"Recently, I have been a great deal about two communities that have put forward idiosyncratic ideas about the world. Less Wrong claims to be “a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality.”  Eliezer Yudkowsky, a proponent of the singularity, began the blog in 2009 and used it as a space to broadcast his views on, well, just about everything but primarily artificial intelligence, epistemology, and ethics. Yudkowsky and the Less Wrong community often base their speculations on ‘rationality’ on research in cognitive science, behavioral economics, and related disciplines. I’ve also been interested for some time in chemtrail conspiracy theorists, a community that is more decentralized. Chemtrailers believe that contrails, or lines of condensed water left in an aircraft’s wake, are in fact, um, chemtrails, chemicals sprayed into the atmosphere by the government or some other malignant group. Chemtrail theorists have carried out their own experiments to verify their intuitions. And they have become the scourge of those proposing research on geoengineering (like these people haunting a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [beginning @ 1:50]).

Thinking about these communities reminded me of Lovecraft’s earlier interactions. In some ways, amateur journalism and epistolary circles of Lovecraft’s day were not unlike the blogs and webpages that Less Wrong and the chemtrailers use. (Yes, I know the dangers of cross-temporal and cross-technological comparisons.) Still, I think there is much to explore about how such groups produce and distribute their knowledge against the background of an epistemic status quo. If scientists have their journals—as Alex Csiszar has been exploring—the laity have their amateur journalism and their blogs. And such spaces give historians of science and technology and STS scholars a chance to examine and probe the practices of epistemic subcultures.

Henry is a friend and I haven't read _Debt_ yet (though it's in the bedside pile), but, yeah.

"Bliss it was in that atrocity to be alive, but to be on the internet was very heaven."

"digital media [have enabled] the massification of self-performance, of crafting a self through the publication of text and image. ... [Not] a brave new world of spectacularly predatory frauds and newly vulnerable victims ... everyman a Lord Byron or George Eliot, if he or she wants to be. The crafting of gentler fictions of selfhood, performative shadings and experiments of our everyday personalities, through disseminated publication, is now a widely distributed possibility.
... practice which was previously restricted to a small cultural elite. ... If everyone can make a literary self ... then crafting a memorably exaggerated literary self like Norman Mailer or Mark Twain or Jonathan Franzen is not in itself anything remarkable. If millions are doing it, most ... will be banal, confused or generic, but there will be enough [who do it well] to demonstrate that past literary lives were less ,,, extraordinary in their inventions than their celebrants have so often proclaimed."

"In this talk, I will discuss the use of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to analyze Debian mailing lists in order to discover political, social, and technical patterns that could be used to inform project decisions. I will concentrate on a class of techniques known as statistical topic models, which automatically infer groups of semantically-related words, known as topics, from word co-occurrence patterns in documents. The resultant topics can then be used to detect emergent areas of technical activity, identify subcommunities, and track trends over time. In addition to providing a brief overview of statistical topic models and their application to Debian mailing list data, I will present examples of topics inferred from Debian mailing lists, as well as some preliminary political, social, and technical findings discovered via these topics."

This seems like a nice custom.

Exploiting the properties of the Chinese writing system to evade the "great firewall", including appropriating ancient forms of divination/wordplay based on splitting characters into radicals.

"Everyone who ever dealt with a Troll knows of the strong, nagging urge to argue back at him ; and they know, of course, that this urge must be repressed at all cost, for it is what Trolls feed on. Thus trolling is powered by the same basic motivation that it serves to satisfy : that crazy desire to get the last word in a conversation. Trolls exist because there is enough Trollhood in everyone of us for them to feed on." Plus: Socrates and Hui Shi as trolls.

"network of political discussions on one of the most popular Polish Internet forums.... The comments of the participants are ... mostly disagreements, with strong percentage of invective and [provocation]... Binary exchanges (quarrels) play significant role in the network growth and topology. Statistical analysis shows that the growth of the discussions depends on the degree of controversy of the subject and the intensity of personal conflict between the participants. This is in contrast to most previously studied social networks, for example networks of scientific citations, where the nature of the links is much more positive and based on similarity and collaboration rather than opposition and abuse. The work discusses also the implications of the findings for more general studies of consensus formation, where our observations of increased conflict contradict the usual assumptions that interactions between people lead to averaging of opinions and agreement."

Ans.: No, unless you by 'ruining' you mean "making obvious to non-economists that the debate exists".

I think he underestimates how receptive the higher agrarian civilizations were to innovation in selected areas (see Hodgson's _Venture of Islam_), and overestimates how useful the Internet currently is for incubating ideas, but, overall, yeah.

So, what was Disch's handle on unfogged?

Some good points, but surprisingly bad history (Chinese printing didn't take off, "The Web began as a means of communication among physicists in 1981"!) from a professional historian. Not material to the mostly-sound recommendations.

Just so: "bizarre behavior is just an emergent property of large groups of humans given the ability to communicate over long distances."

"Every time I’m not perfectly clear about something, an angel eats a kitten."

"we no longer need books telling us that the Internet is a big thing. It is time to treat that fact, as Shirky sometimes does, as the starting point for a discussion rather than the conclusion. The questions then become ones of what kind of structures wil

*cough* Conceit stolen from Charlie Stross *cough*

Of course, back in the day, it was "someone is _wrong_ in the pages of a [scholarly journal]/[little magazine]!"

Special issue of _Public Choice_ on blogging and politics

Some actual data on the question of partisan echo-chambers

Andrew Leonard provides the appropriate quotations from 1848...

McIrvin explains a subtle attack on continuing debates.

Makes an incredible contrast with the Shannen Rossmiller story ("Behind Enmy Lines with a Suburban Counterterrorist")

What can one say but: "!!!"