Emergence of the Rank-5 society

The evolution of cognition by William Benzon and David Hays is an endlessly fascinating read. I get the same sort of inspired buzz as when watching the Matrix and probably for the same reasons.

Their basic proposal is that human societies can be classified according to different ranks representing different modes of thought as we edge towards more complex societies. As an overview, they explain that Rank 1 is associated with the invention of language, Rank 2 with the invention of writing, Rank 3 with the invention of calculation, and Rank 4 with the invention of computation. Each stage of that procession, they explain, is dominated by a certain way of seeing the world that adds something new and valuable to our collective understanding in the previous stages. It has as much to say in sociology as it does in the science of computation.

I take away a lot of new ideas and questions in this piece. One curious absence in the entire article is a direct mention of a Rank-5 society. What would that entail? What would its hallmark invention be? I come to the conclusion that it's a society that through the medium of machine language has delegated the process of algorithm creation to digital agents, through the process of universal induction and by a mechanism of conscious adaptive system design.

In such an age, I gather that beyond our need to "control" systems, as now, the new way of seeing the world will recognize that a means to balance is paramount in all lasting systems. The notion of "control" thus will evolve to a point where we accept a hands-off approach by creating a good system to begin with that suits our needs, a system that no longer requires our direct involvement because its embedded balance keeps it dependable. Self-managing systems will become the norm, breeding a whole new way of seeing the world and our place in it. The beginning of this age then will be announced by the emergence of AI.

Plagiarism versus the new online reality

Memiwanzi recently touches on the origin of the word plagiarism but in this one case, the meaning is far more interesting than the etymology to me.

Ah plagiarism and its related demon, intellectual property rights. With the digital age, "plagiarism" becomes terribly confusing morally and intellectually, if not effectively meaningless. Some intellectual issues follow:

1. Define "copy". Copying can be whole or in part, so at what point can the act of copying be sensibly called "plagiarism"? How can such a fuzzy delineation be made methodical and fair?

2. Define "author". On the net, what does "author" really mean if, say, someone remixes a preexisting song? What if the derivative work of another gains more social value than the original work of an original author? And then should one be paid for derivative works too? How derivative is "too derivative" though?

3. Define the basic moral issue with "plagiarism". Is plagiarism an issue about recognition of authorship, financial compensation, social appreciation, a combination of the above, or something else? Or is this more broadly about the fair compensation of any contributor (anonymous or otherwise, online or off) by means of any "currency" (based on financial value or some other value) according to the overall "value" of the contribution (evaluated by any kind of value or group of values)?

4. A new participatory economy? How might the pre-digital-age free-market model adapt to the new reality of open information exchange where "copying" is a gradient concept, "value" includes non-financial metrics, and where collective contribution and exchange blur the lines of an agent with her environment?

To resolve this pesky issue of plagiarism, we need a new digital economy that:
A) upholds the netizen's inherent right to copy and paste information.
B) recognizes doubly that mere copying adds no participatory value to the system.
C) sufficiently rewards contribution according to its measure of originality and overall social worth.
D) destroys any meaningful gain (in time and money) from stealing another person's work.

Cage Innoye has many interesting insights on just such an economy at his blog Diverse Philosophy. Whatever their exact details may be, competent solutions demand less laws and a more developed value theory.

What if the problem is traditional academia?

Memiyawanzi raises an issue in Imposter syndrome about perfectionism run amok among linguistics students (and students by and large). I noticed that the focus is on the individual's internal psychology but I have an even broader perspective on this.


Individual quirks and psychoses

My life experience has led me to believe that many students who seem to naturally gravitate to scholarly pursuits have a common personality type. They tend to be detail-oriented for one and this can lead to this beautiful skill being turned inward on themselves for less constructive purposes (ie. perfectionism, self-doubt, anxiety, depression, etc.). Detail-oriented people, I believe, are precisely the kinds of people that will direct their psychic energy inward rather than outward, unlike the stereotypical jock who will instead gravitate towards physical pursuits to work off those same internal energies. If this inward reflection is used in a healthy way, one can properly evaluate one's weaknesses and adapt. If not, a student can be swamped by her own thought processes. All introspective, detail-oriented people need to learn to manage this hidden battle within themselves to stay on top.

However, we should also consider how environment must also play a part in a student's mental health. If an environment is unreasonable, we all know that it can contribute to an unhealthy mental state in an otherwise healthy individual. Family abuse, gang intimidation, drug abuse, etc. are the typical things we hear about as toxic environments for many children, teens and even adults. Yet what if traditional academia itself is adding to deleterious feelings of inadequacy in hopeful students?


University as a "place of learning"? Are you sure?

We're all led to believe that the university is a "place of learning" but we should question that notion. The university is in reality a "place of gambling" where students bet with their hard-earned money for a mere shot at the workforce and a future career. The wonky global economy only makes the game more exciting for career thrill-seekers. It goes without saying that rich and incompetent people can afford to gamble multiple times until a pay-off while competent poor people have little room for error. University is a business, pure and simple. Intellectuality comes second to money.

If university were really a place of learning rather than the heavily corporatized institution it is, it would be more in line with a rationalist Socratic ideal where strict roles such as "student" and "teacher" are regarded as illegitimate. The reasoning for this is simple. If knowledge as a whole is infinite and all humans are finite beings, then all of us must be ignorant one way or another. If we're all ignorant, we all can stand to learn something and then that means we're all students. Yet since we all know *something*, we're also all teachers automatically.

