I strongly suggest that everyone take this simple step to reduce the impact that Google's new privacy policy has on you.
If you'd like to start looking more deeply at the relationship between web search and protecting your privacy, this is a great resource.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Obama gets in the nation's ass
Some much needed satire from The Onion.
In The Know Panel Analyzes Obama's Furious, Profanity-Filled Rant At Nation
In The Know Panel Analyzes Obama's Furious, Profanity-Filled Rant At Nation
More on Google's new privacy policy
Although I remain unconvinced that Google's upcoming privacy policy change is the singular death knell for privacy in the age of the internet, I have been persuaded that it is worthwhile to speak out against Google's disingenuous spin in it's presentation of the new policy to the public. Companies with such intrusive personal data gathering capabilities need to be forced to be more forthright with the public about what they do.
Click here to join the effort.
Click here to join the effort.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Is online privacy dead?
I don't know. But if it is, it had already died well before Google announced its new privacy policy, set to take effect March 1. And if it's not, I don't think we're all going to look back on March 1, 2012 as the day when we lost our footing and rolled all the way to the bottom of the slippery slope.
I'm not saying that Google isn't fucked up. Their hollow "Don't be evil" motto has long made me roll my eyes (Were we really to believe that they'd be any more or less evil than any other big, rich company?), and their cutesy PR campaign coinciding with the announcement of the new privacy policy made me nauseous on the subway to work the other day.
I'm not crazy about the personal data gathering that Google (and lots of other companies) does, but I've found a couple articles making good arguments that my life is not going to get that much worse when Google flips the switch on March 1 and, importantly, that all the hubbub surrounding the issue is bullshit.
I have a pet theory that when a scientifically or technically complex issue (and perhaps others) starts to get major public attention and politicians start to grandstand about it, there will soon be (if there isn't already) such a shitstorm of soundbites, sensationalism and open warfare between competing agendas that reaching a facts-in-their-proper-context-based consensus on the most efficient and effective way to address the issue - or even a reasonably efficient and effective way - will be damn near an impossibility. And this is irrespective of whether or not the issue is actually that big a deal in reality.
So there you have my standard "I don't know the answer, but I do know that I wish eternal damnation upon those who are self-servingly turning this into a total clusterfuck" mantra.
Online privacy is an issue that does concern me and that I've done a lot to learn about over the last year or so, so I will return to it again later. In the meantime, if you want to start to learn about how to exert some control over the information collected about you online, I suggest you begin with this article on search engine privacy, and for more information - both policy and practical - on a broad array of related issues, check out the Privacy, Internet Freedom and Cyber Security section of my online resources page.
I'm not saying that Google isn't fucked up. Their hollow "Don't be evil" motto has long made me roll my eyes (Were we really to believe that they'd be any more or less evil than any other big, rich company?), and their cutesy PR campaign coinciding with the announcement of the new privacy policy made me nauseous on the subway to work the other day.
I'm not crazy about the personal data gathering that Google (and lots of other companies) does, but I've found a couple articles making good arguments that my life is not going to get that much worse when Google flips the switch on March 1 and, importantly, that all the hubbub surrounding the issue is bullshit.
I have a pet theory that when a scientifically or technically complex issue (and perhaps others) starts to get major public attention and politicians start to grandstand about it, there will soon be (if there isn't already) such a shitstorm of soundbites, sensationalism and open warfare between competing agendas that reaching a facts-in-their-proper-context-based consensus on the most efficient and effective way to address the issue - or even a reasonably efficient and effective way - will be damn near an impossibility. And this is irrespective of whether or not the issue is actually that big a deal in reality.
So there you have my standard "I don't know the answer, but I do know that I wish eternal damnation upon those who are self-servingly turning this into a total clusterfuck" mantra.
