I used to tell people that they should read Mencius Moldbug, because he was the single person writing today most likely to be read in two hundred years time.
I still think that’s right (both that you should read it, and that he's the most likely to be read in 200 years), but the more I reflect on it, the more I think the chances he will be read far in the future are still rather small.
The problem, rather, is that we live in the dark ages of the written word.
It’s not that things aren’t being written. Quite the contrary. Perhaps more is being written now, by more people, than ever before.
The sense in which it is the dark ages is that much of the writing from today is likely to be lost to history. Everything is being written in a very temporary format, in a way that will not survive for historians of the future to read.
The vast majority of what is written is on the internet. Anything stored privately stays up only as long as the person paying to have it hosted continues to do so. Should they get slack and stop doing it, or get tired of paying for their web domain, that’s that. But even if it continues to exist, link rot sets in pretty fast, making a lot of the context of the original writing which embeds these links hard to follow. The links you had stored suddenly lead nowhere. You can search for the title and hope you find the new address. If there is one, that is. Often times people deliberately take down what they wrote. You couldn’t unpublish a book, but you can easily unpublish a website.
Some things still survive for longer. Newspapers are generally better at keeping hyperlinks and archives because they’re used to this. Books that get to printing also get kept as before. The only problem is that both newspapers and publishing are, if not dying industries, then at least considerably distressed. See: the internet. And lots of interesting stuff isn’t written in books any more. Neoreaction, for instance, would vanish almost entirely without a trace.
The only hope, as far as I can see, is Google Cache, which does store their own local copies of things (albeit in a considerably degraded form that doesn’t always support images). There are two caveats here, however.
The first is to recognize that the ongoing success or failure of Google’s caching efforts may do more to alter the way that future historians understand the early 21st century more than anything else happening on the planet today. Give that company a medal! They are also unusually open in giving people access to their cached data. Facebook, by contrast, treats your data as their possessions inside a walled garden that they control. Do you think historians of the future will have access to all of this? They sure don’t have access to it today.
The second is to recognize that storing things in a way that will be accessible in 200 years time is surprisingly hard. The simple reason is that technology changes so frequently, and storage devices have incredibly limited lifespans. We live in a time of acid printing, except that what we write on today may as well be 1 molar hydrochloric acid paper.
The only way that documents survive over any period of time is if someone is willing to continually transfer them to whatever the new storage medium is at each point in time. That’s certainly what you have to do for, say, your digital photos. If you think you can just leave them on your current computer, camera or SD card, you’re going to be very disappointed in ten years’ time. Just try getting files off your old 5 inch floppy disks. Heck, try something using a SCSI port or a 3 inch floppy. In ten years time, this is how hard it will be to find a laptop that reads a CD.
Even if you actually do this stuff, it’s going to be a) very ad hoc and selective, and b) stored in random locations by random people around the world. If the google cache doesn’t end up working out, it’s going to be a tough business being a future historian studying the 21st century. They may well end up with fewer primary sources than they have for the early 20th century.
But forget historians. What about your own personal consumption? I used to love reading TJIC’s blog. Now it’s gone, completely.
Take my advice, readers. If there is a blog you like, download the whole thing to your hard drive, now. That still won’t be perfect, because blogs link to each other. If you’re really committed, download everything linked to in each post too. In many cases, you’ll find it’s already too late. For Moldbug, a decent fraction of the primary sources that he linked to are already gone. We are talking about a blog that began in 2007. It is already too late, in 2015, to read his writing in the full original context that was intended. The current period is so dark that we can’t even see fully the things we ourselves once remembered seeing.
If you’re relying on Google to keep everything in perfect order for you to return to in 30 years time, you may wake up one day and find it’s already too late.
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Sunday, May 31, 2015
Monday, July 7, 2014
A little internet privacy is like being a yellow belt in karate
One of the things that Sam Peltzman most famously taught us (or perhaps reminded us) is that one should always pay attention to income effects, because they can show up in odd places.
