Tag: Slashdot.org

Jon Katz, Pseudoscience and Memes

Even when he’s right, somehow Jon Katz manages to be wrong. This time around he reviews Walter Gratzer’s Undergrowth of Science. Gratzer’s book has receive a lot of positive reviews and although I haven’t read his book I’ve read a lot of other things he’s written and Undergrowth of Science is probably well worth checking out. One of the major problems today is that Gratzer’s message isn’t self-evidence — most people seem to have a very unrealistic image of how science operates, which makes them gullible recipients of often distorted media messages about science.

This is why I suspect so many Internet-spread myths work so well — the Internet tales mimic closely mainstream sensationalistic reporting.

Anyway, while Katz goes on about how horrible it is that people buy into Pseudoscience, he slips in a bit of his own, writing,

In the media page, these scientific stumbles are particularly dangerous, as they become powerful memes that are rapidly and virally transmitted to the general population by information technologies like TV and the Net.

Memes? Yuck. I agree with Martin Gardner’s assessment that memes are simply not scientifically useful concepts, but rather represent an extremist sociobiological position that is untenable. Gardner notes that in The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore goes so far as to say that the self is an illusion.

Sometimes, for example, I am unsure what to think about some new phenomena. So I find every article on the topic I can on the Internet, print out the most promising looking ones, read the articles and then try to make up my mind. According to Blackmore I am living a lie. What is really going on is a competition between different memes in my brain which gives me the illusion of free choice, but in fact what I finally decide about the matter is dictated completely by the memes,

The self is not the initiator of actions, it
does not ‘have’ consciousness and it does not ‘do’ the deliberating. There is no truth in the idea of an inner self inside my body that controls the body and is conscious. Because this is false, so is the idea of my conscious self having free will.

While I tend to agree with the sociobiological position a great deal, it is this sort of extreme and clearly false claim that makes people reject sociobiology altogether as inherently unscientific and absurd. I assume that Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others would object as superstitious the claim that a person was literally motivated to perform a given action because a demon inhabited his or her body, and yet the claim that memes and genes are responsible for all human actions is simply this demonic claim wrapped up in scientific finery.

Slashdot’s Downhill Slide

Sometimes Slashdot is extremely infuriating. On the one hand people behind the site run around slamming Microsoft for its tactics, especially on a lot of the nonsense Microsoft puts out to tout its products’ alleged superiority. On the other hand, people like Jeff “Hemos” Bates demonstrate that they are just as shallow as soon as they step outside their narrow range of Linux advocacy.

What’s annoying me at the moment is a review by Bates of John Schwartz and Michael Osterholm’s book, Living Terrors. The books is one of several out now hyping the alleged dangers of bioterrorism.

First, the threat of bioterrorism is vastly overstated. As Jonathan Tucker’s Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons concludes,

Crude delivery methods are likely to remain the most common forms of chemical and biological warfare terrorism. They are potentially capable of inflicting at most tens to hundreds of fatalities—within the destructive range of high-explosive bombs, but not the mass deaths predicted by the most alarmist scenarios. Although the devastating potential of a “catastrophic” event of chemical and biological warfare use warrants examination, history suggests that the most probable terrorist use of chemical and biological warfare agents will be tactical and relatively small-scale.

We are likely to see bioterrorism, but they will be small scale attacks much like the release of sarin gas in the a Japanese subway a few years ago rather than massive disease outbreaks that kill thousands of people.

Even more annoying, though, is that Bates makes an error in the introduction to his review which could have been fact checked with a quick web search. According to Bates,

Given the recent reports on the almost total lack of security in places like Russia’s facility for holding the smallpox virus, their Cold War manufacturing of thousands of tons of the stuff, and the FBI sting operation of someone in Las Vegas trying to buy anthrax, the book’s subject matter hits even closer to home.

The Las Vegas “FBI sting operation” almost certainly refers to the 1998 arrest of William Leavitt, Jr. and Larry Wayne Harris. The FBI accused Leavitt and Harris of buying anthrax in order to create a biological weapon, and their arrest was a high profile news story that earned the two a good deal of time on national news broadcasts for a few days.

There was only one problem: what Leavitt and Harris actually bought was a vaccine for animal anthrax. The claim that the two had anthrax and were going to make a biological weapon came solely from an FBI information who had been previously convicted of extortion and at the time was party to several lawsuits.

All charges related to bioterrorism were dropped by the government and Leavitt was released. Although charges against Harris were dropped, he also faced charges related to violation of his parole.

I found all of the above information out by simply doing a Google search for “Las Vegas anthrax”. Is it really asking too much for Bates and others at Slashdot who seem to see themselves as uber geeks to do the same? Please, do us a favor and tear yourself away from Princess Mononoke long enough to do a little fact checking.

Bizarre Jon Katz article

In reviewing Margaret Wertheim’s bizarre new book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Jon Katz provides a classic Katz-ism for the ages,

My own sense is that they are witnessing and participating in the birth of a different sort of nation, seeking not so much spiritual as moral and ethical renewal. We have the sense of being present at the revolution, even if it’s not clear what kind of revolution. People are hungry not only for spirituality, but for a sense of purpose, and they don’t see one advanced in the election.

Nobody makes more profound statements about absolutely nothing than Katz.

Slashdotters Just Don’t Get It

The fun folks at Slashdot are enjoying ripping apart a new study of the effects of a Microsoft breakup. The study is published by a group that Microsoft contributes money to and reaches the conclusion that with a Microsoft breakup, the price of Windows would rise as high as $1,000 per license assuming the average price of a computer is $2,000.

