#but most of the time it just derives in what is basically propaganda machin and thought-erasing contraptions

[mask131]

You know, I stopped regularly watching Doctor Who sometimes after the Silence arc, and I still kept looking casually and randomly at DW throughout all the following years, plus the Internet discourse one cannot escape. That's the kind of territory where you can't help but being spoiled all the big twist without knowing what any of the small or filler episodes are about.

But I didn't stop watching DW out of hatred or dislike or anything. It is just that, at the time, I didn't have time to watch it and you know, I needed a pause, so I did, and I never fully dedicated myself to it again. Yet now I feel I can do for one specific reason.

The Internet.

I watched Doctor Who back in an era I will call the pre-Internet era. Not that Internet wasn't there (in fact the Silence arc episodes I watched on DAILYMOTION back when there still was daily releases of subbed Doctor Who episodes ~ ah the glory days), but I wasn't involved in it so much, and in return Internet wasn't involved so much in shows, and it was long before the entire concepts of fandoms and hatedoms became like an actual thing in people's minds. So I had this very intimate, personal, directly me-to-the-show experience with Doctor Who, at first on TV, then on my computer screen but still without people's comments or long analysis posts or Twitter hot takes bothering me in any way.

And I am glad I "skipped" so to speak an entire Doctor Who era precisely because how insane and fractured and warfaring the DW fandom became, and how people who don't know two shits about DW suddenly declare themselves "expert reviewers".

The funniest thing I see is probably this endless cycle that keeps being repeated again and again: new Doctor comes out, suddenly everybody masses against them to hate it with all of their heart ; then another new Doctor comes out, and suddenly people look more fondly on the previous one and start saying "Okay, this season wasn't so bad, people really were too harsh, turns out there were very cool things in it!", only to throw all of their hatred onto the next Doctor... which then gets redeemed when the NEXT Doctor comes in, and this is a cycle that just KEEPS REPEATING ITSELF. For many it started with the Capaldi era, and then the cycle solidifed itself with the Whittaker and most recently Gatwa eras...

But trust me, it was there before. It was there with the Smith era - which I live through and myself felt a bit just because of how attached we were with Tennant Doctor ; and even before it was there with the TENNANT ERA. Not many people recall this because a lot of the outspoken people who "love" or "hate" the show today are from more recent generations of the show, but back when Eccleston was changed to Tennant, people thought it would be the death of this reboot, as many loved Eccleston and didn't have any hope or liking for Tennant - who wasn't back then as much of a famous and loved actor as he is today.

But that's another thing with the Internet as a whole - because yes, the way fandoms and hatedoms speak is like brainwashed cultists who somehow all share one hive-mind and I don't feel anything wrong with talking about the Internet as a whole in an era where individuality seems to be concept gone out of the window. Internet has a short-term memory. In fact you can clearly see it with a lot of plot points or tonal elements or character writing that people complain or hate about modern Doctor Who... AND WHICH WERE THERE IN OLDER DOCTOR WHO. People keep treating "old" DW as this sort of "ever-serious, extremely deep, dark and complex" thing, except they might forget that it was also very much seen as an extravagant, bizarre, nonsensical, corny sci-fi show. In fact, the way some people complain about the "good old days of DW" literaly feels like these people never watched the show and came up in their head with a whole different series.

And what is the "old" DW you ask? Literaly every DW season that is before, oh let's say Capaldi era, and even this one starts getting classified in the "good ol' classic DW" sometimes. There was a time, long ago, where the "old" DW was anything before the reboot. But now, with all the people that think the reboot is the only DW there ever was, "old DW" can literaly be all that came before the season you are watching now.

I remember complaining about the "fantasy" elements being brought up for example in more recent seasons, making it "unbelievable" "unlike the old classic DW". YOU REMEMBER WHEN THE DOCTOR WAS HEALED BY THE POWER OF LOVE, during his first great battle against the Master in the reboot? When Tennant's doctor literaly was rejuvenated by just enough people speaking his name? So much so for the "hardcore sci-fi DW" you're trying to sell us.

Sorry but I HAD to let this specific one be shouted because seriously a lot of people seem to have literal BLANKS over any part of the Tennant-and-before eras that doesn't fit their bizarre DW ideal, and I do believe that if one of the old seasons, even just the first season of the reboot, was aired today as the "next Doctor Who" a lot of people would complain about it not being as good as "before".

So anyway all of that being said in this unhinged rant, I think I have let enough years go by so that I can, once again, rewatch full seasons of Doctor Who absolutely unbothered by any Internet talk because that's the other beauty of the Internet - when something is more than, I'll be generous, two years old everybody just stops speaking about it, and it is SUCH a relief of mental pollution!

And in this day and age, when you are on the Internet, it is such a rare opportunity to be able to watch something without being flooded by other people's opinions who want to convince you theirs is the sole and only one, and shout in your hear until you have no place to think for yourself.

[safetypinkerton]

Hollywood Propaganda by Mark Dice 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hollywood-propaganda-mark-dice/1137833508

Christianity Under Attack

In order to destroy America, the conspirators are determined to eradicate faith in God and dismantle organized Christianity. Attacking Jesus and Christianity is a sacrament in Hollywood because the far-Left hates Jesus and everything He stands for. It’s not an overstatement to say that many in key positions of power in the entertainment industry (and politics) are Satanists who will someday openly embrace Lucifer as the rebel angel kicked out of Heaven for defying God.

  “I’m glad the Jews killed Christ,” ranted comedian Sarah Silverman in one of her comedy specials. “Good. I’d fucking do it again!” she declares, as her audience agrees in laughter.158 While accepting an Emmy Award one year Kathy Griffin said, “A lot of people come up here and they thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. He didn’t help me a bit…so all I can say is suck it Jesus! This award is my god now!”159

I’m not saying people shouldn’t be able to make fun of Christians, but no mainstream celebrity would dare make such insults or jokes about Muhammad because Muslims (and Jews) are vigorously protected against any criticism or mockery and only wonderful things can be said about them. Even a slightly edgy joke ignites a barrage of attacks with cries of “Islamophobia” or “anti-Semitism” and gears start moving in the well-funded and massive smear machines like the ADL and the SPLC which quickly move to destroy the person’s career before they can utter another word.

Hating Christians is almost as necessary as believing in climate change if you’re going to be a mainstream Hollywood celebrity. There are very few open Christians in Hollywood, most of them are has-beens like Kevin Sorbo and Kirk Cameron who have been basically blacklisted since being open about their faith.

  Kevin Sorbo was banned from Comicon because he’s a conservative and “pals with Sean Hannity.”160 He and other Christian actors are stuck doing low budget films that get little attention. They’re allowed to exist (for now) as long as they never point out the Bible’s teachings on homosexuality. Only watered down and generic Christian messages are allowed to be said.

After Guardians of the Galaxy star Chris Pratt appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and happened to discuss his “spirituality,” many online began attacking him for being a Christian and attending a church. Actress Ellen Page (a lesbian) from the X-Men and Inception tweeted, “If you are a famous actor and you belong to an organization that hates a certain group of people, don’t be surprised if someone simply wonders why it’s not addressed. Being anti LGBTQ is wrong, there aren’t two sides. The damage it causes is severe. Full stop.”161

Singer Ellie Goulding threatened to back out of her scheduled performance at the 2019 Thanksgiving NFL halftime show if the Salvation Army didn’t pledge to donate money to LGBT causes. She got the idea after her Instagram comments were flooded with complaints from her fans because the Salvation Army was sponsoring the game to announce their annual Red Kettle Campaign (bell ringers) fundraiser for the homeless.162 Since the Salvation Army is a Christian charity, Goulding’s fans freaked out, accusing them of being “homophobic” and “transphobic.”

They quickly bowed to the pressure and “disavowed” any anti-LGBT beliefs, which basically means they’re disavowing the Bible because even the New Testament denounces homosexuality in Romans 1:26-27 and 1st Corinthians 6:9-10. Many critics claim that only the Old Testament does, but the Book of Romans makes it clear that just because Jesus came to offer salvation doesn’t mean God’s law regarding homosexuality changed.

The Salvation Army also removed a “position statement” from their website that had made it clear “Scripture forbids sexual intimacy between members of the same sex,” and replaced it with one saying “We embrace people regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”163 One of the world’s largest Christian charities whose very name “The Salvation Army” refers to the salvation of Christ, cowardly bowed down to the Leftist activists out of fear they would be branded “homophobic.”

Christians are easy targets since they’re much more passive than Jews and Muslims when attacked, and Hollywood loves to stereotype them as a bunch of superstitious bigots who don’t know how to have fun. In the rare case that there is a movie favorable to Christianity that gets widespread distribution, that too is attacked.

Passion of the Christ was deemed “anti-Semitic” because it depicts the story of Jesus’ arrest, sham trial, and crucifixion.164 It was the most popular film about the events to be made and wasn’t a straight to DVD release like most others. With Mel Gibson behind it, the film became a huge success, which caused a tremendous backlash.

The ADL [Anti-Defamation League] denounced the film, saying it “continues its unambiguous portrayal of Jews as being responsible for the death of Jesus. There is no question in this film about who is responsible. At every single opportunity, Mr. Gibson’s film reinforces the notion that the Jewish authorities and the Jewish mob are the ones ultimately responsible for the Crucifixion.”165 That’s because that’s what happened!

Technically, the Romans did it, but at the behest of the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem at the time. The Bible makes it very clear what led to Jesus being crucified. Pontius Pilate is quoted in Matthew 27:24 saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” and “It is your responsibility!” meaning the Jewish Pharisees. They were the ones who conspired to have Jesus arrested and killed for “blasphemy” and being a “false” messiah. Pontius Pilate even offered to release Jesus, but the crowd demanded he release Barabbas instead, another man who was being detained for insurrection against Rome, and for murder.166

A critic for the New York Daily News called The Passion of the Christ, “the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of the Second World War.”167 Many others angrily denounced the film when it came out in 2004. Some in the media even blamed it for a supposed “upsurge” in anti-Semitic hate crimes.168

When the History Channel miniseries The Bible was released in 2013, the same cries of “anti-Semitism” rang out.169 The New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss went so far as to say that it’s a “conspiracy theory” that Jews killed Jesus.170

Even though most Christmas movies aren’t overtly Christian and instead focus of the importance of families reuniting and spending time together, that doesn’t mean they’re not going to come under attack. As the war on western culture continues, the Marxists have set their sights on Christmas too.

Online liberal cesspool Salon.com ran a headline reading “Hallmark movies are fascist propaganda,” and complained they promote “heteronormative whiteness” because there aren’t enough LGBT characters or people of color in them.171

“Hallmark movies, with their emphasis on returning home and the pleasures of the small, domestic life, also send a not-at-all subtle signal of disdain for cosmopolitanism and curiosity about the larger world,” Salon said, “which is exactly the sort of attitude that helps breed the kind of defensive White nationalism that we see growing in strength in the Donald Trump era.”172

The article went on to say that because the Hallmark Channel airs so many Christmas movies, it is promoting, “a set of patriarchal and authoritarian values that are more about White evangelicals defining themselves as an ethnic group, and not about a genuine feeling of spirituality…The very fact that they’re presented as harmless fluff makes it all the more insidious, the way they work to enforce very narrow, White, heteronormative, sexist, provincial ideas of what constitutes ‘normal.’”173

The article wasn’t satire. Salon.com has a deep-seated hatred of Christianity, conservatives and families, and is another cog in the Cultural Marxist machine working to destroy the United States.

Comedian Whitney Cummings was reported to the Human Resources department of a major Hollywood studio after she wished the crew of a TV show she was working on “Merry Christmas” when they wrapped up for the year. She made the revelation while speaking with Conan O’Brian the following December. “Last year, I was working on a TV show, [and] got in trouble with Human Resources for saying ‘Merry Christmas’ to an intern,” she began.174

Conan asked her if she was being serious and she said it was a true story, elaborating, “I was leaving, like on the 18th or whatever…and I was like, ‘Bye guys, Merry Christmas.’” When she returned from vacation after New Year’s she was called to HR and scolded. She joked, “I don’t even care how your Christmas was. It was just a formality. It’s what you say when you leave.”175

Conan O’Brien then replied, “In these times we’re in, that could trigger someone or offend them if it’s not their holiday.”176 She didn’t say which network it was, but she’s been involved with some major shows like NBC’s Whitney (where she played the main character), as well as the CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls, which she created and was a writer for.

While today it may seem impossible that Christmas movies may become a thing of the past, nobody could have ever guessed that reruns of the classic Dukes of Hazzard would get banned after the Confederate flag was deemed a “hate symbol” in 2015, or that Aunt Jemima pancake syrup, Eskimo Pie ice cream bars, and Uncle Ben’s Rice would be deemed “racially insensitive” and pulled from production a few years later.177

Once someone reminds liberals that the word Christmas is derived from Christ’s Mass and that it is actually a commemoration of the birth of Jesus, they may finally go over the edge and deem Christmas just as offensive as Columbus Day or the Fourth of July. And with the Muslim and Sikh populations increasing in the United States, the American standard of Christmas music playing in shopping malls and retail stores all month long every December may one day come to an end because it’s not “inclusive” and leaves non-Christians feeling “ostracized.”

[gelderon52]

Consensus Building: an art that we are losing. The Case of Climate Science

by Ugo Bardi (from The Seneca Effect”)

In 1956, Arthur C. Clarke wrote "The Forgotten Enemy," a science fiction story that dealt with the return of the ice age (image source). Surely it was not Clarke's best story, but it may have been the first written on that subject by a well-known author. Several other sci-fi authors examined the same theme, but that does not mean that, at that time, there was a scientific consensus on global cooling. It just means that a consensus on global warming was obtained only later, in the 1980s. But which mechanisms were used to obtain this consensus? And why is it that, nowadays, it seems to be impossible to attain consensus on anything? This post is a discussion on this subject that uses climate science as an example.

You may remember how, in 2017, during the Trump presidency, there briefly floated in the media the idea to stage a debate on climate change in the form of a "red team vs. blue team" encounter between orthodox climate scientists and their opponents. Climate scientists were horrified at the idea. They were especially appalled at the military implications of the "red vs. blue" idea that hinted at how the debate could have been organized. From the government side, then, it was quickly realized that in a fair scientific debate their side had no chances. So, the debate never took place and it is good that it didn't. Maybe those who proposed it were well intentioned (or maybe not), but in any case it would have degenerated into a fight and just created confusion.

Yet, the story of that debate that was never held hints at a point that most people understand: the need for consensus. Nothing in our world can be done without some form of consensus and the question of climate change is a good example. Climate scientists tend to claim that such a consensus exists, and they sometimes quantify it as 97% or even 100%. Their opponents claim the opposite.

In a sense, they are both right. A consensus on climate change exists among scientists, but this is not true for the general public. The polls say that a majority of people know something about climate change and agree that something is to be done about it, but that is not the same as an in-depth, informed consensus. Besides, this majority rapidly disappears as soon as it is time to do something that touches someone's wallet. The result is that, for more than 30 years, thousands of the best scientists in the world have been warning humankind of a dire threat approaching, and nothing serious has been done. Only proclaims, greenwashing, and "solutions" that worsen the problem (the "hydrogen-based economy" is a good example).

So, consensus building is a fundamental matter. You can call it a science or see it as another way to define what others call "propaganda." Some reject the very idea as a form of "mind control," or practice it in various methods of rule-based negotiations. It is a fascinating subject that goes to the heart of our existence as human beings in a complex society.

Here, instead of tackling the issue from a general viewpoint, I'll discuss a specific example: that of "global cooling" vs. "global warming," and how a consensus was obtained that warming is the real threat. It is a dispute often said to be proof that no such a thing as consensus exists in climate science.  

You surely heard the story of how, just a few decades ago, "global cooling" was the generally accepted scientific view of the future. And how those silly scientists changed their minds, switching to warming, instead. Conversely, you may also have heard that this is a myth and that there never was such a thing as a consensus that Earth was cooling.

As it is always the case, the reality is more complex than politics wants it to be. Global cooling as an early scientific consensus is one of the many legends generated by the discussion about climate change and, like most legends, it is basically false. But it has at least some links with reality. It is an interesting story that tells us a lot about how consensus is obtained in science. But we need to start from the beginning.

The idea that Earth's climate was not stable emerged in the mid-19th century with the discovery of the past ice ages. At that point, an obvious question was whether ice ages could return in the future. The matter remained at the level of scattered speculations until the mid 20th century, when the concept of "new ice age" appeared in the "memesphere" (the ensemble of human public memes). We can see this evolution using Google "Ngrams," a database that measures the frequency of strings of words in a large corpus of published books (Thanks, Google!!).

You see that the possibility of a "new ice age" entered the public consciousness already in the 1920s, then it grew and reached a peak in the early 1970s. Other strings such as "Earth cooling" and the like give similar results. Note also that the database "English Fiction" generates a large peak for the concept of a "new ice age" at about the same time, in the 1970s. Later on, cooling was completely replaced by the concept of global warming. You can see in the figure below how the crossover arrived in the late 1980s.

Even after it started to decline, the idea of a "new ice age" remained popular and journalists loved presenting it to the public as an imminent threat. For instance, Newsweek printed an article titled "The Cooling World" in 1975, but the concept provided good material for the catastrophic genre in fiction. As late as 2004, it was at the basis of the movie "The Day After Tomorrow."

Does that mean that scientists ever believed that the Earth was cooling? Of course not. There was no consensus on the matter. The status of climate science until the late 1970s simply didn't allow certainties about Earth's future climate.

As an example, in 1972, the well-known report to the Club of Rome, "The Limits to Growth," noted the growing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, but it did not state that it would cause warming -- evidently the issue was not yet clear even for scientists engaged in global ecosystem studies. 8 years later, in 1980, the authors of "The Global 2000 Report to the President of the U.S." commissioned by president Carter, already had a much better understanding of the climate effects of greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, they did not rule out global cooling and they discussed it as a plausible scenario.

The Global 2000 Report is especially interesting because it provides some data on the opinion of climate scientists as it was in 1975. 28 experts were interviewed and asked to forecast the average world temperature for the year 2000. The result was no warming or a minimal one of about 0.1 C. In the real world, though, temperatures rose by more than 0.4 C in 2000. Clearly, in 1980, there was not such a thing as a scientific consensus on global warming. On this point, see also the paper by Peterson (2008) which analyzes the scientific literature in the 1970s. A majority of paper was found to favor global warming, but also a significant minority arguing for no temperature changes or for global cooling.

