James Macdonald (2): "I don't believe that anyone is so smart that the right conman with the right pitch at the right time can't take him."
I have nothing but sympathy for the victims of this scam, and others like it. There but for the grace of, etc.
We got taken for a couple of thousand dollars by people we hired to do work around the house a few years ago.
I expect we'll get ripped off again sometime. Because, you know, in the end you have to trust people sometime, and sometimes when you do you get burned.
anon (#42): My brother went to a Landmark Forum, he seemed to think he'd gotten a lot out of it. I don't know what he thinks about it now, but it doesn't seem to have done him any lasting harm.
dave (#64): "Now, I appreciate that this kind of brute-force approach to reality might be seen as insensitive, but alas, I don't care."
Actually, I think you do care. You want abi, and others, to be offended by your statement, because you're looking for an argument.
"Any life-enhancing effects that they may feel are produced by their woo are attributable to the fact that it makes them feel good to do what they feel like."
Seems to me that force, in and of itself, is pretty powerful, and not to be dismissed offhand by Skeptics with a capital S.
I've been reading and thinking about spiritualism and religion a lot in the past few weeks, probably more than I have done in my previous life. The sum total of my thinking on the subject is contained in the preceding two paragraphs.
dave (#71): Now I see the subject has changed from a tragedy in Arizona to you, which is I suspect what you wanted all along. Because it's intolerable to you that you should not be the center of attention.
And now I see dave has been banned. Drat. Just when the flamewar was getting to be fun.
Albatross (#103): "As an adult, a lot of what you do to improve yourself or your life involves ignoring some levels of unpleasantness or discomfort or even pain. For example, eating less food to lose weight is unpleasant--it involves ignoring fairly urgent signals from your body, signals that evolved to keep you alive but now are encouraging you to kill yourself by overeating."
Actually, you're wrong--I speak from experience on this, having lost 27 pounds since March by counting calories. I still have 65 pounds or so to go. And good grief, how did I ever allow myself to get this fat?
If you're losing weight the healthy way, you shouldn't be hungry. You should get enough food to keep you going through the day.
You will on the other hand, have to stifle your compulsion to eat when not hungry. Part of the work of losing weight is learning the difference between the compulsion to eat, and actual hunger. And that's unpleasant, but rewarding (so I guess you're right after all).
James Macdonald (2): "I don't believe that anyone is so smart that the right conman with the right pitch at the right time can't take him."
I have nothing but sympathy for the victims of this scam, and others like it. There but for the grace of, etc.
We got taken for a couple of thousand dollars by people we hired to do work around the house a few years ago.
I expect we'll get ripped off again sometime. Because, you know, in the end you have to trust people sometime, and sometimes when you do you get burned.
anon (#42): My brother went to a Landmark Forum, he seemed to think he'd gotten a lot out of it. I don't know what he thinks about it now, but it doesn't seem to have done him any lasting harm.
dave (#64): "Now, I appreciate that this kind of brute-force approach to reality might be seen as insensitive, but alas, I don't care."
Actually, I think you do care. You want abi, and others, to be offended by your statement, because you're looking for an argument.
"Any life-enhancing effects that they may feel are produced by their woo are attributable to the fact that it makes them feel good to do what they feel like."
Seems to me that force, in and of itself, is pretty powerful, and not to be dismissed offhand by Skeptics with a capital S.
I've been reading and thinking about spiritualism and religion a lot in the past few weeks, probably more than I have done in my previous life. The sum total of my thinking on the subject is contained in the preceding two paragraphs.
dave (#71): Now I see the subject has changed from a tragedy in Arizona to you, which is I suspect what you wanted all along. Because it's intolerable to you that you should not be the center of attention.
And now I see dave has been banned. Drat. Just when the flamewar was getting to be fun.
Albatross (#103): "As an adult, a lot of what you do to improve yourself or your life involves ignoring some levels of unpleasantness or discomfort or even pain. For example, eating less food to lose weight is unpleasant--it involves ignoring fairly urgent signals from your body, signals that evolved to keep you alive but now are encouraging you to kill yourself by overeating."
