Archive for February 1st, 2004

Off in My Own Little World

Posted February 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

One of the things I remember hearing – and thinking – as the Internet, DVDs, and other new technology came to the fore in the Nineties was that all of these new gadgets would help spread the word on new artists; stuff that previously would have flown under the radar would get an all-new visibility. I remember signing up with the Firefly service and entering, in fairly extensive detail, my musical and other preferences; the idea was that my custom designed Firefly “agent� program would flit about the system and find other users with tastes similar to mine and let me know what other stuff they liked. The technology never quite lived up to the potential, but the Net was young, and I was pretty sure it would get better.

Today, old and new technology alike has made the situation better. I’m a member of one of the best public radio stations around, WXPN in Philadelphia. I have a Netflix account that delivers my selections from a vast library of DVDs right to my mailbox. I have digital cable that not only gives me dozens more channels, it lets me access many programs at a time of my choosing through its On Demand service. Over the years I’ve developed a huge profile at Amazon that informs their recommendation lists, and my Internet access lets me peruse message boards to see what new acts I might be missing. There should be a never-ending stream of Cool New Stuff making its way into my cranial space. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Culture and Media

Love Conquers: San Francisco and Marriage

Posted February 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

Just when I thought that this election year was guaranteed to make me bitter and cynical beyond belief, I have a new hero: San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom. Newsom recently concluded that California’s laws prohibiting marriages between two people of the same sex violate the state constitution’s protections of equal rights for all citizens. Furthermore, he decided to do something about it, and ordered city officials to start granting marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples.

Now, apart from the fact that I completely agree with Newsom’s stance on same sex marriages, I find his actions inspiring because he saw a situation where he felt the state wasn’t living up to its best ideals and to its obligations, and – let me repeat this for emphasis – he decided to actually do something about it. He took a stand and pressed the issue, forcing Californians and Americans to confront the matter head on. (A recent Salon article suggests that’s par for the course with Newsom.) He did it despite members of his own cabinet – including some of his gay advisors – telling him that Californians weren’t ready for this, that it would cause too much political damage. I am well aware that the rules of the game mean that you have to be cautious with the accumulation and spending of political capital in order to get anything good done, but it feels good, even once in a while, to hear an elected official say “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”

In doing so, Newsom has accelerated the debate on marriage rights, perhaps even more than Massachusetts’ Supreme Court did with its recent decision that a ban on same sex marriages violates that state’s Constitution; it will be several more weeks before Massachusetts starts issuing licenses. I hold nothing against the Massachusetts Court there – I think an elected executive has much firmer ground to stand on in taking such actions than a judiciary. Both decisions are examples of political courage in a cause that I believe future generations will recognize as just, and they have already inspired other officials to follow suit. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Public Policy

Be Reasonable – Part 3

Posted February 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

“We’ll wrap this whole conversation up next time with some further discussion of inductive logic and the fallacies sometimes associated with it, and exactly how we should treat these rules of logic.�

OK, I have no idea what I was smoking when I wrote that last time. I could probably stretch the topics in that sentence into another three essays. Well, that just gives us fodder for the discussion, I suppose.

As I mentioned in the first article in this series, inductive reasoning differs from the deductive logic we’ve been focusing by being less formal and less absolute. Deductive logic is like a math problem. You take your inputs, you follow the procedure dictated by the operations, you get your output. Inductive reasoning is more like writing an interpretative essay for English or history class. You try and pull all your evidence together to support your conclusion, but you have to deal with the fact that no matter how much support you have, it’s always possible that the truth lies elsewhere.

That said, there are good and bad ways to go about making an inductive argument. So let’s look at some of the fallacies one might slip into. (These and a host of other common reasoning problems are discussed in a book called Critical Thinking and Communication: The Use of Reason in Argument. It’s a little dry, but not too technical, and can be a useful resource.)
Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Philosophy