Now we are getting to the truly interesting point of this discussion. The consensus that Earth was warming did not exist before the 1980s, but then it became the norm. How was it obtained?

There are two interpretations floating in the memesphere today. One is that scientists agreed on a global conspiracy to terrorize the public about global warming in order to obtain personal advantages. The other that scientists are cold-blooded data-analyzers and that they did as John Maynard Keynes said, "When I have new data, I change my mind."

Both are legends. The one about the scientific conspiracy is obviously ridiculous, but the second is just as silly. Scientists are human beings and data are not a gospel of truth. Data are always incomplete, affected by uncertainties, and need to be selected. Try to develop Newton's law of universal gravitation without ignoring all the data about falling feathers, paper sheets, and birds, and you'll see what I mean.

In practice, science is a fine-tuned consensus-building machine. It has evolved exactly for the purpose of smoothly absorbing new data in a gradual process that does not lead (normally) to the kind of partisan division that's typical of politics.

Science uses a procedure derived from an ancient method that, in Medieval times was called disputatio and that has its roots in the art of rhetoric of classical times. The idea is to debate issues by having champions of the different theses squaring off against each other and trying to convince an informed audience using the best arguments they can muster. The Medieval disputatio could be very sophisticated and, as an example, I discussed the "Controversy of Valladolid" (1550-51) on the status of the American Indians. Theological disputationes normally failed to harmonize truly incompatible positions, say, convincing Jews to become Christians (it was tried more than once, but you may imagine the results). But sometimes they did lead to good compromises and they kept the confrontation to the verbal level (at least for a while).

In modern science, the rules have changed a little, but the idea remains the same: experts try to convince their opponents using the best arguments they can muster. It is supposed to be a discussion, not a fight. Good manners are to be maintained and the fundamental feature is being able to speak a mutually understandable language. And not just that: the discussants need to agree on some basic tenets of the frame of the discussion.  During the Middle Ages, theologians debated in Latin and agreed that the discussion was to be based on the Christian scriptures. Today, scientists debate in English and agree that the discussion is to be based on the scientific method.

In the early times of science, one-to-one debates were used (maybe you remember the famous debate about Darwin's ideas that involved Thomas Huxley and Archbishop Wilberforce in 1860). But, nowadays, that is rare. The debate takes place at scientific conferences and seminars where several scientists participate, gaining or losing "prestige points" depending on how good they are at presenting their views. Occasionally, a presenter, especially a young scientist, may be "grilled" by the audience in a small re-enactment of the coming of age ceremonies of Native Americans. But, most important of all, informal discussions take place all over the conference. These meetings are not supposed to be vacations, they are functional to the face-to-face exchange of ideas. As I said, scientists are human beings and they need to see each other in the face to understand each other. A lot of science is done in cafeterias and over a glass of beer. Possibly, most scientific discoveries start in this kind of informal setting. No one, as far as I know, was ever struck by a ray of light from heaven while watching a power point presentation.

It would be hard to maintain that scientists are more adept at changing their views than Medieval theologians and older scientists tend to stick to old ideas. Sometimes you hear that science advances one funeral at a time; it is not wrong, but surely an exaggeration: scientific views do change even without having to wait for the old guard to die. The debate at a conference can decisively tilt toward one side on the basis of the brilliance of a scientist, the availability of good data, and the overall competence demonstrated.

I can testify that, at least once, I saw someone in the audience rising up after a presentation and say, "Sir, I was of a different opinion until I heard your talk, but now you convinced me. I was wrong and you are right." (and I can tell you that this person was more than 70 years old, good scientists may age gracefully, like wine). In many cases, the conversion is not so sudden and so spectacular, but it does happen. Then, of course, money can do miracles in affecting scientific views but, as long as we stick to climate science, there is not a lot of money involved and corruption among scientists is not widespread as it is in other fields, such as in medical research.

So, we can imagine that in the 1980s the consensus machine worked as it was supposed to do and it led to the general opinion of climate scientists switching from cooling to warming. That was a good thing, but the story didn't end with that. There remained to convince people outside the narrow field of climate science, and that was not obvious.

From the 1990s onward, the disputatio was dedicated to convincing non-climate scientists, that is both scientists working in different fields and intelligent laypersons. There was a serious problem with that: climate science is not a matter for amateurs, it is a field where the Dunning-Kruger effect (people overestimating their competence) may be rampant. Climate scientists found themselves dealing with various kinds of opponents. Typically, elderly scientists who refused to accept new ideas or, sometimes, geologists who saw climate science as invading their turf and resenting that. Occasionally, opponents could score points in the debate by focusing on narrow points that they themselves had not completely understood (for instance, the "tropospheric hot spot" was a fashionable trick). But when the debate involved someone who knew climate science well enough the opponents' destiny was to be easily steamrolled.

These debates went on for at least a decade. You may know the  2009 book by Randy Olson, "Don't be Such a Scientist" that describes this period. Olson surely understood the basic point of debating: you must respect your opponent if you aim at convincing him or her, and the audience, too. It seemed to be working, slowly. Progress was being made and the climate problem was becoming more and more known.

And then, something went wrong. Badly wrong. Scientists suddenly found themselves cast into another kind of debate for which they had no training and little understanding. You see in Google Ngrams how the idea that climate change was a hoax lifted off in the 2000s and became a feature of the memesphere. Note how rapidly it rose: it had a climax in 2009, with the Climategate scandal, but it didn't decline afterward.

It was a completely new way to discuss: not anymore a disputatio. No more rules, no more reciprocal respect, no more a common language. Only slogans and insults. A climate scientist described this kind of debate as like being involved in a "bare-knuckle bar fight." From there onward, the climate issue became politicized and sharply polarized. No progress was made and none is being made, right now.

Why did this happen? In large part, it was because of a professional PR campaign aimed at disparaging climate scientists. We don't know who designed it and paid for it but, surely, there existed (and still exist) industrial lobbies which were bound to lose a lot if decisive action to stop climate change was implemented. Those who had conceived the campaign had an easy time against a group of people who were as naive in terms of communication as they were experts in terms of climate science.

The Climategate story is a good example of the mistakes scientists made. If you read the whole corpus of the thousands of emails released in 2009, nowhere you'll find that the scientists were falsifying the data, were engaged in conspiracies, or tried to obtain personal gains. But they managed to give the impression of being a sectarian clique that refused to accept criticism from their opponents. In scientific terms, they did nothing wrong, but in terms of image, it was a disaster. Another mistake of scientists was to try to steamroll their adversaries claiming a 97% of scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. Even assuming that it is true (it may well be), it backfired, giving once more the impression that climate scientists are self-referential and do not take into account objections of other people.

Let me give you another example of a scientific debate that derailed and become a political one. I already mentioned the 1972 study "The Limits to Growth." It was a scientific study, but the debate that ensued was outside the rules of the scientific debate. A feeding frenzy among sharks would be a better description of how the world's economists got together to shred to pieces the LTG study.  The "debate" rapidly spilled over to the mainstream press and the result was a general demonization of the study, accused to have made "wrong predictions," and, in some cases, to be planning the extermination of humankind. (I discuss this story in my 2011 book "The Limits to Growth Revisited.") The interesting (and depressing) thing you can learn from this old debate is that no progress was made in half a century. Approaching the 50th anniversary of the publication, you can find the same criticism republished afresh on Web sites, "wrong predictions", and all the rest.

So, we are stuck. Is there a hope to reverse the situation? Hardly.

The loss of the capability of obtaining a consensus seems to be a feature of our times: debates require a minimum of reciprocal respect to be effective, but that has been lost in the cacophony of the Web. The only form of debate that remains is the vestigial one that sees presidential candidates stiffly exchanging platitudes with each other every four years. But a real debate? No way, it is gone like the disputes among theologians in Middle Ages.

The discussion on climate, just as on all important issues, has moved to the Web, in large part to the social media. And the effect has been devastating on consensus-building. One thing is facing a human being across a table with two glasses of beer on it, another is to see a chunk of text falling from the blue as a comment to your post. This is a recipe for a quarrel, and it works like that every time.

Also, it doesn't help that international scientific meetings and conferences have all but disappeared in a situation that discourages meetings in person. Online meetings turned out to be hours of boredom in which nobody listens to anybody and everyone is happy when it is over. Even if you can still manage to be at an in-person meeting, it doesn't help that your colleague appears to you in the form of a masked bag of dangerous viruses, to be kept at a distance all the time, if possible behind a plexiglass barrier. Not the best way to establish a human relationship.

This is a fundamental problem: if you can't build a consensus by a debate, the only other possibility is to use the political method. It means attaining a majority by means of a vote (and note that in science, like in theology, voting is not considered an acceptable consensus building technique). After the vote, the winning side can force their position on the minority using a combination of propaganda, intimidation, and, sometimes, physical force. An extreme consensus-building technique is the extermination of the opponents. It has been done so often in history that it is hard to think that it will not be done again on a large scale in the future, perhaps not even in a remote one. But, apart from the moral implications, forced consensus is expensive, inefficient, and often it leads to dogmas being established. Then it is impossible to adapt to new data when they arrive.

So, where are we going? Things keep changing all the time; maybe we'll find new ways to attain consensus even online, which implies, at a minimum, not to insult and attack your opponent right from the beginning. As for a common language, after that we switched from Latin to English, we might now switch to "Googlish," a new world language that might perhaps be structured to avoid clashes of absolutes -- perhaps it might just be devoid of expletives, perhaps it may have some specific features that help build consensus. For sure, we need a reform of science that gets rid of the corruption rampant in many fields: money is a kind of consensus, but not the one we want.

Or, maybe, we might develop new rituals. Rituals have always been a powerful way to attain consensus, just think of the Christian mass (the Christian church has not yet realized that it has received a deadly blow from the anti-virus rules). Could rituals be transferred online? Or would we need to meet in person in the forest as the "book people" imagined by Ray Bradbury in his 1953 novel "Fahrenheit 451"? We cannot say. We can only ride the wave of change that, nowadays, seems to have become a true tsunami. Will we float or sink? Who can say? The shore seems to be still far away.

h/t Carlo Cuppini and "moresoma"

[poweredbydietcoke]

Favorite books of 2019

A *very* late continuation of my annual tradition … finally got a push to finish this in case you’re looking for book ideas while we find ourselves with plenty of extra time during quarantine. I read a little less in 2019, maybe because I’m working on something new (and have a new kid) or maybe just because I’m getting lazy as I get older? 48 books total, of which 4 were tree books and 23 were audiobooks—I did spend more time in transit last year (yes, it’s possible to listen to audiobooks and talk to ATC at the same time!), but it felt more productive. 

Without further ado, my favorite books. (affiliate links get donated to charity at the end of the year). I’ve included some highlights from Kindle books, but many of my favorites this year were audiobooks, where I haven’t found a great solution to highlighting (especially those I get from the library on a variety of crappy - but free! - services).

Destiny Disrupted, by Tamim Ansary - this was probably my favorite book of the year. I liked it so much I cold-emailed the author and invited him over for dinner, and we had a wonderful time with he & his wife and a bunch of friends. Fundamentally, the book is a history of the world told from the point of view of Islam; the point he makes, quite compellingly, was that there are really two (and probably more) different histories of the world, with the same facts, that just depend on your narrative. This is starting to play on a lot of things I’ve been trying to understand recently, including Ben Hunt’s Epsilon Theory and specifically, his idea of the Narrative Machine, and all of the theory of Common Knowledge that includes. And he does all this with an easy-to-read but well-researched writing style. If you like this one, I’m still working my way through his next one, The Invention of Yesterday, and so far so good.

A ruler can never trust a popular man with soldiers of his own. One day, Mansur invited Abu Muslim to come visit him and share a hearty meal. What happened next illustrates the maxim that when an Abbasid ruler invites you to dinner, you should arrange to be busy that night.

On the Sunni side, four slightly different versions of this code took shape, and the Shi’i developed yet another one of their own, similar to the Sunni ones in spirit and equally vast in scope. These various codes differ in details, but I doubt that one Muslim in a thousand can name even five such details.

Let me emphasize that the ulama were not (and are not) appointed by anyone. Islam has no pope and no official clerical apparatus. How, then, did someone get to be a member of the ulama? By gaining the respect of people who were already established ulama. It was a gradual process. There was no license, no certificate, no “shingle” to hang up to prove that one was an alim. The ulama were (and are) a self-selecting, self-regulating class, bound entirely by the river of established doctrine. No single alim could modify this current or change its course. It was too old, too powerful, too established, and besides, no one could become a member of the ulama until he had absorbed the doctrine so thoroughly that it had become a part of him. By the time a person acquired the status to question the doctrine, he would have no inclination to do so. Incorrigible dissenters who simply would not stop questioning the doctrine probably wouldn’t make it through the process.

If a man commits a grave sin, is he a non-Muslim, or is he (just) a bad Muslim? The question might seem like a semantic game, except that in the Muslim world, as a point of law, the religious scholars divided the world between the community and the nonbelievers. One set of rules applied among believers, another set for interactions between believers and nonbelievers. It was important, therefore, to know if any particular person was in the community or outside it.

Range, by David Epstein. Thomas Layton recommended this to me (he was reading a derivative work on how to coach basketball while applying this theory), and it was fun. The fundamental thesis is that you can split environments into “nice” and “wicked” learning environments. In nice environments, feedback is quick and accurate, and rewards specialization early (eg golf ... you can practice every possible shot by yourself). In wicked environments, feedback is delayed (if available at all), and the rules — let alone the situation — are fluid. This rewards “range”, or a variety of experiences (Epstein uses tennis as an example, but much of life is even more obvious). The return of the Renaissance Man (or Woman) — yay!

When I began to write about these studies, I was met with thoughtful criticism, but also denial. “Maybe in some other sport,” fans often said, “but that’s not true of our sport.” The community of the world’s most popular sport, soccer, was the loudest. And then, as if on cue, in late 2014 a team of German scientists published a study showing that members of their national team, which had just won the World Cup, were typically late specializers who didn’t play more organized soccer than amateur-league players until age twenty-two or later.

A recent study found that cardiac patients were actually less likely to die if they were admitted during a national cardiology meeting, when thousands of cardiologists were away; the researchers suggested it could be because common treatments of dubious effect were less likely to be performed.

Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform. The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid.

...

In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.

When younger students bring home problems that force them to make connections, Richland told me, “parents are like, ‘Lemme show you, there’s a faster, easier way.’” If the teacher didn’t already turn the work into using-procedures practice, well-meaning parents will. They aren’t comfortable with bewildered kids, and they want understanding to come quickly and easily. But for learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem.

Programs like Head Start did give a head start, but academically that was about it. The researchers found a pervasive “fadeout” effect, where a temporary academic advantage quickly diminished and often completely vanished. On a graph, it looks eerily like the kind that show future elite athletes catching up to their peers who got a head start in deliberate practice.

Hilariously, predictors were willing to pay an average of $129 a ticket for a show ten years away by their current favorite band, while reflectors would only pay $80 to see a show today by their favorite band from ten years ago.

In the spring of 2001, Bingham collected twenty-one problems that had stymied Eli Lilly scientists and asked a top executive if he could post them on a website for anyone to see. The executive would only consider it if the consulting firm McKinsey thought it was a good idea. “McKinsey’s opinion,” Bingham recalled, “was, ‘Who knows? Why don’t you launch it and tell us the answer.’”

There was also a “perverse inverse relationship” between fame and accuracy. The more likely an expert was to have his or her predictions featured on op-ed pages and television, the more likely they were always wrong. Or, not always wrong. Rather, as Tetlock and his coauthor succinctly put it in their book Superforecasting, “roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”

Deep Work by Cal Newport - this was an easy listen while on a couple of long runs in Palm Springs during Indian Wells weekend, and definitely worth it. Like classics such as How to Win Friends And Influence People, there’s not a lot fundamentally groundbreaking here, but he articulates some really fundamental principles well enough that you stop and take notice and ask, “I know that ... why am I not doing that?” Now I just need to review my notes...

Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune in China - Evan Osnos. I think Scott Cannon originally recommended this book to me, and it was fascinating. It’s a bit of a long, slow read but a lot of insight into China’s evolution over the last few decades. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this knowledge (or the many other China books I’ve read recently) but it feels important for the coming decades. If only I could learn Mandarin like Matt MacInnis 

Every country has corruption, but China’s was approaching a level of its own. For those at the top, the scale of temptation had reached a level unlike anything ever encountered in the West. It was not always easy to say which Bare-Handed Fortunes were legitimate and which were not, but political office was a reliable pathway to wealth on a scale of its own. By 2012 the richest seventy members of China’s national legislature had a net worth of almost ninety billion dollars—more than ten times the combined net worth of the entire U.S. Congress.

But unlike Zaire, China punished many people for it; in a five-year stretch, China punished 668,000 Party members for bribery, graft, and embezzlement; it handed down 350 death sentences for corruption, and Wedeman concluded, “At a very basic level, it appears to have prevented corruption from spiraling out of control.”

The Central Propaganda Department let it be known that reports that suggested a shortage of happiness were not to receive attention. In April 2012 my phone buzzed: All websites are not to repost the news headlined, “UN Releases World Happiness Report, and China Ranks No. 112.”

Over the years, the risk of being blamed for helping someone was a scenario that appeared over and over in the headlines. In November 2006 an elderly woman in Nanjing fell at a bus stop, and a young man named Peng Yu stopped to help her get to the hospital. In recovery, she accused Peng of causing her fall, and a local judge agreed, ordering him to pay more than seven thousand dollars—a judgment based not on evidence, but on what the verdict called “logical thinking”: that Peng would never have helped if he hadn’t been motivated by guilt.

At one point, Chinese programmers were barred from updating a popular software system called Node.js because the version number, 0.6.4, corresponded with June 4, the date of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

he vowed to punish not only low-ranking “flies” but also powerful “tigers.” He called on his comrades to be “diligent and thrifty,” and when Xi took his first official trip, state television reported that he checked into a “normal suite” and dined not at a banquet, but at a buffet—a revelation so radical in Chinese political culture that the word buffet took on metaphysical significance. The state news service ran a banner headline: XI JINPING VISITS POOR FAMILIES IN HEBEI: DINNER IS JUST FOUR DISHES AND ONE SOUP, NO ALCOHOL.

