Fragmentation - Weiye Loh on Diigo

Mar

7

2012

Our Kind of Truth - Ian Buruma - Project Syndicate

It is unlikely that Rick Santorum, or many of his followers, have read any post-modern theorists. Santorum, after all, recently called Obama a “snob” for claiming that all Americans should be entitled to a college education. So he must surely loath writers who represent everything that the Tea Party and other radical right-wingers abhor: the highly educated, intellectual, urban, secular, and not always white. These writers are the left-wing elite, at least in academia.
But, as so often happens, ideas have a way of migrating in unexpected ways. The blogger who dismissed The Washington Post’s corrections of Santorum’s fictional portrayal of the Netherlands expressed himself like a perfect post-modernist. The most faithful followers of obscure leftist thinkers in Paris, New York, or Berkeley are the most reactionary elements in the American heartland. Of course, if this were pointed out to them, they would no doubt dismiss it as elitist propaganda.

www.project-syndicate.org/...English

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Journalism Polarisation Fragmentation Politics Bias Postmodernism

Of course, not everything in the mainstream media is always true. Mistakes are made. News organizations have political biases, sometimes reflecting the views and interests of their owners.

But high-quality journalism has always relied on its reputation for probity. Editors, as well as reporters, at least tried to get the facts right. That is why people read Le Monde, The New York Times, or, indeed, the Washington Post. Filtering nonsense was one of their duties – and their main selling point.
It is unlikely that Rick Santorum, or many of his followers, have read any post-modern theorists. Santorum, after all, recently called Obama a “snob” for claiming that all Americans should be entitled to a college education. So he must surely loath writers who represent everything that the Tea Party and other radical right-wingers abhor: the highly educated, intellectual, urban, secular, and not always white. These writers are the left-wing elite, at least in academia.
1 more annotation(s)...
- But, as so often happens, ideas have a way of migrating in unexpected ways. The blogger who dismissed The Washington Post’s corrections of Santorum’s fictional portrayal of the Netherlands expressed himself like a perfect post-modernist. The most faithful followers of obscure leftist thinkers in Paris, New York, or Berkeley are the most reactionary elements in the American heartland. Of course, if this were pointed out to them, they would no doubt dismiss it as elitist propaganda.

Aug

7

2011

Rationally Speaking: Why you should hold your beliefs at arm’s length

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...ould-hold-your-beliefs-at.html

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Ideology Opinion Identity Communication Fragmentation

