David Weinberger is one of the Internet’s clearest and cleverest thinkers, an understated and deceptively calm philosopher who builds his arguments like a bricklayer builds a wall, one fact at a time.

 

 

 

David Weinberger is one of the Internet’s clearest and cleverest thinkers, an understated and deceptively calm philosopher who builds his arguments like a bricklayer builds a wall, one fact at a time. In books like Everything is Miscellaneous and Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, he erects solid edifices with no gaps between the bricks, inviting conclusions that are often difficult to reconcile with your pre-existing prejudices, but which are even harder to deny.

 

Too Big to Know, Weinberger’s latest book-length argument, is another of these surprising brick walls. Weinberger presents us with a long, fascinating account of how knowledge itself changes in the age of the Internet — what it means to know something when there are millions and billions of “things” at your fingertips, when everyone who might disagree with you can find and rebut your assertions, and when the ability to be heard isn’t tightly bound to your credentials or public reputation for expertise.

 

Weinberger wants to reframe questions like “Is the Internet making us dumber?” or “Is the net making us smarter?” as less like “Is water heavier than air?” and more like “Will my favored political party win the election?” That is, the kind of question whose answer depends on what you, personally, do to make the answer come true.

 

Weinberger starts with a history of knowledge, from the pre-Enlightenment idea of knowledge as something that is revealed by one’s understanding of the divine, to the scientific method and the positivist notion that knowledge requires falsifiable hypotheses. From there, he moves onto the challenge of expertise and of the merits and demerits of a set of diverse, disagreeing “experts” who don’t speak with one voice in their agreement about the world’s true nature, and to a world today where the disagreements that always lurked in science are visible to everyone.

 

He explores the merits and demerits of “echo chambers” — the fact that it’s easier to get stuff done if you exclude those who question all of your axioms, and the risks of being swallowed by your blind spots when you do. But Weinberger is optimistic about the net’s ability to balance out the need to agree with the need for disagreement. He shows how pre-digital media put artificial constraint on argument, forcing it to all fit within a set of covers and pre-empting the possibility of debate among readers and writers.

 

Moving onto science, Weinberger sets out examples of the amazing possibilities for amassing and synthesizing facts individually and as a group, citing huge scientific datasets like ProteomeCommons, run by a single grad student and comprising 13 million data files. He examines what it means to reach scientific conclusions when there is so much data, and what this means for the scientific method and the idea of falsifiability. If you can use data-mining to arrive at equations describing the relationships between different phenomena in the physical world, and if those equations reliably predict future actions, does it matter if you don’t know why the equation works? And if it does, should you exclude that equation from the realm of science, especially if there’s nothing else quite so useful to take its place?

 

But Weinberger isn’t entirely optimistic about the net. It’s “incontestable that this is a great time to be stupid,” when “nonexperts” can create plausible-seeming bodies of “facts” to support anti-vaccination campaigns.

 

Ultimately, Weinberger treats the net as a fact, not a problem. It exists. It has remade our knowledge processes. It has bound together communication, information and sociability so that you can’t learn things without communicating, and so that every communication brings the chance of a human encounter. In a closing chapter of recommendations, he talks about how we treat the fact of the net as a given, and work from there to try and use it to make us smarter. The concluding chapter is a set of eminently reasonable recommendations on policy, technology, administrations and mindset, expressed with admirable brevity.

 

Weinberger is one of the original Cluetrain Manifesto authors, and has been influencing our relationship to the Internet since very early days. As the net evolves, he continues to be relevant — and indispensable. You can get a taste of the book at TooBigToKnow.com.

 

 

By Cory Doctorow

 

 

 

The reason why democracy always turns into a complete failure is simple.

 

The reason why democracy always turns into a complete failure is simple: most people get to vote, and most people are idiots. People want a leader that represents what they believe about themselves, which is why the president is now nothing more than a blank figurehead for people to project themselves onto. They aren’t interested in policies, except as a way to signal their beliefs, and they don’t care if the leaders that represent them are actually concerned about obeying the highest law of the land or acting in the long-term best interest of the country.

People think that representation means electing a figurehead that symbolizes their interests.* A string of broken campaign promises does nothing to dissuade people from their belief that their representatives actually accomplish things on their behalf. And even these failures are ignored because what’s really important is that one’s preferred politician is nothing more than a status symbol. Thus, democracy devolves to simple status-mongering.

Funnily, though, people always complain about how politicians never do anything useful once they’re elected. What they seem to forget is that a politician’s main purpose is to act as a symbol during an election, and give people a way to sort themselves into their own classes. Once that’s accomplished, a politician is no longer needed, save as a figurehead for a movement or class. And so, democracy does not exist to enable people to solve problems through citizen-based referendums, it exists to allow people to show solidarity with their self-selected class. And this is why it fails, time and again: it focuses on symbolism over substance

 

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The table below shows the most recent World Democracy Audit scores and rankings achieved by this country. Lower scores are preferable.

