Tag: internet

Why You Can’t Win That Internet Argument (And Shouldn’t Try)

~ cafebedouin ~ Leave a comment

We have all been there. You are in a comment section or a group chat. Someone says something that isn’t just wrong—it’s fundamentally confused.

Maybe they think an AI chatbot is a conscious person because it said “I’m sad.”

Maybe they think they understand war because they play Call of Duty.

Maybe they think running a business is easy because they managed a guild in World of Warcraft.

You type out a reply. You explain the facts. They reply back, digging in deeper. You reply again. Three hours later, you are exhausted, angry, and you have convinced absolutely no one.

Why does this happen?

It’s not because you aren’t smart enough. It’s not because they are stubborn.

It’s because you made a mistake the moment you hit “Reply.” You thought you were having a debate. But you were actually negotiating reality.

The Price of Being Wrong

To understand why these arguments fail, you have to understand one simple concept: The Price of Entry.

In the real world, true understanding comes from risk.

  • If a pilot makes a mistake, the plane crashes.
  • If a business owner makes a mistake, they lose their home.
  • If a parent makes a mistake, their child suffers.

This is called a Formation Cost. It is the price you pay for being wrong. This risk is what shapes us. It forces us to be careful, to be humble, and to respect reality. It “forms” us into experts.

The Simulation Trap

The problem with the internet is that it is full of people who want the status of expertise without the cost.

The person arguing that AI is “alive” hasn’t spent years studying neuroscience or computer architecture. They have no “skin in the game.” If they are wrong, nothing happens. No one dies. No money is lost. They just close the browser tab.

They are playing a video game. You are flying a plane.

When you argue with them, you are trying to use Pilot Logic to convince someone using Gamer Logic.

  • You say: “This is dangerous because if X happens, people get hurt.” (Reality)
  • They say: “But if we just reprogram the code, X won’t happen!” (Simulation)

You aren’t debating facts. You are debating consequences. You live in a world where consequences hurt. They live in a world where you can just hit “Restart.”

You cannot negotiate reality with someone who pays no price for being wrong.

The Solution: The “Truth Marker”

So, what should you do? Let them be wrong?

Yes and no. If you stay silent, it looks like you agree. But if you argue, you validate their fantasy.

The solution is the Third Way. It borrows wisdom from the oldest, smartest communities on the internet—like open-source coders and fanfiction archivists—who learned long ago how to survive the noise.

Here is the protocol:

1. Lurk and Assess (The Reality Check)

Before you type, ask one question: “Has this person paid any price for their opinion?”

If they are wrong, will they suffer? If the answer is No, stop. You are not talking to a peer. You are talking to a tourist. Do not engage deeply. You cannot explain turbulence to someone in a flight simulator.

2. Talk to the Room, Not the Person

Realize that for every one person commenting, there are 100 people silently reading. They are your real audience. They are the ones trying to figure out what is true.

3. Place Your “Truth Marker”

Write one clear comment. State the reality. Keep it short.

Old-school hacker communities (like OpenBSD) have a rule: Trim the Noise. Don’t write a wall of text. Don’t quote their whole argument back to them. Just state the boundary.

  • “You can’t program ‘pain’ into a computer. Without a body that can die, an AI is just doing math. It doesn’t care if it’s right or wrong. We do.”

4. The “Opt-Out” (Drop the Mic)

This is the hardest part. Do not reply to their response.

Fanfiction communities (AO3) live by the motto: “Don’t like? Don’t read.” It’s a boundary. Once you have placed your marker, you scroll past.

  • When you reply back and forth, you make it look like a tennis match—two equals battling it out.
  • When you say one true thing and walk away, you make it look like a Lesson.

Warning: Don’t Become the Simulation

There is one danger to this method. If you always place markers and never listen, you might start believing you are always right. You risk building your own “Echo Chamber”—a simulation where your ideas are never challenged.

To avoid this, use a Self-Check:

  • Ask yourself: “If I am wrong here, what do I lose?”
  • If the answer is “nothing,” be careful. You might be drifting into Gamer Logic yourself.
  • The Fix: Occasionally invite someone you disagree with to challenge you—but do it on your terms, in a space where you are listening, not fighting.