So when we say "teacher", we're really saying that society arbitrarily recognizes someone as "more knowledgeable" than "students". The meaning of "teacher" has been perverted into a kind of paid career while the student is an indentured servant beholden by peonage to the system. When we say "specialist", we're really saying that society arbitrarily recognizes someone as "more knowledgeable" than non-specialists and this effectively stops "non-specialists" from questioning them out of threat of shame or ridicule. There's no empirical way to measure how much one is a "teacher" or "specialist" because even the boundaries of any particular "subject" or "branch of study" are arbitrarily defined. Simply put, universities avoid this socratic ideal of equality, critical thinking and individuality because they are in bed with CEOs who would much prefer in its stead inequality, yes-man thinking and conformism.

To be clear, a real student questions others with reason, thinks for herself, investigates the truth no matter how inconvenient, stands up to stupidity and holds her own but none of this is conducive to corporate "team-playing". Learning is and must be a solitary pursuit.

From that angle then, is it any wonder that even a well-meaning, normally adjusted student might feel mentally unhealthy? The university has turned into a kind of ideological war zone meant to separate the true scholars from the status-hungry. The status-hungry win in this system.


On a side note...

Take in UCLA's Campus casts wider safety net for depressed students. This quote is a mixed grab bag of good and grim:

"'Fortunately, at UCLA we have a lower suicide rate than other campuses, and overall we have a higher rate of students who are already being counseled at CAPS,' said Susan Quillan, chief of clinical services at Ashe, who oversaw UCLA’s participation in the partnership."

Oh good, they have a lower suicide rate. We can sleep well at night then. Keep in mind that corporations have made depression into a disturbingly profitable industry (ie. pharmaceuticals) while simultaneously causing much of the woe by creating a head-trip system that runs counter to sense. Irony much?

Alpha males, beta males (... and other choices to be discovered)

A couple of days ago Melinda Beck at The Wall Street Journal posed the question Are Alpha Males Healthy?. The subtext reads Aggressiveness aids rise to top, but the stress can harm a body.

First I can't help but feel that this subject is in some way triggered by the dramatic economic downturn currently unfolding. The implicit notion here perhaps is that wealthy "alpha males" are more stressed out for having unjustly accumulated so much materialism which has caused only crushing war, poverty, disease and death among the rest of the world's population. Naturally "betas" in this sense can only hope that such karma honestly plays out. If "alpha" is meant covertly to hint at sociopathy, then siding with author and psychologist Martha Stout on this matter, such people by nature lack empathy; they seldom if ever learn their lesson or feel sorry for what they do. Certainly there's no questioning that sociopathic people aren't healthy.

But what exactly does "alpha male" or "beta male" mean in this context anyway? We must accurately define it first before we can have a handle on the vague question. It can't just be about aggression since we're often in a variety of different roles from minute to minute in our complex society. As one commenter, James M. Smith, comically puts it:

"'Alpha' in our society is context-based. I know a guy who's an alpha tax accountant, but he's an omega at flag football.

One possible dichotomy that we can use to cleave through this subject is the difference between "healthy competition" and "unhealthy competition." We may argue that moderation is the winning hand at the end of the day in all things. Unhealthy competition is the kind of competition that loses balance and context, thereby leading to stress because it so opposes our evolutionary development and it can lead to many detrimental errors in judgment. Cyberspace is currently debating whether or not our overall economic and social systems are just such an unbalanced form of competition that pits one person against another mentally and physically. An alternative to that format exists, "cooperative competition," that constantly reminds us that we're all in this together against chaos. It's a much saner form of competition that doesn't lead to the widespread isolation observed in extremely competitive societies. Afterall a common expression is "It's lonely at the top!" although it's just as lonely at the middle and bottom if all a society does is wage war with itself to keep up with the Jones's.

Finally, there's a lurking sexism in the whole text. Notice that females are being corralled into a common stereotype and linked to "passive cooperation," while males are likewise associated with "aggressive competition." Let's get real: aggression is not linked with gender. And for that matter, aggression means more than just brute strength. Gender differences are by and large sensationalized by the media. Measured overlaps between the brains of both cardinal sexes aren't taken into account enough in intelligent discussion. If we can all accept that there are "alpha females" present in society too, why then is the title emphasizing males and their aggression as if to say that males have a monopoly on this behavioural trait?

The great economic cycle

It's come to my attention that there are whispers of stock market collapse as the US finally admits to its troubling economics that some might say began in the 70s, let alone 2001. At any rate, it's been my experience that not only does history repeat itself but that merely knowing history doesn't really prevent anything.

The more practical purpose to learning history is not simply to know it but to understand it. That is, to understand why things happened the way they did and to reapply that knowledge to the present world, the world we live today. History is a source of information that we so often fail to take advantage of. This then is sadly why it's very easy to trick many fools into thinking that any system can last forever without change.

The evolution of empathy

There's a great talk here available online at the Centre for Inquiry website that I just have to share with everyone called Evolution of empathy. The speech is very insightful and spoken in plain language. It gives a lot to think about on different societal attitudes towards moral behaviour, behavioural tendencies in social populations, and what direction we're all headed in. (No, it's not necessarily completely doom and gloom at all.) It personally gave me a few positive insights to reflect on.

