Smith, Rand, Altruism


eva matthews

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Carol, I hope this appearance means more to come from you, even if only on weekends. A certain tartness has been missing from OL. If you haven't been reading OL regularly, you may need lots of prepping for discussion, though.


Re Eva/Addie fake-a-thon, and the bruited programme to 'de-conspiracize' the internets ...

., there is a part in the middle where she said she is writing a book about the extent the media has been corrupted, including social media. She said people would be appalled at how far the fake accounts, trolling, etc., have spread. That this is the norm now, not the exception.


Sharyl Attkisson's book is coming in November: Stonewalled: One Reporter's Fight for Truth in Obama's Washington. I hope she finds her feet somewhere in broadcasting, but not RT. She had a lot of reporting that didn't make the cut on the Evening News, but has over 2K reports at CBSnew.com

No, we don't have to look too far to find corruption, that 'fake accounts, trolling has spread' ... where I hang out and read (my Syria files), this has been the norm from as long as I can remember. There was always a suspicion that certain prolific accounts were paid actors (of the Syrian regime, of the moneyed Western patrons of the opposition, of Mossad, Iranians, Hizbollah, etcetera).

Even back further to my time online at Usenet during the Memory Wars, it was assumed by one side that the other side used ringers, hirelings and 'spooks.' Of course, debate/struggle was often between named folks who actually did have vested interests. Sometimes our fears are made of fear and sometimes of fact. Unless we are quite as crazy as the Turkish prime minister (if you have been following the scandals since mid-December, you see how raw power is wielded -- firings, jail, deportation and lately the attempt to remove critics by removing their platform).

Although OL is really small potatoes in this arena, I'm certain we are on some hostile radars out there. Since a reasonable amount of content is constantly generated on OL, even though we don't do SEO and other Internet promotion, we do get into a lot of first places for search terms on Google and Bing, and a crapload more on first pages of SERPS.

Hostile radar ... nice term. I know at least one person who is reading OL from a hostile distance. I can imagine him bent over the screen right now.

Here's a snippet from an Attkinson interview with a local CBS outlet:

“I’ve been wanting to write about the unseen influences on the media by coordinated, paid factions, whether they’re from political, corporate or other special interests, the tactics they use to manipulate the images we see, not just in the news but on Facebook, Wikipedia, or fake Twitter accounts. It’s become a way of life and I don’t think the public is aware of how much nearly everything you see today may be influenced, in some fashion, by a paid interest that wants you to think something,”
Edited by william.scherk
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At first I thought Eva M. was Mrs Moralist, having a merry adventure.

I think Eva was too intelligent to be either Mr. or Mrs. Moralist.

J

However, both Eva and the Moralist Stalker have used the Doubly Irrational Genius Pose (http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=13569&p=191473), and didn't seem to grasp it's fallaciousness even after it was explained to them -- they both just repeat the pose after being told why the pose doesn't work.

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"Bill Harris", the new persona at OO, is the fourth I've seen. He has skipped "Eva"'s start-out-nice phase and proceeded directly to intellectual name-dropping. Demented name-calling will be next. His spelling is better than "Eva"'s, and he avoids the overuse of "rather" that was so characteristic of "Eva" and "Tom".

He's locking horns with Boydstun on physics. This is going to be the most fun since "Eva" took on George Smith on political philosophy.

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"Bill Harris", the new persona at OO [is] locking horns with Boydstun on physics. This is going to be the most fun since "Eva" took on George Smith on political philosophy.

Here's a link to the "Bill Harris" New Content listing by individual posts:

http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?app=core&module=search&do=user_activity&search_app=forums&mid=11374&sid=689751c02972166c1307b5f4e14352c6&search_app_filters[forums][searchInKey]=&userMode=content

18 items so far, and counting.

Edit: The link doesn't work to give the listing by individual posts. Click on "Only posts" on the left for that.

Ellen

ADD: Jonathan blows the whistle.

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Oh God.

I just looked at two posts and that was enough.

I have only encountered one person who ever talked about "the heuristic" for Kahnemann's early stuff that he later called System 1, and that person posted under the name of Eva here. I even looked for other people on the Internet who did this and I could not find any.

Kahnemann studied many heuristics, not just one, even from the beginning. And, as far as I know, he never called the whole shebang "the heuristic."

This error is a tell.

I'm glad to be rid of this person, but I don't feel glad about said person's migration to OO. They are good kids (and adults) over there and a headache is coming for them.

Michael

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This is funny.

The Bill Harris poster, self-described as an instructor in philosophy, doesn't know that "hypothesis" is the singular, not "hypotheses." The misspelling is consistent.

Also note: "Peyton List's 'Gravy' (the preference of my granddaughter)?"

Eva multiple times referred to her niece's using Peyton List's "gravy" for gravity.

So, Eva's niece is Bill Harris' granddaughter? On the other hand, Harris is just a family friend of Eva's family and has taken Eva's dad's course on quantum physics and Eva's mom's course on experimental method in psych and Eva's course on theoretical mathematics?

And both call Binswanger "Bins"?

#322600Did Ayn Rand commit the fallacy of reification?

Posted by bill harris on Today, 08:20 AM in Metaphysics and Epistemology

First of all, it's not my theory, 'bucket' or otherwise. I'm simply stating the fact that the perception>cognition theory of Rand and Bins has been subject to testing by research psychology at least since the 50's.

