'Many web workers, having tasted of the A/B apple, can no longer imagine operating in any other environment. Indeed, they begin to look with pity on the offline world, a terrifying place where each of us possesses only one life to live rather than two (or more) in parallel. “There’s this grilled cheese place down the street,” says Jim Kingsbury, marketing VP at One Kings Lane. “They can’t test anything. Should they price the sandwich at $6 or $6.50? What should be at the top of the menu? Those are purely intuitive choices that they have to make.” At one Silicon Valley office, I overheard an employee complain that dating can’t be A/B tested; an online profile can, to be sure, but once you’re in a relationship with a specific person, 100 percent of the “traffic” is on the line with every decision. The testable web is so much safer. No choices are hard, and no introspection is necessary. Why is B better than A? Who can say? At the end of the workday, we can only shrug: We went with B. We don’t know why. It just works.'

'The definition of the situation is a fundamental concept in symbolic interactionism advanced by the American sociologist W. I. Thomas. It is a kind of collective agreement between people on the characteristics of a situation, and from there, how to appropriately react and fit into it. "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” In other words, the interpretation of a situation causes the action. This interpretation is not objective. Actions are affected by subjective perceptions of situations. Whether there even is an objectively correct interpretation is not important for the purposes of helping guide individuals' behavior. "The situations that men define as true, become true for them."'

'A look into the "HOW" of the Occupy Wall Street movement: The consensus process.'

'...I recognize mass hypnosis when I see it. The mind-numbing call-and-return vocalizations captured in this video reflect the same kind of mind control techniques used in cults, sporting events and even some church revival events. The whole point of this experience is to eliminate the individual mind and train everyone to think, and say, and do exactly what they are told to do by a "leaderless leader" who is really a mind control manipulator. This is a perfectly reflection of this hypnosis "zombie training" ritual at which one person holding the loudspeaker utters one verbal command after another as each one is repeated en masse by the crowd of clueless followers. Free-thinking individuals do not engage in this kind of behavior! Repeat after me: Freedom is… You: Freedom is… Me: …when you don’t do… You: …when you don’t do… Me: …what somebody tells you to do… You: …what somebody tells you to do… Me: …just because they claim false authority over you. You: …just because they claim false authority over you.'

Simon says... SIMON SAYS.

'Much of what passes for valid knowledge becomes simply the individual’s unconscious acceptance of the dominant view. Knowledge generated and indoctrinated into each individual now becomes the moral compass that guides their actions. In the age prior to the time of ubiquitous internet communication, the gate was tightly governed. It was like the eye of a needle that very few could get through to participate in unfolding perception. What those in power absolutely fear is a collapse of the projections that guard the system of expert knowledge, which has replaced individual capacity to listen to ones own conscience. They are afraid of people marching side by side with those individuals who refuse to carry the given script and instead create their own and walk through the gate of the future on their own terms. What WikiLeaks has done is lifted up the perception of the masses that up to now has been governed by illegitimate authority of ‘expert’ knowledge.'

'"My whole life I've made a concerted effort to give people a fair shake and understand different points of view because I felt that everyone had something valuable to offer, but it turns out most of what they had to offer was complete bullshit." "Seriously," Richman added, "what have I gained from treating everyone's opinion with respect? Nothing. Absolutely nothing."' By his estimates, Richman's receptiveness has resulted in 160 irreplaceable hours of listening to grossly uninformed political opinions, 300 hours of carefully hearing out both sides of pointless arguments, and at least a month of listening to his parents' bullshit about how important it is to be open-minded.'

'Relativism is not sanity, just wandering with the lost herd...' -- "There's no way to fight irrational certainty with relativism."

'It hurts to be wrong. Not just emotionally, but physically, especially when it’s public... The horror of it is almost cinematic. The more artificially pumped your ego, or the more brainwashed with academic pretension, the more terrifying that moment of realization is, that moment when all your assumptions are dashed aside like a three-year-old’s alphabet blocks. To a certain point, it is understandable why so many people live in such violent denial, however, this does not detract from the perils of that denial… Useful idiots talk, they don’t listen. They ask lots of questions, but never wait to hear your answers. For them, questions are not a search for information, but rather a method of antagonism. It is a way to keep everyone else on guard while making themselves feel superior. In this game, the useful idiot never has to expose his ignorance because he never has to enter into a meaningful dialogue with anyone who has an opposing view. All he has to do is attack, attack, attack.'

'As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. ...weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism. [Social media activism] doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. There are many things that networks don’t do well.'

