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Removed diversion from «Yesterday» section

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Kenneth John Odle 2024-07-28 20:11:45 -04:00
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@ -219,45 +219,6 @@ At any rate, I emerged from college with an English degree and a newly refreshed
We were wrong. Social media is a great way to make the world better. It's also a great way for nut jobs and conspiracy theorists and racists and fascists to connect with each other and increase their levels of hate and ignorance exponentially. What have we done?
\kdivb{Oh gosh, it's a diversion already.}{-2}
The problem with social media is that while you can broadcast to the world, the reality is that it quickly becomes an echo chamber. You follow people who have the same interests you do, and they follow you back, and it quickly becomes a community. This is a good thing, and this is pretty much where we thought social media would go.
The problem is that some people don't realize that a community is not the same thing as the entire world. If you are one of these people, and you only follow people who agree with your viewpoints, you start to think that the entire world thinks this way and that you are obviously right.
Of course, you probably aren't. You're just a victim of selection bias.
What this means is that the people you've surrounded yourself with haven't been selected at random. You've selected them precisely because they share the same beliefs that you do. This is not a problem. The problem is thinking that the rest of the world looks like this group of people and then assuming you must be correct because ``everybody else thinks like this too.''
There are two great examples of this, one a comedy routine, one a presidential election (and so, yes—this matters).
The first is by George Burns and his wife Gracie Allen which was broadcast on their radio show during the height of the Great Depression. This was a period in United States history when telephones were just becoming a widely available household appliance, but most people couldn't still couldn't afford them. I don't recall the skit exactly, and despite literally seconds of searching the web, I haven't been able to find it. But it went something like this:
\vspace{\baselineskip}
\begin{hangparas}{5mm}{1}
\noindent{}\texttt{George: What have you been doing lately, Gracie?}
\noindent{}\texttt{Gracie: I've been doing a survey to see how many of our friends have telephones.}
\noindent{}\texttt{George: And how many of them do?}
\noindent{}\texttt{Gracie: All the ones I've called.}
\end{hangparas}
\vspace{\baselineskip}
The point here is that of course anyone you call on the phone will have a telephone. Audiences in the 1930s understood this (and unfortunately they also understood the ``smart man/stupid woman'' trope as well).
The other occurred during the 1936 presidential election when a publication called \textit{The Literary Digest} predicted that Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon would win the election. Of course, this did not happen, and their margin of error was huge—almost 40 percentage points.
The problem was that the magazine employed a faulty polling technique, and so didn't capture a random sample of the population. It first surveyed its own readers, and then it surveyed two other readily available lists—registered automobile owners and registered telephone users.
At the height of the Great Depression, most people couldn't afford a magazine subscription, much less an automobile or a telephone, and these people tended to vote for Democratic candidates. The inaccuracy of the poll ruined the magazine's reputation, and it ceased publication two years later. (In point of fact, they not only failed to find a random sample, they relied solely on people who responded to their poll, and such people responded because they were vehemently opposed to Roosevelt. This is an example of ``non-response bias'' or ``participation bias'' but the point is the still the same—they failed to select a random group of people to poll.)
\kdive{-1}
Part G
I have previously mentioned the educational-industrial complex and its very aggressive embrace of what was then called ``Web 2.0'' and how just devolved into little more than social media.
Because I wanted to be seen as someone who could ride this wave into the future, I decided to embrace it wholeheartedly. I decided to get a website first, so I looked around, found a webhost (who was also a domain registrar—convenient), plunked down \$30, and I was in business.
@ -296,8 +257,6 @@ Like i said you can use an FTP client to move files over to your server but if y
The obvious solution is to do all your practice runs in a localhost environment.
Part H
I got myself a web site and got myself a blog but the educational-industrial complex said that web 2.0 was the next big thing. I thought that having those things would give me a leg up on to the (then) very tight job market.
Alas the educational industrial complex does not exist to do right by students. They largely exist to extract as much as profit as they possibly can. (Guess what---their lobbyists are also behind a lot of the legislation that requires these expenditures. Your tax dollars are not going toward making your child education better, but toward making rich men richer. Yay, capitalism!
@ -324,7 +283,7 @@ This is of course exactly what you are not suppposed to do. I made plenty of mis
It was fun but it was also frustrating to have to start over so i did what i should have done in the first place and RTFM. I learned about the proper way to edit your themes, which is that you don't—you create a child theme and do your mischief there. I learned a lot more about HTML and CSS and delved into the world of PHP and Javascript enough that I was able to develop my own plugins and eventually themes from scratch.
I found a highly adaptable theme that i really loved (Graphene) and became an expert in it and started helping out in its support forums. The theme's developer appreciated my efforts and made me a moderator in those forums and also gave me free access to the mobile-friendly version of the theme. It was a great time and I was learning a lot.
I found a highly adaptable theme that I really loved (Graphene) and became an expert in it and started helping out in its support forums. The theme's developer appreciated my efforts and made me a moderator in those forums and also gave me free access to the mobile-friendly version of the theme. It was a great time and I was learning a lot.
This was back when mobile was just becoming a thing and a lot of websittes had two versions of their site—a desktop version first and a mobile version second but at some point people began accessing websites more on their mobile devices than on a desktop so that process is now reversed—we develop first for mobile and then usually later for desktop, sometimes poorly. If you've ever been to a website that looked fine on your phone but looked like an utter shit show on your computer this is why.