Solipsism Gradient

skellybootle wrote:

AGREED

except for the dig at English sports!

…Stan Kelly-Bootle

Stan, thanks for dropping in!

Regarding any and all sports, I invoke the “calm disinterest” clause…

Posted by skellybootle:
AGREED
except for the dig at English sports!
Guess who beat the invincible Aussies in the RUGBY World Cup
Final?

Stan Kelly-Bootle

Posted by taliesin’s log:
taliesin’s log linked to this post

Avoidance therapy

The Wildcat has placed her latest order for things wanted from Paris, but will have to wait.

Simon Willison points at Charles Millers’ Rules of Argument. This excellent article teaches how to avoid online arguments:

Rule one is scarily simple. You will never change anyone’s mind on a matter of opinion. Someone going into an argument believing one thing, and coming out the other side not believing it is a freak occurrence ranking somewhere alongside virgin birth and victorious English sporting teams. People change their minds gradually, and if anything a prolonged argument only serves to back someone into a corner, huddling closer to the security blanket of what they believe.

…Once you have stated your case, there’s no point re-stating it. Going over the same ground repeatedly will damage your case: nobody likes reading the same interminable debate over and over again. Similarly, if people read what you have to say, understand it, but continue to disagree anyway, there’s nothing more you can do unless you suddenly come up with a totally new argument. The only productive thing you can add is if people clearly don’t understand what you?re saying, and you need to clarify.

…Sometimes, you’ll ignore all these rules, and get into a month-long argument about RDF with a fundamentalist gun-nut emacs-user. What then?

The ideal attitude to project during any argument is one of calm disinterest.

I find that I subconsciously already deduced Charles’ rules for several years; I can’t even remember getting into a heated online argument. I suppose I can thank my faithful readers for already being calmly disinterested – hopefully not just disinterested .

Nevertheless, it seems that there’s been a seasonal increase in the number of arguments I read about. Even such an amiable fellow as the AccordionGuy recently had to post a comment etiquette notice. Shelley Powers posted on blog commenters’ hostility on the same day. So did John Walkenbach, who put his finger on the main issue: a weblog (or nearly any other publicly accessible page) isn’t a democracy. The owner decides what to put on it, what to cut, which comments to allow. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to publish his views elsewhere. If you read the comments in the above links, you’ll see that, while a majority of commenters agree with that, by no means all do.

The situation on the Internet contrasts to what many people are used to regarding other media. If a newspaper or TV station publishes something you disagree with, they’re often obliged to allow you equal time or space to disagree; after all, very few people can open their own newspaper or TV station to do so. The Internet and the explosion of free weblog providers changed all that; anyone with the resources to read something also has resources to publicly disagree with it.

Scoble linked to this great story about how JetBlue‘s CEO now and then works as a flight attendant on his own airline:

…Beginning in the first row, he slowly made his way through the plane, stopping to chat with anyone who cared to talk to him, answering every question people asked. I was sitting in the 11th row, and it took him more than an hour to reach me. “Nice airline you have here,” I said. “Where do you come up with all these great ideas – like the televisions?”

“I get most of my ideas on flights like this one,” Neeleman said. “The customers tell me what they want.”

“Oh, listening to your customers,” I said. “What a novel idea!”

Well worth a read. If all CEOs did something similar to keep in touch with their own customers, the world would be a better place…

In a recent post, I said:
Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

…I recommend the Spherical Object Collectors community, created by my friend (in several senses) Mario AV, which already pointed me at this fascinating page about Hikaru Dorodango, or Japanese shiny mud balls.

Now I read at Jonathan Peterson’s way.nu that there’s a more up-to-date article available; it even has videos of each step of the process of making a dorodango!

Posted by Luiz E-dmundo:
O Texto é bom, acho na verdade que ele é bem melhor, mais conciso, mais pé-no-chão que o Manifesto Cluetrain, mas não acredito em verdades absolutas…

Por isso cometi a heresia de comentar, nem sempre concordando, cada um dos 10 itens do texto…

Estou fazendo isso paulatinamento no meu Blog Acorde Dissonante : http://acordedissonante.blogspot.com

Luiz E-dmundo

We’re packing for a whole week offline, during the Carnaval holidays. This time to Gramado, a city way down in Southern Brazil, famous for chocolate and wine festivals.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t resist recommending Malcolm Gladwell‘s excellent article Big and Bad – how the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety:

…The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn’t make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s.

…In psychology, there is a concept called learned helplessness, which arose from a series of animal experiments in the nineteen-sixties at the University of Pennsylvania. Dogs were restrained by a harness, so that they couldn’t move, and then repeatedly subjected to a series of electrical shocks. Then the same dogs were shocked again, only this time they could easily escape by jumping over a low hurdle. But most of them didn’t; they just huddled in the corner, no longer believing that there was anything they could do to influence their own fate. Learned helplessness is now thought to play a role in such phenomena as depression and the failure of battered women to leave their husbands, but one could easily apply it more widely…The man who gives up his sedate family sedan for an S.U.V. is saying something far more troubling – that he finds the demands of the road to be overwhelming. Is acting out really worse than giving up?

I have driven one of these things once, and it was a scary experience. I’m used to small, responsive cars where you feel every pebble; I felt completely out of touch with the road, and was glad when I got out again. I’ve learned to watch out for cars that present one or more of these symptoms:

• darkened windows
• tow hook
• pickup or SUV
• extra points for a rollbar on the pickup/SUV
• extra points for floodlights on the rollbar

since they’ll have a high probability of completely ignoring niceties such as traffic lights, rights of way, speed limits and other cars.