Archive link for those who prefer not to support the reprehensible Gawker: https://archive.is/PP7q2

IMHO Gawker is an absolutely vile clickbait machine that portrays itself as a progressive voice while selling outrage.
It undermines what I consider valid, socially responsible goals by trivialising most of them, generating needless conflict by labelling "bad" people and maintaining a ludicrous left-wing good, right-wing evil narrative. It produces propaganda and hatred for cash.

Nick Denton - the CEO of Gawker - has admitted that the company has a severe empathy problem and tried to relaunch it:
http://www.thewrap.com/nick-de...
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/2...

The problem with journalism is not that one needs an audience, the problem with journalism is that factual reporting is no longer the main goal. Truth is secondary to page-views. Nolan suggests that people are the problem because they won't pay for factual material, http://www.private-eye.co.uk/ demonstrates that one can successfully run a publication that focuses on the pursuit and publication of truth (with a healthy injection of humour).

TFA is an attempt to blame absolutely shitty "journalism" on the audience, what in fact is happening is that those of us who do care about quality journalism recognise Gawker for what it is and don't give it ad-revenue or page-impressions.

To quote Vader: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" (It wasn't a serious question but I realise a joke doesn't always work well in text.)

Somewhat related: I have seen the Phantom Editor and Anti-cheese versions of the prequels. I thought the former did a decent job of tightening up the films without major changes. The Anti-cheese version dubbed over the Trade Federation aliens and Jar-Jar with non-human voices, their dialogue was subtitled. The result was a really simple and quite effective way of making them more alien.

Given that they now own Starwars I'm wondering if it is possible for Disney to rework the prequels.

Given the soul that Pixar can put into a 100% CGI movie with close to no dialogue (Wall-E) I'm sure the Special Edition of the prequels could be injected with some.

They could retcon Darth Jar-Jar! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yy3q9f84EA) ;)

Ok, I think this has become unproductive. I provided a link to a video that pre-dates the creation of the hash-tag demonstrating unequivocally that the original claim was favourable coverage and your reply is an anecdote that this isn't what you experienced. If I can present that and you can dismiss it it is clear that your criteria for what constitutes evidence is different from mine and nothing I present, regardless of how definitive, will sway you.

I did not ignore your point about the Quinnspiracy, I just don't want to invest time into discussing this with you if you're not going to provide some documentation to back your claims. I am open to whatever evidence you can provide.

If you wish to continue please provide links to material that in some way supports your claims.

I absolutely appreciate that you're willing to take the time to chat to me about this but until you can present *something* that validates your claims I don't see this going anywhere. I would also say, purely as a point of argumentation style, that insulting people needlessly isn't a great way to make your points any more convincing.

I had a look at your posting history and noticed that the person you referred to earlier who was making claims of a favourable review presented the same evidence I linked in my original post in this thread (http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8183157&cid=50752585). The odd thing is that this individual made a really inconsistent post that talks about a review then asserts it was favourable coverage while presenting evidence that *it was* favourable coverage and not a review. I would say that this is not my experience when talking to "gater troll"s as I described above.

You discounted the idea that the three instances of coverage were not reviews making the evidence, in your opinion, entirely worthless. It took me a few minutes to invalidate your claim that the original assertion by "Gamergate" was that Grayson gave Quinn reviews for sex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (for those who lack context, this is a mirrored copy of the video that Adam Baldwin linked to when coining the term Gamergate)

If you can get something so straightforward as this wrong is it not possible that you are the person with an axe to grind?

Ethical behaviour is verifying the veracity of the claims rather than discounting them out of hand due to one's biases and when making counter claims backing them up with evidence.

I've had a decent number of conversations with persons I'm guessing you would describe as a "gater troll" as well as anti-Gamergate people. A small number of the former were raving loons who jumped on any conspiracy theory and used it to validate their own biases and prejudices, most however were thoughtful (if irreverent), disillusioned with the media and angry at being branded sexist/right-wing. One thing they were willing to do that anti-Gamergate people were largely unwilling or unable to do is to barrage me with evidence validating their claims (admittedly some were fairly weak, IMHO). anti-Gamergate people have largely pointed me to newspapers and blogs that uncritically present the claims of people saying that "Gamergate" targeted them, usually as part of a scaremongering, victimisation narrative about how dangerous a place the internet is, particularly for women. Reports often include comments about the police having been contacted and that an investigation being under-way. What happened to the standards of innocent until proven guilty or guilty beyond reasonable doubt? I appreciate that the persons who harassed Quinn, Wu and Sarkeesian might never be caught but is it reasonable to assert that one *knows* that "Gamergate" is responsible based on hear-say and conjecture?

A trend I find alarming is that simply asking for evidence results in claims that one is a misogynist or a Gamergate supporter. The very act of attempting to talk to a "gater troll" is that one is branded a "gater troll".

If the evidence is robust it should speak for itself. If instead all one can present is evidence-free assertions, ludicrously slanted opinion pieces, guilt by association finger pointing and goalpost shifting rhetoric then I'm afraid it is entirely unsurprising that a sceptical person would not be convinced of the robustness of claims made.

