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posted by martyb on Friday August 31 2018, @03:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the Garbage-in-garbage-in-garbage-in-and-more-garbage-in dept.

At the The Verge:

Today, The Verge is publishing an interim edition of Sarah Jeong's The Internet of Garbage, a book she first published in 2015 that has since gone out of print. It is a thorough and important look at the intractable problem of online harassment.

After a year on The Verge's staff as a senior writer, Sarah recently joined The New York Times Editorial Board to write about technology issues. The move kicked off a wave of outrage and controversy as a group of trolls selectively took Sarah's old tweets out of context to inaccurately claim that she is a racist. This prompted a further wave of unrelenting racist harassment directed at Sarah, a wave of coverage examining her tweets, and a final wave of coverage about the state of outrage generally. This is all deeply ironic because Sarah laid out exactly how these bad-faith tactics work in The Internet of Garbage.

[...] The Internet of Garbage provides an immediate and accessible look at how online harassment works, how it might be categorized and distinguished, and why the structure of the internet and the policies surrounding it are overwhelmed in fighting it. Sarah has long planned to publish an updated and expanded second edition, but in this particular moment, I am pleased that she's allowed us to publish this interim edition with a new preface.

In that new preface, Sarah stresses that her original text was written from a place of optimism. But the years since have not been kind to internet culture. She writes that the tactics of Gamergate, so clearly on display during the harassment campaign waged against her over the last few weeks, have "overtaken our national political and cultural conversations." That new culture is driven by the shape of the internet and the interactions it fosters. "We are all victims of fraud in the marketplace of ideas," she writes.

I hope everyone with a true and sincere interest in improving our online communities reads The Internet of Garbage and contends with the scope of the problem Sarah lays out in its pages. We are making the entire text of The Internet of Garbage 1.5 available for free as a PDF, ePub, and .mobi ebook file, and for the minimum allowed price of $.99 in the Amazon Kindle store. Below, we have excerpted Chapter 3, "Lessons from Copyright Law."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @05:14PM (17 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @05:14PM (#728838)

    A: Black people are low IQ and should maybe be segregated (stated in way that makes it clear it's their actual belief)
    B: White people sunburn easily and should be buried underground(stated in a way that's clearly mocking A's racism)
    A: B IS RACIST FIRE HER FIRE HER FIRE HER

    The claim made in A is only true in statistical aggregate and most of the calls for racial segregation appear to be coming from BLM. [nationalreview.com] After the civil rights struggles of the '60s, that is ripe for satire. Who is mocking who in your example? Why does the left with their silly ideas around "hate speech" and privilege not practice what they preach?

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday August 31 2018, @05:22PM (16 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 31 2018, @05:22PM (#728843) Journal

    I see we've moved on to the "his explicit racism is true, only racism I don't personally believe is bad." He clearly made a (explicitly genetic, explicitly racial) bioessentiallist argument for it.

    AND it's NOT "true". It is not established by anything resembling controlled experimental science. It's a thing racists jump to believe in after seeing large scale correlations, and immediately go "socioeconomic factors? whoneedsem, that's soft science, and I only believe in things that oversimplify the world to the point where I don't gotta think" Spearman's hypothesis has been repeatedly shown to be bunk. No attempt at finding an actual genetic(via SNPs or any other method I've looked at) correlation to IQ has succeeded.

    It's bunk. It's bunk and racists believe it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @06:22PM (13 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @06:22PM (#728875)

      jump to believe in after seeing large scale correlations

      Commonly called statistical facts. [worlddata.info]

      that's soft science

      Social sciences are soft science and have a habit of ignoring statistical based evidence when it doesn't fit the desired hypothesis.

      No attempt at finding an actual genetic(via SNPs or any other method I've looked at) correlation to IQ has succeeded.

      We're only just beginning to study RNA. [sciencedaily.com] You should read more. [newscientist.com]

      It's bunk. It's bunk and racists believe it.

      The statistics are across populations and that isn't racist. There's much to criticize in IQ tests but we look at other correlations and see they often indicate success. They also reliably correlate with cognitive impairment and we in Western society recognizes that some people cannot function in our society without assistance. Review the psychiatric IQ classifications [assessmentpsychology.com] and tell us where the prejudice is in identifying and providing social assistance to those in the retardation range. When it comes to sub-Saharan Africa, if only the West had sold them text-books instead of guns all these years.

      • (Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Friday August 31 2018, @06:54PM (12 children)

        by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 31 2018, @06:54PM (#728893) Journal

        "We're only just beginning to study RNA"

        What the ever loving fuck are you talking about. I've personally run software analyses 24 NovaSeq runs of tumor transcriptomes just this week. Correlating Single Nucleotide Polymorhpisms(SNPs) to IQ should be trivial if the eugenics/racist/bioessentialist assumptions about IQ are even remotely correct. Tens of thousands of them associated with regions in proteins involved in brain development have been examined in healthy populations, and no significant correlations have been found.

        You're not "right". You're just a racist with racist assumptions and bad opinions about science.

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:03PM (4 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:03PM (#728898)

          I love the attitudes the morons you're arguing with show towards science.

          Climate science = it's not true (and watts up with that?!) because the conclusions make me feel uncomfortable!

          Science showing that the brain may be a gendered organ = it's not true (and brain imaging studies have no credibility!) because the conclusions make me feel uncomfortable! (Ok, I'm beating my dead hobby horse here. If humans can't stop shitting where they sleep--their very own perfect class M planet--there's no hope for them.)

          Science fails to show any truth in racialist theories = science is important and more research is needed.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:07PM (3 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:07PM (#728941)

            Climate science = it's not true (and watts up with that?!) because the conclusions make me feel uncomfortable!