 

South africa: World Democracy Profile

 

Topics	Range	Ranking
World Democracy Audit overall ranking	1-150	43
Political Rights	1-7	2
Civil Liberties	1-7	2
Press Freedom	0-150	41
Corruption	0-149	47

 

There is ultimately nothing to accomplish in life. You don’t need to be rich or well-liked or of prestigious social standing. You don’t need much of anything to be happy.

 

 

 

You can choose money, spend all your days in gradually expanding offices and finally die of a heart attack in a board meeting while your gold-plated Ferrari sits quietly in the garage of your fifty-room mansion in the most exclusive neighborhood in the state.

You can choose family, be buried in a 2-for-1 bargain plot with your children weeping over your headstone and be as forgotten as a dead squirrel in the forest in a matter of generations.

You can choose anything you want in life and probably get it, but you can only completely achieve one thing. If you split your priorities, you will achieve split results as well. You can have a little bit of money, a little bit of prestige, a little bit of family and a little bit of everything else, but none of them will be complete for you. If you want 100% success with anything, that thing must comprise 100% of your priorities. Each goal you set for yourself takes away from all your other goals, because circumstances will always force you to further one at the expense of another and to choose between them every day.

My advice to you is to focus on happiness, on enjoying life. You probably don’t want to hear this, but this means you will not have money or status or anything else. Conversely, focusing on money, status or anything else means you will not achieve happiness. Happiness is not success. Happiness is the opposite of conventional success.

 

It’s not having things, it’s ceasing to want things. When you stop caring about everything that could be and focus completely on enjoying what is, you are happy.

 

You are unhappy when you think your life isn’t the way it should be, that you need to change X and Y and then your life can really begin. It doesn’t work like that, though. This is your life, RIGHT NOW, THIS IS IT! Are you happy?

That’s the truth right there, but I don’t suspect that many even of the readers of this blog want the truth. I’ve noticed with the blog that the more truthfully I write, the less people like it, and the more I write what people want to hear, the more they like it. That’s why you can’t build a business on the truth. The truth is that the price of happiness is everything else, but in the commercial version the price of happiness is whatever you can comfortably afford. Three easy installments of $39.95, ten minutes a day of meditation exercises, a few months of approaching girls in the street. Something like that. Something that doesn’t require you to give up any of the things you really want.

Because people mostly do not want happiness. They want something else, something like money or success or status or respect, a beautiful wife or a wikipedia entry that says they were important. They want other people to think they are happy more than they really want to be happy. When you want to be happy even if it means that everyone you’ve ever loved and everyone you’re ever going to meet will think you’re a pathetic loser, that’s when you’re ready to be happy. Not before.

Being happy is the simplest thing in the world. Just do something that completely occupies your attention.

 

This is why people do extreme sports – the danger requires their complete attention so there is room for nothing else in their brain, and their internal monologue about everything that they think is wrong in their life quiets down. You don’t need to risk death, though. Watch a really good TV show or play a video game, something that really draws you in. Once you get better at giving your complete attention to the immediate present moment, you can do anything. Cook dinner, go for a walk in the park, sit still and do nothing. As long as you can stay out of your head and out of the range of that internal voice that nags about changes it wants made, you’ll stay happy. Happiness is your natural default state. Do you think lions lying in the sun berate themselves over what an ex-girlfriend said about them on Facebook?

That’s the secret to happiness right there. It doesn’t seem that impressive since I didn’t stretch it out to 180 pages with exciting Sanskrit words and made-up spiritual-sounding terms thrown in and charge 29 bucks for it. But it is the truth.

I’ve said what I wanted to say on this blog and I could probably have said it a lot quicker. What does the future hold for me? I might just go and do something completely normal and boring. I think I might be done with this teaching thing. I’ve gotten so used to writing that I wonder if I can quit. Maybe I’ll post something occasionally just for fun. I’ve still got something planned that I didn’t have time to do yet that isn’t exactly writing but it’s sort of related to the topics of this blog.

Aside from that, I guess we’ll see about the future when we get there.

No one can know the future, and don’t ever let anyone convince you they can. Those people on TV and on the internet trying to tell you what “will happen” in the next ten or twenty years are full of shit. All of them. Especially the experts. 

Thinking that a stock market expert can go on TV and say something about the future of the stock market, or that a military expert can know about the future of the military, is like going back to 1999 and asking an Iraq expert what the next decade would look like for Iraq, or going back to 1935 and asking a Poland expert what the next ten years will look like for Poland. The problem with anybody who tries to predict anything is that they fail to understand that the specialty area that they think they know about is always being affected by a million external factors they know nothing about.

Any scientific endeavor to connect what you think is a cause to what you think is an effect is already at least 50% voodoo anyway, and trying to predict the future is like voodoo squared, it’s a whole different level of inaccuracy.

