On Tuesday 27 July 2010 17:11:05 Francis Irving wrote: > An interesting article about how facts don't help, link from Julian > below. >
Facts are a necessary, not a sufficient condition. It certainly doesn't work to explain again and again and again about false positives or climate change. But it's very hard to do anything without the little buggers. This is one of the nice things about WTT and FMS - tools for action, rather than just "sunlight" or whatever. Arguably TWFY, WDTK, TGS, TSC etc were "MySociety 1.0", WTT, FMS, FMT, Democracy Club are MySociety 2.0 - the write channel. Of course, this presumes that writing to your MP or filing trouble tickets with your local council are valid solutions. You can see some of this in the blogosphere - people get together to hurl abuse at Megan McArdle or whoever, which is necessary intellectual refuse collection but won't actually convince the people involved, but the real benefit is that they stay and get their information from alternative sources. He mentions shame as a strategy, but the problem here is that people who deliberately spread nonsense in the public sphere are preferentially selected for their imperviousness to shame. If they had any shame, they wouldn't be doing it. Call it the Blogger's Fallacy. > One of the cultural things I like about the community around mySociety > is our susceptibility to facts. It's key to our non-partisanship. > More fundamentally though, it's a built in geek trait. > > We admit when we're wrong. > > I think that as a quality it is a little unsung. It might be useful to > be a bit more explicit about championing it, if only to make it spread > more. > > And also, as the article shows, to know the facts of its limits. > > << This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers > — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless > rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In > other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the > same time feel more certain that they’re right. >> > > ----- Forwarded message from Julian Todd <[email protected]> ----- > > Maybe we could trace down the actual academic studies on this one: > > http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_back > fire/?page=full > > Found this article following Clay Johnsons tweets > > Julian. > > ----- End forwarded message ----- > > Francis > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list [email protected] > Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: > https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public > -- The only thing worse than e-mail disclaimers...is people who send e-mail to lists complaining about them
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