

   Acting as individuals, using only their training, they wouldn’t have been able to do their jobs. The training was, in fact, only information. Tried and tested against copiers “in the real world,” then shared within an unofficial “community of practice,” information became knowledge.

   You may read something in a manual or book or newspaper. It may seem like you’re doing something by yourself. Just collecting information. But what you read was first made sense of by other people — writers and editors.

   They used their own judgment and experience to decide what was worth putting into words and then how to organize it for your consumption. This is all the work of knowledge.

   We forget that communication involves negotiation and then don’t understand why others can’t always accept what we say at face value.

   Brown and Duguid suggest that information technology’s enthusiasts don’t honor the difference between information and knowledge. Some people “know” what they’re talking about; some don’t. Knowledge is information with a context, which includes the person or people who have it. As Brown and Duguid say, you can’t separate knowledge from the knower.

   The Eat Watch

   Management in isolation struggles with constraints that can frequently
   be eliminated. Engineering in isolation seeks permanent fixes
   which sometimes don’t exist and, even when found, often require an
   ongoing effort to put into place and maintain. Each needs the other
   to truly solve a problem.

   engineer to eliminate constraints, manage to put in places and maintain the fixes and improvements

   The engineers, likewise, realised that while they could fix a large
   part of the problem, they couldn’t do it all. Had they sought to
   eliminate operators entirely, they would never have found a workable
   system. Instead, they automated what they could and relied on a
   well-managed organisation of human beings to handle the balance.

   werk it together

   No amount of management could overcome this limitation. But a series
   of incremental engineering fixes, starting with automated switchboards
   for human operators, then direct dial telephones, and finally direct
   worldwide dialing reduced the demand for operators to a level where
   universal telephone service became a reality.

   identify bottleneck, assess resource, scale of issue, extrapolate, plan and execute accordingly. in this case iteratively

   Once that’s known, a remedy may become apparent
   which eliminates the need to manage the problem

   solve it until you don’t need to manage it
   hm. just realised this is the right way to frame my own loop. I managed my burnout instead of solving it.

   Many difficult and complicated problems require a combination of the
   skills of management and the insights of engineering. Yet often, the
   difficulty managers and engineers have in understanding each other’s
   view of the world thwarts the melding of their skills to truly solve a
   problem.

   In isolation, a manager can feel rewarded watching the
   organisation he created to “work the problem” grow larger and
   more important. Rewardingly occupied too, is the engineer who finds “fix”
   after “fix,” each revealing another aspect of the problem that requires
   yet another fix. Neither realises, in their absorption in doing what they
   love, that the problem is still there and continues to cause
   difficulties.

   interesting loop

   inside

   very reductionistically framed

   Engineers, derided as “nerds” and “techies” in the age of
   management, are taught not to manage problems but to fix them. Faced
   with a problem, an engineer strives to determine its cause and
   find ways to make the problem go away, once and for all.

   Tags: [eatwatch]

   it’s important to
   distinguish managing a problem from fixing it, for these
   are very different acts: one is a process, the other an event.
   Solving a problem often requires a bit of both.

   sounds like a profound framing but it doesn’t really make sense. fixing and problem solving are also process. fixed OTOH is an event
   Tags: [problem solving]

   Once you possess the power to circumvent limitations, to control
   things most people consider immutable, you’re liberated from the
   tyranny of events. You’re no longer an observer; you’re in command.
   You’ve become a hacker.

   gotta laugh at the way this is phrased
   Tags: [cheesy] [funny] [inspo shiz] [test]

   Most extraordinary things are done by ordinary people who never knew
   what they were attempting was “impossible.” Hackers have seen this
   happen again and again; many of the most significant innovations in
   computing have been made by individuals or small groups, working
   alone, attempting tasks the mainstream considered impossible or
   not worth trying.

   Tags: [inspo shiz]

   Bob
   Bickford, computer and video guru, defined
   the true essence of the hacker as “Any
   person who derives joy from discovering ways to circumvent
   limitations.”

   Tags: [definitions]

   blogtank

   UNless you want us all to have online identities tied to massive databses that verify that so-and-so doesn’t have a criminal record, possesses a social security number, has a decent credit rating, and never said “fuck you” to his grandmother.
   I for one don’t want myself tied to any such database.
   Yes, the interpersonal trust issue is one we confront every day online. But I think the only workable solution resides in ourselves. The only way to push through such a “problem” is to come to understand both the strengths and limitations of the medium and operate accordingly.