Actually, you're wrong--I speak from experience on this, having lost 27 pounds since March by counting calories. I still have 65 pounds or so to go. And good grief, how did I ever allow myself to get this fat?
If you're losing weight the healthy way, you shouldn't be hungry. You should get enough food to keep you going through the day.
You will on the other hand, have to stifle your compulsion to eat when not hungry. Part of the work of losing weight is learning the difference between the compulsion to eat, and actual hunger. And that's unpleasant, but rewarding (so I guess you're right after all).
Done. I don't know if Scraps remembers me (we met a couple of times over the years), but please pass along my best wishes for a speedy recovery.
I can question two major points of Vinnie's account based on personal experience as a smalltown newspaper reporter:
I sat through about a million Zoning and Planning Board meetings. It was the mainstay of my job. The boards love developers, they're eager to get new construction in town, and they bend over backwards to accommodate it.
And newspaper reporters love hard-luck stories about the little guy being trampled by bureacracy. It's like porn for teen-age boys. Even better if the victim is semi-literate -- cranks up the pathos. I interviewed the senders of a million of the kinds of letters that Vinnie describes, but only recall getting a story from one of them -- the rest were, alas, basically complaining that a civil servant did his job and they didn't like it.
This was in New Jersey 20 years ago, but I expect things are the same all over America, 10 years ago and today.
Jim & Debra - I'm so sorry for your loss, to you and everyone in your community.
If we middle-class Americans are too isolated from each other - and
I agree we are - and if the Internet is not a substitute for F2F
contact - and I agree that it's, not (although Internet relationships
are valuable on their own), the solution is not to make an effort to
cut down on the Internet. The solution is, rather, to make an effort to
increase F2F contact.
Lee (#191):
Mitch, #182: The experience you describe isn't limited to
online communities. TV stars, in particular, have that sort of thing
happen to them all the time -- people who watch their show
every week and come to think of the actor as if s/he were (1) the
character and (2) their personal friend.
Well, I'm not quite as loony as all that. I had what I thought were
good reasons to believe the guy would know who I was - we participated
in the same online forums. In retrospect, that's obviously no reason to
assume friendship, but it's an order of magnitude different from the
kind of craziness you described.
Also, having been rebuffed, I assimilated the new information and
moved on. I did not move into the guy's house when he was out of town
and claim to be his wife, like those celebrity stalkers occasionally
do.
C. Wingate (#192):
I'm sounding more negative than I really want to. But it
seems to me that Shirpy's tone towards sitcom-watching is somewhat
deprecatory.
Maybe it is. Maybe Shirky thinks all TV is stupid. He's wrong there
-- but even so, a lot of TV is stupid and people often find themselves
watching it because they have nothing better to do. For the fraction of
the world's population engaged with Web 2.0, now there is something better to do, and that's fraction is growing daily.
(Am I allowed to say "Web 2.0" here or will you all throw mackerel at me if I do?)
Serge (#195):
My wife and I met thru one writer's fan group. Our
correspondance was fast & furious for a whole year, with some
phonecalls thrown in, as this happened in the pre-Internet days. Things
got cemented when we drove together to LAcon.
While you were driving? That's dangerous, even if you do have cruise
control. And the cement sounds weird, but if you're into that kind of
thing, I don't judge.
This thread is self-referential. Bill Sutherland's and abi's comments made me feel good. These were not empty calories.
No, they did not make me feel *as* good as the time I was in New
York and visited my brother's family in Westchester and my
then-two-year-old nephew was playing in the backyard and saw me get out
of the car and RAN across the front yard as fast as he could to greet
me, grinning and shouting, "UNCLE MITCH! UNCLE MITCH!"
But that doesn't make Bill and abi's comments any less real - even
if I haven't met either of them, and can't swear that one or both of
them is not a giant hamster pretending to be human.