Although testing any theory makes it a 'hypotheses', it's always fair to say that to convert a philosophical statement into a hypotheses frequently streamlines the text beyond recognition. In other words, it's obviously true that there's far more to the Rand/Bins theory than what's being tested. This more-ness is what's called 'Epistemology', which I'll deal with later.

For now, suffice to say that optical illusions refute any realistic perception > cognition proposal. 'Discreet' in research lingo indicates 'one perception equals one (somewhat) universal response. In this regard, optical illusions are only 'illusional' in the majority of cases. hence, a double refutation.

BH

#322592Did Ayn Rand commit the fallacy of reification?

Posted by bill harris on Yesterday, 10:46 PM in Metaphysics and Epistemology

The easiest explanation (and i'll be happy to expand tomorrow, after sleep) is that 'perception>>> cognition' is merely a 'Null Hypotheses' to begin with.

In other words, no experimental data supports it. To say, moreover, that Bins and Rand support the hypotheses as a philosophical statement doesn't mean that it's less 'null' than any other hypotheses that remains untested....

BH

#322591Tests of General Relativity

Posted by bill harris on Yesterday, 10:38 PM in Physics and Mathematics

Boydstun, on 17 Mar 2014 - 5:55 PM, said:

Polarization patterns in CMB support trillionth-of-a-second inflationary model of universe expansion just after the initial singularity 3/17/14!

Institute of Physics

BBC

Said 'polarization' is that of particles of light that have been diffracted by gravity, thereby indicating its presence during the Guth Inflation, or 'Planck Time'.

It's the tell-tale spiral 'handedness' that gives a gravitational signature.

Now, we can understand that gravity, too, was formed with the Big Bang, along with Strong and Electroweak. So who can make these three fit into the simplest model that will offer a Theory of Everything? Surfer Dude with Lie-8? Peyton List's 'Gravy' (the preference of my granddaughter)?

The world awaits...

BH

Ellen

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Eva multiple times referred to her niece's using Peyton List's "gravy" for gravity.

However, whereas Eva's age when she scored super-high in math dropped from 14 to 10 (see), the age of her niece rapidly increased from 11 to 13:

Or as by 11-year old niece says, 'gravy'...although she knows better. As I write, she just loves Peyton List more than science.

Moreover, according to my 13 year old niece, her idol, Peyton List, explains Wyl so easily that gravity is now referred to by tweens in the know as 'gravy'.

Ellen

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Eva multiple times referred to her niece's using Peyton List's "gravy" for gravity.

However, whereas Eva's age when she scored super-high in math dropped from 14 to 10 (see), the age of her niece rapidly increased from 11 to 13:

Or as by 11-year old niece says, 'gravy'...although she knows better. As I write, she just loves Peyton List more than science.

Moreover, according to my 13 year old niece, her idol, Peyton List, explains Wyl so easily that gravity is now referred to by tweens in the know as 'gravy'.

Ellen

Ellen, I don't see "Eva" giving two different ages as a problem. Both might be true.

For anyone puzzled by "Wyl", I assume "she" meant Hermann Weyl.

A 13- or 15-year old girl explaining Weyl is pretty funny.

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Ellen, I don't see "Eva" giving two different ages as a problem. Both might be true.

For anyone puzzled by "Wyl", I assume "she" meant Hermann Weyl.

A 13- or 15-year old girl explaining Weyl is pretty funny.

Check the posts quoted from. Same story, different age. One age could be a typo of course.

11 or 13, not 13 or 15 re the niece (who seems to also be Bill Harris' granddaughter, although he describes himself as just a family friend of Eva's family. Maybe there are many young admirers of Peyton List who say "gravy"?).

Ellen

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However, whereas Eva's age when she scored super-high in math dropped from 14 to 10 (see), the age of her niece rapidly increased from 11 to 13.

As Murray Rothbard once said to me, "We live in a fast moving world, m'boy."

Ghs

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......

A 13- or 15-year old girl explaining Weyl is pretty funny.

.....

11 or 13, not 13 or 15 re the niece (who seems to also be Bill Harris' granddaughter, although he describes himself as just a family friend of Eva's family.

My phrase "15-year old" referred to Peyton List.

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Re: paid factions, whether they’re from political, corporate or other special interests

Michael, I've been busy reading papers about online shenanigans by state actors (intelligence agencies especially). The kind of disruption by entity Eva/Bill/Aunt Fannie seems toddler-level by comparison.

Glenn Greenwald and team, and the newly-Soviet Snowden have been banging on about this for a while. Here's a rather chilling slideshow of the kinds of operations designed by the UK's GCHQ, "a top secret document prepared by its secretive JTRIG unit."

cyberMagic.jpg



The story of these creepy (but/not necessary) counterintelligence plans is told at the Intercept: "How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations"

Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”

By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document we’re publishing today:

disrupto.jpg


Some of this stuff almost reaches the level of Scientology's Fair Game policy.

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"Bill Harris" post on OO:

link

At the very least, we can agree that you're using 'objective' in a rather louche sense. All it really means is 'subject independent'. So now you're offering up gravity as a 'subject-independent' idea? Wow! How insightful! My 12 year old niece can do better by citing Peyton List's 'gravy theory'.

So now he has a "12 year old niece." Also, I noticed that somewhere he changed his speciality from philosophy to anthropology.

Yet he doesn't come across to me as being the same poster as "Eva." Same subjects and opinions, but large differences in style and manner.

Most peculiar.

Ellen

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