Comment Re:Other title sugestion (Score 1) 128
Another title suggestion: Having a Twitter account does nothing but make an organization look unprofessional.
Another title suggestion: Having a Twitter account does nothing but make an organization look unprofessional.
Actually that's the first time anyone asked that specific question, and the answer is: Nobody ever constructed a plan such that all the editors should have editor accounts (which, among other things, lets people filter out their stories), but my stories would be run under other people's accounts instead of my own so that there was no way to filter them out, because they were deemed "too important". Instead, I don't have an editor account because I'm not an editor, and when people suggest making me an editor so they can filter out my stories, the answer is always that we're not going to pander to people who are too lazy to just skip the stories themselves.
You're demonstrating a lack of familiarity with Slashdot here. The whole reason why the "filter by posting editor" feature was introduced in the first place was so that people could filter out articles posted by a particular "editor" (Jon Katz) who had about the same reception here that you do. Making you an editor so people can filter out the drivel isn't "pandering" to anyone -- it's allowing a particular feature of the website to work as designed. Didn't you just post an article about a website that doesn't work as it should?
The word "editor" on Slashdot doesn't actually mean someone who edits anything, as anyone who has ever read the Slashdot front page is well aware.
and $27k isn't ridiculous?
Amazing that these type of posts have been around since the beginning of
That cannot be explained by (a) me only picking friends who agree with me; or (b) me intimidating people into pretending to agree with me; or (c) my personal charisma [**snort**] charming people around me into agreeing with me; because if any of those were the cause, then my non-mathlete friends would agree with me too -- and they don't, at least not as much.
An obvious explanation, and the one that I suspect is actually correct, is that your perception of your friends is wrong -- you actually respect the opinions of the people that share your opinions, not the ones who are good at math. Very likely the "smart" people that don't share your opinions are the ones that you're less likely to associate with, and so there are probably fewer of them within your circle of friends.
Another obvious explanation is that you choose your "smart" friends with different criteria than your "not-so-smart" friends. For instance, say you met the majority of your "smart" friends through academic pursuits, and your "not-so-smart" friends through recreational pursuits. Of course generalizing anything based on the "smart" group to the entire group would not be valid.
Fundamentally, drawing general conclusions about an entire population based on observations of people in your social circle is not going to give valid results, no matter how you try to justify it. If you don't understand that, I'd suggest getting one of your "smart" friends to explain it to you.
How else would you do it?
Well, you could submit the article to a large community of relatively intelligent people who actually do form a representative subset of your audience, and then get your feedback from them.
Oh, wait. That's what you do. And by and large, those few who read them dislike it. And virtually everyone dislikes the presentation.
Well, I guess that's that then. Like I said, you sound like an idiot, but at least you've confirmed your position now.
Just about everybody who writes something thinks that their work is important, but very few have the nerve to claim that readers should not be allowed to ignore their writing. I invite you to consider the logical conclusion (since you claim to place a premium on logical thinking) of what happens if everybody thinks like you do.
Well I already clarified to the other poster that my sample of "smart people" is based on how well they do at math and logical reasoning (real outside-the-box stuff, not just getting good math grades in school), which is objectively measurable and not subject to my biases.
Do you seriously expect us to believe that you are selecting a statistically representative sample of people who have high, objectively measured, skills at math and logical reasoning? If so, please explain how you do this.
But your statement "I often run the ideas past smart people whose opinions I respect" suggests to me that you are relying on the input of people that you know, and probably know fairly well given that you are soliciting their opinions on your work. A sample of people who are in your social circle is going to be, by its very nature, incredibly biased.
In the face of that, your argument that somehow the majority of your audience must be wrong kind of falls apart.
Still dancing, I see.
im-port-tant - "of great significance or value; likely to have a profound effect on success, survival, or well-being."
Sounds like a pretty good definition to me. You could type "define: important" into Google too, you know.
If an article has great significance or value or is profound, it is important. Importance is a sliding scale, but I'll give you a hint: not a single one of your articles is important enough to justify denying people the ability to filter them out if they choose to do so. Do you seriously dispute that?
You're still dancing around the question. Which makes me think that you know that your position is indefensible, and you don't want to admit it.
If you really believe that your articles on the bugs in the USPS website are so important that people should not be allowed to filter them out of their Slashdot newsfeed, then say so. You'll sound like an idiot, but at least you'll be an honest idiot.
Also, I should point out:
... I often run the ideas past smart people whose opinions I respect
You're giving your article to people "whose opinions [you] respect." The chances that those people form a "representative sampling of smart people" is quite low. Most likely, they are going to be people that are already predisposed to agree with your opinions. Of course they approve of your articles more than the general public -- you're getting your feedback from an echo chamber.
Given how pretentious your reply was, I would think you would have seen an error that glaring.
You're not answering the question. It doesn't matter if the Slashdot mob is too stupid to understand the brilliance that is Bennett Haselton. If some subset of them don't want to see your articles cluttering up their Slashdot homepage, why are you so insistent that they should not be able to choose to filter them out?
Do you also object to the development of adblockers? After all, if you are too lazy to move your eyeball one inch down the page to avoid them, aren't we being enablers by blocking them?
How about e-mail spam filters? If you're too lazy to press the delete button, aren't we being enablers by filtering out the Viagra spam from your inbox?
Slashdot has story filters for a reason -- people prefer to automatically get rid of the things you're not interested in. Why do you want to force people to see your nonsense?
Maybe you should write an essay about why you think that your stuff is so much more important than any other author who is posting things to Slashdot. After all, you seem to be good at writing long, boring screeds that nobody reads.
Because you know who you threw out, tells you nothing about who you didn't know about. You can't know it all, and so pointing to knowing something is not evidence of knowing it all.
And in fact, the existence of people you're deporting proves that you don't have control over who is there; if such control existed, those people would not have been present in the first place in order to be deported.
You're now arguing about whether or not politicians or the government have complete, total control over the people present in a country. That's not what I said. That's not what you said. It is completely obvious that that isn't what I was talking about in my response. So you're arguing against a strawman.
in response to incentives placed their by politicians
Crap, "there." I really do know how to spell, although apparently my fingers don't.
Political choices aren't implicated. It is a false idea that politics could decide who is in a country. That was never the case, not even in the Good Ole Days. Politics can determine who people admit are there, but not who is actually there. It was always thus, back to prehistory.
The ~400,000 people deported from the U.S. for the last several years prove you wrong. The increase in immigration, legal and illegal, in response to incentives placed their by politicians prove you wrong. Obviously politics can have an impact on the people that are present in a country. Claiming otherwise is nonsensical.
If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.
