The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Science & Nature => Topic started by: pmcd9 on March 25, 2010, 02:36:08 pm
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Urban legends and stuff. I know you all get this type of shit in your inbox (http://www.snopes.com/science/cookegg.asp). I don't really want to talk about any particular urban legend. What I'm interested in discussing is why the people that send this shit out get it wrong so often. They have like a 1000 batting average for sending me utter rubbish. It seems like they would get it right occasionally, but they dont is what I'm getting at. Have you noticed this?
And this is what I want to know. Why is that? Okay, sure you saw a video of a cell phone popping popcorn and thought, wow, that is amazing and forwarded it to everyone you know. I know that you are not trying to fool me, that you actually believe this is real and you want to share it with me because you think it's cool. And I know that there is amazing shit on the internet that is real. It seems to reason that my inbox would be flooded with a mixture of real wow that's amazing mixed in with the bullshit. But it's not, only the bullshit gets forwarded.
No, it's almost never real and that's what I can't understand. It's like these people have a filter for bullshit, but it works in reverse. Where truly amazing things get filtered out and only the bullshit gets through.. Why does it work out that way?
There must be some psychological explanation for it.
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That is a really interesting question. Why don't I get forwarded all kinds of fascinating facts and amazing real scientific discoveries? The way the world really works is so much more interesting than the bullshit.
I don't know. I do know that one of my proudest accomplishments is that I taught my mother to always check something on Snopes.com before she forwards it. Seriously - I taught an old lady mom to check out whether emails are urban legends before forwarding them: Now that's an amazing story that everyone should be sending around in their email.
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Now that's an amazing story that everyone should be sending around in their email.
True, but will you settle for a tiny can of Dr. Pepper instead?
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I trained my mother as well.
I told her several times to stop sending me stuff like this. Finally I hit "Reply All" gave a link to Snopes dot com and wrote "Have some dignity."
Now she checks Snopes on anything before she sends it to me.
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Good on you guys for successfully training your moms. I have gotten in the habit of hitting "Reply All" and just sending the Snopes link, and as a result I get a lot fewer emails of this nature, I think because I pissed off the original sender for making them look dopey.
So why do people send this crap?
1. Reality is boring. People WANT to believe cell phones can cook eggs and other crazy crap.
2. For politically-based urban legends, people look for evidence that supports their beliefs and ignore the rest. Some people WANT to believe that Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya and ineligible for the presidency. Some people WANT to believe that George W. Bush is so stupid he couldn't figure out that the lens caps were still on the binoculars. So that's what they forward on, without bothering to check it first. It reinforces my worldview, so it MUST be true.
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Some people are just morons, either gullible or acritical. When the snopes treatment fails me, I email people like this directly to tell them that if they don't stop forwarding me junk, I'll have to assume everything they send is junk and stop reading mail from them. That usually does the trick, but there have been a couple idiots whose addresses I've ended up blocking.
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Some people are just morons, either gullible or acritical. When the snopes treatment fails me, I email people like this directly to tell them that if they don't stop forwarding me junk, I'll have to assume everything they send is junk and stop reading mail from them. That usually does the trick, but there have been a couple idiots whose addresses I've ended up blocking.
Yeah, well would you do that to your mother and father?
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I did that to my mother. My father never earned that treatment. But then, I don't have the best relationship with them anyway, so it was really no skin off my back.
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I don't get crap like this in my email anymore. I did ReplyAll:Snopes my cousin into submission, but mostly I just gave the rest of my family an email address I never check and save the good email address for people who have proven that they will not spam me.
I do have a friend who occasionally sends me jokes, and while they're usually not as funny to me as she seems to think they are (they come with subject lines like, "This is a scream!"), they don't actually diminish my opinion of her.
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My little sister invited me to a facebook group about how 10 LUCKY MEMBERS will win ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS of GIFT CARDS TO IKEA.
and I was about to make fun of her, and then my girlfriend invited me to the same thing.
man, she was so upset when I brought that up. I WANTED IKEA. WHY CAN'T I WANT NICE THINGS. IT SEEMED REAL.
I think we are all just internet-jaded or something.
internet-savvy.
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yeah, she was so mad/sad at having been duped due to her desire for cute furniture.
also she said "that friend of yours, *****, invited me to it, which I thought meant it was legit."
Which is like saying...
