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Second of all, fields naturally select for people who accept their foundational assumptions. People who don't accept those assumptions are likely not to have gone into that field in the first place, or to have left it already.

Sometimes those foundational assumptions are simple enough that an outsider can evaluate them - for instance, I may not be an expert in astrology or theology, but I can understand their starting premises (stars affect human fates; we should accept the Bible as the truth) well enough to confidently dismiss them, and the fields that rest on them. But when the foundational assumptions get more complex - like the assumption that we can reliably model future temperatures - it becomes much harder for an outsider to judge their soundness.

we almost seem to be stuck in a Catch-22: The only people who are qualified to evaluate the validity of a complex field are the ones who have studied that field in depth - in other words, experts. Yet the experts are also the people who have the strongest incentives not to reject the foundational assumptions of the field, and the ones who have self-selected for believing those assumptions. So the closer you are to a field, the more biased you are, which makes you a poor judge of it; the farther away you are, the less relevant knowledge you have, which makes you a poor judge of it. What to do?

luckily, the Catch-22 isn't quite as stark as I made it sound. For example, you can often find people who are experts in the particular methodology used by a field without actually being a member of the field, so they can be much more unbiased judges of whether that field is applying the methodology soundly. So for example, a foundational principle underlying a lot of empirical social science research is that linear regression is a valid tool for modeling most phenomena. I strongly recommend asking a statistics professor about that. 

there are some general criteria that outsiders can use to evaluate the validity of a technical field, even without “technical scientific expertise” in that field. For example, can the field make testable predictions, and does it have a good track record of predicting things correctly? This seems like a good criterion by which an outsider can judge the field of climate modeling (and "predictions" here includes using your model to predict past data accurately). I don't need to know how the insanely-complicated models work to know that successful prediction is a good sign.

And there are other more field-specific criteria outsiders can often use. For example, I've barely studied postmodernism at all, but I don't have to know much about the field to recognize that the fact that they borrow concepts from complex disciplines which they themselves haven't studied is a red flag.

the issue with AGW is less the science and all about the political solutions. Most every solution we hear in the public conversation requires some level of sacrifice and uncertainty in the future.Politicians, neither experts in climatology nor economics, craft legislation to solve the problem through the lens of their own political ideology. At TAM8, this was pretty apparent. My honest opinion is that people who are AGW skeptics are mainly skeptics of the political solutions. If AGW was said to increase the GDP of the country by two to three times, I'm guessing you'd see a lot less climate change skeptics.

systems that allow crowdsourced judgment to be tweaked, not to the taste of the general mass, which produces lowest common denominator effects, but to people and experts that you can trust for their judgment.

these systems are now implemented by Buzz and Digg 4

Important for me though, is that they don’t just take your social graph as is, because that mixes many different people for different reasons, but that you can tweak the groups.

“This is the problem with the internet! It’s full of crap!” Many would argue that without professional producers, editors, publishers, and the natural scarcity that we became accustomed to, there’s a flood of low-quality material that we can’t possible sift through on our own. From blogs to music to software to journalism, one of the biggest fears of the established order is how to handle the oncoming glut of mediocrity. Who shall tell us The Good from The Bad? “We need gatekeepers, and they need to be paid!”

The Internet has enabled us to build our social graph, and in turn, that social graph acts as an aggregate gatekeeper. The better that these systems for crowdsourcing the curation of content become, the more accurate the results will be.

This social-graph-as-curation is still relatively new, even by Internet standards. However, with tools like Buzz and Digg 4 (which allows you to see the aggregate ratings for content based on your social graph, and not the whole wide world) this technique is catching up to human publishers fast. For those areas where we don’t have strong social ties, we can count on reputation systems to help us “rate the raters”. These systems allow strangers to rate each other’s content, giving users some idea of who to trust, without having to know them personally. Yelp has a fairly mature reputation system, where locations are rated by users, but the users are rated, in turn, by each other.

Reputation systems and the social graph allow us to crowdsource curation.

Can you imagine if Apple had to approve your videos for posting on Youtube, where every minute, 24 hours of footage are uploaded? There’s no way humans could keep up! The traditional forms of curation and gatekeeping simply can not scale to meet the increase in production and transmission that the Internet allows. Crowdsourcing is the only curatorial/editorial mechanism that can scale to match the increased ability to produce that the Internet has given us.

One of the interesting things Phil Plait did during his challenging TAM8 speech was to ask the 1300 skeptics in the room this question: How many of you here today used to believe in something — used to, past tense — whether it was flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that? You can raise your hand if you want to.

most pseudoscientific beliefs are not stupid. They’re just wrong.

the top reasons people believe weird things are not only understandable, but identical to the reasons most skeptics believe things: they are persuaded by personal experiences (or by the experiences of a loved one); or, they are persuaded by the sources they have consulted.

reasoning from visceral experience is a recipe for false belief.