The Takeaway

Stop trying to invite people into reality who haven’t paid the entry fee.

State the truth. Set the boundary. Save your energy for the people who are actually flying the plane.

Parking Lots & Cultural Stans

~ cafebedouin

“The twin gods of Smooth Traffic and Ample Parking have turned our downtowns into places that are easy to get to, but not worth arriving at.” The quote is from urban designer Jeff Speck. It’s hard to think of a pithier one to describe the parking pandemic blighting America’s city centers — except perhaps the title of a Bloomberg article on the same topic: “Parking has eaten America’s cities”.

-Frank Jacobs, “These maps provide graphic evidence of how parking lots ‘eat’ U.S. cities.” bigthink.com. March 26, 2023

The major idea in this article is that there is often an inverse relationship between accessibility and interestingness. The more space you have to accommodate cars, the less space you have to accommodate people.

Open question: Is this inverse relationship also true in a space that is designed to accommodate people? Does a stadium that accommodates 100,000 people fundamentally different than one that accommodates 10,000? Are both fundamentally different from a venue that caters to 1,000? If so, is there a function based on orders of magnitude in play?

My sense is that the larger the group of people, the more likely pockets of sameness develop, which we might describe as a sub-culture. But, to have a sub-culture, you also need a dominant culture. We could probably use the Dunbar number as a reference point.

In any group, where each individual can know every other individual, there is a culture than defines interactions between individuals. This culture probably starts in groups as small as two. How two people relate will effect the dynamics of a third that enters a social circle? Each additional N people added to the group will tend to reenforce a particular dynamic. As the group enlarges, different dynamics can arise from different sub-groups.

But, my guess is that there is a share of voice issue that comes into play, where groups of the same sizes, say stadiums with 10,000 people are going to tend to look a certain way. Other factors, say a particular type of sporting event, will have its own norms that will influence these dynamics, but the size, by itself, is a part of these dynamics.

As size increases, the share of voice of average view and attitudes gives more sway to an average point of view, like a bell curve. With more people, there is more tail. But, there’s a whole lot more gravity in the center of the distribution.

This probably has a lot of explanatory power at different scales. For example, when you enable a mass medium for communication that is the Internet and infrastructure like translation tools, you are increasing your scale to global levels. This creates a global, Internet culture, but it also makes possible the creation of sub-cultures and new identities that wouldn’t be supported at a smaller scale.

If we think of this mainstream culture as a kind of parking lot, then it makes sense that people would be largely dissatisfied with it, and seek out alternatives. Yet, the critical mess will still sit at 1/3 and make much of the surrounding culture that it enables less interesting because it creates incentives to join these communities and it reduces the number of connections between individuals. Network nodes move from individuals to their stans, and each stan is a kind of parking lot creating the same kind of drag as the main culture.

This a just a brief sketch, but you get the idea.

Get Blogging!

~ cafebedouin ~ 2 Comments

“Your easy guide to starting a new blog.

A blog is an easy way to get started writing on the web. Your voice is important: it deserves its own site. The more people add their unique perspectives to the web, the more valuable it becomes.”

–https://getblogging.org/

I’ve been blogging since January 2017. In those five years, I’ve found it to be a useful exercise of thinking out loud, taking technical notes, saving websites/stories, etc. I, personally, find it useful in my own life, and I’d recommend it as a practice for others. This can provide some help getting started to non-technical users. The easiest thing you can do is pay for a site on WordPress.com. I believe they still have free versions, and the personal version is something like $4 a month. Well worth it, in my opinion.

Hypothes.is

~ cafebedouin

“Hypothesis is a new effort to implement an old idea: A conversation layer over the entire web that works everywhere, without needing implementation by any underlying site.

–https://web.hypothes.is/about/

I thought I had bookmarked this here before, but it looks like I did not. I thought I’d add for anyone who finds the idea interesting.