'In logic, an argumentum ad populum (Latin: "appeal to the people") is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or all people believe it; it alleges: "If many believe so, it is so." The argumentum ad populum is a red herring and genetic fallacy. It appeals on probabilistic terms... It is logically fallacious because the mere fact that a belief is widely-held is not necessarily a guarantee that the belief is correct; if the belief of any individual can be wrong, then the belief held by multiple persons can also be wrong. The argumentum ad populum can be a valid argument in inductive logic... However, it is unsuitable as an argument for deductive reasoning as proof... ad populum only proves that a belief is popular, not that it is true.'

'Through competition (which also ends up expanding to cooperation), life produces increasingly more complex structures capable of controlling more resources. Better technology leads to better games. Better games (aka behavior templates and/or guides) lead to better technology. The two are intertwined and it can and should be argued that game patterns themselves are a form of technology. So I am now arguing that games are absolutely critical to the planetary phenomenon that futurists have come to call convergent accelerating change. If this is the case, then we can venture the prediction that games will proliferate in direct relationship to other accelerating vectors like computer processing, information, communication and perhaps even human intelligence. ...we’re ultimately building what IBM researcher Jim Spohrer has dubbed the World Board [Baudrillardian Hyper-Reality], a cohesive system that allows people to access data about anything and everything in the world around us.'

'Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt is a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa (as green as they come), and has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement. Climate Depot has released a video of Dr. Rancourt: Man-made global warming is nothing more than a “corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else. Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass.” Rancourt is scathing of universities (and rightly so): “They are all virtually all service intellectuals. They will not truly critique, in a way that could threaten the power interests that keep them in their jobs. The tenure track is just a process to make docile and obedient intellectuals that will then train other intellectuals.” Climate Depot has <choice excerpts> and a list of other greens who have jumped ship.'

'In the language of economic sociology, options are performative; they create what they putatively just describe. In other words, the models have agency (that’s market models we’re talking about, not the fashion models, heaven’s no!). Options enable investors to anticipate other investors’ actions, which spurs herding behavior, where actors decide to disregard their own information (i.e., “That Coco Rocha, urgh!”) and imitate instead the decisions taken by others before them (but Russell Marsh optioned her). Herding and cascades are rather problematic to financial markets; they leads investors to artificially bid up asset values... because investors, like fashionistas, react to each other as well as to the aggregate traces of fellow investors’ actions (captured well in signaling instruments like options), they exacerbate systemic risk. Essentially, valuing financial goods is a matter of trying to be in fashion, which is a gamble.'

'Men go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.' – Charles Mackay

'In the 20th century, when a promotion was launched, the mainstream media reported on it like an echo chamber, each major newspaper and television station reporting the same thing in different ways, until eventually it sunk in. People began to believe it. But the power elite doesn't have that sort of power in the 21st century, thanks to the widespread debunking by the Internet. It's not just the sour economy, for there have been sour economies before. It's the information that is being spread by electronic communications. It's a kind of meme itself – or anti-meme. People are waking up, as if from a bad dream. Many elite promotions are unraveling or at least becoming less convincing. The EU has been built on lies, as those behind it never admitted the final destination was a United States of Europe. Now, thanks to the Internet and the economic crisis, such lies are unraveling and patience is running out. That's what the German leaders are seeing. That's the reason for the desperation.'

'Since 2008, the number of people who don't believe in global warming has doubled to 16 percent. What do you think? -- Brian Fouts, Bid Assessor: "Probably most guys could just use another week or so to reconcile the inconsistencies of recent individual findings with the broader scientific consensus."'

'After the election—and anyone who didn't vote for Obama will know exactly what I'm talking about—you didn't dare say a negative thing about Obama in public. Certainly not a flippant slander, the kind that are common when discussing Presidents. If you were in a restaurant, before you said anything about Obama you took a serious look around to see who else was near you, and only if it was safe (read: white) could you quickly whisper some veiled comment. You weren't even allowed to be pessimistic about Obama. That was the climate. Again, if you didn't vote for Obama you will know what I mean, if you did you'll think I'm exaggerating. I'm not. Fast forward to last week. This is what I heard a guy announce in a crowded downtown restaurant, and I'm quoting: "Fuck him. Fuck Obama, fuck him, and fuck his horsefaced wife. I'm sick of his shit." That man doesn't hate Obama, he hates Obama supporters.' -- Corollary: He hates self-pwning idiocy, Obama supporters being the most depressing example.

