Weblogs: An Antidote To Misquotes?
internet, politics
December 06, 2003, 05:40 PM
One of the biggest problems for people who are in the public eye is published misquotes from reporters or other mass media producers. This ranges from quoting out of context to inaccurate paraphrasing to flat out made-up statements, whether intentionally or by accident. There are several cases of bright careers getting ruined by misquotes, and many more of badly damaged reputations.
Declan McCullagh, the politics-and-technology writer, recently attacked Lawrence Lessig for allegedly promoting the elimination of anonymity online. Fortunately for Lessig, he keeps a weblog, and provides his side of the story there.
This is a direct benefit of personal publication; if everyone has their soapbox, they can use that soapbox to make responses such as these available to the entire world as soon as a potentially damaging misquote hits the public consciousness. This won't guarantee that people will believe them, of course, but at least it removes the barrier of enforced silence through a lack of publication resources. Beyond that, technology can no longer help, and your reputation must stand on the merits of your arguments and the trustability of your data.
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Libel Laws and Blogging
internet, politics
September 17, 2003, 12:54 PM
This is old news, but I think it's worth repeating (I'm just no good at being an information courier... :).
Last June, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that webloggers can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish. Newspapers and other official media outlets can be sued if they republish false information that causes harm to someone (even if they themselves didn't make up the information). But the court decided that weblogs are more like informal discourse and less like carefully fact-checked news publications, and thus fell under the rules for speech rather than news.
I've ruminated about the issue of speech laws online before, as well as some other good news. Nice to see that the courts appear to be making sensible decisions about these sorts of things.
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The Tragedy of the Commons
politics, society & sociology, systems
September 03, 2003, 12:38 PM
Last night, I read a paper for CSCW on "The Tragedy of the Commons", which I believe is the seminal paper that applied this concept to modern political science. If ever there was an argument that knocked down the "Invisible Hand will fix everything" theory of capitalism (still popular among some of the more overzealous libertarians), this is it.
The paper is very good and pretty readable, so I'd strongly suggest you read it. But since I know most of you won't, here's a summary of the argument, as applied to the problem of overpopulation:
- As the number of people increases, the amount of available resources on this planet per capita will decrease.
- Since population, unchecked, grows exponentially, we will soon reach a point where there is only enough resources per capita for bare subsistence, so no one will have sufficient resources to enjoy life (in reality I'd argue this is an unlikely scenario; it's much more likely that a minority will have sufficient resources and the majority will not have enough to survive, but the important point is that either scenario is bad news).
- Therefore, overpopulation is a big problem.
- However, from the perspective of the rational self-interested individual actor (whom the invisible hand is supposedly guiding), the cost of having another child is nearly entirely beneficial since the burden of overpopulation is distributed evenly to all humans and thus is negligable to him, whereas the cost of not having another child is entirely detrimental to him.
- Therefore, the rational self-interested individual actor will conclude that he should always have another child.
- And, of course, so will all the other rational, self-interested actors out there.
- Therefore, the overpopulation problem will continue to get exponentially worse until the scenario described in (2) occurs.
- Sucks to be us.
This is an insight that exposes a core problem confronted by modern economists and other social thinkers. It proves that a blind, simplistic trust in markets is misguided, and that the world is much more complicated than most laissez faire propoganda would have you believe.
This isn't to say that markets are bad, of course, just that they need to be fixed sometimes. The interesting debates are over how to do this; how to balance freedom with responsibility. But in order to engage in this debate, you first have to accept the reality that it must occur.
Hardin claims that attempts to convince people through education that they must voluntarily reject the course of action that benefits them the most for the sake of society at a whole are inherently flawed and unworkable. He argues:
If we ask a man who is exploiting a commons to desist "in the name of conscience," what are we saying to him? What does he hear? — not only at the moment but also in the wee small hours of the night when, half asleep, he remembers not merely the words we used but also the nonverbal communication cues we gave him unawares? Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously, he senses that he has received two communications, and that they are contradictory: 1. (intended communication) "If you don't do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen"; 2. (the unintended communication) "If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons."
Similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma, the system ensures that the people trapped in it cannot escape through cooperation unless they can be convinced to all trust one another, an unlikely scenario.