Income effects are simple at a first pass - if I have more income I can buy more of a product. Most goods are normal goods, meaning that demand rises as income rises. Some goods are inferior goods, meaning that as incomes go up, people buy less of them (e.g. Walmart clothes), because they substitute to better alternatives. So far, so easy.
As microeconomists have known for a long time though, income effects can be induced by changes in the price of goods, rather than directly through income changes. If the price of rice increases, the first order effect is likely to be a substitution effect - rice is now expensive relative to wheat, so I buy more bread and less rice. But there is also an income effect: the real bundle of goods I can now purchase has shrunk, which is effectively a decrease in income.
As a result, the fact that income has decreased can induce other changes in demand which can partially or totally offset the original effect. In other words, the first pass effect is that rice consumption goes down (the substitution effect), but because I'm now poorer overall I have to cut my purchases of luxuries and buy more rice than I otherwise would. If the income effect is large enough to offset the substitution effect completely, the good is called a Giffen good - when the price of the good goes up, demand can actually increase. Robert Jensen and Nolan Miller carried out an experiment in China where they showed that for some really poor Chinese people, rice really is a Giffen good. When its price increases, they buy more of it, because they're now so poor it's the only way to get enough calories.
Which brings us to Mr Peltzman. He famously argued that income-like effects can lead to puzzling results in a wide variety of settings, most notably risk-compensation (which became known as the Peltzman Effect). If you spend government money to make roads safer or mandate seatbelt use, people will have a lower chance of dying from a given type of driving (similar to the substitution effect). But there's an income effect too - the budget set of allowable risky driving behavior has increased. Peltzman argued that this can in some cases totally offset the gains, as people drive in a more risky manner on the safer roads to maintain the same overall level of risk.
The classic case of Peltzman-like effects that people do seem to instinctively grasp is self-defence knowledge. In theory, knowing a little karate has only improved one's ability to fight relative to knowing zero karate. But the problem is the income effect. The ability to defend oneself can either be consumed entirely as an increase in safety, or it can be spent by substituting towards talking $#!& to bullies. Thus the overall level of safety can go up or down as a result of being able to fight back. The popular conception is that people overestimate their fighting ability and 'spend' more than they actually had, leading to Giffen-like behavior at low levels of self-defence knowledge.
And now it turns out that there's inadvertent Peltzman effects going on with internet privacy.
Several researchers with Tor have described how using the internet privacy software Tor results in your IP address receiving permanently much greater scrutiny from the NSA. Even searching for Tor online is enough to get you logged.
At high levels of security, this is still probably worth it if you value privacy. Tor is an incredibly powerful tool to avoid being tracked. Unfortunately there's still lots of other exploits they can use to target your computer, but Tor itself is pretty reliable.
Since the NSA doesn't like this, they are determined to raise the income effect stakes a lot. If you get slack and only use Tor sometimes, you have almost certainly increased the chances of your behavior being tracked and monitored. Before you had the blessing of anonymity. When you embark down the road of privacy, the NSA makes sure that goes away for good. Tor is a Basilisk - a single search for it is enough to get you permanently flagged. So if you're going to start down that road, it's got to be the full retard or nothing at all.
The reality is that maintaining anonymity is hard. Really hard. It is a form of tradecraft, as the spies put it. It needs an obsessive attention to detail, and a willingness to forgo a number of aspects of the internet (flash video, for instance, as well as dealing with slow loading times). And unfortunately, the predicament is quite similar to the position of the IRA viz Mrs Thatcher - the NSA only needs to get lucky once, whereas you need to get lucky every day.
The unfortunate reality is that for most people, no protection is probably safer than a little protection. And even then, the only reason that 'no protection' offers any protection is because the internet is simply too large for the NSA to be able to store everything that goes on there. On the other hand, they are able to store everything done by Tor users.
