Gresham's Law and the Internet

An Internet Whore is someone who is continually self-seeking on the Internet. These people feel that everyone in the world MUST have their opinion on every single topic all the time, no matter if that opinion is not wanted, no matter if their discourse is off topic, uninformed, non-sensensical, unsourced, and no matter if (as is so often the case) they have nothing to say.

An Internet Troll is someone who visits web sites solely to stir up argument and controversy. These people have small and meaningless lives. Do not feed trolls!

Anonymous Cowards are people who will not sign their real name to what they say, will not leave an email address, and will not otherwise identify themselves online. Most are trolls, some are whores, a few are parasites.

An Internet Parasite

is someone who visits other sites predominantly to drive other people to their web site or blog. These people may be Internet Whores or Internet Trolls, or both.

Gresham's Law of the Internet states that whores, trolls, cowards and parasites will tend to build up and eventually dominate a list-serv, bulletin board, or blog unless they are pruned off. The reason for this is simple: morons, whores, cowards, and trolls tend to be underemployed in the real world, while thoughtful people who make rational arguments and get their facts straight tend to get more responsibilities than they can easily handle. As morons, whores, cowards, and trolls dominate a forum, smarter people simply leave as the "sound-to0noise" ratio gets to be overwhelming. The original Gresham's Law simply said that "Bad money drives out good." On the internet, the rule is a bit different: "Bad thinking and acting drives out clear thinking and civility.

The "King Baby" is someone who acts in outrageous and inappropriate ways on the Internet and then, when his or demands are rejected, decides to fall into the “professional-victim” role. These are people who lack intellectual and emotional self-sufficiency. Told to "go write your own," they know they cannot and/or that the world will not beat a path to their door. So what do they do? They go "waaaaaaaaahhhhhhh."

Your Arguments are Invalid

About 15 times a day I read something so good and fun I think, "I wish I had written that," and then I share it with the world. 

Here's one of those occasions.

Over at The Last Word on Nothing, Christie Aschwanden looks at the business of blog commentary in a post humorously entitled, "You've got mail, you Idiot!"

Read the whole thing. 

Seriously, it's good stuff. 

That said, here's a long quote that more or less summarizes a few core points (but without the humorous graphics, hint, hint):

[T]ell readers that they’re wrong about something they know in their heart to be true, and they will send you hate mail...

Now it’s tempting to dismiss these angry readers as a bunch of idiots. But they’re not, and the truth is, I know where they’re coming from. I’ve been that person.

I’m married to an amazing guy. Dave is like those honeybees that always know the way back to the hive. Me, I’ve gotten myself lost in the Hearst building.

We’ll be hiking and we’ll come to a split in the trail and I’ll point one way and say, we need to go here. And Dave will say no, actually, this is the right way (as he points in the opposite direction). And I’ll insist that, no, this is the way.

And then he’ll point out that my way peters out below some cliff face. Which only pisses me off. The more evidence he shows me that I’m wrong, the more insistent I become — I’m right and he’s wrong....

... So when Dave tells me that his way is right and mine is straight up a cliff, I think, oh yeah? Well I’m smart, independent and capable, so therefore I’m correct. I would never point us in the wrong direction.

See, it’s never really about the hiking trail. It’s about some bigger story you’ve told yourself. I’m not taking issue with Dave’s direction. I know he’s right. But the factual mumbo jumbo he’s showing me clashes with the story I’ve told myself. I don’t like what it says about me.

The idea that I could be giving wrong directions contradicts the vision I have of myself as a competent person. I’m sure that I know the right direction, because I’m too smart to lead us astray.

When Dave points out that I am directing us to a cliff face, here’s how I process the evidence. Dave’s way = I’m a helpless, dumb blonde. But I’m not a dumb blonde, I know I’m not, and so I reject his facts.

Which is the same thing that happens when the vitamin takers read my story.

They see the vitamin headline and they hear: your vitamin pill is a worthless scam, sucker! And then they think, no way! I’m no sucker — therefore this article is wrong. They reject the evidence.

Because the story they’ve told themselves is that they’re smart and “proactive” for taking the vitamin. In that story, it’s possible to protect yourself from scary diseases by taking a vitamin pill. And honestly, who doesn’t want to live in that world?

Exactly.

Fantasy is comfortable, and we all like to hear stories that support our core frame, which is that we are pretty smart, pretty well-informed, quite experienced, and that the world operates exactly as we think it does all the time.

And so one party tunes in to MSNBC and the other tunes into Fox, and fewer and fewer people bother to color outside the lines or even consider getting all the facts, much less tease through the competing explanations for all those facts.

Of course, people often know when they are driving faster than their headlights.  They may not slow down, of course, but they know. And so what do they do?