 

A few years ago they were all predicting global shifts of power decades into the future based on which countries had exploitable oil resources and which didn’t, and then somebody invented hydrofracking and now lots of previously unreachable oil is suddenly exploitable and all those pages of projections aren’t even good for toilet paper.

 

Don’t listen to anybody about the future who isn’t an expert on everything and all of the ways in which everything affects everything else.

 

That is, don’t listen to anybody.

 

SOURCE

 

Book Review – Sexual Unhappiness is a Religiously Transmitted Disease?

People who leave religion to seem to be the ones who tried hardest and who have invested those most time into soul-searching.

There are themes of intense searching, bible reading, efforts to conform and find the promises of their religion, only to fail time and again. Ironically, the intense searching, bible reading and attempts to understand led many to recognize there were many things they were not being told and much was hidden or poorly explained.

• The more sexually restrictive a religion is the more it uses guilt.

• Conservative religions teach guilt and proscribe manybehaviors such as sex before marriage, masturbation, oral sex and sex outside of marriage, and use religious based approaches to sex education with emphasis on abstinence only, failing to teach about birth control, condom use and abortion.

• Biology seems to trump religion despite the millions of dollars and hours devoted to teaching religious children how to behave within their

  religious restrictions. Other general studies of sexuality show that 95% all adults have had premarital sex by the time they marry including, we believe, most ministers who tout abstinence only.

• The religious kids were learning from sexual experience more than the less religious!

• Most religions preach incessantly against pornography, yet it is the religious

  children in this sample that used it more.

 

• It appears that the things religions preach against most – sexual experimentation, pornography and the internet – are what religious kids may use the most, while failing to talk to their parents.
  

• Non-religious kids seem to be following the religious proscriptions better than the religious ones.

• For the most religious, getting religion out of their lives seemed to make a huge difference in their sex life.

• Those from the most guilt based religions would show the greatest drop in guilt and biggest increase in sexualsatisfaction.

• If porn is as bad as religions say it is, they aren’t doing a very good job of keeping it out of the hands of children andadolescents, 20% or more of both groups said they were using porn by 12 years old. For all the billboards and sermons against porn, there seems to be little return on theinvestment.

• We were most interested in religion’s effect on porn use. If religion’s

  proscriptions are effective, we should see a clear difference between those who are most and least religious in the teen years when they are getting strong messages from their religion about sex. Looking only at men, we can see that there is very little difference between the groups.This suggests that the effect of religion is negligible for men.

 

•  The moral of this story, if you want a good sex life, don’t get  involved with a highly religious person. Many in our sample seem to have taken that path. Of those that do have highly religious spouses, the majority have sexual problems in the relationship. 

• The main benefit that people  express is the ability to just enjoy sex without guilt.

  Over and over people said, they are much happier and fulfilled not only in their sex life, but in the rest of their life as well since leaving religion.

•  Guilt messages have remarkably little measurable effect on actual behavior. As in other surveys, our results show that religion has a slight effect in delaying the onset of sexual activity.
  

• Religious parents are perceived to be poorer at sex education compared to less religious parents, though neither are particularly good at it.
  

• Religion simply ignores biology and creates psychological states that interfere

  with appropriate sexual expression and development. Teaching guilt and shame around things that are perfectly natural. Religion impacts how people see their bodies andexpress their sexuality whether gay, lesbian or straight. Religions have nothing to say about our biology. They are in large measure clueless about hormones, braindevelopment, attraction factors, body image formation and many other things.

• If parents and schools spent as much time teaching kidsabout safe and enjoyable sex as they do teaching about safe driving, there would be fewer

  unwanted pregnancies, less disease, fewer abortions and far less guilt and shame that lead people to make poor decisions about partners and behavior.

• Eliminate guilt and shame around sex, and religions have very little to work with.

• Religions cannot claim that their ideas and principles actually impact

  behavior or make people happier.

  

• We can also see that religion creates guilt and shame around the most basic sexual act, masturbation, but has no effect on its practice.  

• Condemning children for masturbating, telling them they will go to hell or suffer in this life for doing it, is child abuse pure and simple.

• Religion uses sex for purposes of propagation not the happiness of its adherents.

• There is ample evidence in this survey, that one of the best things one can do to

  improve your sex life is leave religion, especially if you were in a conservative religion.

• We have seen that stigmas, shame and guilt do not work in preventing or stopping behavior, but they do make people feel sexually miserable.

• 95% of Americans have sex before marriage. Your minister probably had sex before marriage but he tells you not to. Protect yourself, use a condom.

• Adolescents and young adults are in a critical time trying to

  establish their sexual identity. Religion intentionally plays upon the doubts and fears of youth to infect them with medieval ideas of sexuality.

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Read more at the link below

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