The death of TV

Ever since Japan's horrible earthquake, the vultures at CTV News, CBC News, BBC news and many other news stations available on my TV have predictably latched on, chasing the sensational headlines like crack addicts chasing the pipe, providing 24-hour coverage for sadists who need to know all the calamitous details of other people's misery in the comfort of their safe living rooms. The toxicity levels of the television programs are starting to make me noxious.

If the TV news were informational and constructive at all it wouldn't bother me, but I shake my head at how consistently neurotic and obsessive these "newscasters" are at spinning everything into even bigger negatives than the world already is wrought with. While I'm usually pessimistic about a lot of things, television is giving me a Mr BadNews overdose now on a consistent basis. They've naturally latched on to the stories of damaged nuclear reactors after the earthquake and now want to make us all afraid about nuclear meltdown à la Chernobyl. But even if the dreaded worst happens, what could any viewer do about it? In what way does this news inform most of us? All it does is enrage while disempowering us as we are left clueless on how to seriously budge the giant corporate machine or aid the damaged world by any realistic and meaningul way.

If I want balanced coverage of a particular topic or to learn about something other than the Japan earthquake today (like, say, those poor people in Libya still fighting for their freedom that we all forgot about, hmm?), the internet supplies more information. I find myself instinctively turning off the TV altogether and being online. If one feels they want to help, yet again, that information is online. This is strange because, being in my mid-30s, I grew up with TV but I'm now wondering why anyone bothers with that dumb box anymore. It's just static noise. Two and Half Men again? No, thanks. Even Charlie Sheen knows it's shoveled manure so he can't be all that kookoo.

In the past decade especially, I feel like TV has become an antiquated medium for bitter old people with no taste. I google for the information I want when I need to seek out a more balanced picture of world events. I'm resourceful enough to find better shows and movies online instead of being subjected to repeat after repeat on TV.

There's probably little point to my post today other than to remark on how hopelessly irrelevant television has become to me and I'm suspecting, most of you too. I suppose this still has relevance at least to modern sociology and the topic of paradigm shifts. I celebrate TV's destruction (or to be more detailed, the complete assimilation of television into the more expansive, diverse and versatile internet medium).

The Pompeiian diet of the poor

When reading the article Pompeii skeletons reveal secrets of Roman family life on the BBC website and the part about the diet of the poor, we're told that the diet may not have been so impoverished as one might assume. This reminds me a lot of the theory of the original affluent society.

Despite some criticisms against the idea of a relatively more leisurely ancient lifestyle in comparison to our hectic modern environment, one can hardly pretend that the excessive modern urbanization that we now have hasn't led to a large segment of our population being all too dependent on other entities to handle food gathering and production, sometimes to the point of crippling dependence. Afterall, how many of us city-folk pick our own berries, fish our own trout or grow our own radishes? Most have lost this ancient knowledge.

We most often go to grocery stores and buy the items we need. Yet we can't do this without first earning monetary tokens from someone else. We therefore struggle in dead-end, highly demanding, even mentally or physically toxic jobs just to acquire the means to obtain food and shelter. Our complete inter-reliance on apathetic strangers through a multi-layered economic system for even the most basic necessities is somewhat unique to modernity. And it's precisely our lack of personal autonomy in so many ways that makes us, in a manner of speaking, "less wealthy" than even our Roman antecedents.

We shouldn't feign too much shock at the notion that the poor in ancient times may have had a healthier diet than what we're capable of or are willing to supply our most vulnerable population despite all our showy technology and superficial symbols.

Illegal baby names

The following amusing article is so àpropos to the topic of society, culture and mass insanity. It's also just plain funny.

10 illegal baby names

Personally I'm stunned that the Swedish name Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced 'Albin') would be banned. I think we should name more kids such things to screw telemarketers up. I can envision hilarious scenarios in the future:

"Is there a Mr. or Mrs... um... erh... Oops, nevermind!" {Phone hangs up suddenly.}

Truth be told, despite all the well-intentioned legislation, there exist quite a share of Nancy Gaylords and Hung Dongs in the world. As far as I know, lawyers haven't objected to their parents' flagrant brutality. The entire character list of the Matrix trilogy must really dismay a lot of lawmakers, come to think of it - Mouse, Trinity, Merovingian, Morpheus, etc.

It's also fascinating how certain arbitrarily selected baby names touch such a raw nerve for lawmakers and yet eliminating child poverty is relatively low on society's list of things to do. Oh well. I guess it's true what they say: A dead malnourished baby is better than a healthy teased baby. And I leave you all to ruminate on that sad note.

Just hang loose, blood

Do you think you know your own language? Sure? Are you also sure about the fine lines between language, dialect and accent? Have you ever pondered on how subcultures shape language? Am I the only geek here? Is this mike on?? Well, whatever. Just watch this comedy skit below, a scene from the 1979 movie Airplane!.


Sometimes comedy keeps it real. Language is an amazingly flexible form of communication and, yes, it's always funny to watch unsuspecting characters transcend behavioural norms and poke fun at society. In the following two clips, Barbara reminisces in a later interview while both the creators and the two jive-talkers (Al White and Norman Alexander Gibbs) explain the collaboration involved in making this classic scene happen.