...

It didn’t take long for the abrupt drop-off in gluttony to affect the economy: sales of shark fin (de rigueur for banquets) sank more than 70 percent; casinos in Macau recorded a drop in VIPs, and Swiss watch exports dropped by a quarter from the year before. Luxury goods makers mourned.

Economists point to a historic correlation between “world’s tallest” debuts and economic slowdowns. There is no cause and effect, but such projects are a sign of easy credit, excessive optimism, and inflated land prices—a pattern that dates to the world’s first skyscraper, the Equitable Life Building. Built in New York at the height of the Gilded Age, it was completed in 1873, the start of a five-year slump that became known as the Long Depression, and the pattern repeated in decades to follow. Skyscraper magazine, a Shanghai publication that treated tall buildings like celebrities, reported in 2012 that China would finish a new skyscraper every five days for the next three years; China was home to 40 percent of the skyscrapers under construction in the world.

Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright & Bradley Hope - Mike Vernal told me to drop most things to read this, and he wasn’t wrong. A well-written account of the 1MDB scandal that I’d only vaguely followed, and tries to put it into context when it basically can’t … something like $5.XB stolen over the course of a few years.

Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky & Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain - I put these two together, both recommended by Robert MacCloy, because they’re quick and fun. I listened to both on audio and they were both “mindless” but interesting…sort of the inside baseball of both the hospitality and restaurant industries. Don’t use a UV light...anywhere.

Smokejumpers by Jason Ramos - recommended by one of our fire captain neighbors at Oxbow and figured it would be good to understand a little more about wildland firefighting … this took me down a long digression of firefighting books that were interesting but if you want one, this one’s fun.

American icon by Bryce Hoffman - great audiobook that Scott Cannon recommended about Alan Mulaly’s turnaround of the Ford. The single most memorable part — after a couple of years working on turning the company around, a reporter asked him what his priorities for the next year were, and he responded with the same three things he’d said from the beginning. The reporter said something to the affect of “I can’t write about that again, it’s boring, you need something new!” And Mulaly responded “when we’ve got these three things done right, then we’ll have something new. We haven’t finished them yet."

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou - my wife raved about this book after she listened to it, and it was all the rage, so I did too…and it lived up to the hype! Fascinating but managed not to be a tabloid-y gossip-y tale of excess so much as a “yeah, each individual step was only a little over the line, and look where it lead them.” A surprisingly poignant reminder about how “fake it til you make it” in Silicon Valley can be idealized until it’s not. This is the next generation in a line started by Barbarians at the Gate and continued by Smartest Guys In The Room.

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Review: ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room

At its crux, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is about more than the social dynamics of the corporate world. Germinating within its edgy, dramatic content is a quiet lambastation of corporatism, within which Enron's downfall is portrayed as a symptom rather than an anomaly.

Alex Gibney's directorial talents shine through once again with his 2005 documentary-film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Based on the homonymous book by Fortune reporters Bethany Mclean and Peter Elkind, Gibney's page-to-screen adaptation layers vibrancy and pathos over the bestselling chronicle's already socially-relevant commentary. Like the book itself, Gibney's documentary traces the rise and fall of the megalithic corporation Enron, which is today synonymous with skullduggery and corruption. Also like the book, Gibney succeeds in demystifying a world of complex numbers by focusing on its intensely human underpinnings.

However, while Mclean and Elkind's book serves as a nuanced analysis for those already familiar Wall Street's basic workings, Gibney's documentary will undoubtedly succeed at resonating with wider audiences. Young adults and veterans of the early-2000s recession alike will appreciate its content, which is attractively-packaged and divided into mini-chapters with catchy titles ("Kenny Boy", "Everybody Loves Enron", "Guys With Spikes," etc) and set to a soundtrack that is at once over-the-top and fitting.

At its crux, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is about more than the social dynamics of the corporate world. Germinating within its edgy, dramatic content is a quiet lambastation of corporatism, within which Enron's downfall is portrayed as a symptom rather than an anomaly. As Peter Coyote dourly remarks in the voiceover narration, "Was Enron the work of a few bad men, or the dark shadow of the American dream?"

Although I was quite young at the time of Enron's bankruptcy, its collapse created a butterfly effect that was difficult to ignore. Equally impossible was remaining ignorant of the legal trials of its CEOs, which were recounted incessantly on television, and in magazines and newspapers. However, it was not until 2013 that I personally read the book by Bethany Mclean and Peter Elkind. As such, I found the documentary to be a fairly accurate condensation of the source material.

Unfortunately, the book and documentary differ substantially in tone. Whereas Mclean and Elkind are scholarly in their attempt to trace the rise and fall of Enron, the documentary oftentimes reduces its content to schlocky drama. To be sure, Enron is at its core a study of human tragedy. But the point is hammered in so often that it grows tiresome. Thankfully, the film's saving grace is that even when resorting to truisms and cheesy metaphors, the impact is made fresh by the accuracy of Sherron Watkins and Bethany Mclean's closing observations. "Looking at Enron is like looking at the flip side of so much possibility because like most things that end terribly, it didn't start out that way. It started with a lot of people who thought they were changing the world."

From the start, the film incorporates into its chronological narrative a near-ideal combination of cinematic foreboding and heavy-handed intrigue. With gravely lines from Tom Waits' "What's He Building?" interspersed between cut-scenes of a bleak Houston cityscape, the effect is at once fascinating and seedy. However, it is not until a re-enactment of Cliff Baxter's suicide, followed by shots of Jeffrey Skilling at the inquisition, that viewers are lured deeper into the sleazy charisma of sensationalism. In many ways, the recreation of the suicide is tasteless. Yet it serves its purpose: wreathing Enron and all its players within an atmosphere of danger and deception. Gibney's framing makes it clear: this is a glittering world of secrets that outsiders are not privy to. However, the documentary also offers its audiences the sly, tantalizing promise of playing fly-on-the-wall within this intricate corporate machine.

Structurally, the film's chronological order is easy to follow. Audiences trace Enron's rise and fall through a lens of interspersed interviews, audio tapes and video footage. We are introduced in dynamic, engaging detail to Enron's star players: Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andrew Fastow, with segments devoted to their backgrounds and personalities. Kenneth Lay's close relationship with the Bush family is also touched upon, but within Enron's overarching structure of corruption, the fact seems to be almost tangential. In many respects, the Bush-Lay friendship comes across as the byplay of America's culture of wealth and exclusivity, rather than a political conspiracy to be explored.

As the film progresses, Enron's exploits – the positive and negative – are portrayed vividly.  There is a sense of awe at the fact that a small-time Texas company was able to rise with such dizzying speed into a multinational corporation. By the late 90s, Enron was not just involved in the gas and energy business, but in broadband, steel, shipping, plastics, weather risk management, and petrochemicals. There is also a quiet admiration for the fact that, despite its cutthroat business tactics, Enron was nonetheless one of the era's great innovators. Ideas such as commodifying energy for trade, the (failed) Blockbuster deal to rent movies online (a precursor to Netflix!), the focus on derivatives instead of hard assets, are all relevant to the current era. Unfortunately, Enron did not seem to grasp that the virtual marketplace came with rewards and risks in equal measure. Rather than owning up to its losses, it chose to sweep them under the rug in the form of illegal partnerships and fraudulent accounting.

Chillingly, there were ever-cropping red flags of Enron's unscrupulous practices early on. The documentary does not disregard these: incidents such as the Valhalla Scandal of 1987, or the disastrous Dahbol power-plant in Maharashtra, India, or sale of Nigerian energy barges to Merril Lynch, are all given careful attention. However, it is not until the chapter 'Kal-ee-for-Nyah', that Gibney brings Enron's corruption into sharp focus. Audiences cannot help but be appalled by Enron's tactics for gaming the Californian market. Business strategies boasting names such as 'Death Star, 'Black Widow,' 'Get Shorty' and 'Fat Boy' are intermixed between audiotapes of Enron traders flippantly discussing ways to bleed the state dry. As Loretta Lynch, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, remarks, "Those guys at the flip of a switch could just yank the California economy on its leash whenever they wanted to. And they did it, and they did it, and they did it. And they made so much money." It becomes eerily apparent that the firm's mentality was not just amoral, but deliberately malicious. During the California energy crisis, not only did they defraud the state out of billions of dollars, but they seem to have treated it as an elaborate shell-game.

Even from this mid-point of the documentary, it is clear to audiences that Enron's downward spiral is inevitable. In many ways it has become a Frankenstein monster that its own creators cannot control. It does not help that they are largely surrounded by enablers and sycophants who create a cavernous echo chamber. Neither renowned banks nor Wall Street analysts seem to question Enron's skewed accounting. To add to that, Arthur Anderson, then a leading auditing firm, chooses to look the other way when Enron decides to adopt mark-to-market accounting. The business press only feeds Enron's delusions of grandeur. Magazines such as Forbes and Fortune present it as a rising star in the business firmament. For years, the company embodies the zeitgeist of the 90s – riding a wave of innovative globalization and fast wealth. Given the weight of such fantastical expectations, it is no wonder that Enron's eventual collapse sends tremors throughout the economic world.

While the documentary is not filmed in a variety of international locations, it more than makes up for it with its diverse cast. Co-writers Bethany Mclean and Peter Elkind both contribute to the narration, and Gibney interviews a number of second-tier executives, attorneys, governors, and friends of Enron CEOs. With their input, Gibney is able to condense and simplify the complexities of the business world without sacrificing the nuances of its human side. Likewise, Enron's entourage of executives are shown to be competitive and resourceful, driven by a need to be the best in the game. Some, such as Kenneth Lay, born to a poor family in Tyrone, Missouri, are self-made successes who practically embody the American dream of rags to riches. Although the documentary details many of their questionable decisions as Enron executives, it does not gratuitously demonize them. Rather, they are portrayed as "victims of their own greed" – the byproducts of an overarching culture that rewards ruthlessness as long as the profits are big enough. Indeed, by the time the documentary ends, audiences are left not with a sense of smug self-righteousness, but immense sadness at what Enron could have been, as well as the still-rippling disasters that could have been avoided had it not fallen prey to avarice.

Overall, one of the most engaging aspects of the documentary is its message. At many points the narrative threatens to morph into a morality play, complete with fallen heroes battling against the Seven Deadly Sins. Its saving grace is how it stretches into an incisive assessment of corporate America, which, with its outsized focus on superficial appearances and financial success, often endorses the same mercenary values it claims to vilify. Another aspect I found pleasantly surprising was how Gibney does not veer into conspiracy theories and political propaganda, which is unfortunately the case for many documentaries. Granted, he has an angle – as many directors do. But he does not let it interfere with even-handed storytelling.

At the same time, one of the film's drawbacks is its Hollywood-esque gimmickry. "Show, Don't Tell" is the dictum for many successful works of art and media, and in this case I would have preferred less of the latter. Gibney's penchant for edgy, artistic mood-building – most apparent in the imagery and soundtrack – is undoubtedly captivating. But it can also be heavy-handed and tacky. Certain dramatizations – such as Cliff Baxter's suicide set to strains of Billie Holiday's God Bless the Child – are in poor taste. So too are recollections of Enron's enigmatic executive Lou Pai, whose penchant for strippers is juxtaposed with intercuts of topless dancers in low red lighting – an effect that comes across as more gratuitous than anything.

On the whole, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a testament to Gibney's craft. Alternately gripping and horrifying, it displays an astute understanding of human nature, at its best and worst, as well as the way wealth and power can function as the potent nuclear force of social dynamics. Ultimately, if there is anything audiences will take away from the film, it is how skillfully Gibney exposes aspects of corporate culture that we are often too uncomfortable to confront ourselves.

[derkastellan]

Review: The Outer Worlds

Seems like I can’t review this Epic Games Store exclusive on Steam yet, nor on gog.com, nor even on Epic itself (though I might have missed something). So let’s do it here.

I played in “Story Mode” (combat easier) and it took me 41 hours to finish the game, including solving all the side quests (”tasks”) I could find to do.

Let me emphasize this is the most bug-free title on release I’ve played in a long, long time. Not a single CTD, no quests I couldn’t complete. Runs smooth on my mid-range gaming rag, no fancy uber-graphics card required. Looking your way, RDR2...

It ain’t as great as “Fallout: New Vegas” (FO:NV from now on) but it is a funny, quirky title and I enjoyed my time in Halcyon.

There will be spoilers.

The game’s loading times are exemplary, fast, and most building interiors have been integrated into the larger game world. Both starting up the game in the first place and

The graphics are nice, colorful, and given that some see these to be the kickoff to something to replace the Fallout series and lure its fans, something new. While a lot of what we see has the mark of decay and failure on it, it is not an almost entirely dystopian wasteland.

Because in “The Outer Worlds” (TOW) there is Hope. Both literally (the name of the missing colony ship you derive from) and implicitly. The vibe of “the world died” is - for good and bad. It is good to not have this hang above your head all the time! I mean, there’s villains, corruption, evil, but the big bad hasn’t already happened. But I noticed one thing... When I play FO:NV or “Fallout 4″ (FO4) little touches can evoke a lot. You find these carefully arranged little scenes that level designers made - two skeletons on a dirty mattress in a bunker, some booze bottles, and maybe one gun, and you get this hunch that somebody didn’t want to face this grim reality of a world that died anymore. And to me, this is missing from TOW. Somehow it’s less emotionally impactful.

What isn’t missing is superb, witty, funny dialogue. In fact, the satirical elements of the game world are top notch, and frankly, the red tape and greed corporate world it depicts is not as far from where we are now than you might wish. Obsidian simply envisioned a world where companies do not have to abide with elections at all or do lobby work, just crank out the propaganda and brainwash them from cradle to grave - chilling, for sure.

You can follow dialogue trees and obtain a lot of information, open up new options through skills. Optimizing for certain builds - like stealth/hacker and personable smooth-talker - will change how the game plays, bypass combat, and give you new options of how to finish missions.

You are usually given choices that range from “I’m the do-gooder”, ”Come the revolution”, “Leave everything as it is”, “What’s in it for me”, to “Fuck you all, I love to mess with you”. Similarly I can easily imagine that the game might tolerate killing pretty much everyone. I didn’t try but I see many quests do not so much depend on people but getting key items and info, I think you could get by by looting the items, using consoles, and solely trading with vending machines. Not my thing but seems at least largely possible.

Choice

Choice is a tricky thing with TOW. You see, this being an Obsidian game, they couldn’t leave choice out. It’s just... clumsy at times, forced.

In FO:NV you start the game in Good Springs (IIRC) and get to side with the villagers or with the Powder Gangers. You get to do various things to beef yourself and your allies up and end up with the showdown with your choices impacting how it goes. You can even walk away and ignore it, shoot everyone, whatever.

This video sums the game design choices regarding, well, choice up very well in the first round about seven minutes when it comes to FO:NV and FO4. It’s the difference between “hey, you chose your path” and “you shoot dese guys, dey be bad” pretty much.

TOW falls clumsily in between. In the end, the game is propelled by its missions. It’s not per se a “wander around” game. There are few optional locations that only feature in side quests. I think Fallbrook on Monarch you don’t have to visit, for example. Well, that’s a bit unfair, I guess. If you wanted to skip through the game you probably can ignore almost everything on the Monarch moon colony. And I think you could solve your “I have no energy coupling” problem in the Emerald Vale probably by going in, taking it, and shooting the opposition? Not entirely sure. At the least you go straight to the Geothermal plant and back and you’re done.

So, how much you meander and what tasks you take on and how you chose to solve them is mostly on you. You get to chose which factions you side with and which ones you chose to piss off.

And yet...

Switch off one colony, you must

The first mission or first part of your main mission forces “choice” down your throat. You have to shit on one faction. Period. And it seemed forced. To repair one space ship you have to disable one of two colonies? Really? It is both a weak choice and weak writing. I mean ships are seen in the sky over Edgewater. Why can’t I loot their power MacGuffin?

And it is largely a no-choice as well. Spacer’s Choice is running the colony into the ground, why leave them in charge? They realized this - and let Parvati offset this with a purely emotional plea. So they add this additional hurdle you have to pass over to essentially do the right thing. In a way. Because you cannot do anything about the hard-headed heartlessness of the woman leading the Deserters. So you have the choice between two assholes, essentially. The endgame titles for this choice are especially galling. People will die because of your choice - or else your mission never starts. It has a bit of a negadungeon feel about it...

Of course this makes for some “edgy” choice, right? No easy rights and wrongs? Fair enough. Except the choice is forced by nothing else but your own need to get out of there. The stakes of the two parties in the end do not matter. I find it fair that no ideal choice exists - this is what makes it one of the true dilemma choices of the game - but maybe it should not have been under such a weak, flimsy pretense to begin with.

Phineas

Another choice you can make several times during the game and eventually have to make is whether to turn Phineas in. I cannot imagine why you would do it, but it is a choice, right? Even if you try not to turn it in, he gets captured in the end. It becomes a choice of no consequence because the plot is on rails. It might change how Phineas feels about you and some epilogue, I guess, but it is largely without impact.

They also paint Phineas increasingly grey to justify this. He let people die - horribly - to save you. Ironically you are offered the same choice - you can let the suspended colonists in the Board labs die to get as much MacGuffin gas as you can to save the others, making you equivalent to Phineas and his “the end justifies the means” choice. But again, an empty choice. I doubt you would end up reviving all the colonists if you took that option, so besides making you feel bad: no consequence.

Since Phineas is so central to the plot he is the only character, I think, with true and literal plot armor. He only talks to you from behind bulletproof glass. I guess they wanted to avoid that trigger-happy psycho players can’t finish the game.

One world at a time

The game never truly turns into open world (but also was never advertised as such by the devs, to be fair). You unlock one location after another. I only missed out on one of them - the landing pad of the Board stooge I ended up shooting later.

You go from Emerald Value to the Groundbraker to Rosewater to Monarch to Byzantium to the Hope to Tartarus. (Schedule some visits in Phineas’ lab on the way.) You unlock optionally Scylla and two space stations. You might bypass Amber Heights and Fallbrook in terms of major settlements. And that is the game. (I think people put the main quest at 20 hours and given I did all I could conceive of in 41 that seems reasonable.)