On the Internet, they post comments anonymously, or they create "sock puppets" to agree with themselves, or perhaps they attack on a minor issue, claiming (for instance) that if someone got one small fact wrong, then the entire train of what is being said (or has ever been said by their opponent) is wrong.

But are they really arguing about the issue here, or is this all sound and noise being driven by ego, denial, fear of being found out, and outrage that someone, somewhere, might not share their world view which they perceive (somehow) to be a direct attack on them?

Christie Aschwanden thinks it's too often the later, and she understands.   She really does. She feels your pain.

• Related Posts:
  ** In the Land of the Blind the One-Eyed Dog is King
  ** Trolls, Whores and Gresham's Law on the Internet
  ** Whores, Trolls, Cowards, Parasites & King Babies
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Skim Milk as Cream

In the wonderful libretto of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, there is a pretty good line:

Things are seldom what they seem,
skim milk masquerades as cream,
Highlows pass as patent leathers;
Jackdaws strut in peacock's feathers.

Isn't that the truth!

Am I alone in noting that a lot of people who claim to know a great deal about dogs never seem to actually take their dogs out into the field? Their dogs are always too young or too old, and -- oh! -- their aching back just went out as well.

For these folks, the "too cold" season rolls into the "too wet" season, and then "baby season" followed by "had to go to a dog show," followed by "too hot" and "the ground is too hard," followed by "too wet" and then "too cold" again.

For some of these characters, year after year goes by and there is never a report or picture of an actual dig in the field. Lots of dog shows, of course. Lot of puppies. Lots of talk about pedigrees, and structure, and "movement," and theories of breeding, but apparently no actual digging in the field. Some of these folks can conjugate canine pedigrees as if they were reading out of the "begats" sections of the Bible, but don't ask them for a picture or date of their last dig!

Which would be no big deal, if these folks simply stopped insisting they had workings dogs and were "protecting" a working breed. They do not, and they are not!

And no, work is NOT killing a rat on the breezeway or a possum out by the carport.

Of course skim milk masquerading as cream is not unique to terrier work, is it? I am told there are whole tribes of hawkers who parade their birds around on their fist, but have never flown a bird free from its creance.

There are expert sailors that have never left the bar stool, lawyers that have never tried a case in court, architects that have never put up 20 sheets of drywall, and race car drivers that cannot change the oil on their own cars.

Priests and nuns seem to have no compunction at all about lecturing the world about sex and birth control, while politicians who send their own kids to private school seem to be certified experts on how much money it takes to run a public version of the same.

And, in truth, sometimes it makes no difference. A cubic zirconium ring is no worse than a real diamond, as far as I can tell.

Ditto for an expensive-looking bottle of wine that remains uncorked.

Only when something is used, does its true nature reveal itself.

The Accuracy of the Internet

A repost from this blog circa August, 2004

Some of the stuff on the internet really is amazing. I got a call the other day from a fact checker on the West Coast that is editing some kind of general dog book. They wanted to know if it was true that a Jack Russell terrier had killed 3 tons of rats in one day!

"Uh no, that would be a lie or a very serious mis-statement," I replied. I explained to the woman that Brian Plummer claimed his TEAM of dogs had killed 3 tons of rats over the course of a YEAR in the mid-1970s, and that this was certainly possible, though still impressive and, oddly enough, there were no pictures. Oh. And the dogs were not Jack Russells.

By they way, I inquired, where had she gotten this little nugget of misinformation that she was about to pass on between two bits of cardboard and charge a price for?

She steered me to this web site (link now broken) which describes a Jack Russell Terrier as a dog that weighs 7 pounds and is 10 inches tall. According to this web site the dog originates in Germany, and the prefered color is black, "but black/tan, red or dark gray are also allowed."

According to this site, the Rev. John Russell crossed Trump with bull terriers and pocket beagles to get the modern Jack Russell.

Sure he did. And yes, it's a 7 pound dog from Germany, and the best color is black. Absolutely!

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The World As It Was and Should Be

I downloaded a dozen FREE books to my Kindle Fire last night, one of which was In Africa - Hunting Adventures In Big Game Country (1910) by John T. McCutcheon.

A quick glance through the table of contents found this summary of Chapter Eight:

Meeting Colonel Roosevelt in the Uttermost Outpost of Semi-Civilization. He Talks of Many Things, Hears that he has Been Reported Dead, and Promptly Plans an Elephant Hunt

Nice!

Now to be clear, I am not saluting elephant hunting, but neither would Teddy if he were alive today. This is, after all, the man who almost single-handedly created the National Forest system, the national Wildlife Refuge system, and the National Park system, and who did more to protect wildlife in this country than anyone who came before or who has come along since.