Thanks, Bill Higgins. But my doctor disagrees with you - he says I need to lose 100 pounds.
albatross (#172):
It's very common to see a rump session talk which would
look plausibly to an outsider like a real, technical result being
presented, except that the audience is howling with laughter for reasons that simply make no sense to someone outside the field.
Four weeks after I started at my first computer trade press job --
which is to say, four weeks after I got involved in the computer
industry in May 1989 -- I was sent to cover a Usenix conference. I
attended a keynote session where one of the attendees shouted out a
comment from the audience that got big laughs. I don't remember who the
speaker was, or what he said, but I remember the joke. It was this:
"OS/2!" I was able to pick up from context why it was funny, but I felt
like a Vulcan at a stand-up comedian conference.
Kathryn Cramer (#177):
My argument is that a good portion of online experience that feels
like you are getting real social interaction in real social situations
is what I think of as empty social calories. Not only is some of it
inauthentic in the sense that many of the people you interact with are
either not who they say they are of not who you think they are, but
also there are large parts of social discourse missing.
Well, I can see both sides of this argument and fall somewhere in the middle.
On the one hand, we are just big bags of meat, and we need
face-to-face interaction with people in the real world. We're wired
that way. Now, virtual worlds research is working on some fancy-shmancy
technology that will bring more realistic nonverbal cues to virtual
worlds, and some of that research is amazingly advanced -- it's
surprising how video-analysis has become, and I expect within five
years we'll be able to navigate in virtual worlds through gesture
interfaces, and our avatars will be puppeted to synch with our
real-life facial expressions and gestures, using technology descended
from the software used to animate Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies. But we have not reached that point today -- and even when we do reach that point, we might still require face-to-face interaction.
One of my most memorable experiences with online interaction -- and
I don't mean this in a good way -- was when I first met a big-name
celebrity within our community, someone who has a shelf-full of Hugo
and Nebula awards. We'd been interacting in the same online forums for
years, and I thought of him as a friend, and when he came to a local
con I introduced myself to him excitedly. He looked at me coolly, like
a complete stranger. I could see the wheels turning in his head - "Who
is this crazy person? Why is he acting like he knows me?" Then he
remembered urgent business elsewhere.
I was really quite hurt by his behavior, so much so that I left the
con soon afterwards, went home, and took to bed for about four hours.
But I came to see things from his point of view: I hung on
every word he wrote, in part because he is a celebrity in our little
field of sf, in part because we have mutual friends -- real-life
friends -- and in part because he's a very entertaining writer online.
But who was I to him? Barely anybody -- just another name who
occasionally posted in some of the forums he frequents.
Since then, I don't assume that any of my online friends are real
friends, unless we've spent some time together in real life, or I've
gotten some other one-on-one reassurance that they even know who the
heck I am.
It's dangerous, especially when reading a personal blog. Some of the
posts are so intimate that you think you're friends with the person
writing. But, from their perspective, you're just one of thousands of
people who read the blog every day.
On the other hand, the interactions we have online are real. Have
you never been cheered up by a kind word from an online friend you've
never met in real life? Or the alternative -- been angered or even made
afraid by a troll? Those emotions are real, they're not "empty social
calories."
As to people online not being who they say they are: Often that kind of misrepresentation is done maliciously, but often it's not. Often it's just part of the rules of the world.
In Second Life, one of the first things that newcomers struggle with
is the idea that people may be differently gendered in real life than
they are in Second Life. I know about a half-dozen RL men who present
as women in SL. Of these, several are just doing it because they think
it's more fun, one or two are transgendered men in RL -- biologically
male who identify as women. Some are open about it, others keep it
quiet. I struggled with whether that's a problem -- and finally decided
it just doesn't matter to my interactions with them. If they present as
women in Second Life, and I don't know their RL gender, I just think of
them as women and move on.
C. Wingate (#123): I am inclined to predict that soon enough the current fashion/rut/tedium of cynically ironic comedies will fade...
I'd say neither The Office, My Name Is Earl, nor especially How I Met Your Mother are cynically ironic.
Indeed, one of the charms of How I Met Your Mother is that,
for the first time in what seems like a long time, it's a show about a
bunch of decent, intelligent people who you'd actually want to have as
your friends in real life.