I’m not suggesting that personal experience is an adequate basis for accepting paranormal claims (it isn’t) or that these claims are true (so far as science can tell, they’re not). I’m saying that, given their information and tools, many paranormalists have understandable reasons for belief.

However we label ourselves or others, we come up against the fact that people are complicated. Generalizations are doomed to inadequacy. But, I will suggest that the differences between skeptics and paranormal believers have less to do with innate credulity, and more to do with training and resources.

If you've ever asked Nike+ to log your runs or given Google permission to keep your search history, you've participated in a bit of self-tracking. Now that more people have location-aware smartphones and the Web has made data easy to share, personal data is poised to become an important tool to understand how we live, and how we all might live better. One great example of this phenomenon in action is the site Cure Together, which allows you to enter your symptoms—for, say, "anxiety" or "insomnia"—and the various remedies you've tried to feel better. One thing the site does is aggregate this information and present the results in chart form. Here is the chart for depression:

Instead of being isolated in your own condition, you can now see what has worked for others. The same principle is at work at the site Fuelly, where you can "track, share, and compare" your miles per gallon and see how efficient certain makes and models really are.

Businesses are also using data tracking to spur their employees to accomplishing companywide goals: Wal-Mart partnered with Zazengo to help employees track their "personal sustainability" actions such as making a home-cooked meal or buying local produce. The app Rescue Time, which records all of the activity on your computer, gives workers an easy way to account for their time. And that comes in handy when you want to show the boss how efficient telecommuting can be.

set out to model was the development of religious schisms. Such schisms are a recurrent feature of religion, especially in the West. The classic example is the fracturing of Christianity that occured after the reformation.

Their model made two simple assumptions. Firstly, that religions that are highly dominant actually induce some people to want to break away from them. When a religion becomes overcrowded, then some individuals will lose their religion and take up another.

Second, they assume that every religion has a value to the individual that is composed of it's costs and benefits. That value varies between religion, but is the same for all individuals. It's a pretty simplistic assumption, but even so they get some interesting results.

Now, this is a very simple model, and so the results shouldn't be over-interpreted. But it's a fascinating result for a couple of reasons. It shows how new religious 'species' can come into being in a mixed population - no need for geographical separation. That's such a common feature of religion - from the Judaeo-Christian religions to examples from Papua New Guinea - that it's worth trying to understand what drives it. What's more, this is the first time that anyone has attempted to model the transmission of religious ideas in evolutionary terms. It's a first step, to be sure, but just showing that it can be done is a significant achievement.

The value comes because it shifts the focus from thinking about how culture benefits the host, and instead asks how the cultural trait is adaptive in it's own right. What is important is not whether or not the human host benefits from the trait, but rather whether the trait can successfully transmit and reproducing itself (see Bible Belter for an example of how this could work).

Even more intriguing is the implications for understanding cultural-genetic co-evolution. After all, we know that viruses and their hosts co-evolve in a kind of arms race - sometimes ending up in a relationship that benefits both.

The WikiLeaks cables present quite a different picture. What emerges is one reality (the real one) colliding with another (the official one). We see smart, good-faith diplomats and foreign service personnel trying to make the truth on the ground match up to the one the administration has proclaimed to the public. The cables show the widening disconnect. It's like a foreign policy Ponzi scheme -- this one fueled not by the public's money, but the public's acquiescence.

The second aspect of the story -- the one that was the focus of the symposium -- is the changing relationship to government that technology has made possible.

Back in the year 2007, B.W. (Before WikiLeaks), Barack Obama waxed lyrical about government and the internet: "We have to use technology to open up our democracy. It's no coincidence that one of the most secretive administrations in our history has favored special interest and pursued policy that could not stand up to the sunlight."

Not long after the election, in announcing his "Transparency and Open Government" policy, the president proclaimed: "Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset." Cut to a few years later. Now that he's defending a reality that doesn't match up to, well, reality, he's suddenly not so keen on the people having a chance to access this "national asset."