But Roosevelt believed in an active life, well-lived. He did not shrink into his hole, cuddle up next to the fire, and play board games all day. Life was to be lived, and he was out in the world living it. That is the world as it was, and the way it should be today.
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Terrierman Now with FaceBook Linkages

I am still operating this blog with an ancient version of blogger, but I have made one concession to modern times...

This blog now has a little thingy on the bottom of all posts for those who want to post a FaceBook link to a blog article. There are also dozen of other "social media" options.

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I Watched This on My Kindle

I watched this video on my Kindle Fire which does not need shelving, allows highlighting and margin notes, and sends all my highlighted text to a computer file for easy use if I am writing something ("Look Ma, no typing!").

All Kindle books are searchable, several million books are free, and all new books are cheaper than their printed versions (and most used books are cheaper too if you figure in postage).  If I do not know a particular word, I only have to hover a finger over i, and a definition pops up.

I still have hundreds of paper books, of course (not all books are online yet) but I can see that in the not-too-distant future they are going to be seen as very heavy furniture that collects dust and makes rooms look smaller.  Yes, paper books are very clearly going the way of "long-playing" records....
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Canine Stalkers, Pretenders and Nutters

This is what is required.

Tracking Wild Tales

One of the staples of the Internet these days are wild animal stories, often buttressed with pictures. The pictures are often real, but the stories themselves are often corrupted to give a sense of immediacy or nearness to something rare that occurred far away. A couple of examples:

Azur Hotel Alligator, New Orleans: The email, sent to me by an office mate, said the photos showed an alligator found swimming down the street in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (this email was received while dogs were still being recovered from boats in New Orleans). The alligator was supposedly 21 feet long, and weighed 4,500 lbs, and was killed by the army national guard "last Sunday at 3:00 pm," and he was "currently in the freezer at the Azur hotel." A great story, but a quick inspection of the picture showed it to be a crocodile, not an alligator. Crocs largely come from Africa, and the skin color of the onlookers suggested this one did too. A minute of research and I found the true story -- a 50-year old Nile Croc, about 16 feet long and weighing 1,874 pounds that was shot in the Congo. The picture of the croc was taken on the beach in front of the Petroleum club, Plage Sportive In Pointe Noire, Congo, and the Hotel Azur is nearby.




Australian Sheep-eating Snake: The email, sent to me by an office mate, said the photos showed a sheep-eating snake found dead on an electric fence in New South Wales Australia. Not likely.   Though there are a fair number of poisonous snakes in Australia, and a few decent long ones, none are the size of this monster. I guessed that the snake was an African Rock Python, and I was right. The snake was found dead on the Silent Valley Game Ranch in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. It had eaten an adult female impala, which made its body too fat to squeeze under the electric fence without touching it. The game farm, by the way, has a few Jack Russells!




To be clear, these kind of emails are not "accidents" -- they are intentional hoaxes of the same kind that your right-wing friends send you which always turn up over at "Snopes" with the word FALSE hanging all over them.  In fact, have any of my conservative friends ever forwarded me an email that turned out to  be true?  Not yet!
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Automatic for the People

As of this morning, I am out of country, and not on the Internet.  

I will be back the third week of August.   In the interim, I have put a few posts on time release. 

Enjoy!
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Does This Mean I Have to Facebook and Twitter?

In an article that dares to ask Is It Time to Shut Down Your Website?, David Rogers notes:

The Wall Street Journal reported that Starbucks receives over ten times as much traffic to its Facebook page (19.4 million unique visitors each month) as to its corporate website (1.8 million). For Coca-Cola, the divergence is even starker: 22.5 million visitors on Facebook vs. just 270,000 to its website—over 80 times as much traffic.

Blogger Crashes and Loses 30 Hours of Posts

Blogger crashed, system-wide, across the world, and 30 hours of posts were lost, including my post (the only important one in the entire world!) on pet shop puppy demographics and the comments to same.

I am not complaining -- I am grateful for this free service from a stellar company that almost always gets it done right. That said, to Google's old moral code ("Don't be evil") let me add another:  Don't fuck up the computer code.  That's the job of us civilians.

On the upside, I am told the lost posts will be recovered in a day or two. 

We shall see.

In the interim let me suggest reading this article about putting all your eggs in one basket:

The same week that Google made its strongest pitch ever for putting your entire business online, one of its flagship services has failed spectacularly.

Earlier this week, Google rolled out a maintenance release for its Blogger service. Something went terribly wrong, and its Blogger customers have been locked out of their accounts for more than a day. Google’s engineers have been frantically working to restore service ever since, although they haven’t shared any details about the problem.

Once this puppy is proven stable again (yes that was a pun), I will post more cool stuff. Maybe.
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Point ... Counterpoint

Terrierman...

... and his most loyal reader..

Terrierman's Daily Dose Now in Latin!

Roman mosaic :: source

Google Translate now supports Latin, which means you will soon be able to enjoy this blog in the language of the dead.  