The unfolding of the world is on rails. (Again, it was not advertised as open world.) FO:NV also had a “recommended” order. But you could rush past most of it. It was just gated behind danger, not impossible. Here you get no choice. You will see roughly 50% of the game by default - which is fair, but not terribly big. TOW, the planets themselves, seem small. You can deviate from the main path, but not much.

Again, nothing else was promised, but we all know this game is here to capture the Fallout fans - made by the FO:NV studio and with Fallout creators as leads... you can’t ignore that when evaluating the game. It was in the ads. And I never triggered the endgame in FO:NV because I was busy exploring its world (though it seemed good) and I never triggered the endgame in FO4 because frankly it seemed stupid to begin with and I was busy exploring its world.

Not so in TOW. I ran out of stuff to do. This is where choice is in chosing to explore. Exploration involves being lured off the beaten path or chosing to do out of curiosity. The game encourages small exploration by hiding stuff in every nook and cranny possible. Also, since monsters don’t wander, you have all the time in the world to explore those nooks and crannies once you’ve killed the area monsters...

Are there major things to be gained by chosing to explore? I would say no, unless you define “exploring” as “doing all the sidequests” - which it is not. Did I find interesting story details by walking around beyond quests? Not really. I found a dead miner and an excavation robot on Scylla. But no real info. No story. I have found a remote location beyond Cascadia on Monarch, but my reward for slaughtering myself past the biggest beasties? A meaningless location marker that I cannot fast-travel to, no explanation, and some free ammo. Basically enough to replace the one I spent.

All the hidden science weapons are quests. I did not find them valuable in spite of putting science in them, but you can “easily” seek them out should you chose to. The one on the Groundbreaker was the hardest to get to and I fell to death twice in getting another one - the only in-game deaths I ever had.

TOW does not expand on story through exploration, simply not. You can miss out on story by not reading all datapads that are in your way, though.

Killer lottery

Now there is another mission that lacks any real choice and has a weak design, wasting its impact needlessly. There is an “Early Retirement” lottery where it is almost instantly clear that this is some dystopian BS. My only question was if they would be turned to Soylent Green or not.

You end up entering a room where people who are “winners” end up being shot by killer drones. Given my own body count at this time in the story hardly shocking, more like lazy and shoddy. No impact.

And then you get to do nothing about it! You can tell a person about it or you can fool somebody out of spite to also get killed, but not a single line of dialogue appears anywhere to apply a consequence to having done the quest. You cannot shut it down - unless shooting the drones count - and you cannot hunt down the people responsible. You do not learn whodunnit and you do not get the satisfaction to avenge these people. It is just a mood piece, and a badly made one.

You could reason you ultimately get the responsibles in the end, but the game does not facilitate you here.

Oh, and if you leave Dr Chartrand alive, you are supposed to talk to Phineas, but no impact on the epilogue, no dialogue line with Phineas. Somebody got to code that?

No (real) consequences

If you opt to thaw up the Hope’s crew you solve all of the colony’s problems. So simply going through with everything Phineas suggested yields a happy end. You can walk the straight path with the default choice and end up none the worse.

What good points are there then to joining with the Board, giving in to your doubts, etc? The colony will slowly prosper and no price is being paid for chosing the most common part. Can I improve on this by playing differently? I don’t feel so.

Let’s see how FO:NV compares - you can hand the Mojave to different factions and the endgame outcomes are really different. There is no by-default good choice. Even if you paint Phineas as grey he is the good guy. A flawed good guy but the person that keeps events in motion.

Do I really care enough about the other options to see them played out? Probably not. Definitely not. I can watch that on YouTube eventually.

There were some consequences to my actions, though. The factions I helped that were not in bed with the Board ended up helping me in the endgame confrontation. Due to the poor handling of friendly fire when it comes to NPC allies I had to reload because I accidentally shot an ally and now had double as many enemies against me. Thanks for helping. Really.

But I liked the touch - Groundbreaker Mardets, Iconoclasts, and MSI troopers all joined me at some point. I felt the faction reputation made at least some sense. I was worried it was only good for discounts at this point...

So, the choices you make will influence the epilogue somewhat, rebates you get, close off some quests, and generate some help in endgame. I guess this is fair but not excellent.

Fridge logic and verisimilitude

In order to justify the whole second half of the plot the colony will starve if things are left as they are. There is a major plot hole here, several actually.

First of all - the colony did not starve in 70 years. How can you not starve in 70 years if there is a problem with the nutrients? Are we to assume that for 70 years actual starvation was held off by supplementing with foods from Earth and other colonies? If this were true, people would need to be near-death and starving already, emaciated. Or is it a matter of a certain stockpile running out?

The whole thing seems weak. It justifies why nobody thawed up the additional mouths but creates more problems than it solves.

But most of the game time what irked me more was nonsensical asset reuse. Why are there weak-ass marauders on Monarch? They should be eaten in no time. Same for canids. The planet is supposedly a hellhole and admittedly full of Mantiqueens and Raptisaurs. So who are these people camping out somewhere in the hellscape without resorting at least to the safety of some buildings? Buildings in comparison where almost always safe spots with no enemies in them. You won’t surprise marauders having lunch - they’re too busy hanging out at intersections!

I also don’t get how Primals came to Scylla. They give the planetoid a distinct feel but what do they eat? Where did they come from? Maybe I missed that...

Short on Western

And finally almost all of the settlements and outposts I came across failed. No sturdy settlers sticking it out, no siree! (Except for the cannibal family.) They all huddle together in the few main places. No distant shack with a crazy coot. No (alive) hunters camping out on Monarch. No small places where we stick it out even if it’s bad idea because we do have gumption.

Also, you don’t get to roam. A western would be about roaming - like in RDR2. (Haven’t played it yet but this quality of just going out and riding around is attracting me to it. That was the damn best thing in “GTA: San Andreas”: Getting on a harley and riding the land once you unlock it.)  Here you turn a corner and find a collection of enemies. There is no freedom. The world looks and sounds like steampunk scifi western but the underlying archetypes of westerns are missing, except for some hick accents.

Things look like in a western but the world itself... is basically a series of failed and near-failed settlements. Even if you can improve on all that ultimately and there is hope you encounter a dystopia while you try to do so. Westerns aren’t usually dystopian. Scifi sure often is! But even a Scifi western like the original Star Wars was full of people, outposts, and what not. People in TOW are not eking out an existence on the frontier. They all clearly have already failed so:

Edgewater: All outposts failed, even the hunting camp needed to feed the “Saltuna” factory has been abandoned. The only other settled location is the - “abandoned” - Botany Station.

The Groundbreaker: You can prevent it from collapsing altogether.

Rosewater: Well, the labs went all to shit and the place is overrun by raptisaurs. They just fought off an attack that might have killed them all.

Scylla: Major settlement eradicated.

Monarch: People in Stellar Bay are scared. Amber Heights is failing. Only Fallbrook thrives. Cascadia ended up completely eradicated.

Byzantium: Rich town, facade breaking down, though. Can’t even keep their maintenance up.

So, where do people actually live? You never get to know. But you sure do your part in breaking down one of the last settlements to survive...

The charm, the wit, the warmth

Now, I ranted a lot about what threw me off. But the game is full of characters you end up liking, dialogue that makes you laugh, things you end up caring about. I mean, you even start to collect little stuff that begins to decorate your ship, gradually changing it as you progress. The experience is not sterile and your ship becomes a home where your small family hangs out.

I even did a hard pass on one of the six available companions because I did not want him around. I didn’t know I could have them all but frankly I did like him. It’s hard to gauge how big the game will be when you play it, and I would have wanted more of it to be sure.

But you cannot stuff just more in. More would inevitably at some point lessen it. At some point quantity inevitably replaces quality. And the companions I had I cared about. I wanted to help Parvati even though I question somebody needing several thousand bits and a visit to three different difficult-to-reach locations to just have a date in a world gone mad, but in the end I was glad to have done it. Her bubbling, quirky personality was believable and charming.

Similarly, I never did a mission without Ellie as soon as I got her. No matter who you talk to, no matter who else is there, Ellie brings out quality quips and wit all the time, even to whoever else is in the party. She’s too cool to be true and that’s fine with me. Shame she didn’t get more of a second mission to herself. She remains closed off as her character seems to be. 

Nyoka is also memorable though her companion quest suffers from cheap emotional impact. Why two expert hunters who can survive on Monarch would die near Edgewater is a mystery, but hey, but five graves and Nyoka surviving them all is what the simple heartstrings narrative wanted. We never get to really challenge her on her alcoholism, which is lame, and she never limits her intake, but maybe that’s actually realistic. And I can abide with that.

Now Felix and SAM obviously can’t keep up with that but they round out the choices. I was very surprised to end up with a crew of three interesting females, Felix was almost an afterthought. They all end up distinct with lots dialogues. You may guess whom the devs liked best by seeing how Felix essentially got only one spaceship mood scene to himself where there’s plenty of interaction with the girls and among each other.

Conclusion

TOW asks valid questions. It has a good story, it has great NPCs, and I love the party. It falls short on other counts, mostly to do with choice, verisimilitude, and exploration. It is a solid game, it is bug free, it was fun to play. I doubt it offers much replay value.

Thing is... these qualities. Good dialogue, good voice-acting, being essentially bug-free... these go down the drain the more content you produce. I never finished “Torment: Tides of Numenera” because I got bored with it. It was big and seemingly dragging on. And in places it simply showed that some of the level designers did not get the memo. (The memo being: “There are no combat XP in Numenera.”)

Not so in TOW. It seems to be made out of one piece, solid, consistent in what it does. A few quests seem kinda unfinished or loose in Byzantium, ending rather abruptly, but you never stand somewhere and say “This doesn’t fit with the rest.” It does reveal a lot of stuff on terminals and datapads, but I guess this way they could get quality voice acting where it mattered and fill out the background blanks elsewhere. The balance works. It sometimes does a tiny bit of “Fallout 76″ in that you often end up chasing datapads and consoles to piece together stories about all the dead people. But since you enact with plenty of varied NPCs it doesn’t matter so much. It not only has some, it has plenty!

It’s also a decent RPG shooter. Choices of weapon matter. You can sneak, in fact it gets so easy with a modest skill in the end that I accidentally walked into enemies without engaging sneak mode because they did not notice me or stay asleep. It will probably not register as a great stealth game even by far, but it does some of it. I somehow finished the game without triggering a companion ability, I have to say. Wish you could set them to do it on their own, actually.

Will this be remembered as a classic? Probably not. Maybe it will. But it puts forward enough stuff to maybe establish a new series. If so, the next installment will have to be more substantial.

Liked it, sometimes loved it.

PS - In watching some reviews now that I finished it I must say I seem overly critical of the game. I enjoyed it but at the latest on Monarch the game kind of wore on me. Long stretches of wilderness that vary the same enemies. There’s often no empty places, no interesting interactions with alien flora and fauna. Just stuff to kill, destroyed sites to explore. 

There’s some variation, there’s some cool moments when you look up and see spaceships passing before the gas giant in the sky. But since most of the time you have your nose to the ground it doesn’t seem all the spacey to me. Might go for a real space game next.

All in all I have waited for a long time for this one to get out. I feel like I finished it too soon and yet it was also good to be done because it had played out what it would like to play out. There were no big mid-game surprises, really. From Byzantium onward the story was clear and also quality slowly went down. It seems like from there on there were less ideas and the rails became narrower. At least Byzantium required some non-violent challenges to reach your goals, so did the Hope. They ended up being repetitive as well.

All in all, my interest in TOW started to fade after the first week, and I noticed that and was annoyed by it. It is a quality game, I won’t fault it for going a long way towards providing a good experience. But mid- and endgame the pace suffers and the game goes on about how difficult and impossible things are that really aren’t. I cake-walked over Monarch most of the time but was thrown off by the game’s attempts to insist stuff is hard. (Yes, I was in story mode but the game’s insistence on talking up stuff that actually is a regular challenge in midgame is annyoing.)

Tons of cool stuff in this one, but also missed chances. I want me some exploration and some deeper choices. That was so cool about FO:NV. You don’t need to save everybody from a catastrophy. You fix the winner of a major world-changing battle, and it can even be you! That was a game about choice. TOW is a game that emulates choice at times. All rails lead to the endgame, everywhere. But TOW’s are too visible for my taste.

Yes, I am spoiled. I complain about good games like “Disco Elysium” or TOW that I actually enjoyed. But come on, industry! Impress me, hook me! I’m waiting...

[newsnigeria]

Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/the-ukrainian-elections/

The Ukrainian elections – a short preview of the coming attraction

Mommy! Daddy!  Look at the circus that came to town! 🙂

Well, it sure looks like the Ukrainian elections will be very interesting after all.  No, they probably won’t change anything truly important, but what is taking place is most interesting indeed.  I just want to mention a few things bullet-point style, not a real analysis (that will be for after the election), but maybe somewhat of a preview.  So, here’s what’s on my list:

The total collapse of Poroshenko:  I just don’t have the time to go into all the (admittedly sexy) details, but I can tell you that Poroshenko’s campaign is in total disarray, every move he has made so far has been stupid and even counter-productive and after each one of this moves, his popularity score went even further down, without Zelenskii having to say a single word.  At this point, the supporters of Poro (they are called the “Porokhobots” in Russian) are desperate and most of them are switching sides as fast as they can (betraying just at the right moment, not too early and not too late, is a Ukrainian specialty and a skillset which Ukie political leaders have honed to perfection over the centuries!). Another very worrying development for Poro is that his political opponents (including the quite charismatic, if rather brutish, Nadezhna Savchenko) are being let go free from the jails they were being held in.  Furthermore, there are rumors (unconfirmed so far) that the Ukrainian State Bureau of Investigations is prosecuting pretty much the entire Urkonazi regime for various crimes, which is also a pretty good indicator that the ship is sinking and the rats running for their lives…

Frankly, at this point I don’t even think that Poro has the resources to pull off something significant as even his allies and aides are now abandoning him and refusing to carry out this orders.  He had a chance to try to pull-off some false flag or provocation, and he missed it.  Now it appears to be too late even for that.

Gone with the wind…

Zelenskii sitting very pretty: amazing, Zelenskii is both 1) doing great and 2) doing nothing.  How is that for a winning strategy?!  Really, I am not kidding, Poro’s Ukronazis are so busy committing political seppuku that all Zelenskii has to do is watch, laugh and wait.  It is quite an amazing sight to hear Zelenskii limit himself to short telephone calls, short video messages and a few off the cuff comments.  The guy is not even really campaigning at all!  Yet, barring the unthinkable, he will win with a huge margin on Sunday.  You can credit Kolomoiskii’s money and advisors if you want, but the truth is that Zelenskii’s “non-campaign” has been a devastatingly effective (not to mention cheap and easy) way to campaign.

Considering how clueless and non-presidential Zelenskii looks (and sounds every time he opens his mouth), I think that keeping him basically silent was not only the most effective technique, it was the only possible one.

The hotly debated question: which outcome is better for Russia? Well, Poroshenko is not only an Ukronazi, alcoholic and war criminal, he is also the Uber-loser guy who  literally FUBARed everything he ever did, at least since he is in politics (Roshen chocolates are actually pretty good!).  If Poro steals the election, which is the ONLY way he is going to stay in power, then Russia will have a perfect pretext to 1) not recognize the outcome of this election and 2) the opportunity to have the Ukies further destroy what is left of their sorry Banderastan without Russia having to do anything at all.  Zelenskii is far more intelligent (not to mention sober) and he is much less likely to be an easy opponent.  Furthermore, Zelenskii is Kolomoiskii’s puppet, and the latter is both VERY evil and VERY smart.  A most dangerous opponent for Russia.  And then, we can be sure the the Zelenskii-Kolomoiskii duo will have the full support of the Zionists (thanks to Kolomoiskii’s very close ties to Israel).

So while many in the Ukraine and Russia understandably hate Poroshenko with all their souls, I am not at all so sure that Zelenskii will be better for the Ukraine or for Russia.  Somewhere, Poro would definitely be easier to handle.

This being said, I also understand that for the people of the Ukraine there is only one way to express their hatred and contempt for that Uber-loser Poroshenko.  Voting Zelenskii in the presidential election followed by a vote for pro-Zelenskii parties in the Rada might be just what is needed to begin jailing various Nazis and other nutcases (I don’t expect either Zelenskii or Kolomoiskii to have any patience with the Ukronazis, especially now that they have become a much bigger problem for the Ukraine than they have ever been for Russia).

As I said before, choosing between Zelenskii and Poro is about as meaningful as choosing between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola.  Having said that, Poro is the weaker, dumber, more isolated and more inept of the two, so he is probably a lesser evil for Russia.

A very merry puppet indeed!

What about the Donbass and the DNR/LNR People’s Republics – what outcome is better for them? For the same reasons, I think that Poroshenko is probably the lesser evil for the Novorussians.  Again, Poro and Zelenskii are both equally bad and even evil (Zelenskii has openly supported the Nazi death-squads and called the Novorussians “scum” – so have NO illusions on this account!) but Zelenskii and his backers are the more dangerous and sophisticated actors.  The truth is that the Novorussians must first and foremost count on their own courage and military acumen, then they can count on Russia not only to stop any (theoretically possible) Ukronazi offensive, but also to keep these two republics alive economically and politically.  Russia has done a lot, but not nearly enough and much more aid (both military and civilian) is needed by the suffering people of the Donbass.

The show *will* go on, and the “Ukie Queen” Oleg Liashko will be part of it

So could *anything* good come from the election of Zelenskii? Yes, but it is not very likely.  First, history is full of puppets who have broken away from their puppet masters.  Don’t necessarily think Obama or Trump here – these were both weak and cowardly people!  Think Putin, for example.  The US has a long and distinguished experience is losing control of its own puppets (Bin Laden, Saddam, Noriega, etc. etc. etc).  So I would never say never.  Especially since Zelenskii is young, clearly smart, and possibly courageous (dunno, too early to tell). In theory, Zelenskii could begin purging the most notorious Ukronazis.  He could also pardon the thousands of Ukrainian political prisoners who are kept incommunicado and who are held in secret jails all over the country.  By freeing them he could even make space for a lot of armed and dangerous Ukronazis nutcases who are roaming around the country freely and who represent a very real danger to Zelenskii (a group of west Ukrainian terrorists was recently caught near one of Zelenskii’s residences; they had guns and even a DShK heavy machine gun mounted inside a car!).  Again, in theory, Zelenskii might agree to some form of decentralization/federation which, by now, even the western Ukrainians want in increasing numbers.  Finally, he might decide to cut his losses and make some kind of deal with Putin directly.  Obviously, this would not be “Zelenskii’s deal” with Putin, but the entire AngloZionist Hegemony telling Kolomoiskii what he can allow Zelenskii to say or do.  How likely is that to produce any meaningful results?