I find this to be as absurd as the Slashdotters, but there’s something they seem to be missing — that figure is completely consistent with the government’s own case. The government claimed Microsoft has a monopoly power on Windows and yet several economists, including some publishing in peer reviewed academic journals, estimate the monopoly price for Windows that would maximize profits to be $900. Even an economist testifying for the government at the MS anti-trust trial, Franklin Fisher, conceded that if Microsoft does indeed have a monopoly power it charges far less than the monopoly price for Windows.

One of the things the Slashdotters seem to think is wrong with this price is that obviously a lot fewer people would be willing to buy Windows at $900, but this shows an obvious unfamiliarty with economics since firms rarely are maximize profits by solely maximizing net sales. At $900, obviously, Microsoft might sell far fewer copies of Windows, but it would not need to sell nearly as many copies at $900 as it needs to at say $150 or whatever the average current price of a Windows license is (not that legally the law only requires that the government prove a firm has monopoly power to bring antitrust actions which is a bit like a police officer giving a ticket to a motorist because his car has the ability to go faster than the speed limit, regardless of whether or not the driver is actually going faster than the speed limit).

As the study author readily admits, the real implication of his analysis is that the existing pricing structure of Windows is completely inconsistent with the claim that Microsoft has an OS monopoly.

Jon Katz Watch: Should Corporations Try to Do Good?

    Katz has an article at Slashdot focusing on a recent Business Week poll showing most Americans think corporations have too much power. At the end of his article, Katz notes with glee that 95 percent of the people in the survey agreed with the following statement,

U.S. corporations should have more than one purpose. They also owe something to their workers and the communities in which they operate, and they should sometimes sacrifice some profit for the sake of making things better for their workers and communities.

    I am in the 5% minority who thinks it is a very bad idea to expect businesses to do things for the community. Corporations used to want to do a lot of things for their community, resulting in company towns where they controlled everything. More recently when corporations decide to do the “ethical” thing it usually involves caving in to predominant community standards.

    When Wal-Mart and K-Mart announced they would stop selling violent video games to children under 17, they were sacrificing profits for a greater good. I’d personally prefer not to be subjected to that sort of corporate paternalism.

    As usual Katz misses the really big issue which is whether or not we really need big corporations anymore. On the one hand, a lot of people seem to dislike working for large corporations. Plus it’s hard to tell whether or not the underlying economic basis for corporations will hold. Corporations have typically had an advantage due to economies of scale both in producing goods as well as contracting for labor. One of the main advantages of a corporation, for example, is reducing the transaction costs of managing thousands of employees.

    But the Internet may undercut both of those since it undercuts the transaction cost advantage and allows very small businesses to compete on a relatively equal playing field with large corporations. We’re even beginning to see the first serious hints of the so-called virtual corporation, with some products quickly coming to market today that are designed by one firm, manufactured by a second firm, and then marketed and sold by several other firms under different brand names.

    I don’t think we’re going to see the corporation disappear, but I do think we’ll see a gradual winnowing of very large corporations and are likely to end up with an economy dominated by even more small business and medium sized companies than today.

Jon Katz Goes Off the Deep End

Okay, I have to get a confession out of the way — I am an avowed Jon Katz hater of many years. I first started ragging on Katz regularly when he was writing for Wired’s various online ventures, and followed him over to Slashdot where ripping Katz’s latest efforts is a sport.

The thing with Katz is not that he writes things I do not agree with or that he is not a particularly good or careful writer (though all three of those things are true), but rather that he is completely inconsistent and often downright bizarre. I’m beginning to suspect that Katz is an artificial intelligence program akin to Eliza.

The problem for the true Katz basher, unfortunately, is that Jon’s starting to go so far off the deep end that it is not even sporting to take swipes at him anymore. Today, for example, he actually has a serious article pushing the role-playing games “Mage: The Ascension” and “Shadowrun” as allegories of our technocratic age. According to Katz,

It’s amazing to encounter so insightful a worldview in a paper-and-pencil role-playing game. While mainstream society was dismissing geeks and nerds, they were increasingly retreating — via games, MUDs and MOOs — into their own folktales, fantasy worlds that foretold the future as brilliantly as Orwell or H.G. Wells. “Shadowrunner,” “Werewolf” and “Changeling” were escape routes, a new genre that offered some of the most revealing insights yet into the people who built (and are still building) the Net and Web, and creating continuing revolutions like the open source movement.

Hey, I am a fanatical RPG fan who has bookshelves filled with games I will never play, but this is the biggest crock of —- I have read in a long time. They are fun games, but they hardly rise to the level of a new sort of folk tale. I am surprised he doesn’t add in a riff about how “Magic: The Gathering” is some geek take on the duality of art and commerce.

The thing I detest about Katz is his self-appointed role as geek spokesman, especially with the nonsense he wrote after the Columbine shooting. Katz depicted Klebold and Hariss as these helpless misunderstood, victims of a cruel society. Hey, I spent my lunch hours in high school with some friends programming on Trash-80s and Apple IIs, and I do not remember any of us feeling we had to off our classmates because we were misunderstood.

The bottom line is that Katz really gets off on that mix of superiority and fear that many of us felt as kids because we were not part of the popular crowds but, on the other hand, we killed those kids — metaphorically, of course — when it came time for the SATs. Katz always strikes me as the sort of guy who would rent a Ferrari to go back to his 10 year high school reunion to prove something to his former classmates.