The only alternative, Hardin argues, is "Mutual Coercion Mutually Agreed Upon". Essentially this involves stamping out the commons and replacing it with systemic structures that either carve out portions and allocate them to individuals ("private property") or artifically make the costs of abusing the commons much higher than the benefits (fines, incarceration, etc). Essentially this entails giving up freedoms, but its a mutual sacrafice that humans agree to on their own volition. Of course, Hardin skirts the issue of what exactly those people who choose not to enter into the agreement are supposed to do... I don't like this conclusion, but so far I must say his argument is convincing.
The core idea, however, is that we as intelligent actors have to alter the system as a whole to work for our long-term best interests rather than against them. But this introduces problems of its own. Systems are complex, and it is hard to predict all the real effects changes will have. I've mentioned the "Law of Unintended Consequences" before. Hardin himself brings up the phrase "Quis custodies ipsos custodes?" or "Who shall watch the watchers themselves?". Whenever you introduce changes, there have to be mechanisms in place to enforce those changes. Usually this requires enforcers, who are human too and subject to the same rules as all the other humans in the system. You can't expect enforcers to be angels; they will look out for their own self-interest just the same as everyone else will.
Is it even possible to design perfect systems that can really address all these issues? Or is this just a cleverly disguised technical solution to a "no technical solutions problem", which Hardin deplores in the first few paragraphs? T.S. Eliot once said "It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one has to be good". Where, then, lies the hope for lasting betterment?
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Corporate Murder Revisited
politics, society & sociology
May 20, 2003, 09:11 PM
K5 has an article about how the UK has enacted a law on corporate killing. If a corporation is responsible for deaths in the UK, and the deaths can be shown to be the result of upper management failures, then members of upper management can be prosecuted as criminals and could face jail terms. This relates to my earlier post on how corporations are viewed as separate entities from the people who make them up and how this affects our language. It's especially interesting that this law is appearing in the UK, where the names of corporations are plural nouns. Not that I'm implying this is the primary reason they made the law, but I'm guessing both are at least partially originating from a different perception of what a corporation is.
If this law is given real teeth, I hope someone looks into the effects it has on corporate operations. We may need something like this here in the USA.
Posted by Rob on May 20, 2003 at 11:06 PM
Unfortunately, it looks like the legislator who is proposing the law is actually claiming that it targets "companies" themselves and not any individuals who sit on the boards. Many people interviewed in the article are protesting this, asking why individual board members can be held accountable for misuse of funds but not for manslaughter.
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Lessig's Modest Crusade
information, politics
May 16, 2003, 06:18 PM
Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford, advocate of free speech and the public domain, fellow Movable Type weblogger, and all-around good guy, has a modest proposal for undoing the major damage of the Sonny Bono Mickey Mouse Protection Copyright Extension Act. He is trying to get a bill proposed to Congress that will require copyright holders to pay a 1$ tax on their copyrights after the first 50 years. If the tax is paid the owner keeps the copyright but must provide a contact point for requests to license the copyright (though the copyright holder need not actually grant any of these requests). The reasoning behind this move is that the vast majority of works are no longer economically valuable after 50 years, and thus they should enter the public domain so that anyone can make use of them without having to license the copyright or worry about litigation. So Disney can keep Mickey, but the rest of us will have access to the countless numbers of works that are locked up by copyright even though they are not available on the market and aren't making anyone any money.
Unfortunately, Lessig is encountering resistance even to this seemingly very reasonable law from lobbyists on Capitol Hill. He attributes it to content creation companies like Disney's willingness to stomp out any form of public domain competition at any cost. Perhaps they are just afraid to let him get his foot in the door. But regardless of the reason, this is a law that could provide a lot of benefit for revitalizing the public domain and can't be even vaguely construed as hurting anyone. It's just a good idea. So write your Congresspersons a quick email asking them to please sponser the Eric Eldred Act, or at least support it if someone else does. It's the least we can do for a good cause.
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Ebay Cleared in Libel Case: Good News for Online Communities
internet, politics, society & sociology
May 06, 2003, 10:22 AM
There's an article posted to good old Slashdot about the dismissal of a libel case brought against Ebay. An auction winner posted several negative comments about a seller, the seller alleged the comments were libelious and demanded that Ebay remove them. When Ebay refused, he sued them for libel. The judge threw out the case, claiming that Ebay is not liable for users' comments under the 1996 Communications Decency Act. The seller plans to appeal.