To begin with, by thinking of this opinion as a characteristic of his person, he is ensuring that criticisms of that opinion will feel like malicious personal attacks on him. I have experienced this from the inside (in my youth as an armchair Trotskyite), and seen similar tendencies in many true believers I’m acquainted with. Eventually, criticism of the idea comes to have a nasty emotional impact similar to criticism of, say, personal appearance.
Relatedly, by committing to this view in public, Carl is ensuring that changing his mind will be maximally difficult and embarrassing. We change our minds less often than we think, and part of the reas
(As an aside, this has huge implications for effective communication between people who disagree. For example, try to treat both your own beliefs and those of others as external to the person altogether. A simple change of phrasing from “I think you’re incorrect” to “I think this idea is incorrect” may make the difference between defensiveness and honest appraisal. On a personal level, I find it useful to think of beliefs as maps that I take out of an imaginary glove compartment.)
6 more annotation(s)...
- The third reason that Carl is wrong to call himself a monarchist (and why I think people oughtn’t to call themselves liberals, conservatives, libertarians, environmentalists or whatever) is that human brains are very leaky contraptions, and one corollary of this is that initially descriptive ideas tend to drift in the direction of prescriptivity (hence, inter alia, the naturalistic fallacy). Let’s say you notice, as a fact about yourself, that you favor low taxes and a generally small government on ethical and practical grounds. You look in a dictionary and, lo and behold, that is a big part of the definition of “conservative.” Out come the phonemes: “I am a conservative.” Aren’t words great?
  What you will probably not notice, however, is that increasingly when you don’t know what you think about some issue yet (say, your country’s stance on foreign affairs), you will take your cue from other self-identified conservatives, as opposed to thinking it through yourself and then describing your conclusion in political terminology. The normative self-definition has staged its coup d’etat. Whatever “conservatives” think, that is going to be your opinion. Of course, when I put it that way, it looks ridiculous. But from the inside, this process feels perfectly rational — like wisely throwing your lot in with a really smart group of people.
- I suggest we should take a piecemeal approach to political issues, avoiding an excessive focus on their historical relations with each other.
- The problem with calling yourself an “atheist” is not that the proposition itself is wrong. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a proposition more overdetermined by philosophical and scientific lines of evidence than this one: that all the creator beings humans have ever dreamt up are laughably improbable (if they even rise to the level of being coherent).
  Rather, the problems with such a self-definition are as follows:
  (1) You will probably develop “person with a hammer” syndrome, wherein every problem you see looks like a nail, or in this case a jihadi. Realistically, although religious belief is a big problem, it is not anything remotely like the biggest problem. If you flipped a switch and everybody on earth became an atheist, we would still retain most of our problems.
  (Arguably, a mass deconversion could actually be a bad or at least neutral thing, if there were no concomitant understanding of rationality in general, or of how ethics, meaning, emotion and subjectivity are supposed to fit into a determined and purely physical universe. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing — just ask the atheists who are now nihilists as well, or the people who think Young’s double-slit experiment proves that We Are All One Consciousness, Man.)
- Also, (2) Why do we care? What interesting thing does this tell us about you, other than your stance on one rather silly proposition? What DO you actually believe in, apart from not being a theist?
  It would be different if you had said “I’m a rationalist” or “I’m a mysterian” or whatever. These refer to interesting tendencies in philosophical thought — tendencies whose consequences are far-reaching indeed. As an aside, note that although being a rationalist should (I claim) result in very low subjective probabilities for creator beings, the term refers to the process by which such claims are to be considered — it doesn’t hard-code specific claims into its definition. Thank goodness.
- (3) In general, it’s bad practice to allow propositions — even very certain ones — into your self-definition. Reasons for this were discussed above: among other things, it makes changing your mind nearly impossible, as well as socially costly. Yes yes, I know you won’t need to change your mind on this question. But are you really so good at judging which propositions are near-certain, and which aren’t? If you say “odds of 99:1 against” on 100 separate occasions, you won’t be wrong more than once or twice... right?
- (4) It’s (probably) nothing to be proud of. If you grew up in a truly religious household or community, with unapologetic brainwashing and social seclusion along religious lines, then yes, you should be proud to have found your way through all those obstacles to the truth. If, however (like me) your parents gave you a measure of intellectual freedom, and your society does too, then you should be no more proud of your atheism than a middle-class westerner should be proud of a high-school diploma. Above all, in general, beliefs are for predicting future experiences, not for feeling proud.
  Just as a probability distribution is not an accomplishment, a policy preference is not a part of who you are.

Jun

23

2011

Ugly politics in NY gay marriage vote

The fight over legalizing gay marriage in New York is getting ugly online as the Republican Senate plans to finally consider the bill in closed-door conference Thursday.

The leader of the state Senate, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan and at least one other lawmaker have been besieged by offensive posts, forcing them to curtail comments.

www.wtnh.com/...vote-get-ugly-nt11-jpe_3858783

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Freedom of Speech Homosexuality Religion Law Marriage Discrimination Politics Fragmentation

"Our unofficial Facebook policy is not to automatically delete comments that disagree with us, but when the comments come into untruths or uncharitable, then we have to delete them," Poust said. "And when it really becomes abusive we have to ban them."

According to the group, one Facebook post stated: "Eventually your kind of 'religion' will be extinguished from the memory of mankind forever, because this sort of interference in the lives of people you only wish to harm. You have NO MORAL AUTHORITY any longer because of your evil pedophilia."

Another said the Catholic church only approves of marriages "that produce altar boys to be molested."

The group deleted both.
"The tension has really reached a fever pitch for some people. ... I'm sure there are certain unstable members of both sides who are prone to excess," Poust said.
2 more annotation(s)...
- The Democrat has been using a
  
  kind of shuttle diplomacy to privately test proposals for additional religious exceptions within the Senate's Republican majority. He's talked to individual senators or small groups of lawmakers privately, breaking down barriers and letting them take his message to others in the Republican caucus.
  