            Never said that.

            Science showing that the brain may be a gendered organ = it's not true

            Never said that, only that it contradicts the claim that men and women are the same.

            Science fails to show any truth in racialist theories = science is important and more research is needed.

            What racial theories? It's not me conflating scientific racism with measurable differences between populations. Neither did i bring the subject up.

            • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @02:15AM (2 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @02:15AM (#729074)

              only that it contradicts the claim that men and women are the same.

              No shit, Sherlock! If men and women weren't different, why the fuck would anybody bother with gender transition?! If anybody says that men and women are the same, tell them to go to fucking hell! Especially if they're a feminist--oh men and women are the same when it's convenient for my Diane-worshipping cisfemale supremacist bullshit but different when that's convenient for my Diane-worshipping cisfemale supremacist bullshit. Gender is a social construct but only when it's convenient! Gender is biological when we get down to the implementation of gross violations of Title IX in public education and the Fourteenth Amendment elsewhere!!!

              argh!

              i'm gonna beat that dead hobby horse to death!

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @03:19PM (1 child)

                by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @03:19PM (#729247)

                No shit, Sherlock! If men and women weren't different, why the fuck would anybody bother with gender transition?

                Save your scorn for the "gender is a social construct" crowd.

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @04:38PM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @04:38PM (#729259)

                  Ah. My sarcasm detector must have given a false positive. As long as you don't then go and say "Ok, gender is not a social construct, so that disproves that brain sex could possibly exist."

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:04PM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:04PM (#728899)

          You're not "right". You're just a racist with racist assumptions and bad opinions about science.

          Welcome to SN, where all the shitty trolls from /. found a home. Their vitriol has already driven away a good amount of the centrist user base. Not to mention the number of times users have bothered to dredge up facts only to have others toss them out and continue with their belief based reality.

          le sigh, must the trolls ruin everything?

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday August 31 2018, @07:08PM (2 children)

            by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 31 2018, @07:08PM (#728902) Journal

            Ironically, I left slashdot because of the racist libertarians, and I figured a smaller community would have less room for them to hide.

            • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:13PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:13PM (#728945)

              True, there is less room for them to hide which makes them even more visible! They've driven off a lot of other users by brigading heavily. If they can't win on merit they'll "win" by spamming and shitposting until the dissenting voices are gone.

              I don't want to see this site die as I believe in the original goals, but until the more moderate libertarians / conservatives push back against the trolls then those trolls will feel comfortable here. Clean up your house SN conservatives, just ACCEPT that you have a serious infestation of TERRIBLE people and start standing against them. The rest of us are just tired of the same old garbage defending propaganda and ignorance.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @11:09PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 01 2018, @11:09PM (#729351)

              Ironically, I left slashdot because of the racist libertarians, and I figured a smaller community would have less room for them to hide.

              You honestly think Libertarians are racist? After our to and fro, I think you're racist! [youtube.com] Progressive outlets like Vox (who own the verge) are undeniably racist. [youtube.com] You doth protest too much, I think that you ikanreed are a racist!

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:14PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @07:14PM (#728909)

          What the ever loving fuck are you talking about.

          The historical timeline of study.

          Tens of thousands of them associated with regions in proteins involved in brain development have been examined in healthy populations, and no significant correlations have been found.

          Now what the ever loving fuck are you talking about? I thought I told you to read more. [cell.com]

          You're not "right". You're just a racist with racist assumptions and bad opinions about science.

          Check you. You're seriously claiming that evolutionary differences do not manifest across different populations? Do you have this astounding revelation published in a peer reviewed paper?

          • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Friday August 31 2018, @10:04PM (1 child)

            by Sulla (5173) on Friday August 31 2018, @10:04PM (#728998) Journal

            He also probably refuses to accept the differences in the types of medications available to people due to differences in blood types. When it comes to blood pressure there are drugs that can be given to people of European and East Asian decent that cannot and must not be given to people of African descent. First line drugs available to the first two groups can cause significant complications in the last group.

            --
            Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @11:27PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @11:27PM (#729024)

              He also probably refuses to accept the differences in the types of medications available to people due to differences in blood types.

              I doubt it, the guy probably has an IQ 2 standard deviations above the median although you wouldn't guess based on the constant "nazi" slurs. Tim Pool touches on these exact topics in a youtube video today. [youtube.com] Curious then that ikanreed (who should read more ;) brought IQ into the discussion here. As Bret Weinstein [wikipedia.org] has said, evolutionary biology is not politically correct and that's a big problem for those working in the field.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:24PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @08:24PM (#728950)

      It's true only mostly because of the circumstances that surround a given population. It has been documented that IQ scored in Texas rose more than 10 points simply due to de-worming campaigns in the early 1900s. Turns out parasites not good for intelligence? Also, look at how everyone was saying how east asians were "clearly not as intelligent" as europeans, back in the 1800s. And today, the IQ scores are higher in east asian populations than in the so called europeans.

      So anyway, something that is true doesn't mean there is correlation to the racist arguments. But it also doesn't mean that reality is not fair either.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @09:57PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @09:57PM (#728992)

        Turns out parasites not good for intelligence?

        Indeed [observer.com]

        It's true only mostly because of the circumstances that surround a given population.

        Heritability studies have been done [nih.gov] (Not to be discounted [discovermagazine.com]) and cultural influences identified. [scientificamerican.com]

        Also, look at how everyone was saying how east asians were "clearly not as intelligent" as europeans, back in the 1800s. And today, the IQ scores are higher in east asian populations than in the so called europeans.

        19th Century scientific racism is discredited pseudoscience.