This ruling is good news for online community sites, where potentially anyone in the world can post content to the site that could be considered libelious. If community sites can be held legally liable for this content, then its hard to imagine how they could continue to operate since most don't have the resources to check up on the facts behind every comment. This issue came up in my previous post about a recommender system for service providers; I'm glad it appears to be getting resolved in the right way.
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IN SOVIET RUSSIA...
history, politics
March 29, 2003, 10:49 AM
On my way back to Alexandria yesterday I finished listening to a lecture course from The Teaching Company titled "The Rise and Fall of Soviet Communism: A History of Twentieth Century Russia". I'd definately recommend it; the history of the Soviets in the last century makes for an interesting if rather sad read. Most of the course discusses historical events such as the atrocities committed by Joseph Stalin and his cronies in the Great Terror, the horrible conditions in Leningrad during the Nazi seige in World War II, and the oppression of the Soviet people throughout Soviet rule. Yet the lecturer, Professor Gary Hamburg, does manage to avoid giving a biased, blatently anti-communist account despite looking at Russia from a clearly Western perspective. For instance, he points out that it was Stalin's Soviets who really defeated the Nazis; D-day and the other Allied incursions were important but not nearly as decisive as Hitler's loss on the eastern front. He also notes at the end of the series that even when Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost policies proved less controllable than he had hoped and brought about a more free-market and democratic society, that these institutions have in many respects brought more problems to Russia and the other former Soviet nations than they have solved.
Joseph Stalin was an interesting character. At least in terms of pure body count he was a worse monster than Hitler; he indirectly caused millions to suffer and die through his Five Year Plan and collectivization of agriculture. He executed many repatriated POWs after World War II since they were "suspected collaborators with the enemy". He slaughtered thousands of dissidents and suspected dissidents during the Great Terror; Professor Hamburg describes how the Man of Steel signed an order to murder over 3,000 people in one night, then went to the movies. The only sense in which Stalin's crimes were lesser than Hitler's was that Stalin was not ethnically motivated. Yet even Stalin had his ideals; at the end of World War II when the Soviet Union was crippled and forced to pull out of the war Stalin panicked and withdrew into his quarters and refused to come out. When his generals came a couple days later to try to get him out he was drunk and thought they had come to arrest him. When he learned they had not, he remarked in despair: "Everything that Lenin did, we have turned to shit." I find something strangely comforting about that.
Another more disconcerting impression I got was how many similarities there were between the recently fallen Soviet system and our country's current administration. Professor Hamburg, when discussing whether Boris Yeltsin is truly a democrat and not merely an authoritarian spouting democratic rhetoric, mentions how the legislature offered Yeltsin "rule by decree" for a year, and he not only accepted this authority but fought with the legislature to maintain this power when the year was up. A true democrat, Hamburg argues, would not have accepted this authority in the first place. If we believe this, then I'd like to ask if we can truly say that we are confident the Bush administration would not accept such power if offered it by Congress (which doesn't seem so implausable after the Patriot Act). If we can't say this, then I'd like to add that Bush is no more of a democrat (in the political theory sense, not the American political party) than Yeltsin was. And given his position, that's not a proposition I feel too comfortable about.
Posted by veji on April 02, 2003 at 05:03 PM
your font is hard to read - can you make it darker? also, can you include the excerpt in the RSS feed? also, where can we get this book on audio?
Posted by Rob on April 02, 2003 at 06:47 PM
Hi Neema!
Yeah, I know the interface sucks; next item on my agenda is to redesign this weblog along with my whole site. Thanks for the suggestions; I'll definately be sure to fix the font. What do you mean by the excerpt? I'm not familiar with all of Movable Type's fields just yet.
I checked The Teaching Company's website and couldn't find the exact course I have; the closest one I found was this one: http://www.teach12.com/ttc/assets/coursedescriptions/8380.asp which is a longer course by the same professor and is currently on sale. The thing about The Teaching Company is you have to buy their courses while they are on sale or they really rip you off.
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Posted by Kevin Fox on December 06, 2003 at 06:58 PM
Another interesting example happened last week regarding the Washington Post and Google. Derek Powazek and Dave Winer are not happy.
http://www.powazek.com/2003/11/000276.html