folksinger

If you have some spare time I'd be happy to have a video chat conversation about the epistomological consequences of academic studies in soft sciences like psychology, sociology and economics and how the experiences of the target audience are always key to accepting knowledge.

I don't think my arguments are going to be very effective in the comment section of a web forum. (See Socrates discussing the written word with Phaedrus for the epistomological issues of discourse without active dialog.)

Instead of testing a null hypothesis through statistical inference, a dubious approach to the scientific method for either a frequentist or Bayesian, how about an appeal to common sense experience?

Out of the scope of the study in question, but do you think a device attached to the world of social media, pornography and video gaming might be more distracting than a book containing focused information?

Closer to the study: even a Kindle offers the temptation of downloading another text.

Also, have you been into a public high school lately and seen just how distracting these devices are in actual use, especially as they are now relied upon in place of expensive textbooks and articles?

Finally, isn't it suspicious that an individual on a technology forum would defend technology? It's almost like your average technology worker has some kind of moral stake in their profession, wouldn't you say?

You make a good point about Walkmans and newspapers... As McLuhan would point out, the Narcissus trance is present in all media technologies! That doesn't meet we should give in to the alluring trance of the Siren.

It is true that newspapermen created the Spanish-American war out of thin air as well, but we learned our lessons about the unethical use of mass print media. Irony of ironies in the name Pulitzer Prize!

I just want to make sure we're not blind to the downsides of this new "liberating" technology. It has had plenty of defenders and has swept up billions of people in its grasp.

Perhaps feeling depressed by staged photos of a friend on vacation posted to Facebook is one thing but threats of nuclear war on Twitter are a much more serious matter!

The reason I asked is because it seems like you might have a lot of your identity and self-worth dependent on a moral acceptance of social media. It seems like you might be subconsciously denying the negative impact that these technologies have on both individuals and society at large.

Or not! Maybe you are fully accepting and fully aware and it is I who is missing the extra pieces to the puzzle!

It is not what we have. We have many other options beyond even the other technologies you've listed. Businesses and products are not prerequisite for interacting with friends and family.

What about simply having a conversation in person, mediated only by spoken language? What if you never moved away from your family and could stop by for dinner a few times a week?

There are many possibilities beyond just accepting the dictations of a few product managers in Silicon Valley!

Do you work for Facebook? It's OK if you do. It's OK if you don't accept what they do. It's OK if you don't love your job. We need to go out into the world and destroy parts of it just to survive.

From 'The Way I Am', sung by Merle Haggard and many more:

I wish I enjoyed how I made my living,

Did what I do with a willing hand.

Some may run but that ain't like me,

So I just dream, keep on being the way that I am.

Where as we have F=m•a in physical reality, in hyperreality it seems as though the rule is inverted, F=m÷a.

It seems the less "mass" a message contains the more "force" it seems to exert. A long response is ignored and carries with it very little persuasive power compared to the pithy response of a mere binary form of approval.

Is an ad-subsidized and for-profit business deeply and fundamentally required to talk to your friends and family?

If interacting with friends and family is what is important, is Facebook the best way to do so?

Do you think the average public library contains a better or worse ratio of good to bad knowledge than Google?

How about a library at a world-class university?

How about the magazines on display at the grocery store checkout line?

Lesson to be learned:

Wisdom and knowledge do not come from technology. They come from wise and experienced educators working one-on-one with their students, not to tell them the truth, but to help them experience the truth. Nullius in verba!

Ed-tech is confidence game.

What technology offers is the productive capacity to support a world filled with actual human educators and actual human intelligence.

First, it may be better for you and I. It may be much worse than a library for most other people. It also may be worse than a library at a world-class university for even you or I. It may only be more convenient than going to a library or walking the halls of a university.

I don't think the answer is obvious to anyone who takes the time to properly examine the matter.

Unfortunately for the both of us the medium itself is terrible for philosophical enquiry so we probably won't cover much ground in a discussion framed by popular opinion.

