Last night I was thinking about why reputation destruction attempts are so rampant online, and why all political sides try to discredit the opponent instead of his arguments, and on the other hand some people act as if all arguments are on the order of “Rome is in Italy” where the person making the statement doesn’t matter. Of course the person making the statement matters; if you’re reading investment advice, Warren Buffet’s opinion is going to carry much more weight than the opinion of some random person on Reddit. That’s why it would be a problem if we had to read all opinions completely unsigned, divorced from the “brand” of the author, and then I thought – the weight we give to the information we read is a product of the weight of the argument itself, and the perceived weight of the person/entity making the argument.
You are going to take something much more seriously if it comes from a reputable source. Also, if a formerly reputable source abuses the trust invested in them by all the previously sound information they have been giving, and starts spreading propaganda, their “brand weight” is going to degrade and people aren’t going to put much trust in their opinions anymore. We saw that already with the news networks, which have degraded to the point where they are the least trustworthy sources out there, but also with corporations like Boeing, and, unfortunately, science – which has been corrupted so terribly by financial influences, policies that favor publishing questionable work often over publishing solid work infrequently, political influences and so on. Basically, I went from a position of treating scientific articles and publications as mostly rock solid in 1980s and 1990s, to a position where I now see them as obfuscated garbage until proven otherwise. This is unfortunate, because I already treated everything the governments are saying as deception until proven otherwise, I treated “news” as propaganda, lies and deception until proven otherwise, and I can also add science as something that’s manufactured on demand by industry and politics, and has no scientific value until proven otherwise. Essentially, my weighing of various “brands” has changed from positive to zero or negative, which leaves me with a very realistic conundrum: whom are we to believe, and are we actually better off with all those sources of (dis)information around, than we would be if it all stopped bombarding us with worthless, deceptive bullshit altogether? Basically, if Internet went down permanently, would that really be a bad thing? At least the liars would have their mouths shut finally, and deluded people would have to depart from their insane echo chambers, if not voluntarily, then because their Borg interconnection hardware stopped working, and Big Brother TV stopped broadcasting.
The painful thought that follows this is, whether people who got liberated from the brainwashing machine would actually bother to turn their brains on, or is it really their aversion to independent thought that created the addiction to the brainwashing machine in the first place? It’s not that people believe that Earth is flat in the 21st century due to lack of evidence; they believe in lies because truth doesn’t make them feel special and important enough. They believe in lies because they prefer it that way.
I would rather choose having to dig through all the noise, and having to weigh probability of truthfulness of every piece of information, than having very limited amount of true and verified information. Because you can’t have both. And one voice that I certainly wouldn’t know about if only verified information is made available would be yours.
It’s actually colossal waste of time digging through all the noise, especially since we had pretty good flow of high quality information well before internet – they were called books and magazines 🙂
And I do not say lightly that I wouldn’t cry for internet very long – my job depends on it, knowledge I need is now only on the internet because things move so fast by the time book is published it is already outdated.
But, that only means things will slow down, which is not a bad thing.
Speeding up did not bring new stuff faster it just pushed first beta, then alpha, and now pre-alpha products to the market, so the quality control alone (if existed) says things need to slow down.
Also, we went into such abnormal complexity with software development – it is actually ridiculous and we are in the full circle back because stuff became unusable.
So, if we revert to modems and BBS, high quality books and magazines – I’m quite fine with that 🙂
Internet is so much crap now that useful info fall into statistical error category. I think reboot is well overdue 🙂
It is. It seems that today you can’t even go to public bathroom without checking its Yelp reviews first.
I mean, I get what you’re saying and completely share your sentiment. It would be really nice to slow down… in some regards. On the other hand, imagine, I don’t know, having a flat tire on A1, and having to walk 15 km or hitchhike to the first telephone, and then not having enough coins for more than a one minute conversation… and that’s just simple stuff that was solved with a flip phone in the last century.