  The proposed protections are aimed at saving religious groups from discrimination lawsuits if they refuse to recognize gay marriage based on their principles.
  
  "Will the conference allow a vote to be taken, that's the threshold," Cuomo said Wednesday evening. "I'm pro-marriage equality, I'm also pro-First Amendment, I'm pro-church-state separation and I'm pro-religious freedom. So I also have the same concern."
  
  Even if Republicans agree to the religious exemptions, that's no guarantee the bill will pass.
- Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa and the District of Columbia allow gay marriage. Of them, all but Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., allow at least limited religious exemptions.

Ghetto Women « Quiet Riot Girl

What seems to have happened is that many feminist interest groups have taken on this concept of ‘intersectionality’ but interpreted it in a simplistic way. They acknowledge how ‘feminism’ cannot represent all women as a homogenous group. They identify themselves as a minority who is ‘othered’ by the dominant feminist ideology, and is seen as ‘troublesome’. But their reaction is to retreat into their own ‘ghetto’, where they feel safe and are not ‘troubled’ by anyone else’s differing identities and opinions. So the radical feminists, trans women, ‘womanists’ , liberal feminists, anti-sex industry feminists, pro-porn feminists, trade union feminists all inhabit different discursive and physical spaces. In some cases they are patrolled by guards and have high fences round them, to keep out intruders.

But I have no interest in ‘ghetto’ politics.

quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/...ghetto-women

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Identity Feminism Fragmentation

There were some key single interest movements in the past, such as Radical Feminism and Black Power, which needed to distinguish themselves from ‘mainstream’ society and organise, educate themselves separately. But this is 2010 not 1970, and even if people need to work in single-issue groups at times, if there is no coming together, no communication, no acknowledgement of the inevitable intersection between us all, there is no future for feminism.
feminism is operating in ghettos, and how anyone who tries to break down the barriers and climb over the fence, gets her hand bitten.
4 more annotation(s)...
- I think as well there is a case of ‘blame the messenger’ going on here. I am one of very few feminists that I am aware of in the UK who is drawing attention to these divisions and conflicts within feminism. I have been accused of getting involved in ‘infighting’ instead of focussing on our shared aims and objectives.
- . I think you’re right that contemporary feminism isn’t resolving its conflicts very well. I wonder, though, whether this isn’t inevitable. Large groups of people can arrange themselves around simple, singular concepts and identities, but rarely around more complex, plural, ones.
- I can see why the most powerful of oppressed groups are the likely to be successful in pressing for change for themselves, but not well placed to understand the needs of others. White middle class people have power, so those women are the ones who are going to be most visible, most likely to facilitate change, but that change will be limited by many lacunae. As a white, middle class, feminist, I can try to understand other identities, I can even stand in solidarity, but there how much can I use my power for them? I’d like to be helpful, but the white Western men who invade to liberate women from the burqa think they are being helpful, too, and how do you know if you’ve become one of those?
- . Neither D/s nor S/M is necessarily about gender — it’s about an exchange of power, and the eroticisation of pain. There are submissive men and dominant women; it’s not about male violence at all.

Jun

14

2011

How the net traps us all in our own little bubbles | Technology | The Observer

An invisible revolution has taken place is the way we use the net, but the increasing personalisation of information by search engines such as Google threatens to limit our access to information and enclose us in a self-reinforcing world view, writes Eli Pariser in an extract from The Filter Bubble

www.guardian.co.uk/...sation-internet-data-filtering

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Internet Search Search Engine Optimization Fragmentation Polarisation Cultural Industries