After all, any Ukrainian politician in touch with reality will understand that making the Ukraine a monolithic state is a dead end, especially after many years of bloody civil war.  As for any discussions about the future of Crimea – they are a total waste of time.  Finally, I bet you that deep inside themselves the Ukrainian politicians understand that the Donbass, the LDNR, Novorussia – call it what you want – is gone forever and will never return under the control of Kiev (unless the regime in power in Kiev is one put into power by the Novorussians themselves).

Conclusion: it will be pretty easy to tell what will happen next

How long will it take until they all get it

If Poro steals the election, Russia will not recognize this election and the Ukraine will sink further into chaos, misery and violence.

Furthermore, Russia has (finally!) introduced some meaningful economic sanctions against the Ukraine, including a ban on the export of Russian oil and oil derivatives (a special government authorization can be requested for specific, special, cases).

If Zelenskii gets elected, one of two things will happen:

Option A: Zelenskii will rapidly and energetically resume all the rabid russophobic policies of his predecessor.  The topics of the Donbass and Crimea will be front and center of Ukie propaganda.  At this point, Russia might as well recognize the outcome of the election (I don’t see a point in pretending that Zelenskii did not “kinda” get a popular mandate) and, in the same breath, recognize the two Novorussian Republics and let them conduct a referendum on their future.

Option B: Zelenskii will rapidly and energetically try to stop (or, at least, “freeze”) the conflict with Russia and with the Donbass.  If he does that, the Kremlin will see that Zelenskii is trying to cut  his losses and gain political credibility by stopping the war in the Donbass and the (utterly stupid and self-defeating) confrontation with Russia.  At this point, Russia is likely not only to recognize the outcome of the election, but also serve as a mediator between the Novorussians and the Zelenskii government in Kiev to offer some kind of compromise centered around a de factoindependence of the two republics combined with some kind of de jure (only!) Ukrainian sovereignty over these republics, even if only symbolical.

At least so far, all the signs are that Zelenskii will go with Option A and resume Poro’s antirussian policies which, considering that Zelenskii is a puppet of Kolomoiskii, who himself is a puppet of the AngloZionist Empire (with, in his case, the stress of the “Zionist” part of the name) certainly makes sense.

Last minute updates:

Thursday April 18th: Poroshenko recorded an address to the Ukrainian people in which he 1) apologizes for this mistakes and 2) blames all his mistakes on Putin.  Go figure Ukronazi “logic”….

Thursday April 18th: Zelenskii did end up giving one real interview, in which he said that Putin was an enemy and that the Donbass should not have any special status. He also said that the fact that Stepan Bandera is a hero for many Ukrainians is “awesome/cool” (класно).  Having a Russian-speaking Jew say this about a guy who pledged allegiance to Hitler and who massacred scores of Jews is rather amazing, especially on the eve of the Jewish Passover is quite a sight.  But then again, the Nazi-occupied Ukraine is the kind of Banderastan were you find Nazis and Jews happily joining forces against their common foe: Russia in general and Orthodox Russia especially.  So forget the (comparatively nicer looking) Zelenskii and think Kolomoiskii.  In other words, lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate…

Friday April 19th:  (1300 UTC) a debate between Poroshenko and Zelenskii is supposed to take place in a soccer stadium in Kiev.  There will be two stages, one for each candidate – this makes it easier to kill one and not the other; that, at least, is the explanations given by many in Kiev.  Rumors about some kind of bomb, or sniper attack, or riots are circulating in the Ukrainian social media and tensions are very high.  One of the main Ukronazi journalists has even begged Zelenskii not to go to this debate and asked him “do you want to be killed”?  These rumors are all helping Zelenskii who is presenting himself like the young, innocent and sincere candidate facing the evil and corrupt state machine controlled by Poroshenko.

Friday April 19th: (1600 UTC) the much expected debate has begun.  First surprise, Poro walked over to the Zelenskii stage.  First Zelenskii spoke pretty poorly.  Then Poro took the floor and immediately jumped on his favorite horse: Putin and Russia.  He also pointed out that he is experienced whereas Zelenskii is a noob.  After that, the debate became outright boring and of very low quality: the two candidates did not answer each other’s question, Zelenskii offered Poro to together stand on their knees before all the suffering Ukrainians, which Zelenskii himself proceeded to immediately do; Poro instead turned his back and kissed the Ukie flag (see screenshot of that bizarre moment on the right)

Friday April 19th: (1700 UTC) the debate is over.  Frankly, both Poroshenko and Zelenskii did very poorly.  Both tried a few cheap tricks, which mostly failed to elicit any major reaction, and now the “democratic charade” is over.

Barring something truly major and earth-shattering, Zelenskii will win.  After that, we can expect Kolomoiskii to take control of most of the government within 30 days or less.  Thus the AngloZionist Empire will re-take control of a FUBARed country the control of which it has been slowly but inexorably losing.  I don’t expect the elections to the Rada to change much to the new power configuration in the Ukraine.

Political debate Ukronazi style: in a stadium with folks in battle fatigues on the stage

It is high time now for Russia to pull the plug on this Ukronazi experiment in “russophobic independence”.  That does not necessarily mean rejecting the outcome of the election, but it does mean that it is high time for Russia to recognize the two republics.  I don’t hold much hope for negotiations with Zelenskii because such negotiations are essentially negotiations with the Zelenskii’s AngloZionist puppet masters with whom negotiations have been made impossible since early 2014.  Simply put: there is no point in negotiating anything with anybody for Russia as long as there are no halfway “agreement capable” partners to negotiate with.  As of now, I see no such partners.  Hence, Russia must embark on policy of unilateral actions.  If the 5th columnists don’t prevail, I expect that that is exactly what Russia will do from now on.

So who will win on Sunday?  Will it be the Big Crook or the Little Crook?

Nobody know, but I can give a a firm prediction: it will be a crook.

The Saker

[thehowtostuff-blog]

Facebook is fielding so many problems, oversights, scandals, and other miscellaneous ills that it wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that its fact-checking program, undertaken last year after the network was confronted with its inaction in controlling disinformation, is falling apart. But in this case the reason you haven’t heard much about it isn’t because it’s a failure, but because fact-checking is boring and thankless — and being done quietly and systematically by people who are just fine with that.

The “falling apart” narrative was advanced in a recent article at The Guardian, and some of the problems noted in that piece are certainly real. But I was curious at the lack of documentation of the fact-checking process itself, so I talked with a couple of the people involved to get a better sense of it.

I definitely didn’t get the impression of a program in crisis at all, but rather one where the necessity of remaining hands-off with the editorial process and teams involved has created both apparent and real apathy when it comes to making real changes.

No bells, no whistles

Facebook likes to pretend that its research into AI will solve just about every problem it has. Unfortunately not only is that AI hugely dependent on human intelligence to work in the first place, but the best it can generally do is forward things on to human agents for final calls. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the process of fact-checking, in which it is trivial for machine learning agents to surface possibly dubious links or articles, but at this stage pretty much impossible for them to do any kind of real evaluation of them.

That’s where the company’s network of independent fact-checkers comes in. No longer among their number are two former Snopes staffers who left to work at another fact-checking concern — pointedly not involved with Facebook — and who clearly had major problems with the way the program worked. Most explosive was the accusation that Facebook had seemingly tried to prioritize fact checks that concerned an advertiser.

But it wasn’t clear from their complaints just how the program does work. I chatted with Snopes head David Mikkelson and checked in with Politifact editor Angie Drobnic Holan. They emphatically denied allegations of Facebook shenanigans, though they had their own reservations, and while they couldn’t provide exact details of the system they used, it sounds pretty straightforward.

Facebook expands fact-checking program, adopts new technology for fighting fake news

“For the most part it’s literally just data entry,” explained Mikkelson. “When we fact-check something, we enter its URL into a database. You could probably dress it up in all kinds of bells and whistles, but we don’t really need or expect much more than that. We haven’t changed what we do or how we do it.”

Mikkelson described the Facebook system in broad terms. It’s a dashboard of links that are surfaced, as Facebook has explained before, primarily through machine learning systems that know what sort of thing to look for: weird URLs, bot promotion, scammy headlines, etc. They appear on the dashboard in some semblance of order, for instance based on traffic or engagement.

“It lists a thumbnail of what the item is, like is it an article or a video; there’s a column for estimated shares, first published date, etc,” said Mikkelson. “They’ve never given us any instructions on like, ‘please do the one with the most shares,’ or ‘do the most recent entry and work your way down,’ or whatever.”

In fact there’s no need to even use the dashboard that way at all.

“There’s no requirement that we undertake anything that’s in their database. If there’s something that isn’t in there, which honestly is most of what we do, we just add it,” Mikkelson said.

Passive partner or puppet master?

I asked whether there was any kind of pushback or interference at all from Facebook, as described by Brooks Binkowski in the Guardian story, who mentioned several such occasions that occurred during her time at Snopes.

Politifact’s Holan said she thought the suggestion was “very misleading.” In a statement, the organization said that “As with all our work, we decide what to fact-check and arrive at our conclusions without input from Facebook or any third party. Any claim suggesting otherwise is misinformed and baseless.”

“I realize Facebook’s reputation is kind of in the dumpster right now already,” Mikkelson said, “but this is damaging to all the fact-checking partners, including us. We would never have continued a working relationship with Facebook or any other partner that told us to couch fact checks in service of advertisers. It’s insulting to suggest.”

The question of receiving compensation for fact-checking was another of Binkowski’s qualms. On the one hand, it could be seen as a conflict of interest for Facebook to be paying for the service, since that opens all kinds of cans of worms — but on the other, it’s ridiculous to suggest this critical work can or should be done for free. Though at first, it was.

When the fact-checking team was first assembled in late 2016, Snopes wrote that it expects “to derive no direct financial benefit from this arrangement.” But eventually it did.

“When we published that, the partnership was in its earliest, embryonic stages — an experiment they’d like our help with,” Mikkelson said. Money “didn’t come up at all.” It wasn’t until the next year that Facebook mentioned paying fact checkers, though it hadn’t announced this publicly, and Snopes eventually did earn and disclose $100,000 coming from the company. Facebook had put bounties on high-profile political stories that were already on Snopes’s radar, as well as others in the fact-checking group.

The money came despite the fact that Snopes never asked for it or billed Facebook — a check arrived at the end of the year, he recalled, “with a note that said ‘vendor refuses to invoice.’ ”

Partners, but not pals

As for the mere concept of working for a company whose slippery methods and unlikeable leadership have been repeatedly pilloried over the last few years, it’s a legitimate concern. But Facebook is too important of a platform to ignore on account of ethical lapses by higher-ups who are not involved in the day-to-day fact-checking operation. Millions of people still look to Facebook for their news.

Sheryl Sandberg knew more of Facebook’s work with Definers than she let on

To abandon the company because (for instance) Sheryl Sandberg hired a dirty PR firm to sling mud at critics would be antithetical to the mission that drove these fact-checking companies to the platform to begin with. After all, it’s not like Facebook had a sterling reputation in 2016, either.

Both Politifact and Snopes indicated that their discontent with the company was more focused on the lack of transparency within the fact-checking program itself. The tools are basic and feedback is nil. Questions like the following have gone unanswered for years:

What constitutes falsity? What criteria should and shouldn’t be considered? How should satire be treated if it is spreading as if it were fact? What about state-sponsored propaganda and disinformation? Have other fact checkers looked at a given story, and could or should their judgments inform the other’s? What is the immediate effect of marking a story false — does it stop spreading? Is there pushback from the community? Is the outlet penalized in other ways? What about protesting an erroneous decision?

Dodged questions from Facebook’s press call on misinformation

The problem with Facebook’s fact-checking operation, as so often is the case with this company, is a lack of transparency with both users and partners. The actual fact-checking happens outside Facebook, and rightly so; it’s not likely to be affected or compromised by the company, and in fact if it tried, it might find the whole thing blowing up in its face. But while the checking itself is tamper-resistant, it’s not clear at all what if any effect it’s having, and how it will be improved or implemented in the future. Surely that’s relevant to everyone with a stake in this process?

Over a year and a half or more of the program, little has been communicated and little has been changed, and that not fast enough. But at the same time, thousands of articles have been checked by experts who are used to having their work go largely unrewarded — and despite Facebook’s lack of transparency with them and us, it seems unlikely that that work has also been ineffective.

For years Facebook was a rat’s nest of trash content and systematically organized disinformation. In many ways, it still is, but an organized fact-checking campaign works like constant friction acting against the momentum of this heap. It’s not flashy and the work will never be done, but it’s no less important for all that.

As with so many other Facebook initiatives, we hear a lot of promises and seldom much in the way of results. The establishment of a group of third parties contributing independently to a fact-checking database was a good step, and it would be surprising to hear it has had no positive affect.

Users and partners deserve to know how it works, whether it’s working, and how it’s being changed. That information would disarm critics and hearten allies. If Facebook continues to defy these basic expectations, however, it only further justifies and intensifies the claims of its worst enemies.

from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2GEieFR

[williamsjoan]

Facebook’s fact-checkers toil on

Facebook is fielding so many problems, oversights, scandals, and other miscellaneous ills that it wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that its fact-checking program, undertaken last year after the network was confronted with its inaction in controlling disinformation, is falling apart. But in this case the reason you haven’t heard much about it isn’t because it’s a failure, but because fact-checking is boring and thankless — and being done quietly and systematically by people who are just fine with that.

The “falling apart” narrative was advanced in a recent article at The Guardian, and some of the problems noted in that piece are certainly real. But I was curious at the lack of documentation of the fact-checking process itself, so I talked with a couple of the people involved to get a better sense of it.

I definitely didn’t get the impression of a program in crisis at all, but rather one where the necessity of remaining hands-off with the editorial process and teams involved has created both apparent and real apathy when it comes to making real changes.

No bells, no whistles

Facebook likes to pretend that its research into AI will solve just about every problem it has. Unfortunately not only is that AI hugely dependent on human intelligence to work in the first place, but the best it can generally do is forward things on to human agents for final calls. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the process of fact-checking, in which it is trivial for machine learning agents to surface possibly dubious links or articles, but at this stage pretty much impossible for them to do any kind of real evaluation of them.

That’s where the company’s network of independent fact-checkers comes in. No longer among their number are two former Snopes staffers who left to work at another fact-checking concern — pointedly not involved with Facebook — and who clearly had major problems with the way the program worked. Most explosive was the accusation that Facebook had seemingly tried to prioritize fact checks that concerned an advertiser.

But it wasn’t clear from their complaints just how the program does work. I chatted with Snopes head David Mikkelson and checked in with Politifact editor Angie Drobnic Holan. They emphatically denied allegations of Facebook shenanigans, though they had their own reservations, and while they couldn’t provide exact details of the system they used, it sounds pretty straightforward.

Facebook expands fact-checking program, adopts new technology for fighting fake news

“For the most part it’s literally just data entry,” explained Mikkelson. “When we fact-check something, we enter its URL into a database. You could probably dress it up in all kinds of bells and whistles, but we don’t really need or expect much more than that. We haven’t changed what we do or how we do it.”

Mikkelson described the Facebook system in broad terms. It’s a dashboard of links that are surfaced, as Facebook has explained before, primarily through machine learning systems that know what sort of thing to look for: weird URLs, bot promotion, scammy headlines, etc. They appear on the dashboard in some semblance of order, for instance based on traffic or engagement.

“It lists a thumbnail of what the item is, like is it an article or a video; there’s a column for estimated shares, first published date, etc,” said Mikkelson. “They’ve never given us any instructions on like, ‘please do the one with the most shares,’ or ‘do the most recent entry and work your way down,’ or whatever.”

In fact there’s no need to even use the dashboard that way at all.

“There’s no requirement that we undertake anything that’s in their database. If there’s something that isn’t in there, which honestly is most of what we do, we just add it,” Mikkelson said.

Passive partner or puppet master?

I asked whether there was any kind of pushback or interference at all from Facebook, as described by Brooks Binkowski in the Guardian story, who mentioned several such occasions that occurred during her time at Snopes.

Politifact’s Holan said she thought the suggestion was “very misleading.” In a statement, the organization said that “As with all our work, we decide what to fact-check and arrive at our conclusions without input from Facebook or any third party. Any claim suggesting otherwise is misinformed and baseless.”

“I realize Facebook’s reputation is kind of in the dumpster right now already,” Mikkelson said, “but this is damaging to all the fact-checking partners, including us. We would never have continued a working relationship with Facebook or any other partner that told us to couch fact checks in service of advertisers. It’s insulting to suggest.”

The question of receiving compensation for fact-checking was another of Binkowski’s qualms. On the one hand, it could be seen as a conflict of interest for Facebook to be paying for the service, since that opens all kinds of cans of worms — but on the other, it’s ridiculous to suggest this critical work can or should be done for free. Though at first, it was.

When the fact-checking team was first assembled in late 2016, Snopes wrote that it expects “to derive no direct financial benefit from this arrangement.” But eventually it did.

“When we published that, the partnership was in its earliest, embryonic stages — an experiment they’d like our help with,” Mikkelson said. Money “didn’t come up at all.” It wasn’t until the next year that Facebook mentioned paying fact checkers, though it hadn’t announced this publicly, and Snopes eventually did earn and disclose $100,000 coming from the company. Facebook had put bounties on high-profile political stories that were already on Snopes’s radar, as well as others in the fact-checking group.

The money came despite the fact that Snopes never asked for it or billed Facebook — a check arrived at the end of the year, he recalled, “with a note that said ‘vendor refuses to invoice.’ ”

Partners, but not pals

As for the mere concept of working for a company whose slippery methods and unlikeable leadership have been repeatedly pilloried over the last few years, it’s a legitimate concern. But Facebook is too important of a platform to ignore on account of ethical lapses by higher-ups who are not involved in the day-to-day fact-checking operation. Millions of people still look to Facebook for their news.

Sheryl Sandberg knew more of Facebook’s work with Definers than she let on

To abandon the company because (for instance) Sheryl Sandberg hired a dirty PR firm to sling mud at critics would be antithetical to the mission that drove these fact-checking companies to the platform to begin with. After all, it’s not like Facebook had a sterling reputation in 2016, either.