We thought we had. But we didn’t. I googled a few problems I was fighting with in the 90ties, and found that the information I had at the time was shit. 🙂 I regularly spent months without any progress on trivial stuff, while at the same time some guy at the other part of the world had info I didn’t and grokked the problem and uploaded the tutorial to his local BBS. Which I never knew about before Internet and Google.
(One infuriating thing that I found relatively recently was the CTRL-A combination for loading saved game in Prince of Persia which I never discovered. I spent so much time playing that game to be able to finish it in one hour without saving, and then finding out that you could actually simply save and continue from that point… FML.)
LOL, how old are you?
No, I do not ask this in a negative way, aren’t you old enough to remember how trip to Adriatic Sea looked like in the 80s?
We did not have flat tire, we had engine failure in Yugo 45, we waited couple of hours for uncle to come with two cars, left us one and we continued the trip … with Opel Omega or something, which was smoking through air vents …
That same Yugo 45 died every time we went through ankle deep water and had to wait an hour for engine (svijećice) to dry out.
I mean, yeah, not fun stuff, but we managed it. Year after year we managed it. Trip lasted entire day to Selce, instead of three hours, but we managed it. There was no rush. We didn’t care.
And today? You rush and then you sit hours at Lučko. Or Bregana if you tried going skiing. And we are pissed all the time at something, we are constantly late somewhere.
How is that an improvement?
We did. We had books. We had magazines that were harder to get than drugs 🙂 but we got them. We had teachers that actually knew stuff. We actually wanted to talk to teachers because we could learn that way. There were fairs. There were other people that knew stuff. Going to computer fair was a central event in my life 🙂
I learned Pascal from a fucking Pascal’s help file and I wrote stuff that brought me money in middle school.
Try learning today anything from a help file.
The reason you need internet is because complexity reached insane levels – in some areas justifiable (neural networks, but we had colleges for that and it worked), but in some just as a result of ego-trips of various communist ego-maniacs (Javascript frameworks and web development in general).
Truly prime example why we need internet, LOL 🙂
You can also take train to Split, and I believe it takes even longer today than when railroads were new, as they actually managed to get worse. Experience some of that old slow feel if you miss it. You can even buy a ticket online, combine the best of old and new. 🙂
Sure, some of them did. I also had a history teacher that peed herself while she was drunk in the class.
Well, I was a kid then, so I had kind of different priorities. That one still stings though. 🙂
Well if that’s all you have, you have no choice. I remember Borland’s C graphics library help file, which was shit compared to GW-BASIC help, but Borland could actually compile stuff into .exe. A one-liner description for each function. And you had a function to draw a point, a rectangle, and a circle, and that’s about it. Then you try to use tricks such as drawing stuff with rectangles over rectangles to draw anything, because drawing points is extremely slow. Meanwhile games and apps wrote stuff directly to graphic memory, which I knew nothing about, and nobody I knew could tell me, because Stack Overflow didn’t exist. Which left me wondering how the hell is everybody doing it, thinking that I have to learn assembler (and I was too stupid for that).
We could go on like this forever.
I am not saying it was all roses before internet, I am saying we were handling it and it was not end of the world.
I am also saying, Internet did not improve things, instead things became more complicated and life became a constant rush for something – that is not an improvement.
You need proof? Just look the current state the world is in. Does that look like an improvement to you?
Here is one fresh example.
For the last two hours I am trying to figure out how to configure .json files to enable debugging with Visual Studio Code built-in Javascript debugger to debug ASP.NET Core WebApi with Angular SPA.
Do note, I had debugging configured (which I wasted couple of hours several months ago), but now, debug extension is deprecated, but built-in extension has some new rules to follow – which are nowhere to be found.
Do you see how many buzzwords are here, just to explain the problem? Which I already solved few months back? Which never should have existed in the first place because debugging is one of those things you except to work out of the box without the need to waste hours and hours digging through internet pile of shit hoping to find some idiot who managed to crack this idiocy?
Yeah …
I can agree with this statement.