   Trust is something many still find trouble with in the real world, and the seemingly anonymity of the Internet is a dangerous allure to many. And the best way to combat poor trust on the Internet is through the education of the naive of the dangers of the Internet, and how to combat them.
   If only people knew not to open unexpected attachments, or if they knew tech support would not ask for their password, or if kids knew the person on the other side may not be a nice man.
   Each may seem obvious to us, but there are many who at least one of those would ring news to their ears. And so it comes down to the education of the public and the ability to trust others only after being informed on the ways in which they may be fooled.

   The Missing Building Blocks of the Web – Anil Dash – Medium

   There’s no reason it has to be that way, though. There are no technical barriers for why we couldn’t share our photos to our own sites instead of to Instagram, or why we couldn’t post stupid memes to our own web address instead of on Facebook or Reddit. There are social barriers, of course — if we stubbornly used our own websites right now, none of our family or friends would see our stuff. Yet there’s been a dogged community of web nerds working on that problem for a decade or two, trying to see if they can get the ease or convenience of sharing on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram to work across a distributed network where everyone has their own websites.

   we can but will we?
   in the era of misinformation, having independent sites / deplatforming / decentralising would be throwing gasolene to the fire no?
   in some ways it’s better to have people “create” on select platforms, that can be policed, despite all the political and business incentives behind it
   distributed spam and fake news
   sure the signals will be weaker in that situation but social media platforms aren’t going anywhere, so the amplifiers will still be there, with a lot more smaller pebbles and clusters where things can spark, grow, and proliferate

   blogtank

   blogtank is an experimental team weblog the purpose of which is to determine whether a group of bloggers from various professions and backgrounds can form a new kind of self-organizing consulting group for debate, research and discussion.

   blogtank™ is a new kind of team blog (a clusterblog?) where an amazing collection of the best minds in blogdom can get together to brainstorm, develop solutions to problems, give birth to ideas and generally read the riot act to the rest of the world.

   Here Comes Everybody – Tummlers, Geishas, Animateurs and Chief Conversation Officers help us listen

   In the meantime, if your newspaper, social media initiative or website isn’t working right, you need to find your tummler, geisha, animateur or conversational catalyst, but you should consider giving them a big name title like ‘Chief Conversation Officer’.

   they get called ‘Moderators’ (as Tom Coates thoroughly described) or ‘Community Managers’, and because when they’re doing it right you see everyone’s conversation, not their carefully crafted atmosphere, their role is often ignored.

   The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don’t have someone there cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage.

   Tummling, SideWiki, Twitter and the Tragedy of the Comments revisited

   This hints at a greater possibility for SideWiki – to weave the web together by better by showing commentary across the web from all places that quote and cite each other, correlating by textual quotation and adding annotated links to the commentary from people we trust most.This is a way Google could use it’s scale of indexing to weave a better web for us to read, through our own chosen trusted sources, rather than funneling commentary into being hosted on its own pages.

   Google attempts to show the ‘most important’ comments first, using a combination of voting and other ranking algorithms, but it is still attempting to show everyone the same comment ordering, not taking personal ‘following’ into account. For SideWiki to succeed, I think this will need to change.Sidewiki does another interesting thing – it matches comments to the same words elsewhere on the web. For example, my comment on Douglas Adams excellent 1999 piece also shows up in SideWiki on JP Rangiswami’s blog where he quotes Douglas Adams too.

   Twitter’s ‘Following’ model is powerful here for both its first-order and second-order effects. The first order effect is that by default we see interesting and friendly comments from people we have chosen to follow, which makes us more likely to want to read on. That people favour and retweet and repeat what they find interesting helps us expand our circles of trust outward to new people. The second-order effect is that as what we see is mostly interesting, funny, polite and so on, we respond in that vein too (assuming that is what we are reading; certainly there can be self-reinforcing intolerance too, but it is more contained).

   Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn | Hacker News

   advertising-based business models

   all investigations of “how tf did we end up here” comes down to one Q: “what is the game we’re playing and what are the incentives driving the rules”. keep going through all the layers of games. repeat.
   [[yeah i really like media]]
   Tags: [seewater] [incentives]

   the focus is not on getting more users and clicks

   answer: advertising-based business models. hm. only now I begun to “get” this. see why it IS such a problem. it’s a problem because it’s costing us our sanity.
   been hearing about how toxic ad-based business models are.
   I get that it’s toxic, encouraging certain behavior that’s unhelpful, but haven’t experienced the effect, not personally affected yet. it’s not real yet. aha…
   Tags: [human] [social infrastructure]

   I wonder how the positive and respectful space here may be reproduced in other social media platforms.It’s very simple once you stop chasing growth and engagement metrics. The main reasons the other social media platforms are cesspools is because outrage generates engagement so the platform is designed to encourage it as well as encouraging users to join and stay regardless of the quality of their contributions, where as here the design itself acts as a small barrier to entry, in addition to a karma system and competent, human moderation that discourages (and eventually bans) bad behavior.