People Mistake the Internet’s Knowledge For Their Own

~ cafebedouin ~ 4 Comments

“In the current digital age, people are constantly connected to online information. The present research provides evidence that on-demand access to external information, enabled by the internet and search engines like Google, blurs the boundaries between internal and external knowledge, causing people to believe they could—or did—remember what they actually just found. Using Google to answer general knowledge questions artificially inflates peoples’ confidence in their own ability to remember and process information and leads to erroneously optimistic predictions regarding how much they will know without the internet. When information is at our fingertips, we may mistakenly believe that it originated from inside our heads.”

-Adrian F. Ward, “People mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own.” PNAS. October 26, 2021 118 (43) e2105061118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2105061118

One person’s rancid garbage is another person’s Golden Corral buffet that they believe they cooked themselves.

You.com

~ cafebedouin

“You.com, which bills itself as the world’s first open search engine, today announced its public beta launch…

Founded in 2020 by Socher and Bryan McCann, You.com leverages natural language processing (NLP) — a form of AI — to understand search queries, rank the results, and semantically parse the queries into different languages, including programming languages. The platform summarizes results from across the web and is extensible with built-in search apps so that users can complete tasks without leaving the results page.

“The first page of Google can only be modified by paying for advertisements, which is both annoying to users and costly for companies. Our new platform will enable companies to contribute their most useful actual content to that first page, and — if users like it — they can take an action right then and there,” Socher continued. “Most companies and partners will prefer this new interface to people’s digital lives over the old status quo of Google.”

—Kyle Wiggers, “AI-driven search engine You.com takes on Google with $20M.” VentureBeat.com. November 9, 2021.

First I’m hearing of You.com, but it’s clear that something like this is the next iteration of search. Bookmarking to look into later.

Silence & Wanting to Be Heard

~ cafebedouin

“Is it necessary that every single person on this planet expresses every single opinion that they have on every single thing that occurs all at the same time?” he asks. “Can anyone, any single one, can anyone shut the fuck up about anything, any single thing? Can any single person shut the fuck up about any single thing for an hour? Is that possible?”

Burnham seems aware of the irony of him not shutting up about anything for an hour and a half, but maybe that’s the point: It’s an impossible request. It’s human nature to want to be heard, and the internet has amplified our voices, sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. Now, it’s up to us to recognize when the world has heard enough. Burnham knows it better than anyone: No one really wants to shut the fuck up.

-Scaachi Koul, “Why Bo Burnham, Jenna Marbles, And Shane Dawson All Logged Off.” Buzzfeed. June 16, 2021.

I had never heard of Bo Burnham, Jenna Marbles or Shane Dawson prior to reading this piece of criticism. I read the quote above and it resonated. I guess, for me, I have found a happy medium for this blog in just trying to find one thing interesting a day to point to or talk about. But, there are days, and some weeks, when even that feels like a lot, where I think to myself, perhaps it would be better to post nothing at all and be silent.

But, on the other hand, I also enjoy the discipline. I’ve had at least one idea worth capturing or came across some snippet that is worth preserving as I’ve gone about my life today, haven’t I? Of course, it depends on the time scale too doesn’t it? In the grand scheme of things, nothing we do will be preserved.

As a reference point, think about all the time that Medieval monks spent copying manuscripts. This was certainly a valuable service that preserved writing from antiquity, but where is their work now? If it still exists, it is stored away in a special library or rare books collection, rarely seen by anyone. Even for something digital and assuming infinite storage capacity, what is the value of preservation anything we might say. Who is going to read it?

Or, consider how many people actually spend time reading the works of Shakespeare outside the classroom. Among a small subset of people, I’m sure he is well read. But, for most? He’s a name only. Pick a major piece of literature from antiquity to the present, and it is the same. However, maybe it is like the Japanese idea of tsundoku, of buying books and never reading them. Perhaps the value is simply that they are there as potential, whether they are ever read is besides the point.

But, perhaps, we are just engaged in wishful thinking on that score. Perhaps, the Rule of St. Benedict was right, and it is best to keep in silence.