Even more wikironic are the statements by his Secretary of State who, less than a year ago, was lecturing other nations about the value of an unfettered and free internet. Given her description of the WikiLeaks as "an attack on America's foreign policy interests" that have put in danger "innocent people," her comments take on a whole different light. Some highlights: In authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable... technologies with the potential to open up access to government and promote transparency can also be hijacked by governments to crush dissent and deny human rights... As in the dictatorships of the past, governments are targeting independent thinkers who use these tools. Now "making government accountable" is, as White House spokesman Robert Gibbs put it, a "reckless and dangerous action."

ay Rosen, one of the participants in the symposium, wrote a brilliant essay entitled "From Judith Miller to Julian Assange." He writes: For the portion of the American press that still looks to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, and that considers itself a check on state power, the hour of its greatest humiliation can, I think, be located with some precision: it happened on Sunday, September 8, 2002. That was when the New York Times published Judith Miller and Michael Gordon's breathless, spoon-fed -- and ultimately inaccurate -- account of Iraqi attempts to buy aluminum tubes to produce fuel for a nuclear bomb.

Miller's after-the-facts-proved-wrong response, as quoted in a Michael Massing piece in the New York Review of Books, was: "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." In other words, her job is to tell citizens what their government is saying, not, as Obama called for in his transparency initiative, what their government is doing.

As Jay Rosen put it: Today it is recognized at the Times and in the journalism world that Judy Miller was a bad actor who did a lot of damage and had to go. But it has never been recognized that secrecy was itself a bad actor in the events that led to the collapse, that it did a lot of damage, and parts of it might have to go. Our press has never come to terms with the ways in which it got itself on the wrong side of secrecy as the national security state swelled in size after September 11th.

And in the WikiLeaks case, much of media has again found itself on the wrong side of secrecy -- and so much of the reporting about WikiLeaks has served to obscure, to conflate, to mislead. For instance, how many stories have you heard or read about all the cables being "dumped" in "indiscriminate" ways with no attempt to "vet" and "redact" the stories first. In truth, only just over 1,200 of the 250,000 cables have been released, and WikiLeaks is now publishing only those cables vetted and redacted by their media partners, which includes the New York Times here and the Guardian in England.

The establishment media may be part of the media, but they're also part of the establishment. And they're circling the wagons. One method they're using, as Andrew Rasiej put it after the symposium, is to conflate the secrecy that governments use to operate and the secrecy that is used to hide the truth and allow governments to mislead us.

Nobody, including WikiLeaks, is promoting the idea that government should exist in total transparency,

Assange himself would not disagree. "Secrecy is important for many things," he told Time's Richard Stengel. "We keep secret the identity of our sources, as an example, take great pains to do it." At the same time, however, secrecy "shouldn't be used to cover up abuses."

Decentralizing government power, limiting it, and challenging it was the Founders' intent and these have always been core conservative principles. Conservatives should prefer an explosion of whistleblower groups like WikiLeaks to a federal government powerful enough to take them down. Government officials who now attack WikiLeaks don't fear national endangerment, they fear personal embarrassment. And while scores of conservatives have long promised to undermine or challenge the current monstrosity in Washington, D.C., it is now an organization not recognizably conservative that best undermines the political establishment and challenges its very foundations.

It is not, as Simon Jenkins put it in the Guardian, the job of the media to protect the powerful from embarrassment. As I said at the symposium, its job is to play the role of the little boy in The Emperor's New Clothes -- brave enough to point out what nobody else is willing to say.

When the press trades truth for access, it is WikiLeaks that acts like the little boy. "Power," wrote Jenkins, "loathes truth revealed. When the public interest is undermined by the lies and paranoia of power, it is disclosure that takes sanity by the scruff of its neck and sets it back on its feet."

A final aspect of the story is Julian Assange himself. Is he a visionary? Is he an anarchist? Is he a jerk? This is fun speculation, but why does it have an impact on the value of the WikiLeaks revelations?

in January, the company was crowing about its online holiday sales. Kate Coultas, a company spokeswoman, wrote to a reporter in January, “Internet sales through jcp.com posted strong growth in December, with significant increases in traffic and orders for the key holiday shopping periods of the week after Thanksgiving and the week before Christmas.”

Penney also issued a statement: “We are disappointed that Google has reduced our rankings due to this matter,” Ms. Brossart wrote, “but we will continue to work actively to retain our high natural search position.”

She added that while the collection of links surely brought in additional revenue, it was hardly a bonanza. Just 7 percent of JCPenney.com’s traffic comes from clicks on organic search results, she wrote.

MANY owners of Web sites with Penney links seem to relish their unreachability. But there were exceptions, and they included cocaman.ch. (“Geekness — closer to the world” is the cryptic header atop the site.) It turned out to be owned and run by Corsin Camichel, a chatty 25-year-old I.T. security analyst in Switzerland.

The link came through a Web site, TNX.net, which pays Mr. Camichel with TNX points, which he then trades for links that drive traffic to his other sites, like cookingutensils.net. He earns money when people visit that site and click on the ads. He could also, he said, get cash from TNX. Currently, Cocaman is home to 403 links, all of them placed there by TNX on behalf of clients.