Google would use 57 signals – everything from where you were logging in from to what browser you were using to what you had searched for before – to make guesses about who you were and what kinds of sites you'd like. Even if you were logged out, it would customise its results, showing you the pages it predicted you were most likely to click on.
Most of us assume that when we google a term, we all see the same results – the ones that the company's famous Page Rank algorithm suggests are the most authoritative based on other pages' links. But since December 2009, this is no longer true. Now you get the result that Google's algorithm suggests is best for you in particular – and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google any more.
8 more annotation(s)...
- In the spring of 2010, while the remains of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig were spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, I asked two friends to search for the term "BP". They're pretty similar – educated white left-leaning women who live in the north-east. But the results they saw were quite different. One saw investment information about BP. The other saw news.
- the query "stem cells" might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem-cell research and activists who oppose it.
- "Proof of climate change" might turn up different results for an environmental activist and an oil-company executive.
- majority of us assume search engines are unbiased. But that may be just because they're increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click. Google's announcement marked the turning point of an important but nearly invisible revolution in how we consume information. You could say that on 4 December 2009 the era of personalisation began.
- Personalisation is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life – much of which you might not trust friends with.
- To be the author of your life, professor Yochai Benkler argues, you have to be aware of a diverse array of options and lifestyles. When you enter a filter bubble, you're letting the companies that construct it choose which options you're aware of. You may think you're the captain of your own destiny, but personalisation can lead you down a road to a kind of informational determinism in which what you've clicked on in the past determines what you see next – a web history you're doomed to repeat. You can get stuck in a static, ever- narrowing version of yourself – an endless you-loop.
- We are predisposed to respond to a pretty narrow set of stimuli – if a piece of news is about sex, power, gossip, violence, celebrity or humour, we are likely to read it first. This is the content that most easily makes it into the filter bubble. It's easy to push "Like" and increase the visibility of a friend's post about finishing a marathon or an instructional article about how to make onion soup. It's harder to push the "Like" button on an article titled "Darfur sees bloodiest month in two years". In a personalised world, important but complex or unpleasant issues – the rising prison population, for example, or homelessness – are less likely to come to our attention at all.
- As a consumer, it's hard to argue with blotting out the irrelevant and unlikable. But what is good for consumers is not necessarily good for citizens. What I seem to like may not be what I actually want, let alone what I need to know to be an informed member of my community or country. "It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest," technology journalist Clive Thompson told me. Cultural critic Lee Siegel puts it a different way: "Customers are always right, but people aren't."

Jun

9

2011

We Do It All The Time | Politics | The American Scene

Knobe goes on to argue that the answer to this question is inevitably ideological – people identify the “true” Mark Pierpont with the “side” in the conflict that they agree with. Liberals say he’s “really” gay and should chuck the religious repression. Conservatives say he’s “really” Christian and shouldn’t give in to temptation.

But those are the perspectives of outsiders. What do they know? I would wager anything that, from Mark Pierpont’s perspective, the “real” him is the one in conflict. That’s what makes his situation tragic. The desires don’t come from the devil and the repression doesn’t come from society. They both come from him.

theamericanscene.com/...we-do-it-all-the-time

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Religion Homosexuality Reality Identity Fragmentation

