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David McGavock

#53 - How to detect bullshit « Scott Berkun - 3 views

www.scottberkun.com/...53-how-to-detect-bullshit

bullshit thinking crap detection evaluate lies

shared by David McGavock on 25 Dec 11 - Cached
  • The first detection tool is a question: How do you know what you know?
  • People so rarely have their claims challenged, that asking someone to explain how they know sheds light on whatever ignorance they’re hiding.
  • Even credible thinkers need time to sort through their logic, separating assumptions from facts: an an exercise that works in everyone’s favor.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The second tool is also a question: What is the counter argument?
  • Similarly useful questions include: Who besides you shares this opinion? What are your biggest concerns, and what will you do to address them? What would need to change for you to have a different (opposite) opinion?
  • Anyone creating BS knows this, and will tend towards urgency. They’ll resist reviews, breaks, consultations or the suggestion of sleeping on decisions before they’re made. Use time & pressure, the third tool of BS detection, in your favor: never allow big decisions to be mismanaged to the point where they must be made urgently.
  • Especially in business and technology, jargon and obfuscation hide huge quantities of BS. Inflated language is a technique of intimidation.
  • The fourth tool of BS detection (derived from the rule of expecting BS) is careful assignment of your trust. Never agree to more than your trust allows. Who cares how confident they are: the question is how confident are you in them? It’s rare that there isn’t time for trust to be earned. Divide requests, projects or commitments into pieces. It’s not offensive to refuse to take someone’s word if they have no history of living up to it before (especially if they’re trying to sell you something).
  • But lies, serious lies, should not be encouraged as they destroy trust, the binding force in all relationships. One particularly troublesome kind of lie is known as Bullshit (BS). These are unnecessary deceptions, committed in the gray area between polite white lies and complete malicious fabrications.
  • David McGavock on 25 Dec 11
     
    "Be like Socrates: assume people are unaware of their own ignorance (including yourself) and politely, warmly, probe to sort out the difference."
Bill Bell

The 7 Bad Habits of Ineffective Job Seekers - Regional Help Wanted - Job search and job... - 0 views

enewsletters.biospace.com/...of-ineffective-job-seekers.htm

shared by Bill Bell on 19 Oct 10 - No Cached
    • Bill Bell
      Bill Bell on 19 Oct 10
       
      Clearly you cannot waste all of your time.
    • Bill Bell
      Bill Bell on 19 Oct 10
       
      I would also say that it's quite possible to land a job that is very unsuitable because employers themselves are often poor at screening candidates.
    • Bill Bell
      Bill Bell on 19 Oct 10
       
      This may be less important in Canada where there are fewer job boards. For a way of finding a much wider array of job boards and job postings using Google see my blog.
  • ...1 more annotation...
    • Bill Bell
      Bill Bell on 19 Oct 10
       
      I have heard that LI now houses the biggest collection of jobs on the 'net. Are you a member?
    • Bill Bell
      Bill Bell on 19 Oct 10
       
      You can build up a reputation or 'brand' on LI by participating in groups and answering questions.
David McGavock

Truth is the foundation of trust | PostIndependent.com - 1 views

www.postindependent.com/...1022&parentprofile=1081

opinion critical_thinking evaluate media

shared by David McGavock on 12 May 12 - No Cached
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 May 12
       
      Something I agree with
  • Sometimes it seems as though all the infighting is self destructive and financially draining.
  • Well, $14 trillion of debt later, I wonder if she still likes the sound.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 May 12
       
      Written with no acknowledgement of the situation that was handed to him. I would like to see the Ross Talbott plan for avoiding a depression.
  • ...3 more annotations...
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 May 12
       
      Truth, truth, truth. He repeats the need for truth and for relationship. At the same time he provides no basis for the arguments he makes. Truth requires evidence.
  • Who then, are the wise? Are they the ones who liked the way he sounded? Are they the ones who believe the lies?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 May 12
       
      It would be helpful to have the details here rather than the chant that we can hear from "the press".
  • A famous saying is, “you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” The opposite of truth is the lie, and the lie creates bondage and death. The lie is so dangerous because it is presented as truth by impressive and convincing people. The real truth is often initially painful but is always liberating. Truth is the light at the end of the tunnel.
  • David McGavock on 12 May 12
     
    One man's version of truth sans evidence.
David McGavock

Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) : Howard Rheingold : City... - 2 views

www.sfgate.com/...detail

twitter literacy rheingold socialmedia

shared by David McGavock on 02 Jan 11 - Cached
  • It's about knowing how and knowing who and knowing who knows who knows what.
  • use of media to be productive and to foster authentic interpersonal connection, rather than waste of time and attention on phony, banal, alienated pseudo-communication. Know-how is where the difference lies.
  • successful use of Twitter means knowing how to tune the network of people you follow, and how to feed the network of people who follow you.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively.
  • The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it.
  • My reasons: Openness - anyone can join, and anyone can follow anyone else
  • Immediacy - it is a rolling present. You won't get the sense of Twitter if you just check in once a week. You need to hang out for minutes and hours, every day, to get in the groove.
  • I don't have to listen to noise, but filtering it out requires attention. You are responsible for whoever else's babble you are going to direct into your awareness.
  • Reciprocity - people give and ask freely for information they need
  • A channel to multiple publics - I'm a communicator and have a following that I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or vlog post in seconds - and each of the people who follow me might also feed my memes to their own networks.
  • Asymmetry - very interesting, because nobody sees the same sample of the Twitter population. Few people follow exactly the same people who follow them.
  • A way to meet new people - it happens every day. Connecting with people who share interests has been the most powerful social driver of the Internet since day one. I follow people I don't know otherwise but who share enthusiasm
  • A window on what is happening in multiple worlds
  • Community-forming - Twitter is not a community, but it's an ecology in which communities can emerge.
  • A platform for mass collaboration:
  • Searchability - the ability to follow searches for phrases like "swine flu" or "Howard Rheingold" in real time provides a kind of ambient information radar on topics that interest me.
  • successful use of Twitter comes down to tuning and feeding.
  • If it isn't fun, it won't be useful. If you don't put out, you don't get back. But you have to spend some time tuning and feeding if Twitter is going to be more than an idle amusement to you
  • Twitter is a flow, not a queue like your email inbox, to be sampled judiciously is only one part of the attention literacy
  • My students who learn about the presentation of self and construction of identity in the psychology and sociology literature see the theories they are reading come to life on the Twitter
  • David McGavock on 02 Jan 11
     