GamerGate supporters complained that she was receiving favourable coverage from a person who is credited as a beta tester for her game and who gave her money.
https://archive.is/WtK25
https://archive.is/QwJbc
https://archive.is/mrVxK
http://blogjob.com/oneangrygam...

""Special thanks for their amazing support during a really difficult time. This game would have been dead in the water months ago without you all." Nathan Grayson included." https://archive.is/AGml8#selec...

Media outlets, invested in the harassment narrative, published articles claiming that GamerGate made the false claim that Grayson reviewed her game.

Misinformation is terribly easy to spread, especially when there are people who will treat hearsay as fact. Your comment is at -1 flamebait which you could take as a sign that poorly researched claims based on a false narrative aren't valued on /.

One should never trust a newspaper's coverage of science. Some journalists don't care about the quality of studies and will often erroneously or intentionally oversimplify (or misrepresent) the implications of a study to suit a narrative they're invested in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There's an additional problem that comes as a consequence of this: wikipedia editors routinely categorise publications that align with their politics and ideology as reliable sources while discounting those who do not as unreliable. The result, particularly in "hot" topics is that you get a non-expert, politicised view of the science rather than a link to the study.

And whilst you would dismiss the content of the 80% of comments you observe here as trolling the only thing that differentiates them from persons who self-identify as social justice warrior (or bard, wizard, etc. (I'm not kidding)) is that the latter claim to be acting in a meritorious way which allows them to validate their bad behaviour.

A few weeks ago I posted this: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Usually it's nice to have an(other) example to illustrate a point.

In this case, not so much.

Time to burn some karma.

SJW is not a term that is adopted by people who tend to do actual social good through campaigning and proactive behaviour. SJW (particularly on social networks) is a self-applied term that armchair experts use to make themselves appear to be "good" people, i.e., those who sign an ill-devised online petition once in a while or fervently use a hashtag to "raise awareness". Thankfully, for the most part, their reach is limited to a relatively small group of people who already agree with them and mirror their behaviour.

Well identified SJW behaviours:
Spewing vitriol onto the internet with little consideration for persuasive argument.
Adoption of any claims that reinforce their ideology no matter how poorly founded and conversely...
Rejection of any evidence, regardless of quality, that undermines their ideology.
Rejection of persons from their group who do not absolutely conform to the ideology.
Labelling persons - regardless of the quality of their arguments - who do not follow the ideology as problematic or racist/sexist/misogynist etc.
Adoption of any and all tactics regardless of how repugnant to further enforce their chosen ideology on others and destroy persons who do not conform.

Thus, SJW has become a pejorative because it does not describe people who do good, it is a self-applied label used by people who claim to do good while behaving in a destructive manner.

Incorrect. That study (I'd need to see citations for the "others like it") shows that only the studies it investigated are probably incorrect as the results were not reproducible. It cannot make any predictive claims on the future of any given field and thus stating that "science" continues to be incorrect is a generalisation that you cannot possibly support by evidence. The fact that we know how and why the sun "rises" despite many erroneous theories is enough to discard your claim. A hypothesis was made and tested, conclusions were reached, eventually the conclusions were reached independently by a range of persons through the same process.

The scientific process is not limited to one or a few studies. At any time conclusions can be refuted and they often are because scientists are a competitive bunch. Finding a better explanatory model of any phenomena results in prestige. At no point does magic come in to it.

The scientific process is not the only method we use. We've listened to holy people who made authoritative statements based on revealed truth, people have simply decided intuitively why things are the way they are. Said truths don't tend to stand up to any scrutiny.

I'm sure everyone would benefit from your suggestions of better alternatives to the scientific method.

It should never be assumed that any single source of information is authoratative, moreover it should probably be assumed that information coming from a limited number of people may include the biases of that person or group.

The current peer review process is an attempt to remove as much of the subjectivity from the findings as possible by introducing independent reviewers. Does it work? Somewhat.

Peer review has its own problems; I once turned down a request to review a study because it contained material I simply did not have expertise in. I voiced my concerns to the editor of the journal who assured me that this was not a problem.

I know of one example of a reviewer trying to inject their own research into a study where it was tenuously relevent. The amount of work required to add this material was not trivial.

Ultimately, people are still involved in science. However, science is self-correcting: Can't reproduce a result? Results and conclusions are then considered poorly founded. Researcher found to have ulterior motives? Their entire past work and any future work will be subjected to greater scrutiny. Don't ever underestimate how invested people get in their own pet theories either.

The scientific process is not perfect but it's the best solution we currently have to removing the people problem.

A good reason to support the work of http://www.alltrials.net/ if you can.

"AllTrials calls for all past and present clinical trials to be registered and their full methods and summary results reported."

They've been making significant progress in attaining their goal, however, some big pharma is highly resistant.

If this were true surely the US legal system would not impose ludicrous fines and prison sentences for computer-related and other non-violent crimes.

Aaron Swartz, Jammie Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum suggest that justice is not the primary consideration in many cases. The courts seem willing to impose penalties so egregiously severe as to create a climate of fear.