Online privacy is an issue that does concern me and that I've done a lot to learn about over the last year or so, so I will return to it again later. In the meantime, if you want to start to learn about how to exert some control over the information collected about you online, I suggest you begin with this article on search engine privacy, and for more information - both policy and practical - on a broad array of related issues, check out the Privacy, Internet Freedom and Cyber Security section of my online resources page.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Inflammatory arguments are not automatically bad
About a year ago, after Gabriel Giffords was shot, people started talking about the need to restore civility to the national debate. I'm not going to comment on whether or not inflammatory rhetoric influenced the shooter - that's a question better left to mental health professionals than to the news commentators and political attack dogs who all chimed in with their self-serving analyses - but I am going to make a point. Before civility becomes a sacred cow in our canon of political correctness, let's remember one thing:
Inflammatory rhetoric is not all necessarily bad.
Look at a sincere polemicist like the late Christopher Hitchens. He had a penchant for saying inflammatory things that could make even people who agreed with him shift in their seats. But no less dazzling than his verbal pyrotechnics was his command of logic and facts whenever he debated. He used polemics to raise passions and to draw attention to issues, but not to divert people from debating the core of the real issue at hand. He took nasty comments directed at him in stride, sometimes even with sportsman like admiration, knowing that he invited much of the ire he received, and he never feigned indignation about it.
In other words, he inflamed passions in order to make people think.
Demagogues, on the other hand, use inflammatory rhetoric in order to make people stop thinking. They stoke people's emotions in order to heighten our appetite for simple, catch-all solutions, and then they exploit our fears and anxieties to force us to uncritically accept their dogma, conspiracy theory, or whatever bullshit they happen to be peddling. And then they'll use faux calls for decorum and civility to avoid answering important questions.
I'm not going to say more about demagogues here, because I'll be saying enough about them other places in this blog. I'll just say that if you don't want to invite a polemicist to your dinner party, fine, but don't write someone's opinion off simply because of their inflammatory rhetoric, and don't automatically give someone credibility just because they're polite. Cut through it and look for the substance and the facts.
I'll close with a video of Penn Jillette telling us about the wonderful ways a thinker like Christopher Hitchens can stimulate our minds.
Inflammatory rhetoric is not all necessarily bad.
Look at a sincere polemicist like the late Christopher Hitchens. He had a penchant for saying inflammatory things that could make even people who agreed with him shift in their seats. But no less dazzling than his verbal pyrotechnics was his command of logic and facts whenever he debated. He used polemics to raise passions and to draw attention to issues, but not to divert people from debating the core of the real issue at hand. He took nasty comments directed at him in stride, sometimes even with sportsman like admiration, knowing that he invited much of the ire he received, and he never feigned indignation about it.
In other words, he inflamed passions in order to make people think.
Demagogues, on the other hand, use inflammatory rhetoric in order to make people stop thinking. They stoke people's emotions in order to heighten our appetite for simple, catch-all solutions, and then they exploit our fears and anxieties to force us to uncritically accept their dogma, conspiracy theory, or whatever bullshit they happen to be peddling. And then they'll use faux calls for decorum and civility to avoid answering important questions.
I'm not going to say more about demagogues here, because I'll be saying enough about them other places in this blog. I'll just say that if you don't want to invite a polemicist to your dinner party, fine, but don't write someone's opinion off simply because of their inflammatory rhetoric, and don't automatically give someone credibility just because they're polite. Cut through it and look for the substance and the facts.
I'll close with a video of Penn Jillette telling us about the wonderful ways a thinker like Christopher Hitchens can stimulate our minds.
Friday, February 3, 2012
What's so bad about public discourse today (Part 3)
If you haven't already, make sure to check out my first and second posts on this topic.
I'll pick up where I left off....
Giving Undeserved Credence to Information Sources
The average person doesn't judge, say, a newspaper article or a statement by a politician based on the credibility of the sources cited; they judge it according to their own worldview.
Fits my worldview = firmly grounded in reality.
Conflicts with my worldview = baseless.