I can't think of a good metaphor, but the person who invited her is kind of dumb, and exactly the person who falls for scams like this and has a weird rationalization of why she thought this one was real.
anyway, the end of the story is that after a certain number of steps on the fake ikea website, it asked for her credit card number, and she realized it was a trick.
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yeah, she was so mad/sad at having been duped due to her desire for cute furniture.
also she said "that friend of yours, *****, invited me to it, which I thought meant it was legit."
Which is like saying...
I can't think of a good metaphor, but the person who invited her is kind of dumb, and exactly the person who falls for scams like this and has a weird rationalization of why she thought this one was real.
anyway, the end of the story is that after a certain number of steps on the fake ikea website, it asked for her credit card number, and she realized it was a trick.
You have a friend named r o b o t?
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This has been going on since the $250 cookie recipe (http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/cookie.asp) and before.
People want to believe they're smart enough, plugged-in enough, subversive enough, or lucky enough to get one over on "the man." People want to be the special unique flower, and the internet is the perfect place for insecure people to present themselves as one.
More than that, though, people want to be the first to contribute something new to their group. They want to be recognized, and by and large most people's internet contacts are universally supportive. It's never been easier to gather groups of people who will support whatever you say, regardless of whether you're right or wrong, and all that feeds on itself. In a world where replacing a "friend" is a matter of a couple of penis clicks, it's easy to want to ingratiate yourself to as many people as you can. It's the opposite of trolling but it comes from the same insecure place that we all ultimately have.
In a network of this sort, fact-checking isn't appreciated; it's an active act of rejection. People don't change their ways when called out about this because you are the one in the wrong for pointing out that this GREAT NEW THING isn't great or new. They're used to a world where communication is costly, and where people didn't waste it on things they didn't know were true.
I was going to end with the thought that someday, someone will actually invent a for-real c*ck enlarging device and they'll never be able to market it, but given the number of TV ads for ED drugs I'm gonna guess that someone will eventually listen...
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I can understand her feeling mad/sad but including you in the blame because of a dopey friend just ain't right.
This is human nature, though.
"Hey, God, this lady you made to keep me company told me to eat it...I figured, you put her here, why would she lead me astray?"
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Oh, I did not interpret what she was saying as blaming me.
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People, people:
1) Urban legends = irrational fears = irrational response = moms worry, that is what moms do = maternal peeps everywhere keep urban legends alive.
2) All people are greedy and want free stuff, especially vapid stuff they would enjoy but rather not spend hard earned scratch on = email addresses collected for use to exploit your desire for free stuff = free marketing opportunity for asshats = greedy people want free stuff.
Interesting challenge I've faced in regard to #1) what happens when you have relevant real knowledge that would be useful to forward on to all, but everyone's skeptical of all forward alls due to problem #1)? Apathy. I keep getting constant emails from the actual attempt to hack my computer via Facebook fraudsters. (http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100318/ttc-uk-facebook-virus-fe50bdd.html) For realz. But dare I forward this on to others?
Interesting challenge I've faced in regard to #2)... oh, I can't tell that story here. Maybe later.
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Can you tell that story now?
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A question that's very similar to PmCd9's observation:
I live in a low income town and I see a lot of "PLANNED PARENTHOOD BAD FOR (town name)" signs on people's lawns. The signs are big and ugly black lettering on yellow background.
I got to wondering the other day why the right side of the political spectrum is so much more vocal in this respect. Also, the e-mail forwards I get. Some of them are objectively fallacious, like the one about how you can save yourself from cardiac arrest by coughing or some such. But many of them are political in nature. Many people from all sides of the political spectrum have my e-mail address, but I only receive e-mails of a political nature from people on the right side of the political spectrum, in most cases from the extreeeem right.
I got one the other day that was bitching about how if you're proud to be white, then you're racist, but it's okay to be proud to be black... The racism in it wasn't really offensive to me. I've come to expect racism from so many people in America. It was the ignorance that I deemed to be offensive and dangerous. I don't think I'll ever become complacent about ignorance. But I guess that's basically what racism is - is ignorance. So anyway, I hit reply all and I asked the guy to never send me another e-mail again. Some guy I worked with for several months. It's amazing how someone can seem to be so nice and friendly and even intelligent, and yet be a complete bigot. And an ignorant one at that. Oh well. I guess when I worked with him we never discussed anything political, but then I start getting these e-mails from him. I think maybe I'm gradually learning to be more perceptive, up front, about people. Or maybe I'll never learn. Whatever.