The one saving grace is that the NSA is not actually the NKVD. For the most part, the NSA is only interested in tracking terrorists, and passing the occasional Silk Road drug dealer onto the DEA. Not only that, they are reluctant to blow the details of the data collection process (any more than they already have) by having the details of it disclosed in court cases unimportant to the NSA's mission. So they're probably not going after you for buying that Adderall online, even though they could.
On the other hand, the Snowden disclosures have massively reduced the cost of the NSA using information at trials, since a lot of the details are now already known, so maybe that protection has decreased too.
Income effects are rarely counterintuitive once they're pointed out, but they have a tendency to be lurking in places that you weren't thinking hard about.
Unfortunately, none of them are good in this story.
Income effects are simple at a first pass - if I have more income I can buy more of a product. Most goods are normal goods, meaning that demand rises as income rises. Some goods are inferior goods, meaning that as incomes go up, people buy less of them (e.g. Walmart clothes), because they substitute to better alternatives. So far, so easy.
As microeconomists have known for a long time though, income effects can be induced by changes in the price of goods, rather than directly through income changes. If the price of rice increases, the first order effect is likely to be a substitution effect - rice is now expensive relative to wheat, so I buy more bread and less rice. But there is also an income effect: the real bundle of goods I can now purchase has shrunk, which is effectively a decrease in income.
As a result, the fact that income has decreased can induce other changes in demand which can partially or totally offset the original effect. In other words, the first pass effect is that rice consumption goes down (the substitution effect), but because I'm now poorer overall I have to cut my purchases of luxuries and buy more rice than I otherwise would. If the income effect is large enough to offset the substitution effect completely, the good is called a Giffen good - when the price of the good goes up, demand can actually increase. Robert Jensen and Nolan Miller carried out an experiment in China where they showed that for some really poor Chinese people, rice really is a Giffen good. When its price increases, they buy more of it, because they're now so poor it's the only way to get enough calories.
Which brings us to Mr Peltzman. He famously argued that income-like effects can lead to puzzling results in a wide variety of settings, most notably risk-compensation (which became known as the Peltzman Effect). If you spend government money to make roads safer or mandate seatbelt use, people will have a lower chance of dying from a given type of driving (similar to the substitution effect). But there's an income effect too - the budget set of allowable risky driving behavior has increased. Peltzman argued that this can in some cases totally offset the gains, as people drive in a more risky manner on the safer roads to maintain the same overall level of risk.
The classic case of Peltzman-like effects that people do seem to instinctively grasp is self-defence knowledge. In theory, knowing a little karate has only improved one's ability to fight relative to knowing zero karate. But the problem is the income effect. The ability to defend oneself can either be consumed entirely as an increase in safety, or it can be spent by substituting towards talking $#!& to bullies. Thus the overall level of safety can go up or down as a result of being able to fight back. The popular conception is that people overestimate their fighting ability and 'spend' more than they actually had, leading to Giffen-like behavior at low levels of self-defence knowledge.
And now it turns out that there's inadvertent Peltzman effects going on with internet privacy.
Several researchers with Tor have described how using the internet privacy software Tor results in your IP address receiving permanently much greater scrutiny from the NSA. Even searching for Tor online is enough to get you logged.
At high levels of security, this is still probably worth it if you value privacy. Tor is an incredibly powerful tool to avoid being tracked. Unfortunately there's still lots of other exploits they can use to target your computer, but Tor itself is pretty reliable.
Since the NSA doesn't like this, they are determined to raise the income effect stakes a lot. If you get slack and only use Tor sometimes, you have almost certainly increased the chances of your behavior being tracked and monitored. Before you had the blessing of anonymity. When you embark down the road of privacy, the NSA makes sure that goes away for good. Tor is a Basilisk - a single search for it is enough to get you permanently flagged. So if you're going to start down that road, it's got to be the full retard or nothing at all.
The reality is that maintaining anonymity is hard. Really hard. It is a form of tradecraft, as the spies put it. It needs an obsessive attention to detail, and a willingness to forgo a number of aspects of the internet (flash video, for instance, as well as dealing with slow loading times). And unfortunately, the predicament is quite similar to the position of the IRA viz Mrs Thatcher - the NSA only needs to get lucky once, whereas you need to get lucky every day.
