Category: Facebook

Font Credulity

Fascinating piece from Errol Morris on NYT Opinionator today.

Picked-up from a cross hit on Psybertron for David Deutsch. One of his quotes is used as an example, but in fact it is tangential to the subject of the article – why the experienced quality, value and truth in a text depends on the font used. Not new clearly, font selection always affects the character of the communication but a fascinating, thorough example.

(I have a recollection of the referenced Phil Renaud article The Secret Lives of Fonts from an earlier encounter, but can’t find my link.)

Too Much Communication

This is surreal and ironic on many levels.

Sam is probably my second favourite amongst the four horsemen, a real moral philosopher. No prize for guessing my least favourite, but it was he who tweeted the link picked-up by Ricky. (Dan, Sam, Hitch and the Dawk in that order in case you’re interested.)

Fact : internet enabled comment on blogs directly and via social media is a major source of miscommunication – an insidious spread of misinformed ideas. (aka The Memetic Problem). Apart from comic entertainment value – most are without value or with meta-value only or, more importantly, with negative content value, unless they can be editorially moderated. Life’s too short.

Weird : Sam reckons PZ Myers “shepherd of trolls” (Pharyngula Blog) to be odious. PZ is clearly on the side of (evolutionary) science in the god debates, so you might think an ally of Harris, along with the other three horsemen. But I’ve noted before the “baying mob” mentality of PZ and his commenters (similar to Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science and many Guardian “Comment is Free” contributors.) Makes intelligent debate hopeless. The baying mob is odious – see the memetic problem.

As I say, I have a lot of respect for Sam, but I have taken exception to some of his “narrow” rationality – a recent example here. I am really intrigued as to the reality of Sam’s take on PZ. Must have missed a significant spat or irony here?

The Memetic Problem ? Sam says:

The Internet powerfully enables the spread of good ideas, but it works the same magic for bad ones”and it allows distortions of fact and opinion to become permanent features of our intellectual landscape.

I say, it’s even worse than that, because the ideas that spread more easily tend to be the inferior ones. Too simplistic, too reductionist, too comfortable fit with existing prejudice and fashion, etc. all make such ideas easier to communicate and receive and re-communicate, and “stickier” when received. Evolutionary fidelity and fecundity both benefit from simplistication of the message and its fitness.

The Cult of Science

Great piece by Jonathan Ree in the New Humanist reviewing the work of Bruno Latour particularly his latest “The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods” (Hat tip to David Morey on Facebook)

But who in this great brawl is really believing naively? Not the religious believers, according to Latour, but the modern atheists, afflicted as they are by the “naïve belief … that ignorant people believe naively”. Indeed the much-loved contrast between the so-called “facts” that provide a foundation for enlightened knowledge and the “fetishes” that animate the beliefs of fools is itself a superstition ” a delusion which Latour proposes to commemorate with his new hybrid word “factish”.

Factish, in short, is what happens when our own “facts” turn out to be fetishes, and the “fetishes” of others turn out to be facts.

But who is the image-worshipper at this table? Not the believers, surely, because however much they treasure their icons, they know very well (most of the time at least) that they are human artefacts. If superstition is at work here, it seems to be on the side of the idol-smashers, however modern they may be and proud of their dispassionate rationality; otherwise how could they get excited about destroying something that is after all no more than an image? Icons are thus the idols of the iconoclasts, making a cult of their anti-cultism.

(My emphasis) Has all the feel of a Foggy-Froggie / PoMo – he is French, but look at that jacket! Indeed he was one of the targets of the great Sokal hoax, but he has nailed the superstition – the psychological disease I call scientism – the delusion he calls factish and Maxwell calls scientific neurosis.

Value-free science is a superstition.

(PS Looks like the New Humanist / Rationalist Association is the antidote to the naivete of the BHA. Time to switch subscriptions.)

Refreshing

Saw this clip the other day – Craig Bellamy being interviewed about being in the GB Olympic football team – and thought as well as being surprisingly articulate, his school-boyish enthusiasm and all round good humour made such a change from all the usual earnest and corporately correct punditry and commentary.

I wasn’t the only person to notice.

[Post Note – And ironic that Welshman Bellamy should score the opening goal, only to have the Daily Express report him scoring for “england”.]

Less is More #34

One in a long series, but here an example that’s new to me.

Faster frame rate TV and Film, cameras and projectors, and interpolation of additional frames to smooth slower frame rate media – may make images more “real”, but not necessarily better.

Here : Home vs showroom vs cinema settings generally.
Here : Slumdog as a cinematic example.
Interesting recommendation that plasma is better than LED, and otherwise unsurprising difficulty in truly comparing TV’s in a showroom setting – tried hard to compensate for this before.

Hat tip to Matt of WordPress.

True to ZMM

Good to hear James Purefoy in the role of Bob / Phaedrus in Peter Flannery’s dramatisation of Robert Pirsig‘s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on BBC Radio4’s Saturday Drama. It’s there to listen again in BBC Radio4 iPlayer’s “Most Popular” . [Only available until next Saturday 30th June 2012.]

The characterizations, tone and atmosphere were dead right, and despite the need for selective editing to fit the 90 minute format, all the main aspects of the narrative, the back-stories and the underlying chautauqua on quality and mental illness came through. Many original scenes re-ordered and combined, and some dialogue recalled in the mouths of others, to get all the ideas and the marquee quotes in, without losing the context or intent, and still maintaining the overall sequence of the journey. An excellent production.

ZMM Dramatization on the Beeb

Robert Pirsig’s 1974 “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” is a special interest of Psybertron, and is the favourite book of Peter Flannery. So, he’s created a dramatization to be be broadcast next Saturday 23rd June at 2:30pm as BBC R4 Saturday Drama. (Mentioned earlier.)