It's no wonder that the Republican presidential contenders have made all kinds of factual errors in the latest television debates. They learned in their November 9 debate last year that voters don't care (do they even notice?) when the candidates simply leave facts out of the equation. Does making factual errors demonstrate greater disregard for truth than not citing any facts at all? Who cares. People don't mind either as long as you don't challenge their beliefs.
Obsessive Mistrust of Authority
Mistrust of authority has a long tradition in the US, and properly incorporated, it's an important part of critical thinking. The problem is that Americans give too much immediate credibility to anyone who claims to stand in opposition to the establishment, and then they accept their claims uncritically. We see this in all the populist ranting against "Washington elites" leading up to each election, and it's not hard to recognize it in the misleadingly named "9/11 Truth Movement" and all of the other garbage peddled by conspiracy theorists.
The Obliteration of Meaning in the Use of Language
We live in a world where there are no longer any problems, only "challenges." Ordnance is delivered to targets in preemptive actions against enemy combatants in response to a clear and present danger. Industry offers us game-changing value-added services in their innovative customer relationship management regimes, leading to a paradigm shift which causes me to shit my pants.
I expect to return to this topic repeatedly throughout the life of this blog. It makes for good laughs, but it's a serious and insidious problem.
The Marketing of Everything
I don't have a good statistic on hand right now, but I'm sure that most of the words the average person is exposed to during a normal day - printed, broadcast, perhaps even spoken - are aimed not at conveying information and letting the individual make their own judgments, but rather at influencing the individual's thoughts and behavior towards specific outcomes. This has poisoned our society on many levels, not least our ability - maybe even inclination - to obtain and judge factual information.
Triumphalism and False Attributions to the "Natural Order of Things"
Attributing one's advantaged position, and the disadvantaged position of someone else, to the "natural order of things" is a great way to turn off one's brain and avoid grappling with difficult questions about how fucked up and unpredictable the world is. We can tell ourselves that we've found "the answer," or at least a part of it, and delude ourselves that we can settle into a static worldview and never have our beliefs challenged again. And then, when our position changes, we have the choice - barring an immediate mental collapse - of either remolding our beliefs to reflect the new reality we encounter, or insulating ourselves in a world of delusions which blames outside forces and allows us to maintain our false beliefs. The former involves a lot more up-front pain, but it can also improve our situation. The latter, which I believe is more common, allows us to breathe some new life into our illusions until reality inevitably crashes down on us in a far more destructive way.
In closing, I'd ask that you take a moment to skim through the topic headings in this three part post. Consider some of the ways these different phenomena can interact to amplify and exacerbate each other, resulting in a cataclysmic deluge of bullshit which sometimes reaches proportions that can overwhelm even the sharpest of minds.
I'll pick up where I left off....
Giving Undeserved Credence to Information Sources
The average person doesn't judge, say, a newspaper article or a statement by a politician based on the credibility of the sources cited; they judge it according to their own worldview.
Fits my worldview = firmly grounded in reality.
Conflicts with my worldview = baseless.
It's no wonder that the Republican presidential contenders have made all kinds of factual errors in the latest television debates. They learned in their November 9 debate last year that voters don't care (do they even notice?) when the candidates simply leave facts out of the equation. Does making factual errors demonstrate greater disregard for truth than not citing any facts at all? Who cares. People don't mind either as long as you don't challenge their beliefs.
Obsessive Mistrust of Authority
Mistrust of authority has a long tradition in the US, and properly incorporated, it's an important part of critical thinking. The problem is that Americans give too much immediate credibility to anyone who claims to stand in opposition to the establishment, and then they accept their claims uncritically. We see this in all the populist ranting against "Washington elites" leading up to each election, and it's not hard to recognize it in the misleadingly named "9/11 Truth Movement" and all of the other garbage peddled by conspiracy theorists.
The Obliteration of Meaning in the Use of Language
We live in a world where there are no longer any problems, only "challenges." Ordnance is delivered to targets in preemptive actions against enemy combatants in response to a clear and present danger. Industry offers us game-changing value-added services in their innovative customer relationship management regimes, leading to a paradigm shift which causes me to shit my pants.