The unfortunate reality is that for most people, no protection is probably safer than a little protection. And even then, the only reason that 'no protection' offers any protection is because the internet is simply too large for the NSA to be able to store everything that goes on there. On the other hand, they are able to store everything done by Tor users.
The one saving grace is that the NSA is not actually the NKVD. For the most part, the NSA is only interested in tracking terrorists, and passing the occasional Silk Road drug dealer onto the DEA. Not only that, they are reluctant to blow the details of the data collection process (any more than they already have) by having the details of it disclosed in court cases unimportant to the NSA's mission. So they're probably not going after you for buying that Adderall online, even though they could.
On the other hand, the Snowden disclosures have massively reduced the cost of the NSA using information at trials, since a lot of the details are now already known, so maybe that protection has decreased too.
Income effects are rarely counterintuitive once they're pointed out, but they have a tendency to be lurking in places that you weren't thinking hard about.
Unfortunately, none of them are good in this story.
Saturday, December 28, 2013
The joys of being a systems programmer
From James Mickens, dubbed 'the funniest man in Microsoft Research', which you might think is a backhanded compliment, but is actually just a compliment. The Night Watch:
And when you're done, read the rest of them too.
Perhaps the worst thing about being a systems person is that other, non-systems people think that they understand the daily tragedies that compose your life. For example, a few weeks ago, I was debugging a new network file system that my research group created. The bug was inside a kernel-mode component, so my machines were crashing in spectacular and vindictive ways. After a few days of manually rebooting servers, I had transformed into a shambling, broken man, kind of like a computer scientist version of Saddam Hussein when he was pulled from his bunker, all scraggly beard and dead eyes and florid, nonsensical ramblings about semi-imagined enemies. As I paced the hallways, muttering Nixonian rants about my code, one of my colleagues from the HCI group asked me what my problem was. I described the bug, which involved concurrent threads and corrupted state and asynchronous message delivery across multiple machines, and my coworker said, “Yeah, that sounds bad. Have you checked the log files for errors?” I said, “Indeed, I would do that if I hadn’t broken every component that a logging system needs to log data. I have a network file system, and I have broken the network, and I have broken the file system, and my machines crash when I make eye contact with them. I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I’VE DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS. My only logging option is to hire monks to transcribe the subjective experience of watching my machines die as I weep tears of blood.” My co-worker, in an earnest attempt to sympathize, recounted one of his personal debugging stories, a story that essentially involved an addition operation that had been mistakenly replaced with a multiplication operation. I listened to this story, and I said, “Look, I get it. Multiplication is not addition. This has been known for years. However, multiplication and addition are at least related. Multiplication is like addition, but with more addition. Multiplication is a grown-up pterodactyl, and addition is a baby pterodactyl. Thus, in your debugging story, your code is wayward, but it basically has the right idea. In contrast, there is no family-friendly GRE analogy that relates what my code should do, and what it is actually doing. I had the modest goal of translating a file read into a network operation, and now my machines have tuberculosis and orifice containment issues. Do you see the difference between our lives? When you asked a girl to the prom, you discovered that her father was a cop. When I asked a girl to the prom, I DISCOVERED THAT HER FATHER WAS STALIN.”Gold, gold, gold. Read the whole thing.
And when you're done, read the rest of them too.
Monday, December 17, 2012
A feature I wish they still had on phones
I was heading back to Australia recently, and true to my disorganised form, hadn't actually figured out the address of the place I was going. I could email my friend to find out, but I was getting on the plane in 15 minutes time, and probably wouldn't receive his reply before then. Once I got to Australia, of course, I wouldn't have free internet on my phone to check the reply. I checked through my phone, but didn't have his number written down anywhere. Bother.
Then I thought about it more, and I realised that I still remembered his mobile phone number from the better part of a decade ago. By contrast, I don't think I remember just about any US phone numbers whatsoever. It's not like I'm Rain Man or anything. (The fact that I'd forgotten to ask about the address in the first place kind of confirms this).