   Tags: [incentives] [seewater]

   I always exit HN with a positive mental head space.The discussion is generally informed, balanced and insightful . I wonder how the positive and respectful space here may be reproduced in other social media platforms.

   RE: what would a well-designed digital social space / media look like?
   what does HN do right?
   how does reddit, quora, IG, FB, Twitter, LI, Youtube compare?
   Tags: [social infrastructure] [product design]

   good professional network that twitter can help maintain connections with (but not passively)

   permeated by influencer culture

   I also tend to stay a lot at a given job (e.g. slightly more than 10y at the last one) but still found the current job through LinkedIn. I do 2 things:1. connect to all recruiters, politely decline with a standard message if obviously not interested2. when I get a potentially-interesting offer, I reply with “that’s all fine and well, but I make now; do you want to continue the discussion?”. (note: I’m not lying).I used to ignore recruiters at point 1, until I realized it costs me almost nothing to politely decline and earns goodwill; today’s junior recruiter that works for a crappy company might be in 10 years the HR director at a company you want to work for. Why not be in touch?Over the years, this adds up, a handful of opportunities actually said “yes” at point 2, and for one of them I actually went to interviews & got the job (and the very-good-offer).

   a good script to use and way to use LI
   Tags: [heuristics] [articulation]

   I guess when I stop to think about it, I do get a lot of use out of it.I use LinkedIn to contact professional colleagues when I don’t have their email addresses. I’ve met 95%+ of the people on my contact list at some point in my career, and it’s easy to send them a message to catch up. That’s especially useful if they’ve switched jobs and they lose their work emails.I also sometimes search people I meet at events or job applicants to find out a bit more about their backgrounds and see if we’re connected with anyone.Sometimes when I’m researching a company or hedge fund for work I’ll search LinkedIn to get some information about the firm below the senior-most executives.It also lets me know when some of my colleagues are mentioned in the media or have TV/print interviews. I like following up with people about those.I never post or like anything. My employer actually forbids it due to securities regulations. I had to give our Compliance Department access to my account through a special program so they can monitor & log everything.

   this person is very well spoken

   Both my current job and my previous job were initiated by recruiters who contacted me on LinkedIn.LinkedIn has been extremely valuable to me. The recruiters who contact me are usually from professional executive search firms and highly relevant, though I only get a few a year.I think the level of relevance depends on the industry though. I’m in finance/banking and fairly senior.

   balanced take, fresh

   The value I see in LinkedIn:1. My linkedin contact list is >300 people that I worked closely with over the years and all have seen me kick ass. I have actual email addresses for <10% of them.2. I can browse my list and see where they are currently working. “oh gee, Mary works at coolCo, I should reach out to her because I’ like to work for/with coolCo.”3. When I want to let them know that I started a new business venture, I can send them a message that is less obtrusive than an email.4. If I give a prospective client my linkedin, they can see a) a brief summary of my resume, b) that I have a lot of contacts in x space, and c) that they may know some of the people I have worked with over the years. These all give me some measure of credibility.

   +1
   my experience as well

   Despite this, some people are still surprisingly listening and engaging

   really?

   everyone tries to push their agenda all of the time, it is just noise

   spambots see me look at me listen to me buy my product. promote promote promote comment sections almost everywhere. blogs FB IG news portals

   The marketing side, which is part of its business model

   I kind of wish there was an HN like job site that was widely used in corporate America but didn’t have all the ‘content’. Just an online resume

   wondering what’s the original purpose of adding the news feed to LI, the product decision.
   lack of understanding I think. to drive “engagements” and keep eyeballs? what’s the incentives and how do they relate to LI’s biz model?
   Tags: [incentives] [product design]

   I never scroll through the news feed

   fine as a way of keeping track of people and potentially contacting those you’re not directly connected to elsewhere

   multidimensional

   The recruiter asks for your cv as a way to get paid

   Tags: [seewater]

   cesspool

   rolodex

   almost feels engineered by design

   permanent un-follow thing is legit,

   a bug to me at the time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s fixed now

   honor

   These feeds do not exist to inform you, they exist to keep a death grip on your attention

   poison ivy

   systematically suppressed in my feed because they didn’t drive as much “engagement”

   they actively try to make your feed controversial.

