Peg Tittle's Blog

Wickedly funny.  British, but frighteningly international and, of course, the President of the U.S. had to be included …

from The True Story of Fake News, Mark Dice

Often exposing bias in the media since forever (ho hum), rather than outright false information, but still, some things I learned …

“Twitter admitted to the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission that they estimated over 23 million of their active user accounts were ‘bots’ or fake accounts run by automated computer programs which then post spam or are used by people to who buy followers so they can look more popular than they are.” p183

And that was in 2017!

“Bots are also used by services that sell ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ that some people buy hoping to appear as if they have more ‘fans’ than they actually do.”  p184

In order to get higher on the results lists of search engines.

In order to get more income from the advertisers on their sites.

For the same reason/s, they post exaggerations and outrights lies; the more outrageous, the more clicks.

Which reveals the problem with using a quantitative rather than qualitative rubric for evaluation.  The first is easier and can be done by AI; the second is harder and beyond the capabilities of even most humans.  That is to say ranking by popularity is easier than ranking by relevance.  (And ranking by importance is near impossible without a clear statement of one’s criteria—which is something most people can’t formulate.)

(This is the problem with economists influencing government; the standard of living has little to do with quality of life; read Marily Waring’s If Women Counted.)

“Google is more than just a search engine.  It is the closest thing to an all-powerful information monopoly the planet has ever seen.”  p223

Well-put.

So don’t use it.

Dice presents some interesting comparisons of results on google, yahoo, and bing (233-234).

And here’s an excellent illustration of the importance of context (p288-289):

“NBC’s version of the call had Zimmerman on the phone with the operator saying ‘This guy looks like he’s up to no good.  He looks black,’ but the actual conversation was Zimmerman saying ‘This guy looks like he’s up to no good.  Or he’s on drugs or something.  It’s raining and he’s just walking around looking about.’ / “The dispatcher then replies: ‘OK, and this guy—is he black, white, or Hispanic?’/  “Zimmerman then responds, ‘He looks black.'”

“‘Fahrenheit 451 of the Vanities’ in which an eighties yuppie is denied books; he does not object, or even notice.” p5

“‘Night of the Living Dead Poets Society’: A mid-career professor in the humanities continuously re-lives the same poor performance in the classroom, as much to his own chagrin as that of his students.” p5

The book has several of these throughout.

“He is a dedicated and thoughtful teacher, which nearly cost him a promotions to full professor last year.”  p13

” … but ego and idiocy don’t count against the faculty we hire in the medical school.  They may be required attributes.”  p119

“Hurricanes?  Each one is declared a natural disaster, which forces the government—that’s you and me, folks—to pay for the beach houses that get washed away.  I guess they can’t figure out why the insurance companies refuse to sell insurance on those homes, so they just keep encouraging people to put ’em back up.”  p133-4

“Administrators appreciate quantitative measures.  That’s a nice way of saying ‘our dean can count, but he can’t read.'”  p151

The bit about the timesheet is hilarious, p175-6.  It reminds me of one of my past administrators telling me that no more than 40% of my students could fail.  But no, I’m not asking you to lie about their grades.  (Or the fact that they didn’t turn in half their assignments or even write the final exam.)

“If, since there is a divine plan for everything, students shouldn’t try to affect change.  They should just sit back and let life happen to them?”  p193

“If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”  p224-5

“The Pope, who … still calls for unbridled population growth, thereby ensuring that millions will suffer while he prospers.”  p269

“I am strongly encouraged to be tolerant of the religious views of my students.  But if they knew my views [atheist], they wouldn’t be tolerant.  … only two ways to get fired from my tenured faculty position, one of which is to demonstrate the slightest intolerance for their views, which are themselves based on intolerance …” p269-70

“and so it goes, people reproducing without any clue what it takes to raise another human being in a civilized manner, driving exponential population growth while quality of life for most inhabitants of the planet spirals downward, ever-faster, toward hell on earth.”  p271

Yeah.

“And all those people want their children to have a better life than they had, so they give them more stuff, with the end result that per capita consumption in the United States is increasing even faster … ” p271

Yeah.

“Meanwhile, Republicans and neo-classical economists beseech us to breed faster and buy more.  Especially if we’re buying American, whatever that means in this age of globalization.  A sustainable civilization?  I fear it’s well beyond our grasp.”  p271

Yeah.

“We haven’t managed to build a sustainable society on a spaceship the size of the planet, so it’s difficult to imagine we could develop one that would endure for several generations on a self-contained spacecraft.” p273

Let alone on another planet.  That doesn’t have, already, oxygen and water and soil.

I once said that Trump was going to single-handedly destroy Earth.

I was wrong.

Alberta’s going to help.

(I guess Danielle Smith hasn’t read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.)

The Thing Itself, by Adam Roberts is a fascinating read.

Especially section 5 of chapter 5 and chapter 9. I was sitting on my dockraft reading, needing to sop often, look up across the water, and just … think about what was just said.

(It occurs to me that anyone seeing an old-ish woman sitting on a dock, book in hand, would not imagine that she is reading a novel that is a Kant-inspired analysis of human perception/consciousness.)

(And I point that out for any readers who may in future see an old-ish woman, book in hand …)

from Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, Donella Meadows et al. 2004

“Scientists do know that there have been temperature upheavals on earth in the past …
“But the most important message … is that current atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane are far higher than they have been for 160,000 years. … There is a significant disequilibrium in the global atmosphere, and it is getting exponentially worse.” p119

How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan – an interesting read, especially, for me, the chapter on the neuroscience of psychedelics

“It could be that in order to judge an insight as merely subjective, one person’s opinion, you must first have a sense of subjectivity. Which is precisely what the mystic on psychedelics has lost.” p305-6 Which is why they feel their experiences to be “revealed truths rather than plain old insights”. p305 per Robin Carhartt-Harris

“If it were possible to temporarily experience another person’s mental state, my guess is that it would feel more like a psychedelic state than a ‘normal’ state because of its massive disparity with whatever mental state is habitual with you.” Robin Carhartt-Harris

“The group chat should essentially just have been titled Adam breathed—applaud.” p29

Was anyone else out there the invisible little sister?

“The end of childhood — realizing adults don’t know what the hell they’re doing.” p55

“My future wasn’t something the family ever really discussed. I guess I was supposed to just figure that out for myself, apply for a loan myself, take myself on open days. Then maybe mention my life-changing decision one night when there wasn’t anything too good on the television.” p135-6

“Like, we only get one life. One. One opportunity at every moment we are given …” p189

“… life is just a bunch of decisions that make you who you are.” p189

“You don’t realize how toxic it is [your ‘home’ life] until you get out. … We think it’s normal, because it is to us.” p229

Yes. YES. It’s not. Normal. Get out and make your own normal. As soon as you can.

“… if you’re told the same story over and over about who you are … it starts to feel true, and therefore it starts to become true …” p404

“… they’d rather feel important than feel happy. … And they don’t mind ruining other people’s happiness in their quest to be important …” p405

Apparently, I have poor people skills.

I’m literal-minded and I take people ‘at face value’, which means that I assume that people mean exactly what they say.

Which is to say that having people skills means assuming that people do not mean what they say—i.e., that they are dishonest (or, less likely, linguistically inept).

Which means that having people skills means assuming dishonesty.

Interesting.