NPR can't brain today...
Jul. 25th, 2005 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdHAS EVERYONE GONE COMPLETELY INSANE?!
NPR has apparently started catching the dumb. The host of the show on right now just introduced lizards and snakes as examples of invertebrates - I mean, for the love of god, snakes are almost nothing but spine - and yesterday, the host of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me interchangeably used "galaxy" and "constellation" when he meant "solar system." It was like listening to fucking Lost in Space Theatre. It's not funny when it's supposed to be news.
I mean, I thought at this point that reasonably educated people had caught up on that last one, in particular. It's such a classic piece of what the fuck is wrong with you? randomness that I thought anybody stuck in front of a national broadcast microphone - particularly on a news-based show on NPR - might get it right. Clearly, however, I was wrong.
It bothers me. It really does.
It's not just the small things, if you can consider getting matters of scale off by several orders of magnitude to be a small thing. People need to be getting smarter, and they aren't. I'm not convinced they're getting dumber; that's easy to imagine, but not very likely to be true. The large-scale education of Americans has never been managed well; the American system produces a sizable minourity of reasonably to very well educated people, and a majority of asshats who we hope don't hurt themselves too much with screwdrivers. Historically, that's been good enough.
But the gap between what is needed and what is present is growing, and that gap is both more visible and is hurting the country. The failure to create the educated population needed to be the body politic in a highly-competitive large-market high-individual-power-ratio world is, I think, a big part of the upsurge in nonsensical crap like dominionism, Islamicism, reconstructionism - fundamentalisms of all sort, really - and the various corruptors against rationalism and civil society that they all engender. That stress - the stress of not having the tools needed to understand the world around you - has to come out somewhere, and in a lot of cases, it's coming out as fundamentalism, probably because of the simpler, reduced world it lets you create around you.
And at the same time, there's a penumbra of failed due diligence in areas of fact. I don't know why. I've worked media (professional news radio while in school; not school papers) and I know crap gets through that wouldn't have before. Certainly I think that the drift change in political coverage to coverage of political spin as newsworthy in and of itself has to be part of it; when the PR flak's spew is the news and the news itself isn't, I don't see how that can't have a corrupting influence upon the rest. The very idea that there's such a thing as "spin alley" and that people who are basically standing there in it and saying, "Hi, I'm here to say things even I don't believe1 to benefit my candidate and I expect you to report it," and that this works, kind of breaks my head. "Hi, I'm lying! Quote me as truth!" "Okay!"
Seriously, what the fuck? Sure, people figure out what's going on, but what good does that do if they don't have the tools to know how to figure out what isn't a lie? What good does that do if they don't even know where to start, like they overwhelmingly don't with science and technology?
When most analysis sources are corrupt, but to varying degrees, how do you learn to tell them apart when you have no capacity to analyse the underlying data?
And how do you run a competitive society that way?
Sunday's miles: 2.0
Miles out of Hobbiton: 297.05
Miles to Rivendell: 161.25
----
1: Such as Senator Rick Santorum's communications director. He's an openly gay man working for one of the most actively homophobic senators in the country; he's a gay man working for someone who believes gay men should be illegal. Has the whole country gone deeply dissociative, in a bad way? How can this possibly be credible? How can you think that the "Jews for Hitler" representative is, you know, not insane? And yet, there he is, yakking away... while reporters take notes. Doesn't anybody else think that's deeply broken?
Today's Flower
Blue star creeper, in the front garden
Workin' on it:
NPR has apparently started catching the dumb. The host of the show on right now just introduced lizards and snakes as examples of invertebrates - I mean, for the love of god, snakes are almost nothing but spine - and yesterday, the host of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me interchangeably used "galaxy" and "constellation" when he meant "solar system." It was like listening to fucking Lost in Space Theatre. It's not funny when it's supposed to be news.
I mean, I thought at this point that reasonably educated people had caught up on that last one, in particular. It's such a classic piece of what the fuck is wrong with you? randomness that I thought anybody stuck in front of a national broadcast microphone - particularly on a news-based show on NPR - might get it right. Clearly, however, I was wrong.
It bothers me. It really does.
It's not just the small things, if you can consider getting matters of scale off by several orders of magnitude to be a small thing. People need to be getting smarter, and they aren't. I'm not convinced they're getting dumber; that's easy to imagine, but not very likely to be true. The large-scale education of Americans has never been managed well; the American system produces a sizable minourity of reasonably to very well educated people, and a majority of asshats who we hope don't hurt themselves too much with screwdrivers. Historically, that's been good enough.
But the gap between what is needed and what is present is growing, and that gap is both more visible and is hurting the country. The failure to create the educated population needed to be the body politic in a highly-competitive large-market high-individual-power-ratio world is, I think, a big part of the upsurge in nonsensical crap like dominionism, Islamicism, reconstructionism - fundamentalisms of all sort, really - and the various corruptors against rationalism and civil society that they all engender. That stress - the stress of not having the tools needed to understand the world around you - has to come out somewhere, and in a lot of cases, it's coming out as fundamentalism, probably because of the simpler, reduced world it lets you create around you.