   The Paradox of Abundance: The average quality of information is getting worse and worse. But the best stuff is getting better and better. Markets of abundance are simultaneously bad for the median consumer but good for conscious consumers

   Tags: [to look up]

   turning platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn into a tool, not a vice. You need to curate

   Nobody is a prophet in their own land

   lea michele, the police kneeling and pushing le 75 y/o the next day. words and actions don’t sync. in both directions. the disconnect. to reflect
   Tags: [people watching]

   content in my feed is from my connections or interactions by my connections

   wannabe thought leaders

   the same phenomenon observed to be part of the root cause of “Tech content is BS”

   The “verified” badge on there is a good heuristic for who not to follow (if not outright block them) because those are not people anymore, but marketing/PR operations.

   Tags: [heuristics]

   spam is now distributed

   business networking sites such as LinkedIn may be considered fair game, platforms used for more personal purposes, such as Facebook and Instagram, are possibly not relevant.”

   GDPR #til
   Tags: [GDPR] [TIL]

   witch hunts

   How to combine respect for privacy and freedom of expression with protecting a company from undeserved harm? Maybe this the problem LinkedIn was trying to solve until it became a giant spam ground for annoying recruiters and influencer wannabes.

   i like seeing how this discussion is an exercise in refining the right question for the problem

   Never say or write anything in public that you wouldn’t want to appear on the front page of the newspaper

   another mantra to chew and reflect on

   Sure, play stupid games/get stupid prizes but we are all human and go through phases of self-discovery. Turning social media into a saccharine, superficial cat pics trading ground where everyone is fearful of losing friendships over, say, well-intentioned analysis and opinions seems like a pathetic outcome for humanity overall. Not to mention how easy it is to miss sarcasm or other thought subtleties that can’t be easily conveyed on international multimedia social networks

   misconstrued, out-of-context quote

   people on social media who have ever in their lives said anything that could be construed as “seriously questionable” (whose definition changes according to the times).

   re:how do you redeem yourself in this era of permanent documenting

   dedicated herself to destroying lives

   free speech MUST ALSO be a cultural value that is protected and defended FIRST and the content of the speech judged SECOND

   no company wants either internal dissent or an external PR hit because someone they hired ranted online about something that’s outside the scope of “civilized” discourse as determined by the standards of the arbiters of appropriate public discussion.

   Tags: [seewater] [incentives]

   blogtank

   A Pattern Language is a superb book on defining the ways that architectural spaces facilitate human interaction. It’s not directly applicable to the Web, but neither is Tufte. I think you have to have a certain amount of 2D design background to “get” Tufte.

   Derek Powazek – AI is Not a Community Management Strategy

   You can’t create a system for everyone, where everything goes, not communicate the rules, not design for community, and then say it’s just too hard to protect everyone. This end state is the outcome of all of those decisions. And AI is not going to be the patch that fixes all the bugs.

   While there’s a community for everyone, not everyone is welcome in every community, and that’s okay. That’s how communities work.

   Of course humans need tools to help manage community. I’ve built systems to do this. And, sure, machine learning can be part of that. But I fear the leaders of Twitter and Facebook are depending too much on technology (again), and overlooking the kinds of systems that are great at this kind of empathetic flexible pattern recognition: humans.

   Anyone who’s ever managed a community knows how complicated people are. A reasonable community member can suddenly have a bad day. Sometimes things that look like bad contributions are honest mistakes. Other times things that look reasonable to a bystander are known to be abusive to the sender and recipient. (Nazis are using milk as a hate symbol. MILK.) When one person tells another to die on Twitter, it’s a threat. But when David Simon says it, he’s making a point. Abusers can use liking to remind their victims that they’re watching. And abuse isn’t limited to one system – just ask Kelly Marie Tran. Point is, we’re complicated critters.

   AI is just computers doing what they do. It’s not a solution to everything. And if we’re using it to avoid making hard decisions, then it’s part of the problem.

   I’m old enough to remember when search engines were dumb. Alta Vista, HotBot, Lycos, Web Crawler. Names nobody remembers anymore. They were dumb because all they did was crawl the web and make indexes. Lists of which words appeared on which pages. So you’d type in a word and you’d get a list of pages that included that word. This was exciting at the time.