    "Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It's not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We're beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it. "
  • David McGavock on 02 Jan 11
     
    Using twitter effectively is a critical thinking skill. Howard describes this in detail.
David McGavock

Making Science by Serendipity. A review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Tra... - 0 views

jetpress.org/campa.htm

Barber information_literacy critical skills evaluate serendipity

shared by David McGavock on 09 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept.
  • Barbano (1968: 65) notices that one of Merton’s constant preoccupations is with language and the definition of concepts and recognizes that the function of the latter is for him anything but ornamental.
  • Merton proposes an articulated technical language now widely used by sociologists and is perfectly aware of the strategic importance of this work.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • Walpole tried to illustrate the concept of serendipity with other examples, but basically failed to do it in an unequivocal way.
  • It was in the 1930s that Merton first came upon the concept-and-term of serendipity in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here, he discovered that the word had been coined by Walpole, and was based on the title of the fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which “were always making discoveries by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
  • As Rob Norton (2002) recognizes: “The first and most complete analysis of the concept of unintended consequences was done in 1936 by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton.” In this way, the combined etymological and sociological quest began that resulted in The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
  • it was to serve as a propedeutic to Merton’s seminal work – On the Shoulders of Giants, acronymised to OTSOG and published in 1965.
  • Merton provides interesting statistics to illustrate how quickly the word had spread since 1958. By that time, serendipity had been used in print only 135 times. But between 1958 and 2000, serendipity had appeared in the titles of 57 books. Furthermore, the word was used in newspapers 13,000 times during the 1990s and in 636,000 documents on the World Wide Web in 2001.
  • The Italian version was published in 2002, after Barber’s death. Two years later and a year after Merton’s death, we could welcome the appearance of the original English version.
  •  Now let us focus on an analysis of the content of the book and its theoretical consequences, that is, on the history of this term-and-concept and its significance to the sociology of science.
  • The first few chapters elucidate the origin of the word, beginning with the 1557 publication of The Three Princes of Serendip in Venice.
  •  In a letter to Horace Mann dated January 28, 1754, Walpole described an amazing discovery as being “of that kind which I call Serendipity.”
  • in 1833, Walpole’s correspondence with Horace Mann was published.
  • As Mario Bunge (1998: 232) remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by training, is the real founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession; his predecessors had been isolated scholars or amateurs.”
  • Serendipity was used in print for the first time by another writer forty-two years after the publication of Walpole’s letters.
  • Edward Solly had the honor
  • Solly defined serendipity as “a particular kind of natural cleverness”
  • he stressed Walpole’s implication that serendipity was a kind of innate gift or trait.
  • Walpole was also talking of serendipity as a kind of discovery.
  • The ambiguity was never overcome and serendipity still indicates both a personal attribute and an event or phenomenon
  • the word appeared in all the “big” and medium-sized English and American dictionaries between 1909 and 1934.
  • authors reveal disparities in definition
  • To avoid both the ambiguities of the meaning and the disappearance of one of the meanings, Piotr Zielonka and I (2003) decided to translate serendipity into Polish by using two different neologisms: “serendypizm” and “serendypicja” – to refer to the event and the personal attribute respectively.
  •  Even if Merton waited four decades to publish his book on serendipity, he made wide use of the concept in his theorizing.
  •  It is worth now turning our attention to the theoretical aspects of serendipity and examining the sociological and philosophical implications of this idea.
  • “Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.”
  •  It is true that the American sociologist studies mainly institutions of science, not laboratory life and the products of science (e.g., theories). But he never said that sociologists cannot or should not study other aspects of science.
  • His attention to the concept of serendipity is the best evidence
  • Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159)
  • “Intuition, scriptures, chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the psychological source of an idea.
  • Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164)
  • Indeed if you are clever enough to take advantage of the opportunity, you may capture a fox thanks to accidental circumstances while searching for hares.
  • This descriptive model has many important implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the historian of science, but it raises further problems for research administrators.
  • If this is true, it is necessary to create the environment, the social conditions for serendipity. These aspects are explored in Chapter 10 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
  • The solution appears to be a Golden Mean between total anarchy and authoritarianism. Too much planning in science is harmful.
  • Whitney supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking: “Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt, without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:
  • If scientists are determined by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.
  • David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
     
    Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept. The choice of writing a book about a word may surprise those who are not acquainted with Merton's work, but certainly not those sociologists that have chosen him as a master. Searching, defining, and formulating concepts has always been Merton's main intellectual activity.
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