The bigger hole in the thesis, though, is in the implication that
the people who are now doing these constructive/productive amusements
are drawn from people who formerly watched, well, sitcoms. I think
that's very dubious. I suspect that perhaps the majority are drawn from
people who in the past were doing different constructive hobbies.
I'm a datapoint to the contrary; I blog, I Second Life, I Twitter, I
FriendFeed, I post photos to Flickr, I participate in online
discussions (like this one), and I grew up on a steady diet of sitcoms:
Gilligan's Island, The Brady Bunch, I Dream of Jeannie, Get Smart,
The Odd Couple, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, -- the full sitcom menu for people of my age (tweeners), social class (middle) and geography (the American suburbs).
Bob Rossney (#125): To pick an online obvious example, before you
can learn anything from the failure of GEnie, you have to know that
there was such a thing as GEnie. It didn't leave a lot of traces when
it went.
The lessons of GEnie: Listen to your customers, and if you can't
listen to them, don't insult them and piss them off while throwing the
doors open for the orders of magnitude greater number of customers who
are going to flock to your service once you've put in place all the
changes that have pissed off and driven away all your existing
customers. Because if you do that, those new customers are going to go
to your competitors.
Lee (#137): The last time I went to see a baseball game
(minor-league, in Chicago, with several friends who are baseball fans),
I was OMG BORED, and eventually went back to sit in the car in the
parking lot and read a book. Now I wonder if a large part of that
boredom wasn't that I didn't consider the game to be a social activity.
If I'd had the option of treating it like a con -- I'm really here to
hang out with my friends, I might watch some programming if it's
interesting, but otherwise that's just the background
My youngest brother, who has a normal American male's interest in sports, says that's exactly
what sports is all about, in particular baseball, which is a
slow-moving game with plenty of time to sit and talk. If you've ever
seen the baseball scene in When Harry Met Sally, ("You made a woman MEOW?"), that's like real life.
Ugh, I see now that I posted substantially the same comment here twice. I apologize for the error.
And immediately after clicking send on that last message, I came across this: From the Mozilla blog.
The Tron guy is a symbol of everything that's great about the
Internet. He put his brain cells and hands to solving a problem for the
sheer joy of solving it -- there's absolutely no practical purpose to
what he did. Moreover, I suspect he knows he looks ridiculous, and
doesn't care. Go, Tron Guy!
Alter R. Reiss (#36): I was lucky enough to see the speech live. When he said the bit about LOLcats, I thought, "Hey! Why's he dissing LOLcats?! I like LOLcats! They're fun!"
But now that I read the text, I think I misinterpreted it entirely.
I think Clay likes LOLcats too -- or, at least, approves of them.
That's his point: They're slight, but they're fun, and now, with the
tools afforded by the PC and Internet, anyone can do them and
distribute them worldwide, therefore contributing some small quantum to
the amount of creativity and joy in the world.
Similarly: I've done some building in Second Life. I am Second
Life's Most Inept Builder, but still I've created a couple of things,
and been proud of them, too, because I think of myself as completely
inept in the visual arts so if I can create a structure in Second Life
that stands up and doesn't make people want to throw up, then I
consider it a triumph.
Patrick (#70 & 71): I interpreted Clay's comments on TV the same way you did - it wasn't an indictment of all TV, just the really bad. TV.
And even if Clay is dismissing all TV, I can disagree with that portion while still finding his message extremely valuable.
I watch TV more efficiently now, thanks to TiVo. I never, ever
channel-surf and find myself watching something I don't like, just
because it's the only watchable thing on. I used to do that far more
often. Now, I have a whole lot of stuff I'll enjoy piled up on TiVo,
and if I feel like watching TV, I'll watch some of that. And I only
watch commercials if they capture my interest.