Both Politifact and Snopes indicated that their discontent with the company was more focused on the lack of transparency within the fact-checking program itself. The tools are basic and feedback is nil. Questions like the following have gone unanswered for years:

What constitutes falsity? What criteria should and shouldn’t be considered? How should satire be treated if it is spreading as if it were fact? What about state-sponsored propaganda and disinformation? Have other fact checkers looked at a given story, and could or should their judgments inform the other’s? What is the immediate effect of marking a story false — does it stop spreading? Is there pushback from the community? Is the outlet penalized in other ways? What about protesting an erroneous decision?

Dodged questions from Facebook’s press call on misinformation

The problem with Facebook’s fact-checking operation, as so often is the case with this company, is a lack of transparency with both users and partners. The actual fact-checking happens outside Facebook, and rightly so; it’s not likely to be affected or compromised by the company, and in fact if it tried, it might find the whole thing blowing up in its face. But while the checking itself is tamper-resistant, it’s not clear at all what if any effect it’s having, and how it will be improved or implemented in the future. Surely that’s relevant to everyone with a stake in this process?

Over a year and a half or more of the program, little has been communicated and little has been changed, and that not fast enough. But at the same time, thousands of articles have been checked by experts who are used to having their work go largely unrewarded — and despite Facebook’s lack of transparency with them and us, it seems unlikely that that work has also been ineffective.

For years Facebook was a rat’s nest of trash content and systematically organized disinformation. In many ways, it still is, but an organized fact-checking campaign works like constant friction acting against the momentum of this heap. It’s not flashy and the work will never be done, but it’s no less important for all that.

As with so many other Facebook initiatives, we hear a lot of promises and seldom much in the way of results. The establishment of a group of third parties contributing independently to a fact-checking database was a good step, and it would be surprising to hear it has had no positive affect.

Users and partners deserve to know how it works, whether it’s working, and how it’s being changed. That information would disarm critics and hearten allies. If Facebook continues to defy these basic expectations, however, it only further justifies and intensifies the claims of its worst enemies.

Facebook’s fact-checkers toil on published first on https://timloewe.tumblr.com/

[theinvinciblenoob]

Facebook is fielding so many problems, oversights, scandals, and other miscellaneous ills that it wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that its fact-checking program, undertaken last year after the network was confronted with its inaction in controlling disinformation, is falling apart. But in this case the reason you haven’t heard much about it isn’t because it’s a failure, but because fact-checking is boring and thankless — and being done quietly and systematically by people who are just fine with that.

The “falling apart” narrative was advanced in a recent article at The Guardian, and some of the problems noted in that piece are certainly real. But I was curious at the lack of documentation of the fact-checking process itself, so I talked with a couple of the people involved to get a better sense of it.

I definitely didn’t get the impression of a program in crisis at all, but rather one where the necessity of remaining hands-off with the editorial process and teams involved has created both apparent and real apathy when it comes to making real changes.

No bells, no whistles

Facebook likes to pretend that its research into AI will solve just about every problem it has. Unfortunately not only is that AI hugely dependent on human intelligence to work in the first place, but the best it can generally do is forward things on to human agents for final calls. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the process of fact-checking, in which it is trivial for machine learning agents to surface possibly dubious links or articles, but at this stage pretty much impossible for them to do any kind of real evaluation of them.

That’s where the company’s network of independent fact-checkers comes in. No longer among their number are two former Snopes staffers who left to work at another fact-checking concern — pointedly not involved with Facebook — and who clearly had major problems with the way the program worked. Most explosive was the accusation that Facebook had seemingly tried to prioritize fact checks that concerned an advertiser.

But it wasn’t clear from their complaints just how the program does work. I chatted with Snopes head David Mikkelson and checked in with Politifact editor Angie Drobnic Holan. They emphatically denied allegations of Facebook shenanigans, though they had their own reservations, and while they couldn’t provide exact details of the system they used, it sounds pretty straightforward.

Facebook expands fact-checking program, adopts new technology for fighting fake news

“For the most part it’s literally just data entry,” explained Mikkelson. “When we fact-check something, we enter its URL into a database. You could probably dress it up in all kinds of bells and whistles, but we don’t really need or expect much more than that. We haven’t changed what we do or how we do it.”

Mikkelson described the Facebook system in broad terms. It’s a dashboard of links that are surfaced, as Facebook has explained before, primarily through machine learning systems that know what sort of thing to look for: weird URLs, bot promotion, scammy headlines, etc. They appear on the dashboard in some semblance of order, for instance based on traffic or engagement.

“It lists a thumbnail of what the item is, like is it an article or a video; there’s a column for estimated shares, first published date, etc,” said Mikkelson. “They’ve never given us any instructions on like, ‘please do the one with the most shares,’ or ‘do the most recent entry and work your way down,’ or whatever.”

In fact there’s no need to even use the dashboard that way at all.

“There’s no requirement that we undertake anything that’s in their database. If there’s something that isn’t in there, which honestly is most of what we do, we just add it,” Mikkelson said.

Passive partner or puppet master?

I asked whether there was any kind of pushback or interference at all from Facebook, as described by Brooks Binkowski in the Guardian story, who mentioned several such occasions that occurred during her time at Snopes.

Politifact’s Holan said she thought the suggestion was “very misleading.” In a statement, the organization said that “As with all our work, we decide what to fact-check and arrive at our conclusions without input from Facebook or any third party. Any claim suggesting otherwise is misinformed and baseless.”

“I realize Facebook’s reputation is kind of in the dumpster right now already,” Mikkelson said, “but this is damaging to all the fact-checking partners, including us. We would never have continued a working relationship with Facebook or any other partner that told us to couch fact checks in service of advertisers. It’s insulting to suggest.”

The question of receiving compensation for fact-checking was another of Binkowski’s qualms. On the one hand, it could be seen as a conflict of interest for Facebook to be paying for the service, since that opens all kinds of cans of worms — but on the other, it’s ridiculous to suggest this critical work can or should be done for free. Though at first, it was.

When the fact-checking team was first assembled in late 2016, Snopes wrote that it expects “to derive no direct financial benefit from this arrangement.” But eventually it did.

“When we published that, the partnership was in its earliest, embryonic stages — an experiment they’d like our help with,” Mikkelson said. Money “didn’t come up at all.” It wasn’t until the next year that Facebook mentioned paying fact checkers, though it hadn’t announced this publicly, and Snopes eventually did earn and disclose $100,000 coming from the company. Facebook had put bounties on high-profile political stories that were already on Snopes’s radar, as well as others in the fact-checking group.

The money came despite the fact that Snopes never asked for it or billed Facebook — a check arrived at the end of the year, he recalled, “with a note that said ‘vendor refuses to invoice.’ ”

Partners, but not pals

As for the mere concept of working for a company whose slippery methods and unlikeable leadership have been repeatedly pilloried over the last few years, it’s a legitimate concern. But Facebook is too important of a platform to ignore on account of ethical lapses by higher-ups who are not involved in the day-to-day fact-checking operation. Millions of people still look to Facebook for their news.

Sheryl Sandberg knew more of Facebook’s work with Definers than she let on

To abandon the company because (for instance) Sheryl Sandberg hired a dirty PR firm to sling mud at critics would be antithetical to the mission that drove these fact-checking companies to the platform to begin with. After all, it’s not like Facebook had a sterling reputation in 2016, either.

Both Politifact and Snopes indicated that their discontent with the company was more focused on the lack of transparency within the fact-checking program itself. The tools are basic and feedback is nil. Questions like the following have gone unanswered for years:

What constitutes falsity? What criteria should and shouldn’t be considered? How should satire be treated if it is spreading as if it were fact? What about state-sponsored propaganda and disinformation? Have other fact checkers looked at a given story, and could or should their judgments inform the other’s? What is the immediate effect of marking a story false — does it stop spreading? Is there pushback from the community? Is the outlet penalized in other ways? What about protesting an erroneous decision?

Dodged questions from Facebook’s press call on misinformation

The problem with Facebook’s fact-checking operation, as so often is the case with this company, is a lack of transparency with both users and partners. The actual fact-checking happens outside Facebook, and rightly so; it’s not likely to be affected or compromised by the company, and in fact if it tried, it might find the whole thing blowing up in its face. But while the checking itself is tamper-resistant, it’s not clear at all what if any effect it’s having, and how it will be improved or implemented in the future. Surely that’s relevant to everyone with a stake in this process?

Over a year and a half or more of the program, little has been communicated and little has been changed, and that not fast enough. But at the same time, thousands of articles have been checked by experts who are used to having their work go largely unrewarded — and despite Facebook’s lack of transparency with them and us, it seems unlikely that that work has also been ineffective.

For years Facebook was a rat’s nest of trash content and systematically organized disinformation. In many ways, it still is, but an organized fact-checking campaign works like constant friction acting against the momentum of this heap. It’s not flashy and the work will never be done, but it’s no less important for all that.

As with so many other Facebook initiatives, we hear a lot of promises and seldom much in the way of results. The establishment of a group of third parties contributing independently to a fact-checking database was a good step, and it would be surprising to hear it has had no positive affect.

Users and partners deserve to know how it works, whether it’s working, and how it’s being changed. That information would disarm critics and hearten allies. If Facebook continues to defy these basic expectations, however, it only further justifies and intensifies the claims of its worst enemies.

via TechCrunch

[fmservers]

Facebook’s fact-checkers toil on

Facebook is fielding so many problems, oversights, scandals, and other miscellaneous ills that it wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that its fact-checking program, undertaken last year after the network was confronted with its inaction in controlling disinformation, is falling apart. But in this case the reason you haven’t heard much about it isn’t because it’s a failure, but because fact-checking is boring and thankless — and being done quietly and systematically by people who are just fine with that.

The “falling apart” narrative was advanced in a recent article at The Guardian, and some of the problems noted in that piece are certainly real. But I was curious at the lack of documentation of the fact-checking process itself, so I talked with a couple of the people involved to get a better sense of it.

I definitely didn’t get the impression of a program in crisis at all, but rather one where the necessity of remaining hands-off with the editorial process and teams involved has created both apparent and real apathy when it comes to making real changes.

No bells, no whistles

Facebook likes to pretend that its research into AI will solve just about every problem it has. Unfortunately not only is that AI hugely dependent on human intelligence to work in the first place, but the best it can generally do is forward things on to human agents for final calls. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the process of fact-checking, in which it is trivial for machine learning agents to surface possibly dubious links or articles, but at this stage pretty much impossible for them to do any kind of real evaluation of them.

That’s where the company’s network of independent fact-checkers comes in. No longer among their number are two former Snopes staffers who left to work at another fact-checking concern — pointedly not involved with Facebook — and who clearly had major problems with the way the program worked. Most explosive was the accusation that Facebook had seemingly tried to prioritize fact checks that concerned an advertiser.

But it wasn’t clear from their complaints just how the program does work. I chatted with Snopes head David Mikkelson and checked in with Politifact editor Angie Drobnic Holan. They emphatically denied allegations of Facebook shenanigans, though they had their own reservations, and while they couldn’t provide exact details of the system they used, it sounds pretty straightforward.

Facebook expands fact-checking program, adopts new technology for fighting fake news

“For the most part it’s literally just data entry,” explained Mikkelson. “When we fact-check something, we enter its URL into a database. You could probably dress it up in all kinds of bells and whistles, but we don’t really need or expect much more than that. We haven’t changed what we do or how we do it.”

Mikkelson described the Facebook system in broad terms. It’s a dashboard of links that are surfaced, as Facebook has explained before, primarily through machine learning systems that know what sort of thing to look for: weird URLs, bot promotion, scammy headlines, etc. They appear on the dashboard in some semblance of order, for instance based on traffic or engagement.

“It lists a thumbnail of what the item is, like is it an article or a video; there’s a column for estimated shares, first published date, etc,” said Mikkelson. “They’ve never given us any instructions on like, ‘please do the one with the most shares,’ or ‘do the most recent entry and work your way down,’ or whatever.”

In fact there’s no need to even use the dashboard that way at all.

“There’s no requirement that we undertake anything that’s in their database. If there’s something that isn’t in there, which honestly is most of what we do, we just add it,” Mikkelson said.

Passive partner or puppet master?

I asked whether there was any kind of pushback or interference at all from Facebook, as described by Brooks Binkowski in the Guardian story, who mentioned several such occasions that occurred during her time at Snopes.

Politifact’s Holan said she thought the suggestion was “very misleading.” In a statement, the organization said that “As with all our work, we decide what to fact-check and arrive at our conclusions without input from Facebook or any third party. Any claim suggesting otherwise is misinformed and baseless.”

“I realize Facebook’s reputation is kind of in the dumpster right now already,” Mikkelson said, “but this is damaging to all the fact-checking partners, including us. We would never have continued a working relationship with Facebook or any other partner that told us to couch fact checks in service of advertisers. It’s insulting to suggest.”

The question of receiving compensation for fact-checking was another of Binkowski’s qualms. On the one hand, it could be seen as a conflict of interest for Facebook to be paying for the service, since that opens all kinds of cans of worms — but on the other, it’s ridiculous to suggest this critical work can or should be done for free. Though at first, it was.

When the fact-checking team was first assembled in late 2016, Snopes wrote that it expects “to derive no direct financial benefit from this arrangement.” But eventually it did.

“When we published that, the partnership was in its earliest, embryonic stages — an experiment they’d like our help with,” Mikkelson said. Money “didn’t come up at all.” It wasn’t until the next year that Facebook mentioned paying fact checkers, though it hadn’t announced this publicly, and Snopes eventually did earn and disclose $100,000 coming from the company. Facebook had put bounties on high-profile political stories that were already on Snopes’s radar, as well as others in the fact-checking group.

The money came despite the fact that Snopes never asked for it or billed Facebook — a check arrived at the end of the year, he recalled, “with a note that said ‘vendor refuses to invoice.’ ”

Partners, but not pals

As for the mere concept of working for a company whose slippery methods and unlikeable leadership have been repeatedly pilloried over the last few years, it’s a legitimate concern. But Facebook is too important of a platform to ignore on account of ethical lapses by higher-ups who are not involved in the day-to-day fact-checking operation. Millions of people still look to Facebook for their news.

Sheryl Sandberg knew more of Facebook’s work with Definers than she let on

To abandon the company because (for instance) Sheryl Sandberg hired a dirty PR firm to sling mud at critics would be antithetical to the mission that drove these fact-checking companies to the platform to begin with. After all, it’s not like Facebook had a sterling reputation in 2016, either.

Both Politifact and Snopes indicated that their discontent with the company was more focused on the lack of transparency within the fact-checking program itself. The tools are basic and feedback is nil. Questions like the following have gone unanswered for years:

What constitutes falsity? What criteria should and shouldn’t be considered? How should satire be treated if it is spreading as if it were fact? What about state-sponsored propaganda and disinformation? Have other fact checkers looked at a given story, and could or should their judgments inform the other’s? What is the immediate effect of marking a story false — does it stop spreading? Is there pushback from the community? Is the outlet penalized in other ways? What about protesting an erroneous decision?

Dodged questions from Facebook’s press call on misinformation

The problem with Facebook’s fact-checking operation, as so often is the case with this company, is a lack of transparency with both users and partners. The actual fact-checking happens outside Facebook, and rightly so; it’s not likely to be affected or compromised by the company, and in fact if it tried, it might find the whole thing blowing up in its face. But while the checking itself is tamper-resistant, it’s not clear at all what if any effect it’s having, and how it will be improved or implemented in the future. Surely that’s relevant to everyone with a stake in this process?

Over a year and a half or more of the program, little has been communicated and little has been changed, and that not fast enough. But at the same time, thousands of articles have been checked by experts who are used to having their work go largely unrewarded — and despite Facebook’s lack of transparency with them and us, it seems unlikely that that work has also been ineffective.

For years Facebook was a rat’s nest of trash content and systematically organized disinformation. In many ways, it still is, but an organized fact-checking campaign works like constant friction acting against the momentum of this heap. It’s not flashy and the work will never be done, but it’s no less important for all that.

As with so many other Facebook initiatives, we hear a lot of promises and seldom much in the way of results. The establishment of a group of third parties contributing independently to a fact-checking database was a good step, and it would be surprising to hear it has had no positive affect.

Users and partners deserve to know how it works, whether it’s working, and how it’s being changed. That information would disarm critics and hearten allies. If Facebook continues to defy these basic expectations, however, it only further justifies and intensifies the claims of its worst enemies.

Via Devin Coldewey https://techcrunch.com

[sheminecrafts]

How Russia’s online influence campaign engaged with millions for years

Russian efforts to influence U.S. politics and sway public opinion were consistent and, as far as engaging with target audiences, largely successful, according to a report from Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project published today. Based on data provided to Congress by Facebook, Instagram, Google and Twitter, the study paints a portrait of the years-long campaign that’s less than flattering to the companies.

The report, which you can read here, was published today but given to some outlets over the weekend; it summarizes the work of the Internet Research Agency, Moscow’s online influence factory and troll farm. The data cover various periods for different companies, but 2016 and 2017 showed by far the most activity.

A clearer picture

If you’ve only checked into this narrative occasionally during the last couple of years, the Comprop report is a great way to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing, with no “we take this very seriously” palaver interrupting the facts.

If you’ve been following the story closely, the value of the report is mostly in deriving specifics and some new statistics from the data, which Oxford researchers were provided some seven months ago for analysis. The numbers, predictably, all seem to be a bit higher or more damning than those provided by the companies themselves in their voluntary reports and carefully practiced testimony.

Previous estimates have focused on the rather nebulous metric of “encountering” or “seeing” IRA content put on these social metrics. This had the dual effect of increasing the affected number — to over 100 million on Facebook alone — but “seeing” could easily be downplayed in importance; after all, how many things do you “see” on the internet every day?

Facebook will show which Russian election troll accounts you followed

The Oxford researchers better quantify the engagement, on Facebook first, with more specific and consequential numbers. For instance, in 2016 and 2017, nearly 30 million people on Facebook actually shared Russian propaganda content, with similar numbers of likes garnered, and millions of comments generated.

Note that these aren’t ads that Russian shell companies were paying to shove into your timeline — these were pages and groups with thousands of users on board who actively engaged with and spread posts, memes and disinformation on captive news sites linked to by the propaganda accounts.