An old children's tale for the modern era

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny (by Tomas Nilsson)

You all need to check out this amazing video above. It's the famous tale of Little Red Riding Hood with a modern media twist. When I saw it, I was struck by how clever it is in conveying a story without words and, what's more, in a highly non-linear way using a fun, visual barrage of data. (Did I just say "a fun, visual barrage of data"?? Yes I did!) It'll all make sense when you click play.

Google is officially random. (And yes, my blog is back...)

Today, possibly around noon or so, my blog was removed. It turns out that Blogger, owned by Google, decided that it was a neat idea to block access to my Gmail account and my blogger account at the same time, while also blocking everyone else's access to my blog that I've been faithfully contributing to for years. A damaging message was placed on it to the effect of "This blog has been removed." Obviously, it's not... now.

At the time all Google told me is that it was due to a "violation". Violation of what? From me? How on earth?? I maintain a mundane linguistics blog. How did this become too X-rated to handle all of a sudden? Sufficed to say, my heart dropped and I was completely floored that Google's system could really be this asinine. Yet it is. And it gets even more suspect as I was to soon discover.

I was given only two options to remedy the situation. The first thing I tried was to use their contact form. But let's face it. We all know that the Google Team would take their sweet time responding because I, you and everyone else is just a number in their overblown bureaucracy. By that point, all my readers would be completely gone and my blog effectively destroyed just by some retarded technicality. And keep in mind, Google was just not telling me what the "violation" was! Why the secret?

I was leery of the second option that Google provided. Supposedly, my account could be "immediately" unblocked if I simply provided them one teensy thing: my cellphone number. Excuse me? That's really getting personal. I don't hand my cellphone to everybody because I don't want jerks phoning me or advertisers harassing me with their wares. But Google had me by the balls and was essentially holding my blog and email account for randsome until I divulged my personal info which may or may not be compromised in the future. I caved in, shelled out the number, and magically, the block was lifted and my blog restored.

WTF IS GOING ON?!!!!

Checking into my gmail, I noticed a message in my account that I never wrote. Now I had the disturbing answer. Apparently some jackass hacker from Russia had cracked into Google's servers and used numerous accounts just to spam some stupid site of theirs to each victim's contact emails. Swell! So basically, my worst fears realized: Google, not being able to keep my email, my blog account or even its own server secure now has my cellphone number to be abused too. Hooray!

I'm so turned off with Google at this point, I mean war. I'm thinking of ways to wean myself off of Google products quickly and Wordpress is looking good now. I'll be looking into that shortly. I expect better handling of the problem than this from a legitimate "service" but it seems that nowdays "service" has become a jaded term designating its complete opposite. Freedom is slavery; war is peace; service is random.

I heart guts

Here's a psychotic link for laughs directed towards a website called I Heart Guts that specializes in bodily organs for the next generation of serial killers. It artfully bastardizes history for cheap marketing. No more of that complicated text stuff that makes our noodles hurt 'n stuff. Bleh! Everything can be understood with distracting street slang! YAY! Here's an excerpt.

"Before humans understood the circulation system, the liver was thought to be the body’s most important organ, being as it is the biggest, heaviest and baddest of them all."

Yes, that liver is a bad cat. Boy, we can all dig that random jive, can't we? And what's that creepy orange blob behind the Piacenza Liver photo? I guess it's supposed to be another liver but I've never seen an orange one before, let alone a smiley one. It's the worst photoshopping I've seen so far, yet it's too tragically deranged to keep my eyes away from. It almost makes me want to check into a hospital and get myself a helping of heroine.

The pièce de resistance: Part of their revenue stream relies predictably on "organ clothing". And before you ask the obvious, yes, they even have 'ovary & testis' panties.

Children of Men

Today, there was a real cinematic treat on the Space Channel called Children of Men. The film stars the brooding Clive Owen together with a small but strong role by Michael Caine, acted brilliantly as always. Although Julianne Moore (as Julian) is listed on covers as a selling point, I think anyone having watched this can agree that her contribution in the film pales in comparison to the solid work of Clare-Hope Ashitey (Kee). The 2006 movie is a dystopia set in 2027. No child has been born for 18 years for reasons that scientists can't explain although out-of-control pollution is hinted as a cause. As such, humankind has less than a hundred years of existence left unless a miracle happens. It turns out that an African refugee named Kee is humanity's hope since she, just as inexplicably, is bearing child. Thus begins the dangerous journey of this expectant mother, protected by the kindness of a small band of philanthropic strangers who would sacrifice themselves for the welfare of this child.

This is one of my favourite sci-fi films of all time because, unlike most directors of the genre that resort to an over-reliance on 'futuristic' special effects to carry a plotless movie, this dystopia relies squarely on solid acting and storyline in the midst of a bleak setting of all-out civil war and opportunistic violence. The premise is all too realistic and if you're not disturbed by any of it, quite frankly, you're probably not human.


The camera tilts and turns through streets and corridors as if we the viewer are invisible participants in the horror. At one point, the camera is splattered with a victim's blood but it continues on navigating through the scene, suggesting by this subtle detail that we ourselves are stained with this future blood by our own witness. A very stark warning. Competing philosophical views (ie. fate versus randomness; atheism versus faith) are referenced but are tactfully presented without beating it over our heads as in Hollywood films. It's really a collector's movie; it's that good!