And at the same time, there's a penumbra of failed due diligence in areas of fact. I don't know why. I've worked media (professional news radio while in school; not school papers) and I know crap gets through that wouldn't have before. Certainly I think that the drift change in political coverage to coverage of political spin as newsworthy in and of itself has to be part of it; when the PR flak's spew is the news and the news itself isn't, I don't see how that can't have a corrupting influence upon the rest. The very idea that there's such a thing as "spin alley" and that people who are basically standing there in it and saying, "Hi, I'm here to say things even I don't believe1 to benefit my candidate and I expect you to report it," and that this works, kind of breaks my head. "Hi, I'm lying! Quote me as truth!" "Okay!"
Seriously, what the fuck? Sure, people figure out what's going on, but what good does that do if they don't have the tools to know how to figure out what isn't a lie? What good does that do if they don't even know where to start, like they overwhelmingly don't with science and technology?
When most analysis sources are corrupt, but to varying degrees, how do you learn to tell them apart when you have no capacity to analyse the underlying data?
And how do you run a competitive society that way?
Sunday's miles: 2.0
Miles out of Hobbiton: 297.05
Miles to Rivendell: 161.25
----
1: Such as Senator Rick Santorum's communications director. He's an openly gay man working for one of the most actively homophobic senators in the country; he's a gay man working for someone who believes gay men should be illegal. Has the whole country gone deeply dissociative, in a bad way? How can this possibly be credible? How can you think that the "Jews for Hitler" representative is, you know, not insane? And yet, there he is, yakking away... while reporters take notes. Doesn't anybody else think that's deeply broken?
Blue star creeper, in the front garden
| the Wit |
| CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean you're pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that 'the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat. I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor takes the most effort to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion. Also, you probably loved the Office. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check it out here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/. PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais |
 |
My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
|
| Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid |
| The Expatriate Achtung! You are 7% brainwashworthy, 27% antitolerant, and 28% blindly patriotic |
| Congratulations! You are not susceptible to brainwashing, your values and cares extend beyond the borders of your own country, and your Blind Patriotism ("patriotism" for short) does not reach unhealthy levels. In Germany in the 30s, you would've left the country. One bad scenario -- as I hypothetically project you back in time -- is that you just wouldn't have cared one way or the other about Nazism. Maybe politics don't interest you enough. But the fact that you took this test means they probably do. I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt. Did you know that many of the smartest Germans departed prior to the beginning of World War II, because they knew some evil shit was brewing? Brain Drain. Many of them were scientists. It is very possible you could be one of them, depending on your age. Conclusion: Born and raised in Germany in the early 1930's, you would not have been a Nazi. |
 |
My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
|
| Link: The Would You Have Been a Nazi Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid |
Workin' on it:
| You Should Learn Japanese |
 You're cutting edge, and you are ready to delve into wacky Japanese culture. From Engrish to eating contests, you're born to be a crazy gaijin. Saiko! |
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 06:01 pm (UTC)http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/05/07/10/1719223.shtml?tid=146&tid=4
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 06:57 pm (UTC)stupid keyboard, gonna throw t throughteh wall
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 08:11 pm (UTC)The other thing that drives me nuts: EVIDENCE MATTERS! It's just not true that your "opinion" is equal to mine if yours is based on nothing and mine is based on evidence.
Cathy
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 09:16 pm (UTC)When I was a child, we had two bibles in my house: the Oxford English Dictionary, and Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia. My mother has a distinct memory of me teetering on my high chair getting down the OED at age 3 to look up "semantic pedant" after my father had called me that and refused to explain what it meant. Van Nostrand's, joyously, is still published in Big Fucking Book form, even though it comes with a CD now, and in two volumes; I don't know if it's worth the multiple hundreds of dollars to have a copy around when the book is probably not the ideal format, but the nostalgic idealist in me really wants to get one to have around if I ever have kids. (The world atlas and the OED are, of course, a given.)
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 06:19 pm (UTC)It would have bothered me too. That's the last place I would have expected that kind of idiocy.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 06:34 pm (UTC)I'm responding mainly so that I can point out that my quiz results were the same as yours overall, with some differences in the details:
Language--Japanese.
When I varied some answers where I wasn't sure of my response I ended up with French instead of Japanese. Really, on weekends I'd like a foreign film, a small amount of video games, and alternating sushi and cafe depending upon the day, and philosophy as much as foreign languages. Maybe I should learn to speak Japanese with a French accent.
The Expatriate
30% brainwashworthy, 27% antitolerant, and 0% blindly patriotic (I'm easier to brainwash than you, but much less patriotic. Either way, I'm getting the hell out if necessary.)
the Wit
(78% dark, 26% spontaneous, 5% vulgar) -- higher than 99% on dark, and 0% on spontaneous and vulgar
Funny, I do.
Date: 2005-07-25 06:45 pm (UTC)Re: Funny, I do.