You will now set out to prove me wrong and hope to gather support from people who already agree with you. We will not at all engage in the cooperative quest for wisdom.

Such is life on the internet.

The reason why those of us on this forum can tell the difference between good and bad information is because we received a good education and learned critical analysis skills.

Facebook, Google and the internet in general are an objectively bad source of knowledge. They are subjectively good sources of knowledge.

The vast majority of people do not have the skills to use the internet as a source for good knowledge.

The contents of the average library contain better knowledge than the internet. The contents of a library at a world-class University and even more-so.

The internet is the most overrated institution of contemporary society when it comes to obtaining knowledge.

It is somewhat good for entertainment but probably not better than your average game of Dungeons and Dragons.

I read this as,

"Do you hate freedom? Buy yourself an Apple Watch and always, literally always, be shackled to someone else's priorities!"

I realize this is not a charitable interpretation but I feel like it deserves a counter-narrative.

I've been telling anyone who will listen that we need a public social media platform funded by just such a mechanism, akin to similar institutions like copyright registration and the postal service.

Innovation could occur on top of what is a very simple data model and doesn't need the free market to stay relevant.

Our public institutions are what we make of them. If we despise and distrust them they will wither and die. If we encourage and support them they will flourish and we will all prosper together.

No man is an island!

The article mentions nothing of the most important problem we have yet to solve. Who is liable for protecting private data?

The way it works right now is that everyone is basically agreeing to publish any information when they use these platforms. If Facebook, Apple or Google leaks this information they are not legally liable. For the ad-based revenue models they couldn't be, their entire business model is selling this information!

He doesn't actually believe this. The reason why Facebook only allows people to have a single identity tied to their real name is that is what advertisers would prefer.

Zuckerberg doesn't believe in anything other than money and power.

See: Kant on a priori notions of space-time.

I'm not surprised that a forum full of people who work in the information technology industry cannot see the epistomological failure of mass media, but these problems are not new, and the idea that nothing communicated through a screen can be trusted will most definitely cause more good than harm outside of the very near future.

Democratic institutions not only functioned but were put into effect before the advent of recorded or transmitted audio and video. Mass media has already been distorting the truth for over a century.

"Trust nothing you read online" becoming commonplace is something to be celebrated!

You can still trick the best image classification techniques with objects that to the human mind are clearly not what the machine says they are. Machines do not reason in the way that humans do. They don't have a concept of a self that exists in space-time. Humans can make inferences about images precisely because they have an a priori understanding of space-time.

You will always find that those who have faith in strong AI also have faith in a reductionist approach to human intellect. That is, they are behaviorists and neuroscientists and not philosophers and poets.

What makes great art is not the notes that make up the melody but expression of the human condition.

Machines do not make art. They make meaningless objects.

Prove it.

No, I'm saying that he has to provide a better refutation of my point.

I do not agree that the graphs look identical.

What point am I trying to make, BTW?

Well I already did the work I'm willing to do on my end. Further research would obviously have to take in to consideration deviations from general population density, but just looking at the map, there's a lot of voter intimidation being reported in the south that clearly has nothing to do with population density.

Also, there's no correlation with voter intimidation and population density for cities in the midwest.

So I guess it's just my word and my graph against your word and, well, nothing else. So you better get to work!

Yeah but the maps I'm showing don't follow general population density so the point being made by this comic doesn't apply in this instance.

The reports of "voter intimidation" on the electionlandstrends map matches the boundary of this racial demographic map.

http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_nhwhite.gif

Here's those two maps combined:

http://i.imgur.com/eKT5s0h.png

As someone who happened to be a young adult before the advent of iPhones and AirBnB I can promise you that it was indeed possible for people to do things without technologies available since 2010.

I successfully moved to a number of different cities with neither money nor job prospects. It involved using the ancient human rituals of "using a telephone", "riding the bus", "speaking with other persons" and "walking around".

In the process I had to deal with some minor inconveniences and sometimes things didn't go exactly the way I wanted. The horror!