From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Jul 24 2001 - 19:42:51 MDT
Hal Finney writes
> The various proposals for bringing a more critical eye to factual
> reporting have never come to fruition. Xanadu, Crit mediator and other
> web-commentary systems, back links, Drexler's fact forums, all have
> remained nothing but toys. Maybe the world's just not ready for them.
Two things are required for people to appreciate such tools: one
is temperament. Anyone with a political axe to grind, or who feels
so passionately about issues that he or she is not often objective,
will have little use for tools that can also be used by "the enemy".
Second is simply having adequate intelligence. By this I don't mean
that if they were properly motivated, ordinary people would find such
tools beyond them; I'm merely saying with the usual motivation we
humans possess, many of us lack the necessary intelligence. For example,
if I were much smarter, then the "overhead" of finding out all about
these tools would be less. This means: if all our I.Q.s tomorrow
were doubled (say by some genetic engineering), these tools would be
used by more people.
Lee
Because of its usual objectivity and clarity, I indulge by quoting
the remainder of Hal's post:
> ct forwards,
>> Global climate change does occur, however, and sometimes so quickly that
>> you can watch it happening. Just look at our neighbor, Mars: within the
>> last month, the global atmospheric temperature of Mars has increased by
>> approximately 50 degrees Fahrenheit, according to data being received by
>> the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor
>> spacecraft.
>
> It's funny how our observations and interpretations are guided by
> the current political landscape. In the 1970s there was talk of an
> impending ice age, and the 1980s brought the nuclear winter scare, so the
> emphasis on the Mars dust storms was the resulting *fall* in temperature.
> Today the worry is global warming, so we read about the sudden *rise*
> in temperature on Mars.
>
> Imagine the headline 20 years ago being Mars Dust Storms Raise Temperature
> 50 Degrees. That would have been no more possible than to see one today
> about a sudden drop in temperature.
>
> I hope that someday we will have improved our communications technology
> to the point that news can be disseminated with much less concern about
> political implications. Of course the net is a great step forward.
> 20 years ago there would have been no way for us to express our
> concerns about these issues, except perhaps through letters to the
> editor. Distributed virtual communities allow for sharing of news and
> information outside the control of the great political and economic
> powers. Talk radio and magazines offer other avenues. But we still
> don't have an integrated system where these two worlds can coexist:
> the official, respectable, politically correct one, and the anarchic,
> diverse, uncomfortable and unflinching world.
>
> The various proposals for bringing a more critical eye to factual
> reporting have never come to fruition. Xanadu, Crit mediator and other
> web-commentary systems, back links, Drexler's fact forums, all have
> remained nothing but toys. Maybe the world's just not ready for them.
> But Slashdot has been reasonably successful despite the often abysmal
> quality of their moderation system (which attempts to select and highly
> higher-quality commentary). Perhaps it will eventually grow to add some
> parallel mechanisms to help to integrate parallel viewpoints into a story.
>
> Hal
>
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