Date: 2005-07-25 07:13 pm (UTC)Real reporting brings in real information, which can cut short this cycle. There are niche markets for this kind of thing, but not a mass audience. Even the supposedly mass audience for stuff like Fox News is only a few million viewers at any time. Niche news organizations with real reporting have even fewer people following them.
It's all about advertising ultimately. News, like any other TV, exists to keep people watching ads and buying stuff. If I was going to look for an upside, it's that with PVRs and content-on-demand, advertising will change and produce different viewing behaviors. I wouldn't try to predict how different, but I think cable news may fragment along with network news, leading most people away from any kind of news at all, and leaving the rest of us with a more decentralized and personalized news approach. Maybe Google News is a sign of things to come. This will likely result in a total disengagement by the majority from public life. The upside will be that it's harder to propagandize people who shy away from news content entirely. The downside is that most people will be uninformed, fragmented, and powerless. I'm not convinced that even among the small minority that seek out news according to their own perference, the crap won't still win out.
I suppose public education is where this knowledge gap from mass media is supposed to be filled. We need more thorough and universal science education, particularly in the methods of science. I don't think anyone should be able to graduate from high school without a detailed understanding of the scientific method. Critical reading and thinking skills are more necessary than ever in the age of the internet. People have to be taught how to learn by themselves, and continue to learn and evolve throughout their lives. They need to learn how to dismiss bullshit and propaganda. If they don't learn, they get to come back until they do.
I think finding a way to integrate learning and teaching into the adult world of work is a good idea, beyond narrowly-focused training courses that try to crank out more productive drones. Encourage and compensate real-world workers who want to take a paid sabbatical to assist full-time professional teachers as well as learn new skills. Encourage professional teachers to take paid sabbaticals in a related professional field, as well as increasing their education within their specialty. Right now there's a divide where many professionals think teachers are people who couldn't hack it in their field, and even though this is probably true in a few individual cases the perpetuation of this divide discourages good teaching and learning practices for children and adults alike.
Given the flexibility of the 21st century labor market, we need social policies that promote stability for people as they move from jobs to learning and back to new jobs without destroying their earning potential. Labor unions can probably assist in this role, but that will mean a complete overhaul in their practices and focus. Businesses, universities, pensions, and benefits packages will have to be completely rethought. The whole universe or work, and how it intersects with teaching and learning and just life in general, is broken in this country (and not so great anywhere else).
also
Date: 2005-07-25 06:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 07:39 pm (UTC)Buuuuuuh.... I think they must have been thinking cold-blooded or something.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 08:08 pm (UTC)Well, you don't. The world used to come here for Ph.D. work and now they're starting not to. Used to rule on Nobel prizes and patents and stuff, too, and we're slipping. We're coasting, figuring that we used to be number 1, so we always will be.
I go nuts when people screw up--OK, live speech slip of the tongue I can forgive--but a prepared speech or a piece of writing? And have you seen what has happened to copyediting of books lately? Feh.
And the news thing...just...I just can't stand it any more. I read the NYTimes and watch Jon Stewart and read a lot of blogs. And leave the room if anyone puts CNN on.
Oh, and I'm supposed to learn Swedish. ;)
Cathy
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 08:26 pm (UTC)...hasn't exactly been holding the best of standards lately either. Even the supposed flagships are fucking up a lot, in discoverable ways.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 09:53 pm (UTC)Even their ombudsman (Ahem, public editor) neutered himself before quitting. I exchanged a few e-mails with Daniel Okrent and he basically retracted to me all of his criticism of the Times from the Iraq War coverage. Even their apology for the whole no-WMDs issue and the cheerleading for war was full of conditions. It's a sad, sad fate for the publication that got interdicted by Nixon for punlishing the Pentagom Papers.
As a whole, the media has forsaken facts. To avoid being portrayed as partisan, they adhere to a "conservatives saud/liberals said" double-mirror of spin, basically forsaking the issues. There no better example for this than the whole Karl Rove/Valerie Plame issue, in which 95% of the print and media material is used to spread or debunk spin points.
And regarding Santorum's aide....well, selling out is a lucrative career. If you have no empathy and enough ambition, it's not that hard to do a Michelle Malkin and call for the heads of your own.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 05:23 am (UTC)I've been trying to come up with a good way to write coherently about this, but yes: what you said here, exactly.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 11:41 pm (UTC)Cathy
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 08:49 pm (UTC)Guh.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-25 11:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 01:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 04:29 am (UTC)But as so many of you have pointed out, when it's all spin and no fact, what can you really evaluate?
no subject
Date: 2005-07-26 09:26 am (UTC)Actually, there was one famous "Jew for Hitler" (the fencer, Helene Mayer) and she wasn't exactly insane. As I understand it, she was trying to make the statement that German Jews are Germans first, Jews second, so you shouldn't hate us. Well, that sure did the trick.
See for instance NAZI OLYMPICS, BERLIN 1936 (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005680), sixth paragraph.