The reason I still remembered his number is that I used to call my friend back in the day when mobile phones would display the following when you call someone:
'Calling Michael Mobile
0412 345 678'
And the simple repetition of seeing the person's number in front of you over and over meant that eventually you remembered it.
I'm not saying I'd trade the modern version of syncing and backing up contacts for the previous one. But given you're going to be looking at the screen anyway over and over before you put it up to your ear, it would be incredibly handy to have the option to display the number. That way I could remember my US friends' numbers for the cases when I don't have my phone on me, or when it's dead.
Apparently I'm the only one who cares about this, since it would be trivially easy to implement, but nobody's doing it. Ah well.
Anyway, as this post implies, my holidaying around creates a lower than normal volume of written hilarity. Part time posting to continue for the next few weeks, and full time posting to resume in the New Year.
Then I thought about it more, and I realised that I still remembered his mobile phone number from the better part of a decade ago. By contrast, I don't think I remember just about any US phone numbers whatsoever. It's not like I'm Rain Man or anything. (The fact that I'd forgotten to ask about the address in the first place kind of confirms this).
The reason I still remembered his number is that I used to call my friend back in the day when mobile phones would display the following when you call someone:
'Calling Michael Mobile
0412 345 678'
And the simple repetition of seeing the person's number in front of you over and over meant that eventually you remembered it.
I'm not saying I'd trade the modern version of syncing and backing up contacts for the previous one. But given you're going to be looking at the screen anyway over and over before you put it up to your ear, it would be incredibly handy to have the option to display the number. That way I could remember my US friends' numbers for the cases when I don't have my phone on me, or when it's dead.
Apparently I'm the only one who cares about this, since it would be trivially easy to implement, but nobody's doing it. Ah well.
Anyway, as this post implies, my holidaying around creates a lower than normal volume of written hilarity. Part time posting to continue for the next few weeks, and full time posting to resume in the New Year.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Whack That Mole!
Over at Hacker News comes another story of patent trolls at PersonalWeb trying to use the legal system to extort money out of a company that actually produces something of value - Rackspace.
Rackspace describes the hilariously inept lawsuit:
But don't let this kind of pathetic 'failure-to-google-even-basic-details-about-the-tech-industry' ineptitude fool you - these guys are technology pioneers, and its crucial to protect their right to innovate for ... well, nobody knows quite what fig leaf they're even claiming.
Rackspace in its post describes legislation they're supporting to try to combat this problem.
Tree #1 - patent trolls keep filing lots of frivolous lawsuits, extorting money out of technology company. This needs some sort of specific remedy, such as making unsuccessful plaintiffs pay the defense's legal costs.
Tree #2 - Unscrupulous junk science trial lawyers keep suing doctors for enormous amounts of money over any perceived problem, driving up the cost of malpractice insurance and healthcare. This needs some sort of specific remedy, like capping damages for pain and suffering in malpractice lawsuits.
Tree #3 - Thugs desiring to silence public debate file lots of lawsuits to bankrupt opponents. This requires some sort of specific remedy, such as an Anti-SLAPP statute to help stop egregious discover processes and make unsuccessful plaintiffs pay the defense's legal costs.
What is the forest? The fact that America refuses to implement an across-the-board loser pays system of civil proceedings.
The great reasons why unsuccessful patent trolls should pay the other side's legal costs apply to everybody - lame unfair dismissal claims, Americans with Disabilities Act gold-digging lawsuits for trivial breaches of building codes, frivolous claims that you slipped over on somebody's sidewalk, etc. etc. etc. You can get rid of the whole lot of them, all at once, by just making the losing party pay the legal fees.
The lawyers will howl that this will discourage people from filing lawsuits.
Exactly. There are far, far too many lawsuits in America. A big part of the reason for this is that filing a lawsuit when your own counsel is operating on contingency (as lots of plaintiffs have) gives you a call option - your payoffs are zero or positive. And people are surprised when lots of people load up on call options?