But with this one, I’m having mixed feelings. Yes, things are definitely more complex, and it seems that everything is trying to take away your focus. On the other hand, you generally have more freedom and more options, and some of them actually don’t suck at all. But I’m having a hard time determining how much of that is simply this world going to hell, things improving because the devil is dead, and how much is just my experience where I’m in much better place now then before when I was younger and thus naturally had much less liberties. Or maybe I’m simply not objective at all.
It seems a lot of what you call freedom and options are defined through available financial resources.
Which are important to some extent, I’m not disagreeing with that, but they can also quickly create much more bondage (not in u fun way) than freedom.
Also, what is freedom? I have never felt so trapped with rules, regulations, monitoring which are all result of “progress” and technology.
I am not saying technology is bad, but it is also not inherently good – it all depends on how it is used which depends on people which are most certainly not inherently good.
Further, lately I have realized I don’t give a shit about freedom and options in this world if these are paths that lead me further away from God.
I want nothing of this world as anything and everything of any value is of God and not of this world.
So, the only option and only freedom I would like is for God to replace all my other options and freedoms.
Sounds like a recursive function leading to stack overflow … which might be exactly what I need.
While financial resources do help somewhat, in this particular instance I was thinking more about how as a kid you have much less agency than as an adult.
I can agree with this statements as well.
Well, I remember it quite well; my parents had a Zastava 101, and the trip to Hvar took half an hour more than it does today, with the highway and all the modern stuff. Basically, seven hours including the ferry. The highway made a huge difference in safety, because the old road is so dangerous, with all the blind overtaking spots and potential for collisions, I can’t remember ever having driven it without having at least one close call. Now on the highway, I never feel there’s a real danger unless I push it, and that at least is something that’s under my control. So, basically, what improved things was the highway, not the more modern phones. The cars are better today, but that’s mostly because we couldn’t afford really good cars in the 1980s because socialism.
Yes, the cellphones made a huge difference in a sense that you could reach out and re-arrange plans if something went wrong, but we used other methods then – we made plans and stuck to them, so if the deal was to be somewhere at 15h, you were there at 15h. Internet on the phones brought a very mixed bag of improvements and drawbacks; on one hand you have a live map that helps if you get lost, on the other you have tons of social network nonsense people get entangled with and lost in; I myself don’t have any of that stuff, at all. No facebook, no twitter, no instagram, nothing. My social network is on my personal website which is basically a BBS connected to the Internet, and it would probably work with a dial-in line and minor software tweaks.
I’m not saying the Internet isn’t useful, I’m saying that it’s spiritually deadly for most people.
Yeah, not so sure about that.
Sure, there is no traffic from opposite direction and it is quite good when the traffic is low.
But, when the traffic gets more dense, combined with higher speeds … I had several close call yesterday because somebody decided it needs to overtake bus without looking behind or they are in the rush and can’t wait two seconds for you to pass by and they just jump in front of you.
Then there are speeders that makes those situation even worse and make people jump to right lane between cars causing havoc.
Basically, most people are not trained to handle high-way at high-way speeds and a lot of them are tired, and many of them are in the rush – so I end up much more drained after highway than old roads.
Not to mention Italy. Clearance does not exists in Italy – if you make a clearance for more than 5 meters – you get a car in front of you. All that at above 140 km/h – or you can take the right lane behind the truck at 80 km/h and relax. If you can. 🙂
I can’t – so I drove 500km with a car less than two meters in front of and behind me at 120-160 km/h.
Fuck highways 🙂
I don’t think there’s going to be much choice in the matter; I think Internet is going down no matter what, because, just think about it – the Gods have a problem with it because it makes it very difficult for them to save individuals who got tangled up with this mess, because the Internet makes the global astral field coherent in the worst possible way and also suppresses the spiritual paths required to establish a vertical meditative connection with God. The opposition to the current leftist main stream has a problem with it because the entire system is spying on them and it’s making it very difficult for them to overturn things and bring back what used to be conventional Western main stream 20 years ago, and is now seen as the extreme right or whatever nonsense.