Explained From First Principles

~ cafebedouin

“The goal of this website is to provide the best introduction available to the covered subjects. After doing a lot of research about a particular topic, I write the articles for my past self in the hope they are useful to the present you. Each article is intended to be the first one that you should read about a given topic and also the last — unless you want to become a real expert on the subject matter. I try to explain all concepts as much as possible from first principles, which means that all your “why” questions should be answered by the end of an article. I strive to make the explanations comprehensible with no prior knowledge beyond a high-school education.”

–https://explained-from-first-principles.com/

Only articles on email and the Internet, but a good start.

Sifting the Internet for Gold

~ cafebedouin

“…which of my beliefs remain unchanged? What assumptions will remain in place? What trends will be accelerated, which delayed, and which stopped entirely? What do I care about that has become newly relevant, and what no longer matters?

-Toby Shorin, Drew Austin, Kara Kittel, Edouard Urcades, “Premonition.” subpixel.space. March 25, 2021.

Something about the phrase “lifestyle performance and participation” bugs me, but I agree with the thrust of the commentary, i.e.:

  • More culture is shifting online
  • It will continue moving away from giant aggregators like Facebook
  • Much of it will not be generally accessible, moving away from clear net to more private modes
  • Smaller communities, by definition, introduce more variance in behavior, that is, they are weirder
  • The death of retail will open up spaces for small culture and these small communities formed online will reconstitute themselves in meatspace, making meatspace downstream of online life
  • There will be a general flight from most cities as work-from-home becomes a legitimate option. This will give birth to a new suburban culture

However, there are obvious places where they are wrong too. For example, retail is going to be devastated, but it isn’t because of a recession, it will be because they have been made redundant by online stores and to your door delivery that is already impacting general retail, pharmacy, restaurants and practically every other area of retail you can think of.

“More self-organizing friend groups and professional networks are using video calls and enterprise chat as a way to socialize. As a result, many individuals will suddenly begin to experience their interactions as content that can be public and monetized, and will feel more pressure to externalize their communications for an audience.”

Specialist physicians, for example, can create “journal clubs” and presentations for little cost for Continuing Medical Education credit, which will probably will help in the cross-pollination of practices and lead to better health care.

“We are still exiting an era of defunct political parties that are failing and fragmenting, and making our way into an era of discovery and realignment.”

Possible, but I think the existing political parties in the United States are a Coke/Pepsi duopoly that serves elite interests. It’s possible these new movements will be captured, but if it goes off in a truly new direction, you can be sure that the old guard will protect their lunch.

“The culture war between the East Coast and West Coast, which has been going on for some time, is now all but over. It has self-evidently been lost by the East Coast.”

About as right as saying the United States is declining and China is replacing it, which is to say there’s a surface truth here that falls apart if you think about it for five minutes.

Some of the ideas here are truly horrible. A digital graveyard? Want to imagine what your digital grave is going to look in a century in a culture like the U.S. that doesn’t believe in filial piety or worshiping ancestors? One is the loneliest number, indeed. There is something deeply sad about wanting desperately to be remembered and the reality that very few of us will be. Personally, I think it is better to think about this moment, this life as “tears in the rain”, lost forever once it is over. The transience of it, of the moment, is what is valuable about it. We are thinking about this issue all wrong.

“Breathe. Read the air. We are all going online in a new way, and we will never entirely leave again. In this new era, cultural literacy is a baseline requirement for making technology, for making policy, for living and for dying. Squad up. The real knowledge work begins now.

Let me say, with all sincerity, “Fuck that.” I’m going to stick in my own little weird subculture of one, and while I take an interest in the broader culture, since it is fascinating, let’s also understand Sturgeon’s Law applies, i.e., 90% of it is crap. The real knowledge work isn’t cultural literacy, it is taste making. In the deluge of terrible that comprises much of the Internet, who can distill all of that dross and find the nuggets, the pearls? No one can find them all, obviously, but there’s gold in them there hills! Well, reader, it’s probably as good of a description of what I’m up to with the site as any.

New sites I learned about from the article:

  • Figma helps teams create, test, and ship better designs from start to finish.
  • Notion: One tool for your whole team. Write, plan, and get organized. So, maybe a Slack/Roam?