I expect to return to this topic repeatedly throughout the life of this blog. It makes for good laughs, but it's a serious and insidious problem.
The Marketing of Everything
I don't have a good statistic on hand right now, but I'm sure that most of the words the average person is exposed to during a normal day - printed, broadcast, perhaps even spoken - are aimed not at conveying information and letting the individual make their own judgments, but rather at influencing the individual's thoughts and behavior towards specific outcomes. This has poisoned our society on many levels, not least our ability - maybe even inclination - to obtain and judge factual information.
Triumphalism and False Attributions to the "Natural Order of Things"
Attributing one's advantaged position, and the disadvantaged position of someone else, to the "natural order of things" is a great way to turn off one's brain and avoid grappling with difficult questions about how fucked up and unpredictable the world is. We can tell ourselves that we've found "the answer," or at least a part of it, and delude ourselves that we can settle into a static worldview and never have our beliefs challenged again. And then, when our position changes, we have the choice - barring an immediate mental collapse - of either remolding our beliefs to reflect the new reality we encounter, or insulating ourselves in a world of delusions which blames outside forces and allows us to maintain our false beliefs. The former involves a lot more up-front pain, but it can also improve our situation. The latter, which I believe is more common, allows us to breathe some new life into our illusions until reality inevitably crashes down on us in a far more destructive way.
In closing, I'd ask that you take a moment to skim through the topic headings in this three part post. Consider some of the ways these different phenomena can interact to amplify and exacerbate each other, resulting in a cataclysmic deluge of bullshit which sometimes reaches proportions that can overwhelm even the sharpest of minds.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
What's so bad about public discourse today (Part 2)
In my earlier post on this topic, I looked mainly at phenomena related to modern mass media. Most of the problems I'm going to look at today aren't nearly as new, but in combination with one another and with the problems I discussed last time, they've become particularly prevalent, and their effects are often extremely nefarious.
Hunger for a Panacea
As problems become more complex and harder to solve, there is a natural human tendency to look for simple, catch-all answers and solutions. It's a search for a sense of control in a world too complex for any of us to fully understand. But however natural this tendency may be, it's unhelpful when it comes time to grapple with problems in the real world. This tendency deceives people into thinking that shallow soundbites are meaningful, and worse, it makes them susceptible to dogma, ideology, demagoguery, and various other sorts of false salvation which make them even less able to address the problems they face in an honest and effective way. This tendency is also what gives so much potency to many of the other problems I'll discuss below.
Demagoguery
Demagoguery is nothing new, but with fear and anxiety about the future at fever pitch in our society today, and in an age when the average teenager has at his fingertips communication tools which Hitler and Goebbels could only have dreamed of, demagogues are making lots of problems and have the potential to make even more.
Logical Fallacies
It's shocking how many people can't assess the validity of the the logic of anything beyond the most basic "if-then" statements. It's not sexy and exciting, but solid logic is an indispensable tool in any critical thinking toolbox, and it's also a key facilitator of meaningful and constructive dialogue between conflicting ideas.
Backlash against Science
The backlash against science in our society today is remarkable. I don't know the latest statistics on how many Americans believe in evolution, but I suspect that it hasn't improved much since this stunning 2009 survey.
The treasure and human effort this country has poured into science and the benefits it has reaped from its investment are staggering in their own right. The dismissal of science by so many Americans is also breathtaking of its own merit. Taken together, these things should constitute a gargantuan mindfuck. Your everloving head should explode. But sadly, it's come to seem almost normal. Contemplate it next time your mind is in an altered state and tell me what the fuck happens. Maybe you can get it to seem weird again.
The effects of the dismissal of science go way beyond turning some of our most profound insights into the natural world into casualties on the bloody battlefields of the culture wars. It has also created an atmosphere in which religious ideologues can perversely claim that they are being persecuted when the rest of us insist that facts and working theories established by science form a better foundation upon which to base our shared understanding of the world around us than religious myth.