Back in the 80s, I worked at a daily newspaper, on the swing shift,
getting off work about 1-2 am every day. Other reporters and editors
were able to go home and go right to bed, but not me -- I'd be bouncing
off the walls for hours. Couldn't sleep. And this was in the
country, there was nothing to do after midnight except get drunk, fight
or fornicate. I wasn't much a fan of the first two, and my girlfriend
worked days. I could only read so much, so I watched a lot of TV.
Sometimes I was so desperate for entertainment I watched Charlie Rose twice; they ran the show for two hours after the entertainment talk show went off the air, and then they ran it immediately again.
And sometimes I look back and think, man, if only we'd had Internet access then.
Patrick, when I heard Clay's speech I thought of you, specifically a
comment you made years ago about how our society doesn't recognize the
importance of creative play.
BTW, I'm sympathetic to the notion that prospective writers should
be discouraged, but in a completely different context and for
completely different reasons than the Times.
Alter R. Reiss (#36): I was lucky enough to see the speech live. When he said the bit about LOLcats, I thought, "Hey! Why's he dissing LOLcats?! I like LOLcats! They're fun!"
But now that I read the text, I think I misinterpreted it entirely.
I think Clay likes LOLcats too -- or, at least, approves of them.
That's his point: They're slight, but they're fun, and now, with the
tools afforded by the PC and Internet, anyone can do them and
distribute them worldwide, therefore contributing some small quantum to
the amount of creativity and joy in the world.
Similarly: I've done some building in Second Life. I am Second
Life's Most Inept Builder, but still I've created a couple of things,
and been proud of them, too, because I think of myself as completely
inept in the visual arts so if I can create a structure in Second Life
that stands up and doesn't make people want to throw up, then I
consider it a triumph.
Patrick (#70 & 71): I interpreted Clay's comments on TV the same way you did - it wasn't an indictment of all TV, just the really bad. TV.
And even if Clay is dismissing all TV, I can disagree with that portion while still finding his message extremely valuable.
I watch TV more efficiently now, thanks to TiVo. I never, ever
channel-surf and find myself watching something I don't like, just
because it's the only watchable thing on. I used to do that far more
often. Now, I have a whole lot of stuff I'll enjoy piled up on TiVo,
and if I feel like watching TV, I'll watch some of that. And I only
watch commercials if they capture my interest.
Back in the 80s, I worked at a daily newspaper, on the swing shift,
getting off work about 1-2 am every day. Other reporters and editors
were able to go home and go right to bed, but not me -- I'd be bouncing
off the walls for hours. Couldn't sleep. And this was in the
country, there was nothing to do after midnight except get drunk, fight
or fornicate. I wasn't much a fan of the first two, and my girlfriend
worked days. I could only read so much, so I watched a lot of TV.
Sometimes I was so desperate for entertainment I watched Charlie Rose twice; they ran the show for two hours after the entertainment talk show went off the air, and then they ran it immediately again.
And sometimes I look back and think, man, if only we'd had Internet access then.
Patrick, when I heard Clay's speech I thought of you, specifically a
comment you made years ago about how our society doesn't recognize the
importance of creative play.
Lis Riba (#66): Thanks for the link to the NPR segment, which was
very good. But it suffers from an unfortunate lack of Nielsen Hayden.
I see a double-standard here. When we see men who serve at high levels in the George W. Bush administration, we assume that they're there because they believe in Bush, or because it helps their careers.
But when women serve at high levels in the Bush administration, we think it's because they're somehow inadequate as women. And if the woman is Condi Rice, we think it's because she's inadequate at an African-American too.
A few years ago, I read a Salon editorial which looked at Rice's relationship with Bush and determined that she had an unhealthy father-fixation on him, which was a regrettable failing of professional black women. To which I said, and say: Crap. White men can and often do idealize their mentors and look at them as paternal figures. Especially if the mentor is the President of the United States.
I think if I were returning money to its owner, I'd be unable to avoid playing with their head first. "Can you describe the bill?" "Whose picture is on it?" "What's the serial number?" etc.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 3 |
| 2008 | 16 |
| 2007 | 47 |
| 2006 | 112 |
| 2005 | 120 |
| 2004 | 63 |
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