Lanier: "Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting. Initially people aren't sure what the pack is. Somebody tries to ridicule something else, and other people who want to play it safe join in so that they're not the target. Gradually, the pack forms. You can tell it's formed by two things: an internal enemy and an external enemy. The internal enemy is the low person on the totem pole who gets ridiculed. And then there's the external enemy, the "other"." -- Krotoski: "We see this in playgrounds, we see this pack mentality in other, non-web environments. -- Lanier: "That's because it comes from the people, not from the machine."

"Use the Jedi mind tricks and just keep saying, 'The debate is over.'"

Howard Rheingold: 'Collective action is not the same as collectivism. Collectivism involves coercion and centralized control; treating the Internet as a commons doesn't mean it is communist.' -- Larry Sanger: 'Epistemic collectivism is a real phenomenon; whether they admit it or not, a lot of people do place the views of the collective uppermost. People are epistemic collectivists in just the same way, and for just the same reasons, that they are abject conformists. Surely epistemic collectivism has its roots in the easy sophomoric embrace of relativism. If there is no objective truth, as so many of my old college students seemed to believe, then there is no way to make sense of the idea of expertise or of intellectual authority. Without a reality "out there," independent of us, that we can be right or wrong about, there is no way to justify placing some "experts" above the rest of us in terms of the reliability of their claims.'

'...what the recent climate-science scandals reveal is that such dodgy science becomes more likely the more that science is politicised and used to motor social policy and social-control initiatives. The politicians and green activists desperately calling for the IPCC to get its house in order, to get rid of the crap science and only keep the allegedly good stuff, know which side their bread is buttered. They know that the IPCC is the emperor’s last shred of clothing, providing otherwise denuded rulers and campaigners with a form of unquestionable authority for their backward, killjoy, misanthropic agendas. They are really demanding the preservation of the IPCC by any means necessary because they value the way it provides them with a God-like authority for Orwellian action at a time when serious democratic debate is noteable by its absence. And perhaps we should call for the abolition of the IPCC, not because some of its science is daft, but for precisely those same reasons.'

'This is One Spectacular Poster of ClimateGate Covering 3 Decades. You have to see this up close to believe it. Look up close and admire the detail while you despair at how long science has been going off the rails. To better appreciate the past and what was exposed by the CRU emails, the Timeline chart consolidates and chronologically organizes the information uncovered and published about the CRU emails by many researchers along with some related contextual events. That the chart exists at all is yet another example of how skilled experts are flocking in to the skeptics’ position and dedicating hours of time pro bono because they are passionately motivated to fight against those who try to deceive us.'

'The fact that many readers have automatically conflated the word “sociopath” with “evil” in fact reflects the demonizing tendencies of loser/clueless group morality. The characteristic of these group moralities is automatic distrust of alternative individual moralities. The clueless are not capable of much compassion, unless they can very strongly identify with the person. ...the clueless and losers often externalize their moral sense, into some sort of collectively (and ritually) adopted code, thereby abdicating responsibility for the moral dimension of their actions entirely. You don’t have to think about the morality of what you do if you can just appeal to some code (religious texts are the main kind...). The morality that they defer to is always a codified communal version of the views of some charismatic sociopath, but it is the abdication of responsibility, as a group, by the clueless and losers, that amplifies the impact of both the Hitlers and Gandhis of the world.'

'The Sociopath's private morality is not, in their view, a matter for external democratic judgment. Sociopaths can be compassionate because their distrust only extends to groups. They are capable of understanding and empathizing with individual pain and acting with compassion. A sociopath who sets out to be compassionate is strongly limited by two factors: the distrust of groups (and therefore skepticism and distrust of large-scale, organized compassion), and the firm grounding in reality. The second factor allows sociopaths to look unsentimentally at all aspects of reality, including the fact that apparently compassionate actions that make you “feel good” and assuage guilt today may have unintended consequences that actually create more evil in the long term. This is what makes even good sociopaths often seem callous to even those among the clueless and losers who trust the sociopath’s intentions. The apparent callousness is actually evidence that hard moral choices are being made.'