The content itself was, of course, carefully curated to touch on a number of divisive issues: immigration, gun control, race relations and so on. Many different groups (i.e. black Americans, conservatives, Muslims, LGBT communities) were targeted; all generated significant engagement, as this breakdown of the above stats shows:

Although the targeted communities were surprisingly diverse, the intent was highly focused: stoke partisan divisions, suppress left-leaning voters and activate right-leaning ones.

Black voters in particular were a popular target across all platforms, and a great deal of content was posted both to keep racial tensions high and to interfere with their actual voting. Memes were posted suggesting followers withhold their votes, or with deliberately incorrect instructions on how to vote. These efforts were among the most numerous and popular of the IRA’s campaign; it’s difficult to judge their effectiveness, but certainly they had reach.

Examples of posts targeting black Americans.

In a statement, Facebook said that it was cooperating with officials and that “Congress and the intelligence community are best placed to use the information we and others provide to determine the political motivations of actors like the Internet Research Agency.” It also noted that it has “made progress in helping prevent interference on our platforms during elections, strengthened our policies against voter suppression ahead of the 2018 midterms, and funded independent research on the impact of social media on democracy.”

Instagram on the rise

Based on the narrative thus far, one might expect that Facebook — being the focus for much of it — was the biggest platform for this propaganda, and that it would have peaked around the 2016 election, when the evident goal of helping Donald Trump get elected had been accomplished.

In fact Instagram was receiving as much or more content than Facebook, and it was being engaged with on a similar scale. Previous reports disclosed that around 120,000 IRA-related posts on Instagram had reached several million people in the run-up to the election. The Oxford researchers conclude, however, that 40 accounts received in total some 185 million likes and 4 million comments during the period covered by the data (2015-2017).

A partial explanation for these rather high numbers may be that, also counter to the most obvious narrative, IRA posting in fact increased following the election — for all platforms, but particularly on Instagram.

IRA-related Instagram posts jumped from an average of 2,611 per month in 2016 to 5,956 in 2017; note that the numbers don’t match the above table exactly because the time periods differ slightly.

Twitter posts, while extremely numerous, are quite steady at just under 60,000 per month, totaling around 73 million engagements over the period studied. To be perfectly frank, this kind of voluminous bot and sock puppet activity is so commonplace on Twitter, and the company seems to have done so little to thwart it, that it hardly bears mentioning. But it was certainly there, and often reused existing bot nets that previously had chimed in on politics elsewhere and in other languages.

In a statement, Twitter said that it has “made significant strides since 2016 to counter manipulation of our service, including our release of additional data in October related to previously disclosed activities to enable further independent academic research and investigation.”

Google too is somewhat hard to find in the report, though not necessarily because it has a handle on Russian influence on its platforms. Oxford’s researchers complain that Google and YouTube have been not just stingy, but appear to have actively attempted to stymie analysis.

Google chose to supply the Senate committee with data in a non-machine-readable format. The evidence that the IRA had bought ads on Google was provided as images of ad text and in PDF format whose pages displayed copies of information previously organized in spreadsheets. This means that Google could have provided the useable ad text and spreadsheets—in a standard machine- readable file format, such as CSV or JSON, that would be useful to data scientists—but chose to turn them into images and PDFs as if the material would all be printed out on paper.

This forced the researchers to collect their own data via citations and mentions of YouTube content. As a consequence, their conclusions are limited. Generally speaking, when a tech company does this, it means that the data they could provide would tell a story they don’t want heard.

For instance, one interesting point brought up by a second report published today, by New Knowledge, concerns the 1,108 videos uploaded by IRA-linked accounts on YouTube. These videos, a Google statement explained, “were not targeted to the U.S. or to any particular sector of the U.S. population.”

In fact, all but a few dozen of these videos concerned police brutality and Black Lives Matter, which as you’ll recall were among the most popular topics on the other platforms. Seems reasonable to expect that this extremely narrow targeting would have been mentioned by YouTube in some way. Unfortunately it was left to be discovered by a third party and gives one an idea of just how far a statement from the company can be trusted. (Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Desperately seeking transparency

In its conclusion, the Oxford researchers — Philip N. Howard, Bharath Ganesh and Dimitra Liotsiou — point out that although the Russian propaganda efforts were (and remain) disturbingly effective and well organized, the country is not alone in this.

“During 2016 and 2017 we saw significant efforts made by Russia to disrupt elections around the world, but also political parties in these countries spreading disinformation domestically,” they write. “In many democracies it is not even clear that spreading computational propaganda contravenes election laws.”

“It is, however, quite clear that the strategies and techniques used by government cyber troops have an impact,” the report continues, “and that their activities violate the norms of democratic practice… Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike.”

Predictably, even social networks’ moderation policies became targets for propagandizing.

Waiting on politicians is, as usual, something of a long shot, and the onus is squarely on the providers of social media and internet services to create an environment in which malicious actors are less likely to thrive.

Specifically, this means that these companies need to embrace researchers and watchdogs in good faith instead of freezing them out in order to protect some internal process or embarrassing misstep.

“Twitter used to provide researchers at major universities with access to several APIs, but has withdrawn this and provides so little information on the sampling of existing APIs that researchers increasingly question its utility for even basic social science,” the researchers point out. “Facebook provides an extremely limited API for the analysis of public pages, but no API for Instagram.” (And we’ve already heard what they think of Google’s submissions.)

If the companies exposed in this report truly take these issues seriously, as they tell us time and again, perhaps they should implement some of these suggestions.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2BoiW4g via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

Russian efforts to influence U.S. politics and sway public opinion were consistent and, as far as engaging with target audiences, largely successful, according to a report from Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project published today. Based on data provided to Congress by Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Twitter, the study paints a portrait of the years-long campaign that’s less than flattering to the companies.

The report, which you can read here, was published today but given to some outlets over the weekend, summarizes the work of the Internet Research Agency, Moscow’s online influence factory and troll farm. The data cover various periods for different companies, but 2016 and 2017 showed by far the most activity.

A clearer picture

If you’ve only checked into this narrative occasionally during the last couple years, the Comprop report is a great way to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing, with no “we take this very seriously” palaver interrupting the facts.

If you’ve been following the story closely, the value of the report is mostly in deriving specifics and some new statistics from the data, which Oxford researchers were provided some seven months ago for analysis. The numbers, predictably, all seem to be a bit higher or more damning than those provided by the companies themselves in their voluntary reports and carefully practiced testimony.

Previous estimates have focused on the rather nebulous metric of “encountering” or “seeing” IRA content put on these social metrics. This had the dual effect of increasing the affected number — to over a hundred million on Facebook alone — but “seeing” could easily be downplayed in importance; after all, how many things do you “see” on the internet every day?

Facebook will show which Russian election troll accounts you followed

The Oxford researchers better quantify the engagement, on Facebook first, with more specific and consequential numbers. For instance, in 2016 and 2017, nearly 30 million people on Facebook actually shared Russian propaganda content, with similar numbers of likes garnered, and millions of comments generated.

Note that these aren’t ads that Russian shell companies were paying to shove into your timeline — these were pages and groups with thousands of users on board who actively engaged with and spread posts, memes, and disinformation on captive news sites linked to by the propaganda accounts.

The content itself was, of course, carefully curated to touch on a number of divisive issues: immigration, gun control, race relations, and so on. Many different groups (i.e. black Americans, conservatives, Muslims, LGBT communities) were targeted all generated significant engagement, as this breakdown of the above stats shows:

Although the targeted communities were surprisingly diverse, the intent was highly focused: stoke partisan divisions, suppress left-leaning voters, and activate right-leaning ones.

Black voters in particular were a popular target across all platforms, and a great deal of content was posted both to keep racial tensions high and to interfere with their actual voting. Memes were posted suggesting followers withhold their votes, or deliberately incorrect instructions on how to vote. These efforts were among the most numerous and popular of the IRA’s campaign; it’s difficult to judge their effectiveness, but certainly they had reach.

Examples of posts targeting black Americans.

In a statement, Facebook said that it was cooperating with officials and that “Congress and the intelligence community are best placed to use the information we and others provide to determine the political motivations of actors like the Internet Research Agency.” It also noted that it has “made progress in helping prevent interference on our platforms during elections, strengthened our policies against voter suppression ahead of the 2018 midterms, and funded independent research on the impact of social media on democracy.”

Instagram on the rise

Based on the narrative thus far, one might expect that Facebook — being the focus for much of it — was the biggest platform for this propaganda, and that it would have peaked around the 2016 election, when the evident goal of helping Donald Trump get elected had been accomplished.

In fact Instagram was receiving as much or more content than Facebook, and it was being engaged with on a similar scale. Previous reports disclosed that around 120,000 IRA-related posts on Instagram had reached several million people in the run-up to the election. The Oxford researchers conclude, however, that 40 accounts received in total some 185 million likes and 4 million comments during the period covered by the data (2015-2017).

A partial explanation for these rather high numbers may be that, also counter to the most obvious narrative, IRA posting in fact increased following the election — for all platforms, but particularly on Instagram.

IRA-related Instagram posts jumped from an average of 2,611 per month in 2016 to 5,956 in 2017; note that the numbers don’t match the above table exactly because the time periods differ slightly.

Twitter posts, while extremely numerous, are quite steady at just under 60,000 per month, totaling around 73 million engagements over the period studied. To be perfectly frank this kind of voluminous bot and sock puppet activity is so commonplace on Twitter, and the company seems to have done so little to thwart it, that it hardly bears mentioning. But it was certainly there, and often reused existing bot nets that previously had chimed in on politics elsewhere and in other languages.

In a statement, Twitter said that it has “made significant strides since 2016 to counter manipulation of our service, including our release of additional data in October related to previously disclosed activities to enable further independent academic research and investigation.”

Google too is somewhat hard to find in the report, though not necessarily because it has a handle on Russian influence on its platforms. Oxford’s researchers complain that Google and YouTube have been not just stingy, but appear to have actively attempted to stymie analysis.

Google chose to supply the Senate committee with data in a non-machine-readable format. The evidence that the IRA had bought ads on Google was provided as images of ad text and in PDF format whose pages displayed copies of information previously organized in spreadsheets. This means that Google could have provided the useable ad text and spreadsheets—in a standard machine- readable file format, such as CSV or JSON, that would be useful to data scientists—but chose to turn them into images and PDFs as if the material would all be printed out on paper.

This forced the researchers to collect their own data via citations and mentions of YouTube content. As a consequence their conclusions are limited. Generally speaking when a tech company does this, it means that the data they could provide would tell a story they don’t want heard.

For instance, one interesting point brought up by a second report published today, by New Knowledge, concerns the 1,108 videos uploaded by IRA-linked accounts on YouTube. These videos, a Google statement explained, “were not targeted to the U.S. or to any particular sector of the U.S. population.”

In fact, all but a few dozen of these videos concerned police brutality and Black Lives Matter, which as you’ll recall were among the most popular topics on the other platforms. Seems reasonable to expect that this extremely narrow targeting would have been mentioned by YouTube in some way. Unfortunately it was left to be discovered by a third party and gives one an idea of just how far a statement from the company can be trusted.

Desperately seeking transparency

In its conclusion, the Oxford researchers — Philip N. Howard, Bharath Ganesh, and Dimitra Liotsiou — point out that although the Russian propaganda efforts were (and remain) disturbingly effective and well organized, the country is not alone in this.

“During 2016 and 2017 we saw significant efforts made by Russia to disrupt elections around the world, but also political parties in these countries spreading disinformation domestically,” they write. “In many democracies it is not even clear that spreading computational propaganda contravenes election laws.”

“It is, however, quite clear that the strategies and techniques used by government cyber troops have an impact,” the report continues, “and that their activities violate the norms of democratic practice… Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike.”

Predictably, even social networks’ moderation policies became targets for propagandizing.

Waiting on politicians is, as usual, something of a long shot, and the onus is squarely on the providers of social media and internet services to create an environment in which malicious actors are less likely to thrive.

Specifically, this means that these companies need to embrace researchers and watchdogs in good faith instead of freezing them out in order to protect some internal process or embarrassing misstep.

“Twitter used to provide researchers at major universities with access to several APIs, but has withdrawn this and provides so little information on the sampling of existing APIs that researchers increasingly question its utility for even basic social science,” the researchers point out. “Facebook provides an extremely limited API for the analysis of public pages, but no API for Instagram.” (And we’ve already heard what they think of Google’s submissions.)

If the companies exposed in this report truly take these issues seriously, as they tell us time and again, perhaps they should implement some of these suggestions.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2BoiW4g Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[vipcryptosignalscom-blog]

Remembering Satoshi’s Vision — Because It Used To Be Written

New Post has been published on https://vipcryptosignals.com/bitcoin-news/remembering-satoshis-vision-because-it-used-to-be-written-2/

Remembering Satoshi’s Vision — Because It Used To Be Written

On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto had a imaginative and prescient to proportion with the arena — a protocol he called “bitcoin, a new digital cash machine that’s totally peer-to-peer, with no depended on third birthday celebration.” When You Consider That that time a whole lot has changed, and there is an unlimited Cryptocurrency panorama with over 1,500 virtual currencies indexed on data feed web pages. It’s been a very very long time given that Satoshi left the group and his vision, the white paper, and even the protocol’s proof-of-paintings has been wondered more than one occasions over the years.

Additionally read: Privacy-Centric Coin XMR Splits Into 4 Other Monero Protocols

BCH Proponents Imagine That Many Key Attributes Had Been Slowly Replaced With A Whole New Concept

Satoshi Nakamoto left the neighborhood in 2010, and no one has heard from the nameless writer of bitcoin ever considering the fact that. at the second the bitcoin group has split into two factions due to the scaling debate, that coincidently started the same year Satoshi left. Many bitcoin money supporters consider the BTC side of the neighborhood hasn’t ever had a legitimate excuse towards raising the 1 MB block size by using a refuse to offer in at-any-value mentality. The bitcoin cash neighborhood believes this workforce has been so cussed that Core supporters basically enabled blowback to happen this earlier August, allowing a large majority of customers to go their separate techniques by way of forking the protocol, sooner than the introduction of the contentious Segregated Witness (Segwit). The protocol Segwit had been and nonetheless is debatable and hasn’t gained a lot traction even to at the moment. All of those people who as soon as shared similar visions with their peers, formed any other group and rallied around the bitcoin money (BCH) network believing that BCH is the nearest chain to Satoshi’s authentic imaginative and prescient.

A slide from Dr. Peter Rizun’s speech on the way forward for Bitcoin convention displays just one the reason for this is that people find Segregated Witness damaging.

Revisionism

Along all of this vitriolic power tethered to the scaling debate, BCH supporters say there were moderately a couple of individuals who consider “Satoshi’s imaginative and prescient doesn’t topic,” and actually have the audacity to suggest making adjustments to the creator’s white paper. many people will tell you the explanation for this is because supporters of the Segwit chain have discovered that the report does not apply to the BTC community. Sadly, BTC hardly ever resembles what’s described in Satoshi’s white paper. as an example, the co-house owners of Bitcoin.org, ‘Theymos,’ and ‘Cobra Bitcoin’ among others have mentioned converting certain words in Satoshi’s paper. Another example is how the web portal Bitcoin.org, that’s heralded by means of Middle supporters as ‘truth,’ got rid of the cheap and fast transactions description for bitcoin off the front page — the reason for that is since the description doesn’t follow to Center community.

The house owners of Bitcoin.org have mentioned modifying and revising the white paper on more than one occasions.

after all, bitcoin money supporters were livid approximately this technique of revisionism used by the opposite aspect of this debate. it’s steadily said that “Satoshi’s vision” or the writer himself doesn’t matter, but BCH supporters consider so much free-thinking folks needless to say history is vital. Satoshi’s phrases and his authentic white paper is extremely essential in opposition to holding the community from being perverted. Someone who denies history doesn’t know the way issues got here to be, they usually may have a major issue coping with the long run. The prior is the long run’s direct causation. The very name of the white paper explains that bitcoin is a “peer-to-peer electronic money machine” which displays absolutely no references to keeping the coin as a speculative asset, or any comparability that represents a ‘digital retailer of worth.’ 

Bitcoin.org removes positive descriptions from front web page.

Can’t Afford to Send Bitcoin? — Maintain It — It’s ‘Censorship Resistant’ for a certain Crew Of People  

After close to a decade, one by way of one, BCH supporters state that particular options that used to be promoted extensively some of the bitcoin neighborhood have been slowly forgotten. within the early days, bitcoin used to be regarded as pseudonymous and wanted equipment like mixers and tumblers that could assist provide anonymity. Alternatively, as a result of the upward thrust in transaction prices so much bitcoin mixers and tumblers found the network unsustainable, and many were not able to combine coins because network charges have been both too dear and unreliable. Further, during the occasions when BTC suffered from excessive community congestion, and unconfirmed transactions spiked to neatly over 200,000, darknet mixers and tumblers had been referred to as out for ‘spamming the community.’

There’s nobody that may in point of fact argue that this meme is inappropriate.

Remember That while transactions were once defined as cheaper than so much centralized processors like Western Union? in the early days, other folks expected billions of micropayments helping other people in need and third world international locations. As An Alternative all through 2015- 2017, Middle advocates and developers said they didn’t mind if fees aggregated to $100 according to transaction. Center developer Gregory Maxwell stated through the worst period of BTC’s transaction backlog and $60 fees that he used to be popping bottles of champagne.  

“In My View, I Am pulling out the champagne that market behaviour is certainly producing process ranges that can pay for safety with out inflation, and likewise producing charge paying backlogs had to stabilize consensus development as the subsidy declines.” ~ Greg Maxwell Dec. 21, 2017

It didn’t subject that economically unfortunate nations couldn’t have enough money to make use of the bitcoin blockchain as long because the chain persisted to stay ‘censorship resistant’ — Sarcastically this concept procedure results in the censorship of greater than 2/3rds of this world who have a difficult time making an allowance for paying $0.25 cents in keeping with transaction (tx) let alone $30-60 USD according to tx. It’s safe to say that taking part in the rising rate marketplace procedure is immediately out of a Ponzi scheme guide the place only the early adopters are folks that can have the funds for to make use of the network advantages.