this is not a peculiarity to homosexuality. The woman who is a devoted mother who’s fallen out of love with her husband has a conflict. You could say that she “needs” to take care of her needs and leave him, or she’ll wind up dragging her kids down with her misery, or you could say that she “needs” to put her selfish needs aside and think of her children, and that if she does this she’ll find fulfillment within the life she has. But these aren’t advice – they are ways of making us feel better about the advice we’re giving. The reality is: she’s got a profound conflict. Her true self is divided.
whatever way you wind up jumping in these sorts of conflicts, you first have to acknowledge that the conflict is real. It’s really easy to tell ourselves happy little lies to convince ourselves that the conflict doesn’t actually exist, but we’re not really fooling ourselves. We’re getting through the day, but at a cost of escalating levels of stress and alienation from ourselves. And, as a consequence, from those who care about us.
5 more annotation(s)...
- When the woman tells her husband about her conflict, he’ll have to respond. That response, in turn, will help clarify for her what is and isn’t possible.
- if we experience an internal conflict, such as Mark Pierpont’s, why, unless there is a reality to the self, can we not resolve that conflict by an act of will? Why are we so constituted that we can experience that kind of conflicted self, a self that needs two things that cannot be reconciled? I don’t see how you answer that question without accepting that the self has some reality. When you say “anything that works works” that means, presumably, anything that works for your real self. Because, given that you have a real self, not everything will.
- both Wilkinson and Knobe spend much of their time thinking about how we perceive other people’s “true selves.” But it’s important to recognize that their examples pertain to situations where we are not experiencing these other selves directly, but rather mediated through mass communications. If we knew Mark Pierpont through his various changes, we would make an assessment of whether he seemed “more himself” before or after not only based on our ideology but based on our actual experience of him. If we are at all sensitive people, we’d know – whether we liked it or not – whether he seemed more “real” before or after.
- it’s worth highlighting how our intuitions can serve us poorly when we experience people in a mediated form.
- when we talk about politics, the intuitions that we bring to the game from the world of small-scale interpersonal relations can easily betray us. The guy who “seems authentic” and “makes you want to trust him” is the guy to be nervous about – because he has a kind of charisma that is powerful. He is not earning your trust; almost by definition, he’s conning you. That doesn’t mean “don’t vote for that guy” – precisely because that guy has that power, he’s likely to be more effective. It means don’t trust that this “authenticity” means what it might mean in an interpersonal context of long and stable relationships. You don’t really know who any of these guys are. The one thing you can know for certain, though, is that they aren’t who they want you to believe they are. Because they want you to believe that they understand you, personally, and they want tens of millions of other people to believe the same thing about them. And that’s just not humanly possible.

Rowan Williams: no one voted for coalition policies | UK news | The Guardian

"The uncomfortable truth is that, while grass-roots initiatives and local mutualism are to be found flourishing in a great many places, they have been weakened by several decades of cultural fragmentation," Williams writes.

www.guardian.co.uk/...an-williams-coalition-policies

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Religion Fragmentation Politics

Jun

4

2011

Hacker attacks threaten to dampen cloud computing's prospects | Reuters

The recent high-profile hacking of Google's Gmail service and Sony's Playstation gaming network is threatening to slow the take-off of the next big thing in the computing space - the cloud.

www.reuters.com/...omputing-idUSTRE7521WQ20110603

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Hacking Cloud Computing Fragmentation

Security is a hot issue in the computing world. Hackers broke into Sony's networks and accessed the information of more than 1 million customers, the latest of several security breaches.
The breaches were the latest attacks on high-profile firms, including defense contractor Lockheed Martin and Google, which pointed the blame at China.
Analysts and industry experts believe hardware-based security provides a higher level of protection than software with encryption added to data in the servers. Chipmakers are working to build more authentication into the silicon.
1 more annotation(s)...
- one of the problems cloud faces is that it is a fragmented market where many vendors provide different security solutions based on their own standards.
  Intel's rival ARM and Advanced Micro Devices are also in the process of embedding higher security in their chips and processors, but working with different partners.
  If there was an open standard to follow, it would help the industry to build a much secure cloud system, according to AMD.

May

31

2011

Why a hyper-personalized Web is bad for you - Internet - Insight - ZDNet Asia

Eli Pariser is making noise these days as the author of "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You". His new book, which was released earlier this month, argues that the latest tools being implemented by the likes of Google and Facebook for making our Internet experiences as individual as possible are taking us down some very unsavory paths.

First, of course, Pariser explains the dynamic we all face online today: that no two people's Web searches, even on the same topics, return the same results. That's because search engines and other sites are basing what they send back on our previous searches, the sites we visit, ads we click on, preferences we indicate, and much more. Not to mention the fact that we are more and more shielded from viewpoints counter to our own.

But while the results are no doubt geared to what we're most interested in, they come at a price--in terms of lost privacy, more ads, and even being followed by certain types of ads no matter where we go online.

www.zdnetasia.com/eb-is-bad-for-you-62300497.htm

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Internet Polarisation Fragmentation Information Search Engine Optimization Social Media Persuasion Rhetorics

Invisibly but quickly, the Internet is changing. Sites like Google and Facebook show you what they think you want to see, based on data they've collected about you.
The filter bubble is the invisible, personal universe of information that results--a bubble you live in, and you don't even know it. And it means that the world you see online and the world I see may be very different.
7 more annotation(s)...
- As consumers, we can vary our information pathways more and use things like incognito browsing to stop some of the tracking that leads to personalization.
- 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.