'#1. The term “climate change” itself. #2. “Climate change denier” #3. The appeal to peer-reviewed and published research. #4. Appeal to authority. #5. Unwillingness to debate. #6. A lack of common sense. #7. Use of climate models as truth. #8. Claims that climate models have been tested. #9. The claim that the IPCC is unbiased. #10. The claim that reducing CO2 emissions is the right thing to do anyway.' -- Comments Gene Nemetz: #11. “We must act now!” -- P Gosselin: #1. “if you care about our children and our grandchildren” #2. “It’ll create millions of green jobs” #3. “unprecedented” #4. “The science is settled” [*groans*] #5. “The whole world is looking to us” #6. “They’re shills of the oil industry” #7. “They’re not real scientists” #8. “The sceptics are a very small fringe group” #10. “We can curb climate change” #11. “Climate killing greenhouse gases” #12. “We’re destroying the planet”'

'What the CRU’s hacked emails convincingly demonstrate is that climate scientists in the AGW camp have corrupted the peer-review process. In true Gramscian style they marched on the institutions – capturing the magazines (Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc), the seats of learning (Climate Research Institute; Hadley Centre), the NGO’s (Greenpeace, WWF, etc), the political bases (especially the EU), the newspapers (pretty much the whole of the MSM I’m ashamed, as a print journalist, to say) – and made sure that the only point of view deemed academically and intellectually acceptable was their one. Neutral observers in this war sometimes ask how it can be that the vast majority of the world’s scientists seem to be in favour of AGW theory. “Peer-review” is why. Only a handful of scientists – 53 to be precise, not the much-touted 2,500 – were actually responsible for the doom-laden global-warming sections of the IPCC’s reports.' -- SCUM *spits*

Discuss -- #More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us. -- Elizabeth Kolbert: "People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. In one, feminists who spoke with other feminists became more adamant in their feminism. In a second, opponents of same-sex marriage became even more opposed to the idea, while proponents shifted further in favor. In a third, doves who were grouped with other doves became more dovish still." -- The Internet is becoming a vast petri dish for the group polarization phenomena. As Sunstein puts it “The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.” -- Birds of a feather...

75mins Channel 4 documentary on the cult of environmentalism and the politically-motivated supression of scientific method/skepticism. Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle

'...if flippancy is more fun then it’s also more attractive. Much like the coolest kid in middle school, it’s funny and it’s exclusive and it’s confident of being understood by just the right people—maybe even especially when it’s being superior and snarky and speaking at someone else’s expense. It can be so attractive, in fact, that you want to share its assumptions, whatever they are. It’s not addressing those assumptions, or earnestly explaining them to you in some dull droning unfunny voice, but you want to share them even more, because you aspire to be on the right side of the cool person’s joke. You might not even think about those assumptions, or notice yourself adopting them. Which means flippancy and snark can be convincing, substantively convincing, without even making an argument. They convince socially, not rhetorically. Being convinced socially isn’t anything complicated or new, not in the least...'

In nutshell... People conform to the consenus. People are hypocrits who confuse words for deeds. People shirk personal responsibility and initiative when amongst a group of strangers. People will seek positions of power when available or of victimhood when not. People will blindly follow orders issued by authority figures believing they are absolved of all personal responsibility for their subsequent actions.

'When the most intelligent people over-ride the social intelligence systems and apply generic, abstract and systematic reasoning of the kind which is enhanced among higher IQ people, they are ignoring an ‘expert system’ in favour of a non-expert system. -- ...random silliness of the most intelligent people may be amplified to generate systematic wrongness when intellectuals are in addition ‘advertising’ their own high intelligence in the evolutionarily novel context of a modern IQ meritocracy. The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost-exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong. Hence the phenomenon of ‘political correctness’ (PC); whereby false and foolish ideas have come to dominate, and moralistically be enforced upon, the ruling elites of whole nations.'

'Pack journalism is an often derogatory term used to describe the tendency of news reporting to become homogeneous. Pack journalism occurs because the reporters often rely on one another for news tips or are all similarly dependent on a single source for access (which is often the very person they are covering). A type of groupthink occurs, as the journalists are constantly aware of what the others are reporting and an informal consensus emerges on what is newsworthy.'

'... on the whole, we know significantly less about our friends, colleagues, and even spouses than we think we do. -- ...interacting with people and sharing experiences with them doesn’t necessarily translate into knowing lots of things about them. The main hurdle is the way we talk to those we’re close to: our conversations are usually meant not so much to gather information as to establish rapport and to bond - in short, to make friends. And we do that by focusing on areas of agreement and avoiding topics that might cause friction. Our natural tendency toward comradeship makes us, ironically, leery of learning too much about the people we’re befriending. -- People naturally seek out those they see as most like them, and a falsely inflated sense of similarity may only further cement friendships. ...couples that maintained positive illusions about each other tended to be happier than those that didn’t.'