So anyway... back to the lawn signs, which are essentially a form of SPAM. I was wondering: why are people of hypothetical political ideology X more likely to put up lawn signs than people of political ideology Y? I decided that the answer must be that people of ideology Y have an ideology which is more rooted in rational reasoning, and therefore, these people are less likely to be influenced by a lawn sign, and are less likely to envision other people as being influence-able with a lawn sign, and so these people don't even bother, whereas, for people of ideology X, ideology X is more amenable to expression on a lawn sign because it's less rooted in complex and extended layers of reason, and more rooted in simple knee-jerk reflex.
Moreover, we can differentiate our hypothetical political discourse of adherent of ideologies X and Y by how interactive the discourse is. A lawn sign is not very interactive. It's a one-way communication. It's not a cooperative exploration of a topic, it's a unilateral expression of an idea.
Theoretically e-mail is possibly a more interactive format, but in actuality, can you imagine what would happen if everyone who got forwarded an e-mail hit reply-all and engaged in a discussion? Well, the productivity of a conversation is logarithmically proportional to the number of partici#####... Furthermore, when you look at the structure of the reasoning of these political e-mail forwards, this reasoning is not too sophisticated. It's not complex. It's basically a series of short and concise lawn signs strung together, resulting in an overall argument that is nothing more than a unilateral expression of a political position, and is usually also substantially fallacious and replete with non sequiturs.
In other words, people don't forward these political chain e-mails with the intention of engaging in conversation or debate. People don't look forward to the mutual exploration of a political subject. People merely are getting a dopamine high off of unilaterally ejaculating their bias simultaneously into as many people's inboxes as possible.
I don't believe that this all tells us as much about properties inherent in human nature as it tells us about behavior which is cultivated by our overall culture due to it's being excessively rooted in consumerism. Instant gratification and education seem to me to be mutually exclusive concepts.
I know I come off as cocky and arrogant at times, but that's just because I'm pissed at people's ignorance and the terribly negative effects ignorance has on us as a society and on the whole world. But at the same time, I do understand that education is something which, if deprived of, places people at a rather significant disadvantage. Condescending attitudes towards people because they ain't educated isn't going to solve anything. The million dollar question is: how do we educate all these people who are engaging in unilateral SPAM discourse? How do we get them off of their mental masturbation habit, how do we help them kick their dopamine instant gratification addiction to jizzing this discourse all over the place? That's a question I have.
If it's political idiocy, or any other kind of idiocy... it's all around us, and I honestly don't know how to begin to engage these people... some of them are friends, some are even family. I'm not the most clever person in the world. I'm not a quick thinker. So I'm not going to be able to seize on a person's perceptions, grapple with their preconceptions, and wrassle them into some kind of intellectual hold that forces them to see a little bit of the complexity and nuance in a subject. It's like... where do you start? I went to school... I took debate class.. In school we studied how to debate things... intelligently... but debating with an uneducated uninformed ignorant prejudiced bigoted person... that is a whole other game... is there a college class for that? Maybe it's called politics 101? I'm being facetious here, but at the same time I'm serious... this is a serious question that is facing the US right now, and it's not going to just go away any time soon, unfortunately.
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In school we studied how to debate things... intelligently... but debating with an uneducated uninformed ignorant prejudiced bigoted person... that is a whole other game... is there a college class for that? Maybe it's called politics 101? I'm being facetious here, but at the same time I'm serious... this is a serious question that is facing the US right now, and it's not going to just go away any time soon, unfortunately.
I don't know how it's done. I tried it yesterday with pretty bad results. I had a hell of a time arguing religion with my parents and brother last night. When the logic of their argument failed, we were talking abut how long is a "day" in the creation story, they resorted to the faith argument. Which is a way of saying, I don't care what evidence to the contrary can be gleaned from the natural observable world, I believe this ancient book anyway.
And I think there's a strong confluence of people with fundamental religious leanings and people with far right political reasons for very similar reasons. Both of these groups are willing to believe what is either unproven or dis-proven based on their pre conceived notion of what is right.
[long rant of a personal nature deleted, which can be summed up by saying I don't think I'll be going to church next Easter]
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I've learned the hard way never to discuss politics or religion with my family. Last night, though after Easter dinner my Mom was complaining about how she owed $4000 in taxes this year, and was ranting about how Obama was destroying the middle class, yadda yadda yadda. I tried to come back with some counter-arguments but she was having none of it. Then later she was going over the paperwork again and realized that she was actually getting a return of $4k. I just smiled at her and she told me to shut up.