The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Skarl:

Re: jargon and idiolect, such systems are really just attempts to reduce the actual information contained in a transmission to the minimum necessary. This is effective, but there is a minimum limit, hence it will always be possible to extract some data.

Re: Fanatics, this is a definite problem with increasingly different viewpoints. On the other hand, the Internet does give people the option of hearing other viewpoints. IMO, a successful society in an information-saturated world will have to place a high value on honesty in the scientific sense - telling the truth as you see it, without allowing personal bias to interfere.

Whether Gibson's transparency takes place will be dependent more on whether media coverage can maintain this kind of honesty - with data to support any assumption (at the depth the average citizen has the time to absorb), only journalists who present the most valid data, without partisanship or bias, will be providing useful information.

I'm not sure that 'deep' and 'sophisticated' are synonyms when it comes to philosophy.

PKD's sci-fi was good because he wrote really, really well about paranoia, mental illness, and mostly a rather Gnostic essential flaw in the world - at least in those of his novels I have read. He managed to make the reader experience that view of the world.

The deep questions of philosophy - why are we here, are we here, etc. - are simple and personal. If The Matrix and its sequels manage to make people feel the importance of these questions, and cause them to think about them, then as far as I am concerned, they will be every bit as valuable a work as PKD's novels - perhaps more, given the much larger audience.

I guess I could have just said "Patrick is right!" Ah well.

Yehudit:

The 'Left' cannot "shut up" de Genova. First, because there is no such organization. Second, because he made his comments at a campus rally - not in a left-wing publication. Third, because no matter how much searching is necessary, publications like the NY Post will search out someone willing to make such stupid comments, even if it is only a "campus crank".

The right-wingers you mentioned are politicians - they can be controlled to some extent by their party - not untenured professors.

But more importantly, how are these extremists the responsibility of anyone but themselves and those who publish their views? How are they the left's "own wackos"?

Keep in mind that it is the opponents of left-wing policies that pollute the media with the views of irrelevant radicals. Not the Haydens or anyone else posting to this thread. Not me.

And the the NY Post's statement that De Genova is not "worth the effort" - while printing his statements, and implying in their headline that he somehow represents the university - emphasises how much they must search to find such an objectionable viewpoint.

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