Yearly Archives: 2004

Measuring the Micro-Conversations in Blogs, and How Do People Change Opinions?

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I was talking to Jesse Berrett (a critic, historian, and teacher) yesterday about whether all these “conversations” in the blogesphere really amounted to anything productive/significant in the context of the national discourse. People like Jeff Jarvis herald these “conversations” that go down mostly in the “comments” section of posts or in other people’s blog posts which link to the original as great things which evolve thinking. Is this true? Or are these conversations predominately “this is my opinion and why” and “this is my opinion and why.” Is anyone’s opinion really changing? Or perhaps the meta question is, What process do people go through before publicly changing their opinion? Doc Searls has said I think that on the blogesphere you can never be too steadfast in your opinion because you can instantly be inundated with links and rebuttals causing to change. Is this true?

We all hear about Rathergate and high profile stories about bloggers. But this is mostly about “fact checking your ass.” Jarvis does say here that the blogesphere so far has been mostly about fact checking mainstream media, asking questions that mainstream media won’t ask, and generally taking the role of media criticism. I get the sense that Jarvis hopes that more bandwidth can be spent on issues and things that elevate the quality of the debate. But the “conversations’ which have ensued on Jarvis’ “Issues 2004” posts have been mostly “this is my opinion” and “this is my opinion.” Not too fun to read, or opinion-changing.

So what I want to know is if we can measure or quantify the value creation of all the “micro-conversations” that exist in the 3 million blogs out there. Let’s face it, outside of the most popular bloggers like Jarvis and others (who mostly are former journalists or professors) the rest of us are popular within our own circle of 20, 30, 100, or 1000 readers. And most of those conversations may be about important political issues, but probably more often about a book one is reading, fishing trips, interesting articles, etc. As hundreds of thousands of these small conversations take place in the blogesphere, I wonder how one measures that in any empirical way.

From what I’ve seen of Technorati, it isn’t useful in this way. Anyway, those are my meandering and opaque thoughts at the moment – I’d love for you to clarify any of this for me!

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Emerging Neurosociety and Immortality

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I posted a few months ago on Zach Lynch‘s blog on practical developments in neuroscience and the emergence of a neurosociety. I believe that we are all just a bunch of chemical reactions and that brain, heart, and soul are all just about neuroscience. I find topics like neuroeconomics facinating. This stuff doesn’t just define us; it is us.

So I have enjoyed two recent posts by Chris Yeh. The first one links to this article from nature.com which discusses a paralyzed man who can now send email and watch TV all through thoughts because of an implanted brain chip that is connected directly to neurons. It won’t be long before such chips are not singular to disabled people.

Chris’ second outlines his prediction that “Mankind will achieve physical immortality in my lifetime” (he’s 30). He includes some great links that outline where science is at in this respect. If I live to 2080, probable barring some unexpected event, I wonder how powerful personal computers will be and if, as Chris suggests, we all will be creating “virtual worlds” and if we will be running on electronic circuit boards instead of biological neurons.

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Gone Fishin'

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When I was 10 or so I really wanted to go fishing. I don’t know why, but it was always something I’d wanted to do. Finally, my godfather agreed to take me on his next trip. Before we were to go, he died of cancer, and I spoke about his promise to take me fishing at his memorial service. Today, I finally got to try my casting at some trout up near Napa Valley with 5 or 6 friends from school and our Outdoor Ed director Chris. It was raining the whole 2.5 hour drive up and back, but out on the lake and river there was no rain. It was nice. How many fish did we get? Let’s not get into that (it was my first time). After a couple hours at this one lake we were heading back to the van to go onto the next spot when we came across some bikers who were resting. We asked the two women where they were biking to/from. They were 70 miles into a “century” ride. One of the ladies asked, “Want to see my raspberry?” I didn’t know what that meant. Chris said “Yeah, let’s see it!” She proceeded to pull down her pants to reveal her entire left butt cheek with a huge bruise. We were stunned. “I saw a little more than a raspberry there!” Chris said. Ah, the great outdoors.

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Accelerating Change Essay

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I was pleasantly surprised to get an email the other day from folks organizing the Accelerating Change conference Nov 5-7 at Stanford. There are some interesting speakers and futuristic-like topics on the table. Since it’s happening on a weekend I considered registering but never did anything. Now, I’ve been offered a “high school scholarship” and will be able to go for free. I think they found out about me through my blog. I did need to write up a little essay that addressed: “Describe the most important changes in the world you think you are going to see happen over your lifetime. Is this different from what you would ideally like to see happen? How would you like your government, businesses, schools, and other institutions help you deal with those changes? What things can you do personally to prepare yourself for the future? What can you do to shape the global future?” My quick essay is below. If you’re going to be at the conference, email me and we can hook up.
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In the past we have been able to pinpoint changes on a timeline by taking time in the present to analyze and interpret history. This ability, to both deal with present-day issues while examining how our world has changed in the past, is rapidly deteriorating. Now, we are moving forward at a pace that many of us can not keep up with. We are moving forward with changes that are more complex and scientific than most of us are intellectually capable of digesting. For example, there is a certain amount of human despair when it comes to the simple task of voting. There are so many issues, so many different ideas and opinions, analyses and perspectives, and even more perspectives on perspectives, that it is not hard to see why so many throw our hands up in a confusing torrent of information.