Russia and China don’t like it because its only purpose is to spread American propaganda which feeds all sorts of madness and dissent both in their homeland and with their neighbors. Islam doesn’t like it because Internet is debunking the Islamic mythology and also spreading materialistic values.
The only ones who actually love it are the American intelligence agencies, the leftists who have no life or purpose outside it because it’s their whole world, and everybody else who became dependent on it and it’s hardly a choice to live without it now. So, with very powerful forces being against it, it’s just a matter of time before someone takes it down, and that’s why I was thinking whether that would be such a bad thing.
So the issue is basically with social networking? Do you think whole Internet needs to go down (say, solar flare that basically disables half of satellites, and most of the power infrastructure on one side of the Earth), or could more surgical solutions be applied – like the Chinese are able to almost isolate themselves on their own part of the Internet?
That particular coherence you talk about almost screams “Facebook”; could bringing down a few centralized social networks do the trick? Governments are already looking for excuse to limit Facebook, for example, when Facebook tried to introduce payments as well, reaction they got from governments was pretty much “no way in hell”, even if they tolerate similar things from PayPal.
I do not think it would, because social networks are not powerful because of software, they’re powerful because of “social” part of it and you bring social networks down, you’ll just get new ones because people will want it, especially now after they once had it.
It’s like drugs problem – you can’t solve the problem by catching small dealers, you can’t even solve the problem by catching huge dealers and manufacturers because demand is constant and as long there is demand …
I don’t know what will happen, technically, I’m just having consistent warning-hunches about it and they didn’t start recently, it’s just one of those things you become aware of at some point and then you understand they’ve been here for a while, you just didn’t notice.
BTW, what I find interesting is that there was a very strong and vivid New Age movement in the 1990s, coinciding with the ascent of the Internet, but it seems to have completely died strongly coinciding with the ascent of social networks and smartphones. One could say that those things seem to have supplanted the kind of spirituality that was present, as if it competed for the same connective hardware, and it was simply too strong and tempting for the spiritual connection to have a chance.
Also, I noticed how the social networks have a tendency to become really nasty really quickly, simply because there are no real-world mechanisms developed for dealing with nasty people, which is why they have an undue advantage in the medium. However, there are also serious advantages of online communication, such as the asynchronous nature of it allowing you to think things through and write things that are of a higher quality than most people could manage to either verbalize or process in realtime.
I have also seen people trusting Youtubers because, wait for it, they are popular.
So, if they say Earth is flat – it must at least have some truth to it, right? Video has millions of views, for fuck sake!
Combined with “if millions say it’s true, then it must be and I am wrong, right?” – you get a really nice package.
People are not evaluating opinions, they are simply repeating it creating or emulating this Borg entity.
However, there is the opposite spectrum of (significantly fewer) people that refuse to revise their knowledge. They have learned it, period.
I recently had a discussion with a guy about a certain caliber – he learned about it in military school in 1990’s – except either he or his teacher got it wrong. Now he ends up in a situation where a completely fresh guy (low competence) is telling him he is wrong and providing fucking SAAMI specs as proof – but he just can’t go past the fact he could be wrong about it, because he learned it in military school 20 years ago.
But he at least knows something, while repeaters actually knows nothing, their brains are in repeating mode and that’s it. More people repeating, they feel better. That’s what Facebook success lies upon.
The problem is, we can’t actually verify accuracy of anything we see or hear online, except when they report on things that overlap with our own experience, which in practice means “basically never”. This means we can either do what I’m doing – read lots of sources, see what makes sense, treat it as possibly true until proven otherwise, and correlate as many sources as possible, and also treat information received from known fraudulent/manipulative sources as false and deliberately deceptive until proven otherwise, and thus create a complex image of reality that is continuously revised with new data – or, as most people are doing, just believe whatever you want to believe.