Now, to come back to the topic of linguistics, the point of my blog afterall, Kee softly sings a lullaby in an African language. I wanted to test out my online research skills and see if I could call up the name of this song, its lyrics and the exact meaning behind it. Well, I have to pat myself on my back. YAY! While I assumed at first that it was in Swahili, the sweet song is spoken in a more obscure language called Gã. The endearing lyrics of the song^[1] go perfectly with the film's bittersweet seesaw between the senseless self-ruin of the masses in the short term and the striving towards a higher purpose by a few in the long:

Kaːfo, kaːfo, kaːfo ni moko kwɛ oɖaŋ	Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry for someone to look in your mouth
Sika kɛ kpɔ yɛ oɖan	A gold nugget is in your mouth
Kaːfo ni moko kwɛ oɖaŋ	Don't cry for someone to look in your mouth[2]

NOTES
^[1] Agawu, Representing African music: Postcolonial notes, queries, positions (2003), p.99 (see link).
^[2] Agawu explains the nature of the lyrics in the aforementioned reference: "Mother speaks to child, trying to dissuade him from crying. There is a gold nugget in your mouth; if you cry, people will see it and want to possess it because it is precious. So hide it by closing your mouth, by not crying."

Effective moderation, anonymity and the "good faith" fallacy

Let's make this clear and concise. Contrary to dismayingly popular belief, "good faith" is not a logical principle whatsoever. The tip-off is the two completely subjective words that this obnoxious term is composed of: "good" and "faith".

First, what is "good"? We learn thoroughly from a proper knowledge of history and world issues that this question is silly because it can be different from culture to culture and period to period. It was okay to burn women accused of witchcraft once. Now, not so much. In Canada, we support the rights of women to vote and own property. In Afghanistan, not so much. No matter how conscientious and seemingly well-argued one's opinion of what is good, there will always be another who will oppose it with a differing point of view. So as practitioners of logic, it's pointless for us to dwell on what is "good" or "evil" since these are terms with more interpretations than there are people in the world, causing an unhealthy "infinite loop" in reasoning.

Then there is the term "faith". I don't have faith. I never will. I don't intend to (re)start either. During my childhood, I was indoctrinated to believe by my well-meaning fundamentalist parents that the earth could only be 6000 years, no matter what the purportedly evil scientific evidence, and that evolution was an intentful academic conspiracy meant to undermine the faithful worship of God. I just had to have faith to suspend all logic just waiting to bubble up from my severly oppressed brain. Been there, done that, never ever again. Like the term "good", there are more belief systems than the stars in the sky. "Faith" should never be uttered in logical, objective discussion and yet far too often it is by not just the woefully uneducated but even by persons with university degrees!

Now, if both "good" and "faith" are such irrational and meaningless terms, what then of the combined term "good faith" which is supposed to simply mean "compliance with standards of decency and honesty" (cf. Answers.com: good faith)... and which is in itself clearly another subjective term. The term usually ends up being redefined as a philosophy of belief that one should always **assume** that a person's intent is **good** unless **shown otherwise**. Three logical issues here involve idle assumption, the imposition of a subjective term "good", and the matter of when if ever it can be convincingly "shown otherwise" that a person's intent is "un-good". Rational-minded people will see the dilemma immediately in this nonsense since, if we cannot logically define what is "good", we will never be able to define what is "un-good" or "bad". Therefore, good faith is nothing more than a covert carte blanche for trolls to castrate all reasoning from mature communication and snuff out any flames of constructivity. As long as good faith is allowed to dictate, there are no limits to stupidity or maliciousness, both of which have the exact same deleterious effect anyways despite the common false dilemma.

If a blogger or forum moderator is mature and sensible enough, (s)he will recognize that logical debate must be governed by nothing else than logic itself, not something as puerile as good faith, blind faith or any other senseless kind of faith. When done unslothfully, negative elements despite the cowardly anonymity of the speaker can be sussed out of a debating group immediately, even before the potentially harmful comments are posted, by the consistency of their dyslogical statements that regularly employ any number of the well-known logical fallacies long ago exposed. No more idée-fixes or beating dead horses with circular arguments because we can gauge the presence of logic by logical means. This "pruning" by the blogger or forum moderator is not to be done out of emotion, as is far too often done, but only by conscious logical assessment. While it may seem "mean" to bleeding hearts, the result is that not only will angry trolls be silenced, but also silly children who have little yet to offer a mature debate in their forgivable ignorance, and the hopelessly insane who can never be reasoned with no matter what incontrovertible fact is presented. Alas, the effectiveness of one's moderation is fully incumbent on one's comprehension of logic, something which is not intuitive for most.

I believe that once we get active and take the extra effort to properly moderate the websites we go to the bother of creating and advertising in the first place, such websites will become a breath of fresh air in contrast to the immaturity of the surrounding internet where the one with the biggest mouth and smallest brain wins. I can only suspect that good faith has been so popularized as it has because of confused religious zealots who sincerely take great strides in believing that all people are somehow constructive and "good" despite all the facts otherwise, and the tragically lazy who can't be bothered to own up to their own online commitments at the expense of their readership.