The Resurrection of Killer Apps

Middle supporters will let you know that bitcoin cash proponents are deceptive by utilizing the open emblem name ‘bitcoin,’ while in truth all BCH proponents imagine they are doing is “adhering to Satoshi’s original imaginative and prescient.” in fact, the chain and the BCH community are direct derivatives of cussed blowback. Revisionists and actors with confirmation bias have clung to arguments that make no experience and act like the world is set to undertake an entire new infrastructure called the ‘Lightning Community.’ That Is after knowing on-chain BTC transactions are not very fast, and on-chain BTC transaction charges are unreliable particularly during periods of demand. Unfortunately, mainstream attention that took place right through THIS AUTUMN of 2017, was considered one of the worst periods of time for congestion, as BTC fees aggregated to upwards of $60 according to transaction and affirmation instances of up to per week for low fees. Then the mainstream used to be directed to a device that is now not even close to common adoption, although this mainstream target market used to be mainly at a tipping element in opposition to mass adoption.

On April 4, a document was once published that distinct prime flaws and topology considerations with the Lightning Network. the writer of this take a look at used to be neither a bitcoin money or bitcoin middle holder.

Fortunately for mainstream adopters, BCH supporters imagine bitcoin money will be there to offer the very things that were promised within the early days that made the theory of cryptocurrencies so cool — precise rapid, affordable, and reliable transactions that cannot be censored.

That Is as a result of BCH supporters state that mainstream audiences and users from third global nations received’t be hindered from using the Cryptocurrency as a result of unreliable transfer times and tumultuous network charges. in addition they gained’t have to learn to adopt a brand new community on best of the blockchain or know about the failings of routing, watchtowers, centralized hubs, opening channels, or keeping coins online in limbo. No, all they will have to be told is how to make use of bitcoin as it used to be taught for the prior 9 years. Mainstream audiences also are getting a glimpse of an ‘software resurrection’ of tools that were once heralded by way of the BTC neighborhood. The bitcoin cash ecosystem has resurrected mixers and tumblers, micro-tipping packages, a Bittorrent platform, social media apps like Memo and Blockpress, even the power to send very small fractions of BCH with out a web based connection.  

Protective Propaganda and Censorship Over Judgment Of Right And Wrong and Concepts

Bitcoin money proponents suppose that revisionists will proceed to take a look at and say that Satoshi and the white paper “doesn’t subject” and can attempt to revise historical past to make bitcoin one thing that it isn’t. Why do BCH enthusiasts imagine this? Most Likely it is as a result of supporters of bitcoin revisionism have defended propaganda and censorship, so much that it has develop into a routine job on some of bitcoin’s most frequented boards. All of this for a cussed win-at-any-price mentality that wouldn’t even permit the dialogue or open debate of including one measly megabyte to the block measurement. No, BCH proponents imagine the confusion Center supporters whinge approximately, rests on their conscience, because they obfuscated the protocol’s original intentions, nameless minions sniffed out dissenting critiques, and cried once they were given the blowback (the delivery of BCH) they deserved.

It’s secure to mention that Satoshi’s vision can be remembered, and his white paper will stay protected from adjustments. However, BCH supporters keep in mind that the revisionists may also be known for being intellectually dishonest and as sophists attempting to stay bitcoin hostage. Bitcoin money fans believe that when August 1, 2017 bitcoin’s adverse takeover has ended, and there’s now an avenue available to continue following Satoshi’s vision. 

What do you think that approximately the idea that almost all BCH supporters consider that Center proponents have revised history and have tried to lessen Satoshi’s imaginative and prescient or even adjust the white paper? How do you take into account that this historical past? let us recognise within the feedback below.

That Is an Op-ed article. The evaluations expressed on this article are the author’s personal. Bitcoin.com does not recommend nor fortify perspectives, reviews or conclusions drawn in this post. Bitcoin.com is not answerable for or accountable for any content material, accuracy or high quality within the Op-ed article. Readers should do their own due diligence prior to taking any movements associated with the content material. Bitcoin.com isn’t accountable, directly or indirectly, for any injury or loss caused or speculated to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any information on this Op-ed article.

Pictures via Shutterstock, the long run of Bitcoin Convention, Bitcoin.com, Pixabay, and Wiki-commons.

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[williamsjoan]

How Russia’s online influence campaign engaged with millions for years

Russian efforts to influence U.S. politics and sway public opinion were consistent and, as far as engaging with target audiences, largely successful, according to a report from Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project published today. Based on data provided to Congress by Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Twitter, the study paints a portrait of the years-long campaign that’s less than flattering to the companies.

The report, which you can read here, was published today but given to some outlets over the weekend, summarizes the work of the Internet Research Agency, Moscow’s online influence factory and troll farm. The data cover various periods for different companies, but 2016 and 2017 showed by far the most activity.

A clearer picture

If you’ve only checked into this narrative occasionally during the last couple years, the Comprop report is a great way to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing, with no “we take this very seriously” palaver interrupting the facts.

If you’ve been following the story closely, the value of the report is mostly in deriving specifics and some new statistics from the data, which Oxford researchers were provided some seven months ago for analysis. The numbers, predictably, all seem to be a bit higher or more damning than those provided by the companies themselves in their voluntary reports and carefully practiced testimony.

Previous estimates have focused on the rather nebulous metric of “encountering” or “seeing” IRA content put on these social metrics. This had the dual effect of increasing the affected number — to over a hundred million on Facebook alone — but “seeing” could easily be downplayed in importance; after all, how many things do you “see” on the internet every day?

Facebook will show which Russian election troll accounts you followed

The Oxford researchers better quantify the engagement, on Facebook first, with more specific and consequential numbers. For instance, in 2016 and 2017, nearly 30 million people on Facebook actually shared Russian propaganda content, with similar numbers of likes garnered, and millions of comments generated.

Note that these aren’t ads that Russian shell companies were paying to shove into your timeline — these were pages and groups with thousands of users on board who actively engaged with and spread posts, memes, and disinformation on captive news sites linked to by the propaganda accounts.

The content itself was, of course, carefully curated to touch on a number of divisive issues: immigration, gun control, race relations, and so on. Many different groups (i.e. black Americans, conservatives, Muslims, LGBT communities) were targeted all generated significant engagement, as this breakdown of the above stats shows:

Although the targeted communities were surprisingly diverse, the intent was highly focused: stoke partisan divisions, suppress left-leaning voters, and activate right-leaning ones.

Black voters in particular were a popular target across all platforms, and a great deal of content was posted both to keep racial tensions high and to interfere with their actual voting. Memes were posted suggesting followers withhold their votes, or deliberately incorrect instructions on how to vote. These efforts were among the most numerous and popular of the IRA’s campaign; it’s difficult to judge their effectiveness, but certainly they had reach.

Examples of posts targeting black Americans.

In a statement, Facebook said that it was cooperating with officials and that “Congress and the intelligence community are best placed to use the information we and others provide to determine the political motivations of actors like the Internet Research Agency.” It also noted that it has “made progress in helping prevent interference on our platforms during elections, strengthened our policies against voter suppression ahead of the 2018 midterms, and funded independent research on the impact of social media on democracy.”

Instagram on the rise

Based on the narrative thus far, one might expect that Facebook — being the focus for much of it — was the biggest platform for this propaganda, and that it would have peaked around the 2016 election, when the evident goal of helping Donald Trump get elected had been accomplished.

In fact Instagram was receiving as much or more content than Facebook, and it was being engaged with on a similar scale. Previous reports disclosed that around 120,000 IRA-related posts on Instagram had reached several million people in the run-up to the election. The Oxford researchers conclude, however, that 40 accounts received in total some 185 million likes and 4 million comments during the period covered by the data (2015-2017).

A partial explanation for these rather high numbers may be that, also counter to the most obvious narrative, IRA posting in fact increased following the election — for all platforms, but particularly on Instagram.

IRA-related Instagram posts jumped from an average of 2,611 per month in 2016 to 5,956 in 2017; note that the numbers don’t match the above table exactly because the time periods differ slightly.

Twitter posts, while extremely numerous, are quite steady at just under 60,000 per month, totaling around 73 million engagements over the period studied. To be perfectly frank this kind of voluminous bot and sock puppet activity is so commonplace on Twitter, and the company seems to have done so little to thwart it, that it hardly bears mentioning. But it was certainly there, and often reused existing bot nets that previously had chimed in on politics elsewhere and in other languages.

In a statement, Twitter said that it has “made significant strides since 2016 to counter manipulation of our service, including our release of additional data in October related to previously disclosed activities to enable further independent academic research and investigation.”

Google too is somewhat hard to find in the report, though not necessarily because it has a handle on Russian influence on its platforms. Oxford’s researchers complain that Google and YouTube have been not just stingy, but appear to have actively attempted to stymie analysis.

Google chose to supply the Senate committee with data in a non-machine-readable format. The evidence that the IRA had bought ads on Google was provided as images of ad text and in PDF format whose pages displayed copies of information previously organized in spreadsheets. This means that Google could have provided the useable ad text and spreadsheets—in a standard machine- readable file format, such as CSV or JSON, that would be useful to data scientists—but chose to turn them into images and PDFs as if the material would all be printed out on paper.

This forced the researchers to collect their own data via citations and mentions of YouTube content. As a consequence their conclusions are limited. Generally speaking when a tech company does this, it means that the data they could provide would tell a story they don’t want heard.

For instance, one interesting point brought up by a second report published today, by New Knowledge, concerns the 1,108 videos uploaded by IRA-linked accounts on YouTube. These videos, a Google statement explained, “were not targeted to the U.S. or to any particular sector of the U.S. population.”

In fact, all but a few dozen of these videos concerned police brutality and Black Lives Matter, which as you’ll recall were among the most popular topics on the other platforms. Seems reasonable to expect that this extremely narrow targeting would have been mentioned by YouTube in some way. Unfortunately it was left to be discovered by a third party and gives one an idea of just how far a statement from the company can be trusted. (Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Desperately seeking transparency

In its conclusion, the Oxford researchers — Philip N. Howard, Bharath Ganesh, and Dimitra Liotsiou — point out that although the Russian propaganda efforts were (and remain) disturbingly effective and well organized, the country is not alone in this.

“During 2016 and 2017 we saw significant efforts made by Russia to disrupt elections around the world, but also political parties in these countries spreading disinformation domestically,” they write. “In many democracies it is not even clear that spreading computational propaganda contravenes election laws.”

“It is, however, quite clear that the strategies and techniques used by government cyber troops have an impact,” the report continues, “and that their activities violate the norms of democratic practice… Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike.”

Predictably, even social networks’ moderation policies became targets for propagandizing.

Waiting on politicians is, as usual, something of a long shot, and the onus is squarely on the providers of social media and internet services to create an environment in which malicious actors are less likely to thrive.

Specifically, this means that these companies need to embrace researchers and watchdogs in good faith instead of freezing them out in order to protect some internal process or embarrassing misstep.

“Twitter used to provide researchers at major universities with access to several APIs, but has withdrawn this and provides so little information on the sampling of existing APIs that researchers increasingly question its utility for even basic social science,” the researchers point out. “Facebook provides an extremely limited API for the analysis of public pages, but no API for Instagram.” (And we’ve already heard what they think of Google’s submissions.)

If the companies exposed in this report truly take these issues seriously, as they tell us time and again, perhaps they should implement some of these suggestions.

How Russia’s online influence campaign engaged with millions for years published first on https://timloewe.tumblr.com/

[theinvinciblenoob]

Russian efforts to influence U.S. politics and sway public opinion were consistent and, as far as engaging with target audiences, largely successful, according to a report from Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project published today. Based on data provided to Congress by Facebook, Instagram, Google and Twitter, the study paints a portrait of the years-long campaign that’s less than flattering to the companies.

The report, which you can read here, was published today but given to some outlets over the weekend; it summarizes the work of the Internet Research Agency, Moscow’s online influence factory and troll farm. The data cover various periods for different companies, but 2016 and 2017 showed by far the most activity.

A clearer picture

If you’ve only checked into this narrative occasionally during the last couple of years, the Comprop report is a great way to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing, with no “we take this very seriously” palaver interrupting the facts.

If you’ve been following the story closely, the value of the report is mostly in deriving specifics and some new statistics from the data, which Oxford researchers were provided some seven months ago for analysis. The numbers, predictably, all seem to be a bit higher or more damning than those provided by the companies themselves in their voluntary reports and carefully practiced testimony.

Previous estimates have focused on the rather nebulous metric of “encountering” or “seeing” IRA content put on these social metrics. This had the dual effect of increasing the affected number — to over 100 million on Facebook alone — but “seeing” could easily be downplayed in importance; after all, how many things do you “see” on the internet every day?

Facebook will show which Russian election troll accounts you followed

The Oxford researchers better quantify the engagement, on Facebook first, with more specific and consequential numbers. For instance, in 2016 and 2017, nearly 30 million people on Facebook actually shared Russian propaganda content, with similar numbers of likes garnered, and millions of comments generated.

Note that these aren’t ads that Russian shell companies were paying to shove into your timeline — these were pages and groups with thousands of users on board who actively engaged with and spread posts, memes and disinformation on captive news sites linked to by the propaganda accounts.

The content itself was, of course, carefully curated to touch on a number of divisive issues: immigration, gun control, race relations and so on. Many different groups (i.e. black Americans, conservatives, Muslims, LGBT communities) were targeted; all generated significant engagement, as this breakdown of the above stats shows:

Although the targeted communities were surprisingly diverse, the intent was highly focused: stoke partisan divisions, suppress left-leaning voters and activate right-leaning ones.

Black voters in particular were a popular target across all platforms, and a great deal of content was posted both to keep racial tensions high and to interfere with their actual voting. Memes were posted suggesting followers withhold their votes, or with deliberately incorrect instructions on how to vote. These efforts were among the most numerous and popular of the IRA’s campaign; it’s difficult to judge their effectiveness, but certainly they had reach.

Examples of posts targeting black Americans.

In a statement, Facebook said that it was cooperating with officials and that “Congress and the intelligence community are best placed to use the information we and others provide to determine the political motivations of actors like the Internet Research Agency.” It also noted that it has “made progress in helping prevent interference on our platforms during elections, strengthened our policies against voter suppression ahead of the 2018 midterms, and funded independent research on the impact of social media on democracy.”

Instagram on the rise

Based on the narrative thus far, one might expect that Facebook — being the focus for much of it — was the biggest platform for this propaganda, and that it would have peaked around the 2016 election, when the evident goal of helping Donald Trump get elected had been accomplished.

In fact Instagram was receiving as much or more content than Facebook, and it was being engaged with on a similar scale. Previous reports disclosed that around 120,000 IRA-related posts on Instagram had reached several million people in the run-up to the election. The Oxford researchers conclude, however, that 40 accounts received in total some 185 million likes and 4 million comments during the period covered by the data (2015-2017).

A partial explanation for these rather high numbers may be that, also counter to the most obvious narrative, IRA posting in fact increased following the election — for all platforms, but particularly on Instagram.

IRA-related Instagram posts jumped from an average of 2,611 per month in 2016 to 5,956 in 2017; note that the numbers don’t match the above table exactly because the time periods differ slightly.

Twitter posts, while extremely numerous, are quite steady at just under 60,000 per month, totaling around 73 million engagements over the period studied. To be perfectly frank, this kind of voluminous bot and sock puppet activity is so commonplace on Twitter, and the company seems to have done so little to thwart it, that it hardly bears mentioning. But it was certainly there, and often reused existing bot nets that previously had chimed in on politics elsewhere and in other languages.

In a statement, Twitter said that it has “made significant strides since 2016 to counter manipulation of our service, including our release of additional data in October related to previously disclosed activities to enable further independent academic research and investigation.”

Google too is somewhat hard to find in the report, though not necessarily because it has a handle on Russian influence on its platforms. Oxford’s researchers complain that Google and YouTube have been not just stingy, but appear to have actively attempted to stymie analysis.

Google chose to supply the Senate committee with data in a non-machine-readable format. The evidence that the IRA had bought ads on Google was provided as images of ad text and in PDF format whose pages displayed copies of information previously organized in spreadsheets. This means that Google could have provided the useable ad text and spreadsheets—in a standard machine- readable file format, such as CSV or JSON, that would be useful to data scientists—but chose to turn them into images and PDFs as if the material would all be printed out on paper.

This forced the researchers to collect their own data via citations and mentions of YouTube content. As a consequence, their conclusions are limited. Generally speaking, when a tech company does this, it means that the data they could provide would tell a story they don’t want heard.

For instance, one interesting point brought up by a second report published today, by New Knowledge, concerns the 1,108 videos uploaded by IRA-linked accounts on YouTube. These videos, a Google statement explained, “were not targeted to the U.S. or to any particular sector of the U.S. population.”

In fact, all but a few dozen of these videos concerned police brutality and Black Lives Matter, which as you’ll recall were among the most popular topics on the other platforms. Seems reasonable to expect that this extremely narrow targeting would have been mentioned by YouTube in some way. Unfortunately it was left to be discovered by a third party and gives one an idea of just how far a statement from the company can be trusted. (Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Desperately seeking transparency

In its conclusion, the Oxford researchers — Philip N. Howard, Bharath Ganesh and Dimitra Liotsiou — point out that although the Russian propaganda efforts were (and remain) disturbingly effective and well organized, the country is not alone in this.

“During 2016 and 2017 we saw significant efforts made by Russia to disrupt elections around the world, but also political parties in these countries spreading disinformation domestically,” they write. “In many democracies it is not even clear that spreading computational propaganda contravenes election laws.”

“It is, however, quite clear that the strategies and techniques used by government cyber troops have an impact,” the report continues, “and that their activities violate the norms of democratic practice… Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike.”

Predictably, even social networks’ moderation policies became targets for propagandizing.

Waiting on politicians is, as usual, something of a long shot, and the onus is squarely on the providers of social media and internet services to create an environment in which malicious actors are less likely to thrive.

Specifically, this means that these companies need to embrace researchers and watchdogs in good faith instead of freezing them out in order to protect some internal process or embarrassing misstep.

“Twitter used to provide researchers at major universities with access to several APIs, but has withdrawn this and provides so little information on the sampling of existing APIs that researchers increasingly question its utility for even basic social science,” the researchers point out. “Facebook provides an extremely limited API for the analysis of public pages, but no API for Instagram.” (And we’ve already heard what they think of Google’s submissions.)

If the companies exposed in this report truly take these issues seriously, as they tell us time and again, perhaps they should implement some of these suggestions.

via TechCrunch