If you simply made plaintiffs bear some of the costs, in expectation, that they impose on society through their lawsuits, you wouldn't have to screw around with a zillion other makeshift fixes for the enormous numbers of problems that this underlying legal deficiency creates.
Is this going to happen any time soon?
Sadly, no.
Rackspace describes the hilariously inept lawsuit:
To explain, this suit claims that Rackspace infringes the PersonalWeb patents “by its manufacture, use, sale, importation, and/or offer for sale of the following products and services within the PersonalWeb Patent Field: Rackspace Cloud Servers and GitHub Code Hosting Service.” It’s apparent that the people filing the suit don’t understand the technology or the products enough to realize that Rackspace Cloud Servers and GitHub are completely different products from different companies. By now, it’s widely known that GitHub is hosted at Rackspace, but beyond that, there is no other connection between the two.In other words, they named both Rackspace and a client of Rackspace as both being things sold by Rackspace.
But don't let this kind of pathetic 'failure-to-google-even-basic-details-about-the-tech-industry' ineptitude fool you - these guys are technology pioneers, and its crucial to protect their right to innovate for ... well, nobody knows quite what fig leaf they're even claiming.
Rackspace in its post describes legislation they're supporting to try to combat this problem.
The next legislative effort will likely center around what is known as the SHIELD Act, which has been introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) and Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). This bill would require plaintiffs to pay defendants’ legal costs if the suit is unsuccessful. Under current law, the patent trolls don’t have any meaningful risk in bringing litigation. The defendants, on the other hand, are subjected to enormous legal expenses and discovery costs. The SHIELD Act is designed to level the playing field and take away the trolls’ unfair advantage. We encourage all of our customers, partners, open source collaborators and friends to support Reps. DeFazio and Chaffetz in their effort to discourage these abusive patent troll lawsuits.I applaud this effort, but it seems to miss the forest for the trees.
Tree #1 - patent trolls keep filing lots of frivolous lawsuits, extorting money out of technology company. This needs some sort of specific remedy, such as making unsuccessful plaintiffs pay the defense's legal costs.
Tree #2 - Unscrupulous junk science trial lawyers keep suing doctors for enormous amounts of money over any perceived problem, driving up the cost of malpractice insurance and healthcare. This needs some sort of specific remedy, like capping damages for pain and suffering in malpractice lawsuits.
Tree #3 - Thugs desiring to silence public debate file lots of lawsuits to bankrupt opponents. This requires some sort of specific remedy, such as an Anti-SLAPP statute to help stop egregious discover processes and make unsuccessful plaintiffs pay the defense's legal costs.
What is the forest? The fact that America refuses to implement an across-the-board loser pays system of civil proceedings.
The great reasons why unsuccessful patent trolls should pay the other side's legal costs apply to everybody - lame unfair dismissal claims, Americans with Disabilities Act gold-digging lawsuits for trivial breaches of building codes, frivolous claims that you slipped over on somebody's sidewalk, etc. etc. etc. You can get rid of the whole lot of them, all at once, by just making the losing party pay the legal fees.
The lawyers will howl that this will discourage people from filing lawsuits.
Exactly. There are far, far too many lawsuits in America. A big part of the reason for this is that filing a lawsuit when your own counsel is operating on contingency (as lots of plaintiffs have) gives you a call option - your payoffs are zero or positive. And people are surprised when lots of people load up on call options?
If you simply made plaintiffs bear some of the costs, in expectation, that they impose on society through their lawsuits, you wouldn't have to screw around with a zillion other makeshift fixes for the enormous numbers of problems that this underlying legal deficiency creates.
Is this going to happen any time soon?
Sadly, no.
Friday, September 7, 2012
On Roombas
Great sentences from Steve Sailer:
The specific emotional response isn't the same from person to person. I call my Roomba 'The Cleaning Lady', and tend to get irritated when it inevitably gets caught on clothes or cords on the floor.