And now for something more amusing...


Interesting quotes on the abuses of the "good faith" mantra
(and consequently why I don't respect it)

"The rule itself means that you are to... almost literally, take a lawn-mower to your brain. You are to assume that every edit by every user is done with the best interests of Wikipedia and 'truth' at heart. Each edit is to be assumed as though the editor is free from bias and that the edit is designed to advance the concept of learning and knowledge and all these fluffy flowery things that we SHOULD all value. This rule itself, however, shelters trolls and those who come with a point of view they wish to propagandize."
The Evil Vigilante, Musings on why Wikipedia fails (July 2007)

"Since the High Court overruled the General Medical Council and reinstated Professor Sir Roy Meadow it has been 12 days and counting. Yet the implications have not yet been fully understood. You can get away with being wrong, the judgment seems to say, as long as you were wrong in good faith. You should not be disciplined by your professional body, even if that body deems that you have broken its rules."
Times Online, In good faith? A bad excuse (March 2006)


"In other words, would any solitary human worthy of the name be recreationally cruel to a sick or weak person when he stood to gain nothing?"

"Internet trolls regularly tread on gouty toes. They trick vulnerable people with whom they have no quarrel; they upset those people; they humiliate them; they break their hearts; they mess with them. They do it for something Hume didn’t perfectly name: the lulz — the spiteful high."

"The troll behaviors that are classic on the Internet are actually more readily and narrowly defined — deliberately inciting hatred repeatedly so as to disrupt and annoy. It’s an absence of good faith; it’s opposition-defiance disorder sort of behaviour constantly challenging the rules just for the sake of challenging them, not for the higher cause of establishing the truth, or advocating a sincerely-held point of view."
The Medium, Trolling for Ethics: Mattathias Schwartz’s Awesome Piece on Internet Poltergeists (July 2008)

Now, after proving how inanely subjective the term is and the problems that it condones or even causes, who in their right mind would still utter the phrase "good faith"? Quite frankly no one. Only mentally lazy individuals (aka "troll enablers") or bona fide trolls, neither of which are of much use to academic debate or society. Stay true, fellow logicians.

Dyslogic, the official sport of the 21st century

I mentioned very briefly in my last post that my experience with Aegeanet, a forum devoted to the topic of the Aegean Bronze Age, so far is not all that it's cracked up to be. In all fairness, the problems that I observe on Aegeanet are sadly no different than what I've noticed on other forums of this nature in more than a decade that I've participated in them.

I hardly hide the fact that I'm a strict logician in scholarly matters. That is, if one must be faithful to something at all, I believe it should be Logic. Afterall, I've never seen an airplane built on Christianity, I've never seen a math problem solved with Islam, and when you're falling from 300 ft from the ground, Buddhism is never going to help you avoid the inevitable, although it may give you a calm state of mind before the boneshattering impact. While Aegeanet claims to disallow ad hominem attacks, it appears that this is untrue. Even when a message clearly has no academic value and makes the character of another member the topic, it's let through, as was the case with a message from Doctor Jack Dempsey who later went on to annoy me with private messages of vitriol. However, when it comes to these email forums, this is only typical and I don't lose sleep over it since unsubscription is just a click away.

The effective moderation of online forums is dependent on a healthy ability to recognize Logic from pointless nonsense. Without a rational and active moderator, most email forums are doomed to fail and what's worse, all its members' emailboxes are at the mercy of the moderator's maturity to recognize trollish lunacy from honest opinions. This is quite different from blogs where there is no membership and full helm-control is given to the contributor rather than the observer. Also the immediacy of email encourages short quips over more mindful input. Yet despite these advantages of blogs over email forums, bloggers too may be as irrational as they wish, even if it is a negative advertisement.

What always concerns me though is a much larger phenomenon that I feel this trolling and inability to debate is a symptom of: societal acceptance of irrationality as a valid philosophy. This is perhaps a particularly timely topic after a killer of a young Winnipeg man innocently enjoying a ride on a Greyhound bus was considered "not criminally responsible" for beheading his victim in plain view of all the other passengers simply because he was schizophrenic. As a result, despite the utterly disgusting homocide, he will not be given a record. To any rational person, it should be entirely irrelevant whether a murderer is insane or not, since any act of murder unmotivated by real self-defense (as opposed to imagined and delusional self-defense) is so clearly irrational. The real matter at hand should be the safety of the public. Hiding his criminal record from public perusal or allowing him to ever be set free again is quite obviously opposite to public safety. Yet bureaucracy always takes precedence over common sense in our crazy world and most citizens, convinced of their powerlessness, succumb to apathy rather than outspokenness and action, drawing increasingly within their own world of ignorance.

This page entitled You Fail Logic Forever lists many logical fallacies that we're bombarded with in media and society on a daily basis. It also references one of the biggest and most popular offenders of logic, Stephen Colbert of the hit TV show The Colbert Report. Of course, Steven Colbert exploits logic for a clear purpose: comedy. Good comedy afterall is nothing more than the provocation of a laugh from the audience by stating one clever absurdity after another. Steven Colbert happens to be particularly skilled at it. For those of us that are not cognitively impaired, we might take it for granted that we are fully able to discern the logic of a person's statements in matters of seriousness on the one hand as well as appreciate logical absurdities in matters of comedy on the other. Yet what if, for a growing portion of the public, the line between seriousness and comedy and between logic and the lack thereof is becoming difficult to distinguish?