Online Personalization Creates Echo Chamber to Affirm Biases - NYTimes.com

according to Eli Pariser, the author of “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You.” Personalization on the Web, he says, is becoming so pervasive that we may not even know what we’re missing: the views and voices that challenge our own thinking.

“People love the idea of having their feelings affirmed,” Mr. Pariser told me earlier this month. “If you can provide that warm, comfortable sense without tipping your hand that your algorithm is pandering to people, then all the better.”

www.nytimes.com/...29stream.html

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Fragmentation Polarisation Internet

May

31

2010

Skepticblog » Our Coming Robot Overlords

OUR COMING ROBOT OVERLORDS

by STEVEN NOVELLA, May 31 2010

skepticblog.org/...our-coming-robot-overlords

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Specialization Fragmentation Technology

our modern technological civilization is becoming too complex for us to manage adequately.
Certainly we need to get better at managing such complexity, by having clear lines of authority and responsibility, proper risk assessment, and a thorough understanding of group dynamics.
12 more annotation(s)...
- I also wrote previously about The Checklist Manifesto – Atul Gawande offers his own solution, the humble checklist. He convincingly argues that using checklists allow for better communication among individuals engaged in complex tasks, and results in systematic best practices and avoidance of forgetting details. Don’t rely on training and human memory, he argues – have a system.
- But I am left with the feeling, taking the longer view, that they are also stop-gap measures. Technological complexity will continue to increase, and it seems likely that complexity will outstrip our desperate attempts to manage it by modifying human behavior.
- As technology advances, people have to specialize on narrower and narrower slices of that technology.
- Medicine is another example – we still need generalists, but more and more they are becoming like contractors – guiding the overall management of health, but farming out to specialists the management of specific diseases and procedures.
- The solution that we are increasingly turning to is computers. We are automating those checklists, using computers to communicate among specialists, and expert systems to guide specialists. Computer programs are increasingly involved in design and engineering, risk management, and even the writing of other computer programs.
- As end users we are becoming increasingly comfortable relying upon computers for our needs.
- The question is – are they tools to make us more productive and free us from drudgery so that we can engage in more creative endeavors? Or are they making us lazy and dependent by coddling us? Perhaps a combination of both.
- One extreme vision of a dystopian future run by computer nannies is Wally. On board the ship that carries the remnants of humanity, people float around on recliners, endlessly engrossed in video entertainment, while the ship’s systems see to their every need.
- it is an interesting thought experiment – what will ultimately happen as our civilization becomes more and more complicated, and we need to rely more and more on computers? Some think we will merge with computers – we will become them, and will be able to expand our own mental abilities as needed.
- e may also reach an equilibrium, at least for a while, between relying on computers and using computers to enhance our own abilities and productivity. We may also see subcultures in which every permutation plays itself out.
- We also should not assume that as technology progresses complexity will necessarily increase as well. We may pass through a technological era of maximal complexity, but as our knowledge and technological prowess progress complexity will be replaced by elegant simplicity.
- It also seems that humans will, to some extent, titrate their own complexity. As technology makes our lives simpler, we find new things to do that add complexity – to the limit of our tolerance, then we search for ways to simplify again.

Weiye Loh's Library tagged Fragmentation → View Popular, Search in Google

Our Kind of Truth - Ian Buruma - Project Syndicate

Rationally Speaking: Why you should hold your beliefs at arm’s length

Ugly politics in NY gay marriage vote

Ghetto Women « Quiet Riot Girl

How the net traps us all in our own little bubbles | Technology | The Observer

We Do It All The Time | Politics | The American Scene

Rowan Williams: no one voted for coalition policies | UK news | The Guardian

Hacker attacks threaten to dampen cloud computing's prospects | Reuters

Why a hyper-personalized Web is bad for you - Internet - Insight - ZDNet Asia

Online Personalization Creates Echo Chamber to Affirm Biases - NYTimes.com

Skepticblog » Our Coming Robot Overlords

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