   Four Components of Free Speech Risk — Analysis of Sam Harris’ Podcast With Roger McNamee | Daniel Miessler

   elements of risk in free speech

   Shirky: Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software

   Social interactions are far more complex and unpredictable than human/computer interaction, and that unpredictability defeats classic user-centric design.

   We have grown quite adept at designing interfaces and interactions between computers and machines, but our social tools — the software the users actually use most often — remain badly misfit to their task.

   The practice of
   software design is shot through with computer-as-box assumptions,
   while our actual behavior is closer to computer-as-door, treating the
   device as an entrance to a social space.

   Much of the current literature and
   practice of software design — feature requirements, UI design,
   usability testing — targets the individual user, functioning in
   isolation.

   When we hear the word “software,” most of us think of things like
   Word, Powerpoint, or Photoshop, tools for individual users. These
   tools treat the computer as a box, a self-contained environment in
   which the user does things.

   Non Zero

   I think we should start practicing with collective intelligence first. This may sound rather similar, but it’s something quite familiar. Whenever a group of people solve a problem no one individual would have been capable of solving, it is in a sense an act of collective intelligence. Some of the most interesting acts of collective intelligence involve computers and the internet, perhaps because they often have the most unexplored potential.

   The technology we might need for a literal global consciousness is still in the realm of science fiction, which is probably just as well. The mechanism of the brain which directs our conscious attention is not really part of our consciousness itself. Are we really ready to have that power over other people’s brains – and trust them with it over ours? Neurons seem prone to certain unwarranted intimacies with each other.

   I don’t see the Web as socratic. I see it as connective, and socratic dialogue is only one form of connecting, and a pretty paltry one at that. Yelling, joking, teasing, provoking, criticizing, grieving, and flirting are all forms of connecting. So is simultaneous masturbation (no, I don’t mean blogging). What makes the Web utopian (in some sense) is that it’s connective, not that it’s polite, rational or even intelligent. At least that’s what I meant to say. If I threw off the estimable Kevin Marks, I must have put it badly.

   The fitful but relentless tendency of invisible social brains to hook up with each other, and eventually submerge themselves into a larger brain, is a central theme of history. The culmination of that process— the construction of a single, planetary brain—is what we are witnessing today, with all its disruptive yet ultimately integrative effects…

   Of course, through cultural evolution, the settings for non-zero-sum games have gotten much less intimate than a hunter-gatherer society. Chances are you’ve never met the person who made your shoes. In fact, chances are that any one person who had a hand in making your shoes has never met all the other people who had a hand in it. A key feature of cultural evolution has been to make it possible for such non-zero-sum games to get played over great distances, among a large number of players. And in these kinds of situations, typically, there does need to be explicit communication (however circuitous), and there do need to be explicit means of sustaining trust. Hence the importance of evolving information technology in expanding the scope and complexity of social organization. Hence, too, the importance of evolving “technologies of trust” (often, though not always, in the form of laws enforced by a government) in helping to realize the non-zero-sum potential that new information technologies (and other technologies) create.

   Listen

   I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum

   https://poets.org/poem/song-myself-51
   Song of Myself, 51
   Walt Whitman – 1819-1892
   The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
   And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
   Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
   Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
   (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
   Do I contradict myself?
   Very well then I contradict myself,
   (I am large, ==I contain multitudes.==)
   I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
   Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
   Who wishes to walk with me?
   Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
   Tags: [poems]

   the hum of assumed predictability

   people are hearing their own emotions

   >
   Tags: [heartstrings] [articulation]

   “I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.”

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   guilt about the way we feel

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   There are obviously ways of acting that aren’t allowable, but any emotion you and I might happen to feel, no matter how in or out of sync it is with the rest of the world, that’s a legitimate emotion.

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   they seem somehow out of tune with what we should be feeling right now

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   People talk about the way they hear birds sing in formerly busy city streets, but it is also true that people are hearing their own emotions sing out—sometimes shriek out—when they might once have been drowned out by the noise of the world, might have been lost alongside the hum of assumed predictability we used to have as white noise as we went through our busy days.

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   What is my pain or dislocation in the face of those who have had death and destruction tear through their worlds?

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   as if our own emotions aren’t allowed to be ours right now—they need to be compared to others, measured for appropriateness, and held out to public approval.