Enter Dr Aric Sigman (BBC News: Online networking harms health) who believes that "websites such as Facebook set out to enrich social lives, but end up keeping people apart" and Baroness Susan Greenfield who claims that "social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity" (Guardian: Facebook and Bebo risk 'infantilising' the human mind). As a computer programmer with an Internet-free upbringing throughout the 80s, I'm convinced that it's important to consider how some people may simply be mentally unequipped to deal with the internet. Mentally unequipped because the only thing that can help someone navigate the digital seas of mass information and distinguish sense from noise is a strong sense of Logic. Since Logic is never taught directly in public schools, the school system doesn't detect logic disorders quickly and merely leaves it up to children to magically acquire a sensible understanding of consequence. Yet since most working parents have limited time to interact with their child due to the economic realities of our society and since media is now so all-pervasive, children are mostly left alone to fend for themselves. We already know that early stimulus, whether it be quick image-change in TV shows or the caress of a loving mother, can for good or bad radically effect a child's ability to concentrate later in life. (Read Toddler TV Time May Shorten Attention Spans [pdf] for the study involved.)

Now personally, I don't believe that this next generation is particularly different from previous generations just because of the presence of the new internet. I simply suggest that as civilization "progresses" and its associated bureaucracy becomes larger, so too does individual alienation, weaker attention span, and thoughtless conceit as a coping mechanism against society's encroachment on the individual. A strong grounding in the real-world and Logic is the one true means of reconnecting with the universe in which we live and overcoming this growing alienation and postmodern narcissism.

The apocalypse... atheist-style!

I'll get to serious stuff in a moment, but first some levity. A great comic called Subnormality at Viruscomix explores a 'scary' world of atheism and reasoning.

The Atheist Apocalypse!

(It sort of goes along with my previous post about the current trend of populist-driven anti-intellectualism.)

Creativity and society

Just today, I found this article called Why is there Anti-Intellectualism?. Steven Dutch uses Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel as a base in his inquiry into what it means to be truly creative. It's very thought-provoking and, well, creative!

Some questions that arise in my mind are:

• Might we say that 'tinkering' is a prerequisite to 'true creativity' even if the latter is not the inevitable result of the former? Hence: tinkering > true creativity.
• In such a curiosity hierarchy that we may infer from this, might curiosity be in part connected to Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Afterall, I can't imagine people stuck in survival mode having the time or energy to expand their minds beyond the immediate here and now, even if they are capable and willing of higher thought under better circumstances.
• And extending now far beyond this immediate topic, might this pyramid of thought already be instinctively understood by power-hungry dictators who seem to always manage to reduce the governed population to abject poverty in order to make mindControl and groupThink more effective? Who has time to think about government corruption when one's home is being seized because of a housing bubble and one's job is being exported overseas by way of out-of-control globalization?
• Finally, could the latest surge of anti-intellectualism in the past decade (albeit based on my own subjective perception drawn from the increasingly influential internet culture which is replete with cowardly anonymous trolls that exploit logical fallacies at every turn and often attack people like me who are just innocently blogging my thoughts) be just the pretext to establish a modern tyrannical regime by brainwashing the population to blindly ridicule anyone who dares exhibit signs of enjoying scholarly pursuits? Quite frankly, if I were a dictator, corrupting the will of the people through poverty and anti-logical political rhetoric is a deliciously evil way to establish systematic censorship of thought in all levels of society without needing to enforce oppressive rules by myself.

The Language Hat caper solved -- Fraud

I'm sorry to dwell on this one more time so I'll be brief. This is important to fellow bloggers, particularly linguistics bloggers, who may have seen a rise in trolls lately in their stats. It may even shed yet more enlightenment on the ailing psychology of modern society.

Upon consulting my blog stats, I have confirmed that the IP address of my recent attackers (namely 209.6.245.13) has been emanating entirely out of Massachusetts, home of Language Hat (aka Stephen Dodson). Considering Stephen's strained credibility in his comments pictured above (link to his site here), I'll just go out on a crazy limb and suggest that Stephen Dodson is masquerading as "Vanya" and other names. It's now looking like he's trying to sabotage other blogs, whether for fun or for something more calculating, through the guise of numerous trolls both on and off his site. Perhaps this helps his ratings, or he's bored this month or he needs a hundred more Google Ad clicks to pay his rent. Whatever the motives, proof is in the pudding.

These spiteful people always like to use the threats of social disgrace or feign offense to try to coerce people into not speaking up when people are being hurtful. (Echoing the tactics of the Bush administration to silence opposition and free speech covertly and... rather successfully.) Of course, having grown up in a pacifist religious minority and then becoming open about my sexuality, somehow my toughened sense of individuality is not threatened by popularity vote. People who aren't trying to be cool have more interesting things to say on life than fashion-conscious (or is that fascism-conscious?) drips anyway. You know I'm right. ;)

Thankfully Language Hat has released Paleoglot from his blog links. Amen. I should expect to see a sharp drop in troll comments on my own site now. Any readership of mine worth keeping will only be intelligent adults who have the sense to see through Language Hat's poorly played game. It's unfortunate that Stephen is so gifted in one kind of intelligence (i.e. literary and scholastic) and yet lacks the social intelligence to understand when the game is over, if not ended before it even began. It's time to put away the toys and find purpose in life without putting down others for it.