This blog is already available to those who speak French, Spanish, German, Russian, Finnish, Dutch, Italian, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish and Portugese (among others) thanks to the Google Translate Gadget to be found in the far right gutter of this blog.

The counter I added a few years after this blog started says we have had over 1,560,000 visitor from 216 countries.  Google  Stats (a new feature on Blogger) says we had 1,600 page views as of noon today).

Let's see if we get a few more readers in the next few weeks!
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Whores, Trolls, Cowards, Parasites & King Babies

In the world of Internet biology, there are taxonomic "lumpers" and "splitters" just as there are in real biology.

For example, when it comes to Internet vermin, I think a lot of ground is covered by lumping them as Whores, Trolls, Cowards, Parasites, or King Babies, as I note in this little page on Gresham's Law & the Internet.

I am a lumper.

But, of course, there are taxonomic splitters too, and at least one of them (Mike Reed) is a very good artist and has put together this delightful site called Flame Warriors where we get masterful illustrations and fine description of such folks as the the Artful Dodger, the Ideologue, the Furious Typer and the Tireless Rebutter.

The site even has a bulletin board where new warriors are suggested, such as Bird Dog, Thesaurus Rex, Puppet Master, Bullshit Merchant, and the Parrot. Check it out!

Of course, I get a little of this, as all blogs do.

One lady posted the same nonsense three times yesterday, revealing that she had not even read the original post that she was so outraged about (she's a vet who is hot that anyone would question some of the business tactics of so many in her profession). Perfect. Of course, she also did not bother to actually give a real email address or cite a single source in her rabid tirade. What am I going to do? It's not like I don't give instructions to the anonymous cowards is it? Nope. Delete.

One fellow sent me a screed that was actually meant for someone else. . I pointed out that he had sent it to the wrong person, in the wrong country, and on the wrong continent. Though he was being very rude to someone else (someone who has forgotten more about dogs than he will ever know), I took the time to point out (gently) that he was wrong on the fundamentals and that he might take the time to retool and rethink. After all, he was not (yet) being rude to me. Maybe he just needed a little information? So far this lunatic has sent me sixteen more emails (not getting my name right in more than half a dozen of them), and not caring that I do not respond (in fact, I do not even open them). What to do? Delete.
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How Google Really Works

It seems I am not the only one writing about B.F Skinner and operant conditioning.

This morning I was sent a link to Google's description of how their search engine determines page rankings and search engine results.

As a Google user, you're familiar with the speed and accuracy of a Google search. How exactly does Google manage to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google's search technology is PigeonRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

Building upon the breakthrough work of B. F. Skinner, Page and Brin reasoned that low cost pigeon clusters (PCs) could be used to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms. And while Google has dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of our service on a daily basis, PigeonRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.

Yes, you have to read the whole thing.
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Newsweek Said the Internet Would Fail

Fifteen years ago this week, Clifford Stoll told Newsweek readers that the Internet was a fad that would fail and fade away.

Enjoy!

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

... How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

... Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

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Google Docs Offline

I have some stuff I have to write today, and I would prefer doing it over coffee rather than being chained to my desktop at the house.

Question: Is there a way to edit my stuff in Google Docs offline if I cannot get an Internet connection at my coffee shop?

Answer: There is, and this video explains it all.

God bless Google, hallowed be its name.
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Box Opening My New Net Book

Believe it or not, I have never really had a laptop -- anything that comes into the house that falls into that slot is snatched up by the kids. No more. As of today, I have a tiny little 11.6 inch Acer Aspire One with full-sized key board, 250 GB hard drive and 2GB RAM. It's a slower Intel® Atom™ processor, but the machine itself is just 2.8 lbs. and 1" thick, has a camera and 3 USB ports, Wi-Fi, and a 720p HD screen.

The machine cost only $300, and came with Windows Vista and Microsoft Works. Though I hate Vista, the price-gouge on Macs is intolerable, and Windows XP is on the way out. Vista's bugs will get sorted out in time, I suspect.

Some may wonder "What the hell is an Acer?" Acer is the largest manufacturer of laptop computers in the world, and the second largest computer manufacturer in the world, behind Hewlett Packard. These folks own Gateway, the maker of hard drives, if that tells you anything. For those of a flora and fauna bent, Acer is also the genus name of the maple tree.

I do not yet know how well this little baby works in the real world, other than I can get Internet, and I can answer email and do some writing at coffee. The screen is terrific, and I am getting used to the keyboard and pad -- always an issue with a new machine. I have to register a couple of new bits of software tomorrow, and figure out how to make sure I get the most recent version of McAfee virus protection on the system, but I think it will all work out. Fingers crossed!

This post is being done on the new "Netbook," by the way -- wireless and without power cord. Look ma, no hands!