“You do pretty well,” he wrote, referring to income from his links trading. “The thing is, the more you invest (time and money) the better results you get. Right now I get enough to buy myself new test devices for my Android apps (like $150/month) with zero effort. I have to do nothing. Ads just sit there and if people click, I make money.”

For instance, slide 23 shows a Google search for “liberal social psychologist,” highlighting the fact that one gets a whopping 2,740 results (which, actually, by Google standards is puny; a search under my own name yields 145,000, and I ain’t no Lady Gaga). You then compared this search to one for “conservative social psychologist” and get only three entries.

First of all, if Google searches are the main tool of social psychology these days, I fear for the entire field. Second, I actually re-did your searches — at the prompting of one of my readers — and came up with quite different results. As the photo here shows, if you actually bother to scroll through the initial Google search for “liberal social psychologist” you will find that there are in fact only 24 results, to be compared to 10 (not 3) if you search for “conservative social psychologist.” Oops. From this scant data I would simply conclude that political orientation isn’t a big deal in social psychology.

Your talk continues with some pretty vigorous hand-waving: “We rely on our peers to find flaws in our arguments, but when there is essentially nobody out there to challenge liberal assumptions and interpretations of experimental findings, the peer review process breaks down, at least for work that is related to those sacred values.” Right, except that I would like to see a systematic survey of exactly how the lack of conservative peer review has affected the quality of academic publications. Oh, wait, it hasn’t, at least according to what you yourself say in the next sentence: “The great majority of work in social psychology is excellent, and is unaffected by these problems.” I wonder how you know this, and why — if true — you then think that there is a problem. Philosophers call this an inherent contradiction, it’s a common example of bad argument.

Finally, let me get to your outrage at the fact that I have allegedly accused you of academic misconduct and lying. I have done no such thing, and you really ought (in the ethical sense) to be careful when throwing those words around. I have simply raised the logical possibility that you (and Tierney) have an agenda, a possibility based on reading several of the things both you and Tierney have written of late. As a psychologist, I’m sure you are aware that biases can be unconscious, and therefore need not imply that the person in question is lying or engaging in any form of purposeful misconduct. Or were you implying in your own talk that your colleagues’ bias was conscious? Because if so, you have just accused an entire profession of misconduct.

One might think that such an esteemed organization would prove an insurmountable challenge for a bunch of disaffected kids to hack. World-renowned, government-recognized experts against Anonymous? HBGary should be able to take their efforts in stride. Unfortunately for HBGary, neither the characterization of Anonymous nor the assumption of competence on the security company's part are accurate, as the story of how HBGary was hacked will make clear. Anonymous is a diverse bunch: though they tend to be younger rather than older, their age group spans decades. Some may still be in school, but many others are gainfully employed office-workers, software developers, or IT support technicians, among other things. With that diversity in age and experience comes a diversity of expertise and ability.

Suppose we found that computers are diminishing our capacity for certain pleasures, or making us worse off in other ways. Why couldn’t we simply spend less time in front of the screen and more time doing the things we used to do before computers came along – like burying our noses in novels? Well, it may be that computers are affecting us in a more insidious fashion than we realise. They may be reshaping our brains – and not for the better. That was the drift of ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’, a 2008 cover story by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic.

Carr thinks that he was himself an unwitting victim of the computer’s mind-altering powers. Now in his early fifties, he describes his life as a ‘two-act play’, ‘Analogue Youth’ followed by ‘Digital Adulthood’. In 1986, five years out of college, he dismayed his wife by spending nearly all their savings on an early version of the Apple Mac. Soon afterwards, he says, he lost the ability to edit or revise on paper. Around 1990, he acquired a modem and an AOL subscription, which entitled him to spend five hours a week online sending email, visiting ‘chat rooms’ and reading old newspaper articles. It was around this time that the programmer Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web, which, in due course, Carr would be restlessly exploring with the aid of his new Netscape browser.

Carr launches into a brief history of brain science, which culminates in a discussion of ‘neuroplasticity’: the idea that experience affects the structure of the brain. Scientific orthodoxy used to hold that the adult brain was fixed and immutable: experience could alter the strengths of the connections among its neurons, it was believed, but not its overall architecture. By the late 1960s, however, striking evidence of brain plasticity began to emerge. In one series of experiments, researchers cut nerves in the hands of monkeys, and then, using microelectrode probes, observed that the monkeys’ brains reorganised themselves to compensate for the peripheral damage. Later, tests on people who had lost an arm or a leg revealed something similar: the brain areas that used to receive sensory input from the lost limbs seemed to get taken over by circuits that register sensations from other parts of the body (which may account for the ‘phantom limb’ phenomenon). Signs of brain plasticity have been observed in healthy people, too. Violinists, for instance, tend to have larger cortical areas devoted to processing signals from their fingering hands than do non-violinists. And brain scans of London cab drivers taken in the 1990s revealed that they had larger than normal posterior hippocampuses – a part of the brain that stores spatial representations – and that the increase in size was proportional to the number of years they had been in the job.