On that note, despite trolls, my next draft for my Etruscan Dictionary project will be posted later on today unabated (or is it 'unbaited'?) . Quite frankly, I'm all so ashamed for being so damned productive. Must be my alleged Asperger's flaring up again.

Some words on the 'Free Speech' fallacy and the true purpose of blogs

Oh dear, the readers of the blog Language Hat have finally flipped their little lids. The attacks against me have now gone from "fallacious but almost believable"... to "downright kookoo". Stephen Dodson, the American author behind the Language Hat blogsite heralding from Massachusetts continues to, as he says, 'defend free speech'. While naturally concerned at first (as a non-anonymous netizen should be) about the slander allowed to exist in his commentbox, the absurdity and desperation of trolls have reached an all-time low. It now turns out that Queen Elizabeth I herself has joined Language Hat's "intellectual debate" to denounce me and have me hanged while Prince, the famous musical artist, agrees. Chris Crocker however is in my defense. How honoured I feel to be mentioned in the presence of so many celebrities. Now I just have to laugh about it, LOL!

As Karma works its magic on Language Hat, linguists might be interested by the topic of free speech and how, despite all our fuzzy and warm intentions bred by political propaganda, it can never be honestly 'free' at all. Other blogs have written about this too and one site by Henry Hessing clarifies for us what's really going on here and the treasonous self-defeatism Language Hat is fostering in humankind:

"The fundamental basis for freedom of speech is a respect for the rational mind, which requires the freedom to weigh the evidence, to dispute and debate, without fear of coercive interference. By their reliance on violence and brute force of mob gatherings, the vandal shows contempt for the mind. It is confession of intellectual and moral bankruptcy, a confession that, for them, rational argumentation does not matter: all that matters is that their opponents are cowed into submission." (Click here for full article)

Flamewars transpire on the internet 2000 times a minute and it's only getting worse as anonymity has the negative side-effect of promoting a lack of accountability to reality. Any rational person who still goes outside once in a while and smells the daisies must eventually say "Enough is enough". We have to start fighting back against the Tyranny of the Stupid. Can free speech ever be truly unlimited in practical life or is this just abstract dogma? This is easily answered by pointing to clearcut examples where people's credit card numbers and other personal data have been shared online by malicious criminals whose actions can never be undone. No one, not even Stephen Dodson would want his credit card number or pictures of his wife and kids exposed online without his consent, obviously. So if even one instance of free speech is indefensible in civilized society, then waving the "I'm a defender of free speech" flag is exposed as nothing more than a stunted, extremist ideology. A tactic perhaps to maintain a double standard.

Interestingly, Mr Stephen "Free Speech" Dodson has since erased these joke comments in the picture above while defending more abrasive jokes by commenters named Anonymous and John Emerson under the hypocritical banner of defending free speech. Apparently jokes directed towards serious cognitive disorders like Asperger's Syndrome (i.e. Michael Farris' comment: "a) Gordon is an Asperberger's kind of case who can't perceive anything beyond the surface meaning of words.") are of greater value to Dodson than other jokes without a prejudiced slant. If only Dodson were more honest with us about what logic or lack thereof lies behind Language Hat's nebulous policies on the demonstrated limitations of his inconsistent free speech doctrine.

Accepting then the limits of free speech, are we clear on what those limits are? Have we really thought through what the overblown catchphrase "free speech" really means and what value it can possibly maintain in a sea of unmoderated gibberish? With only a few specks of intelligence strewn about in this media muddle, Truth eventually becomes indistinguishable from Lie and Value becomes indistinguishable from Valuelessness. If speech loses value, the value in defending individual speech will assuredly be the next thing on death row... and then our rights in a democratic society.

Dodson also misunderstands the true purpose of his and everyone else's blog. He continues to cowardly hide behind a politics-laced statement "I'm a defender of free speech" without confronting the logical meaning of his ideology. The fact is that blogs are not here to defend everyone's free speech at all. Blogs are here to defend one's own free speech. If everyone has the power to make their own blog, then free speech needs no defending on any single blog because it is the continued collective power of many voices in unison that defends free speech by virtue of their combined existences. Why do I as a linguistics blogger need to defend your free speech on my blog if it fails to have relevance to the clear purpose of my site (i.e. linguistics) and undermines logical, knowledgeable debate by promoting a culture of fear and lies driven by trolls? Unlike Dodson, my stance on comment deletion is clearer and more objective: Comments without relevance, whether their purpose is to jet ad hominems at me and others or to exploit other logical fallacies, are deleted without such purely negative trash ever being published to infect debates with emotional irrelevancies. I remain unremorseful about this policy.

In a nutshell, this insanity exists because of a prevailing mental disorder called dogmatic relativism which sabotages individuals into feeling unentitled to uphold individual principles or to distinguish right from wrong for themselves. It seeks then to devalue individual choice, logic and speech itself. This societal impairment in reasoning that so often arises in various ways throughout history is not only of interest to linguists, psychologists and historians but to all people who value the inherent right to learn and grow in a democratic civilization that choses to defend free coherent speech while shunning persistent fools.