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   I feel guilty for giving into anxiety right now when so much in my life is still stable

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   I feel guilty about being sad right now because there are so many others who are so much worse off

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   I feel guilty about being happy right now, because so many are sad

   Tags: [heartstrings]

   Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare? | Hacker News

   archiving their voice would’ve been useful

   Tags: [fyi]

   Ricky Gervais – Making Sense with Sam Harris • Podcast Notes
   >
   near the end ricky talked about being honest to yourself
   about what you want, what you’re trying to do, is it clear

   “A camel is a horse designed by a committee”In other words, too many opinions will result in a bad outcome

   I need to use this some time at work

   Media is supported by ads, ads want clicks, clicks come from outrage, so therefore – the media’s goal has shifted to create as much outrage as possible

   incentives incentives incentives

   A good question to ask: “Who determines what is hate speech?“Also, who determines cultural appropriation?

   context context context
   framing framing framing

   If you can’t joke about bad things, there is no need for humor because sometimes all you can do in a bad situation is laugh

   reminds me of a recent podcast episode I listened to. was it liz gilbert on tim ferriss? yeah I think so. the part where she talked about rayya’s death, and dying

   Comedy is an intellectual pursuit and if you’re pandering to get everyone to agree with you, then you’re losing part of the comedy

   Social media also doesn’t know international boundaries – the word “c*nt” in the US is seen as extremely offensive, while in the UK it’s used quite differently

   Just as journalists should be able to write about anything they want, comedians should be able to do the same and tell jokes about anything they please

   where’s the line though? every output generates a feedback loop with the hivemind, turning into input to ourselves with our cracking, overwhelmed, filters
   it’s unrealistic to wish everyone to see jokes are jokes, to rely on journalists to generate unbiased facts, and politicians as self serving leeches, err that’s my bias speaking
   Tags: [free speech] [hivemind] [collective intelligence] [feedback loop] [global social brain in the cloud] [extended brain] [extended noosphere] [memex] [information overload] [filter failure] [content platforms] [signal x noise] [fake news] [sensemaking]

   Media is supported by ads, ads want clicks, clicks come from outrage, so therefore – the media’s goal has shifted to create as much outrage as possible

   our social and media infrastructure are outrage machines, icentivised
   Tags: [social infrastructure] [incentives]

   More often than not, a comedian’s joke isn’t his real opinion and is very often an exaggeration of a belief

   art is observing and re-expressing the world. art is creation. art is self expression. art is living
   Tags: [art] [creation]

   Comedians say bad things that they don’t mean and get in trouble while world leaders say bad things they do mean and get away with it

   huh, never thought about it this way
   Tags: [perspective]

   Song of Myself, 51

   I am large, I contain multitudes.

   Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015: Indie Ed-Tech

   We’re a decade+ on and we still haven’t managed to improve on this problem. In fact, we may have actually made it worse.

   Digital publics, Conversations and Twitter

   Everyone who uses Twitter sees a different, semi-overlapping public, which maps closer to our individual idea of the digital public we are speaking to, and listening to; one that maps more closely what the socialogist and theorists have been describing for a while.

   We don’t all read the same web, we see our own reflections in what we seek through searches or filtered by our homophily-led reading.

   What I learned from talked to teens is that they are living in a world where things are “public by default, private when necessary.”

   The Rubber Bag

   As you’ll see in the
   next chapter, people who never get overweight have a mechanism in
   their bodies that tells them when to eat and when to stop. We who
   have trouble with weight either seem to have that mechanism broken, or
   else we’re eating too frequently or too much for other reasons; we’re
   eating not because our bodies need the food but to satisfy
   psychological needs the exposition of which in various bubbleheaded
   psychobabble diet books has leveled vast forests.

   Proposed Salmon Protocol Aims To Unify Conversations on the Web

   Many people believe that transporting comments from one site to another and making the conversations one could cause confusion, or even make potential commenters uncomfortable. With this in mind, John has suggested that users “be made aware of the publishing scope of the comments they leave,” adding “For some aggregators, this may be implied (all data is public), for others a warning or a checkbox may be necessary.” (See: Salmon Protocol (Draft) Protocol Summary)

   The debate over fractured conversations has risen and fallen over the last two years. In September, I essentially said I was done listening to people complain about the issue after hearing complaints regarding Google SideWiki – as I believe people will want to have conversations where they are comfortable, and that they shouldn’t be forced to come back to a single source.

   <

   blockquote>
   As comments on the Web become fragmented, conversations that occur on downstream aggregation sites often are taking place in a silo, disjointed from parallel discussions on the originating Web site. Over the last two years, many people have found this evolution controversial, hoping to unify the conversations in a central location – and some

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