But the level of emotional involvement is indeed much higher, exactly as Sailer notes. The satisfaction from not having to do the vacuuming is way higher than the satisfaction from having to clean the dishes.
Robot & Frank raises the metaphysical question of what makes something human. Can simulacra easily manipulate our emotions? Can we actually care about things that can only pretend to care back?
The answer is yes. For instance, people who buy Roomba vacuum-cleaner robots frequently develop parental feelings toward their faithful—if often inept—servitors. Why do humans feel more warmly toward their Roombas than toward their dishwashers? The key emotional triggers are that Roombas move on their own, try hard, aren’t very bright, and they need much guidance and grooming. They’re like small children who love doing their chores.Ha!
The specific emotional response isn't the same from person to person. I call my Roomba 'The Cleaning Lady', and tend to get irritated when it inevitably gets caught on clothes or cords on the floor.
But the level of emotional involvement is indeed much higher, exactly as Sailer notes. The satisfaction from not having to do the vacuuming is way higher than the satisfaction from having to clean the dishes.
Monday, July 2, 2012
That's why you're in admin, not in IT
In the annals of hilariously lame administrative @$$-covering messages, I always enjoy receiving these emails:
Unfortunately, that's not how email works - you don't get an 'undo' button after you send it, and you don't get to magically delete it from people's computers if you send the wrong thing.
So why don't you just send the obvious message:
Tools.
'Department [X] would like to recall the message titled '[Mistaken Subject Y]'.You'd like to recall it, would you? I bet you would.
Unfortunately, that's not how email works - you don't get an 'undo' button after you send it, and you don't get to magically delete it from people's computers if you send the wrong thing.
So why don't you just send the obvious message:
'The message [Mistaken Subject Y] was sent in error - please disregard it. My apologies for the confusion.'Ah, because that would imply that someone in particular was to blame, and admin fools can't ever commit that to writing. Let's just press the magic 'recall' button instead!
Tools.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Margins of Error
I'm always impressed with the engineering associated with ATMs. Think about it - they have some of the smallest margins of error of just about anything outside of the aerospace/submarine/firearms industry. Made a mistake counting? Either you're spewing out money, or short-changing people and pissing off customers. (I'm guessing the former keeps bank managers up at night more than the latter does). Sure, the process is simple, but they get the number of bills right an astonishing amount of the time. I'm no engineer, so it's all just black magic to me.
But I do notice that the reliability is good enough that most of the time I don't even bother counting the money that comes out. Think about that - you're putting your faith in both the honesty and crazy technical competency of the bank. That's a crazy level of trust, but then again first world societies often have levels of trust that seem amazing when you think about them.
But I do notice that the reliability is good enough that most of the time I don't even bother counting the money that comes out. Think about that - you're putting your faith in both the honesty and crazy technical competency of the bank. That's a crazy level of trust, but then again first world societies often have levels of trust that seem amazing when you think about them.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Why Smart People Are Getting Worse At Spelling
This is not a post about why dumb people are getting worse at spelling. There's lots of obvious culprits - the spreading of teenage text message LOLspeak, declining educational quality, feelgood 'everybody wins a prize!' teaching methods that decline to correct too many mistakes, lunatic academics who argue that insisting on correct spelling and grammar is horribly racist and elitist, etc. etc.etc.
No, what's less remarked on is the hidden decline in spelling knowledge among educated people. But you'll only see this in a very particular context - if you ask them to hand-write something that requires big words. Their typewritten work is getting better and better.
Once upon a time, people used to need to know how words were spelled. To write something wrong in a letter was embarrassing, and every correction you made was obvious too. The benefits in knowing the correct spelling the first time were significant.
Now, we instead train people to know that they have to use spell-check. This requires them to know how to have a good stab at the word, and to diligently check that their document doesn't have any red squiggly lines under any words. But this doesn't actually drill spelling.