The brain’s ability to change its own structure, as Carr sees it, is nothing less than ‘a loophole for free thought and free will’. But, he hastens to add, ‘bad habits can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones.’ Indeed, neuroplasticity has been invoked to explain depression, tinnitus, pornography addiction and masochistic self-mutilation (this last is supposedly a result of pain pathways getting rewired to the brain’s pleasure centres). Once new neural circuits become established in our brains, they demand to be fed, and they can hijack brain areas devoted to valuable mental skills. Thus, Carr writes: ‘The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains.’ And the internet ‘delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli – repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive – that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions’. He quotes the brain scientist Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of neuroplasticity and the man behind the monkey experiments in the 1960s, to the effect that the brain can be ‘massively remodelled’ by exposure to the internet and online tools like Google. ‘THEIR HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES,’ Merzenich warns in caps – in a blog post, no less.

It’s not that the web is making us less intelligent; if anything, the evidence suggests it sharpens more cognitive skills than it dulls. It’s not that the web is making us less happy, although there are certainly those who, like Carr, feel enslaved by its rhythms and cheated by the quality of its pleasures. It’s that the web may be an enemy of creativity. Which is why Woody Allen might be wise in avoiding it altogether.

empirical support for Carr’s conclusion is both slim and equivocal. To begin with, there is evidence that web surfing can increase the capacity of working memory. And while some studies have indeed shown that ‘hypertexts’ impede retention – in a 2001 Canadian study, for instance, people who read a version of Elizabeth Bowen’s story ‘The Demon Lover’ festooned with clickable links took longer and reported more confusion about the plot than did those who read it in an old-fashioned ‘linear’ text – others have failed to substantiate this claim. No study has shown that internet use degrades the ability to learn from a book, though that doesn’t stop people feeling that this is so – one medical blogger quoted by Carr laments, ‘I can’t read War and Peace any more.’

Since the arrest of Julian Assange in December, the US government that protested against the censorship policies of rogue states has now called for similar acts for its own protection. If anything, this proves that while the political uses of the internet are in question, so is the definition of freedom that underpins it. The internet proves that you can’t have it both ways.

In contrast, while David Eagleman’s Why the Net Matters might sometimes suffer from what Morozov calls “cyber-utopianism”

The content is organised so that it can be navigated in any number of ways, and each page is accompanied by impressive images and graphics, sometimes with little connection to the text.

This new work, an enhanced app available only in digital form, is not quite a book – more an essay with added features. It is one of the first enhanced ebooks to come from a mainstream British publisher and offers some insight into what the future book might look like.

Looking at six different ways the internet might save us from disaster, Eagleman buys into the Clinton doctrine without question. He shows how the internet will help us to combat epidemics, preserve knowledge and respond to natural disasters with websites such as www.ushahidi.com, which came into its own after the Haiti earthquake, and allowed aid workers on the ground to pinpoint in real time, using email, Twitter and SMS, where help was most needed.

What these two books prove is that we still don’t know what the internet is and what it is for. This is no bad thing. The web is a tool that may liberate the future, if not quite delivering the type of freedom that Eagleman proposes. It is at its best when it grows from grass roots and responds to immediate concerns.

That’s when I wrote my last significant piece for Skeptic North.  Titled, “Rodney Palmer: When Pseudoscience and Narcissism Collide,” it was a fiery take-down of every claim I heard Palmer speak before the committee, as well as reiterating some of his undisclosed collusion, unethical media tactics, and some reasons why he should not be considered an expert.

This time, the article got a lot more reader eyeballs than anything I had ever written for this blog (or my own) and it also caught the attention of someone on a school board which was poised to vote on wifi.  In these regards: Mission very accomplished.  I finally thought that I might be able to see some people in the media start to look at Palmer’s claims with a more critical eye than they had been previously, and I was flattered at the mountain of kind words, re-tweets, reddit comments and Facebook “likes.”

The comments section was mostly supportive of my article, and they were one of the few things that kept me from hiding in a hole for six weeks.  There were a few comments in opposition to what I wrote, some sensible, most incoherent rambling (one commenter, when asked for evidence, actually linked to a YouTube video which they referred to as “peer reviewed”)

One commenter was none other than the titular subject of the post, Rodney Palmer himself.  Here is a screen shot of what he said: Screen shot of the Libel/Slander threat.