It is not only the amount of information that worries people, but the media through which we receive it. Instead of everyone carefully reading the New York Times and feeling content for the day that they were well-informed, executive-level thinkers now consume 3 or 4 newspapers a day, 20-30 blogs, satellite radio, on-demand TV, and so forth. In the old days it took a printing press to influence opinion. Now all it takes is a personal computer. The result? Millions are exerting their influence, and when taken together, this creates a dizzying array of choices and contradictory opinions.

Hence my avoidance to use “information overload” and instead “stimuli-overload” as the key challenge and change I will see over my lifetime. It is hard to say how this compares with an ideal future. Will this accelerating change ultimately benefit society and the world? We can only find out. We often spend so much time analyzing our past and predicting the future that we forget to take a breath in the present. To that end, the only thing we do know is that change is happening now.

I believe that government must not try to regulate these changes. Instead, it must let innovation and change happen organically. Educational bodies must inform through research and studies. We often hear technology prophets and visionaries proclaim the Next Big Thing and that leaves a lot of people wondering just how much penetration new technologies are having. If universities can help clear the fog in this respect we will all benefit. Businesses, finally, must do what they do best: attract the smartest people, give them the tools to make change, and then turn those ideas into viable concerns. In the United States, it will take a combination of all these institutions in order to keep this country the capital of creativity and change.

It is up to my generation to look at technologies like the internet and say “To what extent do we accept it for what it is versus what it can and should be?” Fortunately, most young people have not had a problem adapting to an always-on world with more information coming from more places than any parent has dealt with. It is necessary for all of us to foster this spirit of optimism and embracement of change through the appropriate incentives to keep this young talent engaged, caring, and most important, rewarded for their role in producing and adapting to change.

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End of Faith: Religion and Reason

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Below is a review I wrote for my high school paper

I have the upper hand by reviewing The End of Faith by Sam Harris after Jeremy Avins (’06) wrote about it in Issue 2 of the Devil’s Advocate, as well as skimming various reviews in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle. Moreover, I have no explicit goals or baggage, such as bolstering the foundation of my own faith. Instead, I read End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason as a high school kid who is agnostic at best, maybe Buddhist, and more likely just confused. I am confused about why wars have been fought all over the world over this thing called religion. I am confused about what spirituality really means. I am finally unable to effectively describe the interchange that exists today between science and religion.

Those disclaimers out of the way, I devoured Harris’ book, with all of its imperfections, and came away with more questions than answers, a disappointing outcome for Harris I would guess since he so vigorously argues his points and attempts to close the door on alternate viewpoints.

At its best, End of Faith offers an intelligent critique of the intersection of beliefs, rationality, and science, and how those influences affect us every day. He is particularly on-the-ball when discussing the new trend of “religious moderation.” Instead of excepting moderates from his blistering attack on fundamentalism, he is even more harsh on their movement, which has blossomed because the Enlightenment, advances in science, and increasing reliance on reason and evidence to fuel society, have in combination chipped away at many tenets of religion.

Harris derails slightly when he attempts to cite various passages from various religious texts as evidence that the religions do not accept (and in some cases advocate killing) non-believers. Avins astutely highlighted contradictory passages from Jewish texts encouraging peace. This is my point. It is easy to close one eye, as Avins does, and read only the parts of the text that fit modern, rational thinking. Or, as Harris does, to discover parts of Islam that are surprisingly violent and conclude that anti-Semitism is intrinsic to the belief. Harris also swims in treacherous waters when he tries to empirically prove that religion is irrational. All his examples have a contradiction or a way to disprove his assertion. But when he arrives at God, Harris seems to just be frustrated that, as Avins says, there is no way to prove that God does not exist. Nonetheless, his line of logic makes more sense than Avins’ reasoning. Avins says, in essence, that early humans could not find any other way to explain things so they credited a higher being. This may prove that it is human nature to want to understand and explain everything, but it certainly does not by default make it rational.

The book finally offers an interesting perspective on President Bush’s faith-based initiatives, the “myth” that religion strengthens communities (surely debatable), and why talk on religion is taboo in today’s culture. Alas, Harris’ versatility also leads to seemingly directionless meandering, as he ventures into abstract philosophy, consciousness, and neuroscience. By the end, I wish he would have devoted those energies on further discussion of the mortality argument (can we humans just not accept that life will end?) instead of showing off his wide-reaching intellect. But my sense is that any well-documented effort like Harris’ can be heralded as a success if it prompts the reader to dig deeper, keep reading, and keep answering millennium-old questions with more questions.

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