The reality is that bad spelling in a document these days is a sign only of laziness or complete illiteracy. Grammar is still more of a filter, as grammar checkers are less sophisticated. But the test of 'does this document contain typos?' is now only a very weak signal of actual spelling ability.
Five minutes ago, I had to type the word 'accelerate', and I couldn't remember if it had one or two "c"s, and whether it had one or two "l"s. No worries! Just have a stab, and keep going through the combinations until you hit it.
But here's the problem - within 5 seconds, I'd forgotten what the answer was. And next time, I'm going to do the same thing. It's like using a GPS instead of a map - in theory, the more efficient system could be used as a tool to improve the learning process. In practice, it gets used as a substitute for the learning process.
Don't believe me? Try writing a hand-written letter to someone, and see how many times you find yourself stumbling over the correct spelling of a word. And this is only the mistakes you know you're making, let along the ones you don't! It's a sure-fire way to cure yourself of any hints of snobbery about how eloquent and precise your writing is.
Overall, I'm okay with this process - it's not like men are about to be thrust into the wilds of nature where no spell-checkers are available. This is certainly less problematic than the decline in mental arithmetic skills with the ubiquitiousness of calculators. There are a lot more situations where it's valuable to be able to do fast mental mathematics than to always have correct spelling.
Since nobody writes handwritten letters any more, there is only one case where you really see how bad people's spelling has gotten - handwritten signs. Very few people who are going to write a protest sign tend to type it in Word first. But they should:
(image credit)
(when it's on 'know your meme', the time for image credits is pretty much over)
Everyone looks at these signs and thinks these people are unspeakable idiots. But this is the wrong lesson. I'm sure if either one had to send an email, it would be spelled just fine.
Technology giveth, and technology taketh away.
No, what's less remarked on is the hidden decline in spelling knowledge among educated people. But you'll only see this in a very particular context - if you ask them to hand-write something that requires big words. Their typewritten work is getting better and better.
Once upon a time, people used to need to know how words were spelled. To write something wrong in a letter was embarrassing, and every correction you made was obvious too. The benefits in knowing the correct spelling the first time were significant.
Now, we instead train people to know that they have to use spell-check. This requires them to know how to have a good stab at the word, and to diligently check that their document doesn't have any red squiggly lines under any words. But this doesn't actually drill spelling.
The reality is that bad spelling in a document these days is a sign only of laziness or complete illiteracy. Grammar is still more of a filter, as grammar checkers are less sophisticated. But the test of 'does this document contain typos?' is now only a very weak signal of actual spelling ability.
Five minutes ago, I had to type the word 'accelerate', and I couldn't remember if it had one or two "c"s, and whether it had one or two "l"s. No worries! Just have a stab, and keep going through the combinations until you hit it.
But here's the problem - within 5 seconds, I'd forgotten what the answer was. And next time, I'm going to do the same thing. It's like using a GPS instead of a map - in theory, the more efficient system could be used as a tool to improve the learning process. In practice, it gets used as a substitute for the learning process.
Don't believe me? Try writing a hand-written letter to someone, and see how many times you find yourself stumbling over the correct spelling of a word. And this is only the mistakes you know you're making, let along the ones you don't! It's a sure-fire way to cure yourself of any hints of snobbery about how eloquent and precise your writing is.
Overall, I'm okay with this process - it's not like men are about to be thrust into the wilds of nature where no spell-checkers are available. This is certainly less problematic than the decline in mental arithmetic skills with the ubiquitiousness of calculators. There are a lot more situations where it's valuable to be able to do fast mental mathematics than to always have correct spelling.
Since nobody writes handwritten letters any more, there is only one case where you really see how bad people's spelling has gotten - handwritten signs. Very few people who are going to write a protest sign tend to type it in Word first. But they should:
(image credit)
(when it's on 'know your meme', the time for image credits is pretty much over)
Everyone looks at these signs and thinks these people are unspeakable idiots. But this is the wrong lesson. I'm sure if either one had to send an email, it would be spelled just fine.
Technology giveth, and technology taketh away.
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