Knowing full well the story of the libel threat against Simon Singh, I’ve always thought that if ever a threat like that came my way, I’d happily beat it back with the righteous fury and good humour of a person with the facts on their side.  After all, if I’m wrong, you’d be able to prove me wrong, rather than try to shut me up with a threat of a lawsuit.  Indeed, I’ve been through a similar situation once before, so I should be an old hat at this! Let me tell you friends, it’s not that easy.  In fact, it’s awful.  Outside observers could easily identify that Palmer had no case against me, but that was still cold comfort to me.  It is a very stressful situation to find yourself in.

The state of libel and slander laws in this country are such that a person can threaten a lawsuit without actually threatening a lawsuit.  There is no need to hire a lawyer to investigate the claims, look into who I am, where I live, where I work, and issue a carefully worded threatening letter demanding compliance.  All a person has to say is some version of  “Libel.  Slander.  Hmmmm….,” and that’s enough to spook a lot of people into backing off. It’s a modern day bogeyman.  They don’t have to prove it.  They don’t have to act on it.  A person or organization just has to say “BOO!” with sufficient seriousness, and unless you’ve got a good deal of editorial and financial support, discussion goes out the window. Libel Chill refers to the ‘chilling effect’ that the possibility of a libel/slander lawsuit has.  If a person is scared they might get sued, then they won’t even comment on a piece at all.  In my case, I had already commented three times on the wifi scaremongering, but this bogus threat against me was surely a major contributing factor to my not commenting again.

I ceased to discuss anything in the comment thread of the original article, and even shied away from other comment threads, calling me out.  I learned a great deal about the wifi/EMF issue since I wrote the article, but I did not comment on any of it, because I knew that Palmer and his supporters were watching me like a hawk (sorry to stretch the simile), and would likely try to silence me again.  I couldn’t risk a lawsuit.  Even though I knew there was no case against me, I couldn’t afford a lawyer just to prove that I didn’t do anything illegal.

The Libel and Slanders Act of Ontario, 1990 hasn’t really caught up with the internet.  There isn’t a clear precedent that defines a blog post, Twitter feed or Facebook post as falling under the umbrella of “broadcast,” which is what the bill addresses.  If I had written the original article in print, Palmer would have had six weeks to file suit against me.  But the internet is only kind of considered ‘broadcast.’  So it could be just six weeks, but he could also have up to two years to act and get a lawyer after me.  Truth is, there’s not a clear demarcation point for our Canadian legal system.

Libel laws in Canada are somewhere in between the Plaintiff-favoured UK system, and the Defendant-favoured US system.  On the one hand, if Palmer chose to incur the expense and time to hire a lawyer and file suit against me, the burden of proof would be on me to prove that I did not act with malice.  Easy peasy.  On the other hand, I would have a strong case that I acted in the best interests of Canadians, which would fall under the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision on protecting what has been termed, “Responsible Communication.”  The Supreme Court of Canada decision does not grant bloggers immunity from libel and slander suits, but it is a healthy dose of welcome freedom to discuss issues of importance to Canadians.

Palmer himself did not specify anything against me in his threat.  There was nothing particular that he complained about, he just said a version of “Libel and Slander!” at me.  He may as well have said “Boo!”

This is not a DBAD discussion (although I wholeheartedly agree with Phil Plait there). 

If you’d like to boil my lessons down to an acronym, I suppose the best one would be DBRBC: Don’t be reckless. Be Careful.

I wrote a piece that, although it was not incorrect in any measurable way, was written with fire and brimstone, piss and vinegar.  I stand by my piece, but I caution others to be a little more careful with the language they use.  Not because I think it is any less or more tactically advantageous (because I’m not sure anyone can conclusively demonstrate that being an aggressive jerk is an inherently better or worse communication tool), but because the risks aren’t always worth it.

I’m not saying don’t go after a person.  There are egomaniacs out there who deserve to be called out and taken down (verbally, of course).  But be very careful with what you say.

ask yourself some questions first: 1) What goal(s) are you trying to accomplish with this piece? Are you trying to convince people that there is a scientific misunderstanding here?  Are you trying to attract the attention of the mainstream media to a particular facet of the issue?  Are you really just pissed off and want to vent a little bit?  Is this article a catharsis, or is it communicative?  Be brutally honest with your intentions, it’s not as easy as you think.  Venting is okay.  So is vicious venting, but be careful what you dress it up as.