And then we get Glenn Beck on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial taking a messy liquid shit on the memory of the struggle for civil rights by blacks.
But worse, this creates an environment in which religious myth becomes a viable contender with scientific fact in influencing public policy. Science is stigmatized as an oppressive ideology (how ironic when a core tenet of science is that the body of knowledge should constantly be updated, with old understandings replaced by newer, better ones through a process of dispassionate trial - anathema to the static, inflexible nature of most ideologies as we define the concept of ideology today), and teaching of the scientific method becomes viewed as some kind of a Trojan Horse for scientism, and voila, our critical thinking toolbox just got lighter again. Soon the toolbox will be empty and we can just replace it with a sledgehammer, faith, or whatever other blunt instrument the next demagogue or snake oil salesman or conspiracy theorist foists upon us. With our powers of critical thought so weakened, it will be damn near impossible to see him for what he is.
And fuck, I'm out of steam. I guess this is going to be a three part deal. More soon.
Hunger for a Panacea
As problems become more complex and harder to solve, there is a natural human tendency to look for simple, catch-all answers and solutions. It's a search for a sense of control in a world too complex for any of us to fully understand. But however natural this tendency may be, it's unhelpful when it comes time to grapple with problems in the real world. This tendency deceives people into thinking that shallow soundbites are meaningful, and worse, it makes them susceptible to dogma, ideology, demagoguery, and various other sorts of false salvation which make them even less able to address the problems they face in an honest and effective way. This tendency is also what gives so much potency to many of the other problems I'll discuss below.
Demagoguery
Demagoguery is nothing new, but with fear and anxiety about the future at fever pitch in our society today, and in an age when the average teenager has at his fingertips communication tools which Hitler and Goebbels could only have dreamed of, demagogues are making lots of problems and have the potential to make even more.
Logical Fallacies
It's shocking how many people can't assess the validity of the the logic of anything beyond the most basic "if-then" statements. It's not sexy and exciting, but solid logic is an indispensable tool in any critical thinking toolbox, and it's also a key facilitator of meaningful and constructive dialogue between conflicting ideas.
Backlash against Science
The backlash against science in our society today is remarkable. I don't know the latest statistics on how many Americans believe in evolution, but I suspect that it hasn't improved much since this stunning 2009 survey.
The treasure and human effort this country has poured into science and the benefits it has reaped from its investment are staggering in their own right. The dismissal of science by so many Americans is also breathtaking of its own merit. Taken together, these things should constitute a gargantuan mindfuck. Your everloving head should explode. But sadly, it's come to seem almost normal. Contemplate it next time your mind is in an altered state and tell me what the fuck happens. Maybe you can get it to seem weird again.
The effects of the dismissal of science go way beyond turning some of our most profound insights into the natural world into casualties on the bloody battlefields of the culture wars. It has also created an atmosphere in which religious ideologues can perversely claim that they are being persecuted when the rest of us insist that facts and working theories established by science form a better foundation upon which to base our shared understanding of the world around us than religious myth.
And then we get Glenn Beck on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial taking a messy liquid shit on the memory of the struggle for civil rights by blacks.
But worse, this creates an environment in which religious myth becomes a viable contender with scientific fact in influencing public policy. Science is stigmatized as an oppressive ideology (how ironic when a core tenet of science is that the body of knowledge should constantly be updated, with old understandings replaced by newer, better ones through a process of dispassionate trial - anathema to the static, inflexible nature of most ideologies as we define the concept of ideology today), and teaching of the scientific method becomes viewed as some kind of a Trojan Horse for scientism, and voila, our critical thinking toolbox just got lighter again. Soon the toolbox will be empty and we can just replace it with a sledgehammer, faith, or whatever other blunt instrument the next demagogue or snake oil salesman or conspiracy theorist foists upon us. With our powers of critical thought so weakened, it will be damn near impossible to see him for what he is.
And fuck, I'm out of steam. I guess this is going to be a three part deal. More soon.
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