2) In order to attain your goals, did you use data, or personalities?  If the former, are you citing the best, most current data you have available to you? Have you made a reasonable effort to check your data against any conflicting data that might be out there? If the latter, are you providing a mountain of evidence, and not just projecting onto personalities?  There is nothing inherently immoral or incorrect with going after the personalities.  But it is a very risky undertaking. You have to be damn sure you know what you’re talking about, and damn ready to defend yourself.  If you’re even a little loose with your claims, you will be called out for it, and a legal threat is very serious and stressful. So if you’re going after a personality, is it worth it?

3) Are you letting the science speak for itself?  Are you editorializing?  Are you pointing out what part of your piece is data and what part is your opinion?

4) If this piece was written in anger, frustration, or otherwise motivated by a powerful emotion, take a day.  Let your anger subside.  It will.  There are many cathartic enterprises out there, and you don’t need to react to the first one that comes your way.  Let someone else read your work before you share it with the internet.  Cooler heads definitely do think more clearly.

Some markets have local firms that compete on price to offer legitimate content (think the US, which has companies like Hulu, Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft that compete to offer legal video content). But the authors conclude that, in most of the world, legitimate copyrighted goods are only distributed by huge multinational corporations whose dominant goals are not to service a large part of local markets but to “protect the pricing structure in the high-income countries that generate most of their profits.”

This might increase profits globally, but it has led to disaster in many developing economies, where piracy may run north of 90 percent. Given access to cheap digital tools, but charged terrific amounts of money for legitimate versions of content, users choose piracy.

In Russia, for instance, researchers noted that legal versions of the film The Dark Knight went for $15. That price, akin to what a US buyer would pay, might sound reasonable until you realize that Russians make less money in a year than US workers. As a percentage of their wages, that $15 price is actually equivalent to a US consumer dropping $75 on the film. Pirate versions can be had for one-third the price.

Simple crackdowns on pirate behavior won't work in the absence of pricing and other reforms, say the report's authors (who also note that even "developed" economies routinely pirate TV shows and movies that are not made legally available to them for days, weeks, or months after they originally appear elsewhere).

The "strong moralization of the debate” makes it difficult to discuss issues beyond enforcement, however, and the authors slam the content companies for lacking any credible "endgame" to their constant requests for more civil and police powers in the War on Piracy.

piracy is a “signal of unmet consumer demand.

Our studies raise concerns that it may be a long time before such accommodations to reality reach the international policy arena. Hardline enforcement positions may be futile at stemming the tide of piracy, but the United States bears few of the costs of such efforts, and US companies reap most of the modest benefits. This is a recipe for continued US pressure on developing countries, very possibly long after media business models in the United States and other high-income countries have changed.

Dr Altuna not only includes the lack of involvement of teaching staff amongst the limitations for incorporating ICT, but also that of the involvement of the families. It was explained that families showed interest in the use of Internet and ICTs as educational tools for their children, but that these, too, excessively delegate to the schools. The researcher stressed that the families also need guidance, as they are concerned about the use by their children of Internet but do not know the best way to go about the problem.

Educational psychologist Dr Jon Altuna has carried out a thorough study of the phenomenon of the school 2.0. Concretely, he has looked into the use and level of incorporation of Internet and of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into the third cycle of Primary Education, observing at the same time the attitudes of the teaching staff, and of the students and the families of the children in this regard. His PhD, defended at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), is entitled, Incorporation of Internet into the teaching of the subject Knowledge of the Environment during the third cycle of Primary Education: possibilities and analysis of the situation of a school. Dr Altuna’s research is based on a study of cases undertaken over eight years at a school where new activities involving ICT had been introduced into the curricular subject of Knowledge of the Environment, taught in the fifth and sixth year of Primary Education. The researcher gathered data from 837 students, 134 teachers and 190 families of this school. This study was completed with the experiences of ICT teachers from 21 schools.

In the old days, mainstream editors could be relied upon to block publication of any photos (of small audiences) that would embarrass the PAP, but netizens are only too eager to publish such pictures. The paradigm has shifted.

A smart response, in my view, would be for the PAP to shift the paradigm again: No more rallies. Don’t create opportunities to be embarrassed. Once such a decision is taken, the subsequent question will naturally be: How else to campaign for votes? Clearly the answer will have to lie with new media. Perhaps a blitz of cool videos, catchy phrases that can be spread by mobile media and other tools which even I myself, not being state of the art in many ways, cannot anticipate. If indeed they took such a decision some time back, they would have spent maybe 18 months conceptualising and putting together such a campaign.

Meanwhile the opposition parties have been stuck in their old ways (the Singapore Democratic party excepted) thinking in terms of market walkabouts and rallies in muddy fields, assuming that there will be little liberalisation of media rules.

Suppose I concede to Prinz that reason cannot settle differences in moral values and sentiments. Difference of opinion doesn’t mean that there isn’t a true or rational answer. In fact, there are many reasons why our cognition, emotional reactions or previous values could be wrong or irrational — and why people would not pick up on their deficiencies. In his article, Prinz uses the case of sociopaths, who simply lack certain cognitive abilities. There are many reasons other than sociopathy why human beings can get things wrong, morally speaking, often and badly. It could be that people are unable to adopt a more objective morality because of their circumstances — from brain deficiencies to lack of access to relevant information. But, again, none of this amounts to an argument against the existence of objective morality.

As it turns out, Prinz’s conception of objective morality does not quite reflect the thinking of most people who believe in objective morality. He writes that: “Objectivism holds that there is one true morality binding upon all of us.” This is a particular strand of moral realism, but there are many. For instance, one can judge some moral precepts as better than others, yet remain open to the fact that there are probably many different ways to establish a good society. This is a pluralistic conception of objective morality which doesn’t assume one absolute moral truth. For all that has been said, Sam Harris’ idea of a moral landscape does help illustrate this concept. Thinking in terms of better and worse morality gets us out of relativism and into an objectivist approach. The important thing to note is that one need not go all the way to absolute objectivity to work toward a rational, non-arbitrary morality.

even Prinz admits that “Relativism does not entail that we should tolerate murderous tyranny. When someone threatens us or our way of life, we are strongly motivated to protect ourselves.” That is, there are such things as better and worse values: the worse ones kill us, the better ones don’t. This is a very broad criterion, but it is an objective standard. Prinz is arguing for a tighter moral relativism – a sort of stripped down objective morality that is constricted by nature, experience, and our (modest) reasoning abilities.

I proposed at the discussion that a more objective morality could be had with the help of a robust public discourse on the issues at hand. Prinz does not necessarily disagree. He wrote that “Many people have overlapping moral values, and one can settle debates by appeal to moral common ground.” But Prinz pointed out a couple of limitations on public discourse. For example, the agreements we reach on “moral common ground” are often exclusive of some, and abstract in content. Consider the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, a seemingly good example of global moral agreement. Yet, it was ratified by a small sample of 48 countries, and it is based on suspiciously Western sounding language. Everyone has a right to education and health care, but — Prinz pointed out during the discussion — what level of education and health care? Still, the U.N. declaration was passed 48-0 with just 8 abstentions (Belarus, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, USSR, Yugoslavia, South Africa and Saudi Arabia). It includes 30 articles of ethical standards agreed upon by 48 countries around the world. Such a document does give us more reason to think that public discourse can lead to significant agreement upon values.

Reason might not be able to arrive at moral truths, but it can push us to test and question the rationality of our values — a crucial part in the process that leads to the adoption of new, or modified values. The only way to reduce disputes about morality is to try to get people on the same page about their moral goals. Given the above, this will not be easy, and perhaps we shouldn’t be too optimistic in our ability to employ reason to figure things out. But reason is still the best, and even only, tool we can wield, and while it might not provide us with a truly objective morality, it’s enough to save us from complete moral relativism.

it's in these companies' hands to do this ethically--to build algorithms that show us what we need to know and what we don't know, not just what we like.

why would the Googles and Facebooks of the world change what they're doing (absent government regulation)? My hope is that, like newspapers, they'll move from a pure profit-making posture to one that recognizes that they're keepers of the public trust.

most people don't know how Google and Facebook are controlling their information flows. And once they do, most people I've met want to have more control and transparency than these companies currently offer. So it's a way in to that conversation. First people have to know how the Internet is being edited for them.

what's good and bad about the personalization. Tell me some ways that this is not a good thing? Here's a few. 1) It's a distorted view of the world. Hearing your own views and ideas reflected back is comfortable, but it can lead to really bad decisions--you need to see the whole picture to make good decisions; 2) It can limit creativity and innovation, which often come about when two relatively unrelated concepts or ideas are juxtaposed; and 3) It's not great for democracy, because democracy requires a common sense of the big problems that face us and an ability to put ourselves in other peoples' shoes.

Stanford researchers Dean Eckles and Maurits Kapstein, who figured out that not only do people have personal tastes, they have personal "persuasion profiles". So I might respond more to appeals to authority (Barack Obama says buy this book), and you might respond more to scarcity ("only 2 left!"). In theory, if a site like Amazon could identify your persuasion profile, it could sell it to other sites--so that everywhere you go, people are using your psychological weak spots to get you to do stuff. I also really enjoyed talking to the guys behind OKCupid, who take the logic of Google and apply it to dating.

Nobody noticed when Google went all-in on personalization, because the filtering is very hard to see.