Al Gore took the initiative in creating the Internet, so for Cecil’s sake USE IT!

The BBQ Pit
1

Al Gore’s famous statement wasn’t really that far off, certainly by politician standards. As Senator, he authored the High Performance Computing Act, a bill which gave grants to commercial and academic developers, he was an early backer of NSFNet, he talked about the “information superhighway” before most people had a 24K modem. Talk to Vint Cerf, Mark Andreessen or any number of technological pioneers and they’ll agree that the internet as you experience it today owes a lot to then-Senator Gore.

But wait! There’s more. Al Gore happened to be Vice President of the United States in the early days of the consumer/commercial internet. And do you know what he did? He made all the federal agencies start putting some, most or even all of their published information on the internet! For free for you to see anytime you want! This is great and awesome stuff! This is good government and better democracy all in one! Here is Fedstats.gov, where you can find almost everything the executive branch publishes statistics-wise. More interested in browsing around a specific agency to see what they’re up to? You can do that – here’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example. Here’s the State Department.

It gets better. The Legislative Branch got in on the act. Want to track a bill or see what it says? Thomas is a resource for exactly that purpose. The House and Senate also have their own sites where you can learn about individual members, committees, all sorts of stuff. Even the Judicial Branch is involved. They’re a little behind, on account of judges are old and stuff, but The Supreme Court is on line. They’ve even got some oral arguments transcribed on there. So are most appeals courts, bankruptcy courts, some circuit courts, etc.

And that’s not all! Private industry and non-profits are also using this “internet” thing to keep track of the government. For example, Cornell University’s Law Center keeps the United States Code right where you can find it and easily organized. It’s astounding just how much information is on Mr. Gore’s superhighway.

And if you order right now, and even if you don’t, even non-US types are embracing this marvelous distribution method. Here’s the UN. And Iraq (under construction) is getting up to speed, in English even! Need information on the Indonesian fishing industry? No problem.

Why do I mention this in the Pit? Because it seems that thousands of the smartest, hippest people on the planet are currently outnumbered, or at least outposted, by a few total dipsticks. Dipsticks who don’t use this amazing resource like it was intended. Dipsticks content not only to form an opinion but to argue that opinion based solely on their own preconceptions plus some blog or newspaper article or press release.

Here’s my message to you who do that: Because of the internet, which I know you know how to use, you don’t have to trust filtered news any more. It doesn’t matter what your political opinions are or the opinions of the filterer are or the bigness or smallness or experience or credentials of the filterer – SeeBS or Faux News or All the News That’s Fit to Print Plus Some Stuff We Made Up from Whole Cloth or “Reuters” or al-Moveon or Little Green Testicles, it doesn’t matter. IN MANY CASES YOU CAN GO TO THE SOURCE AND LEARN FOR YOURSELF! Failing to do so on this subject or that does not make you a bad person; we all need filters of one kind or another in this information barrage of a world. But it does make you unqualified to argue about it. Doing that makes you a dipstick.

Don’t make Cecil reverse the phrase to a few of the smartest, hippest people on the planet plus thousands of dipsticks. Don’t be a dipstick.

2

Word, sir. Few things on the SDMB should be treated with more derision and scorn than arguments knowingly founded in ignorance.

By the way, thanks a bunch for that link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I’ve been looking for something like that the last couple of days but was too dumb to find it on my own.

3

neuroman, this is the only link you need to quickly get to any U.S. federal government site:

http://www.lib.lsu.edu/gov/fedgov.html

4

While I agree with you 100% in principle, I would submit that there are many, many people who do not have time to go to the source and slog through hundreds of pages of government reports and charts themselves, and so are forced to rely on filtering sources that get to the nut of the matter (that’s not to say that I don’t have time to look up my congressman’s e-mail, but if I want to form an opinion about how fertilization is affecting the crop in OK this year and what impact that has on the global market–?)

Or perhaps many people are unable to understand the terminology of certain documents, or even worse, in their arrogance misinterpret the documents but assume they have it right. We need reliable filtering sources to do the analyzing for us, not only for truth’s sake, but because most of us aren’t seasoned political analysts or lawyers or academics.

That’s why it’s up to us as information “consumers” to look for unbiased, fair news reporting, to make sure we are receiving a good product (and of course, in this day and age, such a thing is a near figment of the imagniation – although I find the periodical The Week to be a breath of fresh air).

That being said:

  1. I personally rely on MSNBC for my daily world news, as the local stations suck ass and I find their web format easy to browse. Everything I read there is taken with a grain of salt, and if I find a bit of reporting questionable, I will research it further myself. News/politics/government reports aside, I LOVE knowledge and sharing mundane stuff. I will speak authoritatively about an issue and am willing to argue it, UNLESS I am not sure of my facts, at which point everything I say will be given the disclaimer of :“I don’t know the facts for sure, but I am of the opinion A and I think so because of supporting evidence B, C and D.”

  2. People who have the TIME to post and debate on a place like the SDMB have the time to go to those sources themselves. Being at work is not an excuse! :smiley:

5

What used to really stump me in the pre-net days of my youth, was the rule of thumb that the more firmly held and passionately argued the opinion, the less facts was that opinion based on. In this internet world I now inhabit, I see this rule implemented in ways so grand that I would never have previously envisioned it.

The less they know, the more sure they are of it. Entropy increases.

6

Which of the Internets should I use?

7

Oh, I agree entirely. In fact, I’ll go you one better – I’ll assert that everyone needs filtering for most things. Otherwise the amount of information is just too much to process. Heck even many “original” documents have at least some filtering. I pore through the minutia of BLS’ monthly labor reports, for example, but I do not then demand to read the tanscripts of the telephone interviews they hold to derive the data, nor the minutes of the meetings where they decide how to score that raw data.

But if someone wants to argue about something I think there’s a minimum amout of work which should be done if someone is going to argue in good faith. One can feel this way or that about abortion, for example, but to argue Roe v. Wade without having read the decision and having made an effort to understand SCOTUS’ evolving "penumbra"of rights is misguided and represents a net creation of ignorance rather than an eradication of it.

That’s why I believe that your “1)” statement was so wise and your “2)” statement should be all but a rule in GD. :slight_smile:

In the immediate instance which inspired this thread, I asked for examples of the text from a narrow, specfic part of a bill which others were asserting were harmful. What I got was a mainstream media article which was a general derision of it with a quote picked out and no independent analysis and an affirmative statement that someone had no intention whatsoever of examining the text of the bill for himself.

In an earlier instance, some idiot alleged that he wanted to debate an auditor’s report about expenditures in Iraq. But all he had was a short BBC article about it. So I posted links to the raw data and invited arguments based on it. What happened? One half-assed cite to another media article and a dead thread. I say if you won’t do the work, keep your yaps shut.

The one where you can buy some wood, of course! :smiley:

8

Cool! If they say it on a government website than I know it has to be true.

9

Indeed. And allow me to present an example of my own, wherein some of us had the exact same argument (for at least 5 out of 7 pages) in this thread just last week.

10

:smiley:

11

Put a lid on it, manhattan.

If everyone starts getting their facts straight, it would take half the fun out of seeing egg on the face of people who pull numbers out of their keisters and cite biased, incomplete news sources.

We look like magicians, citing census data, quoting senate testimony, pulling fact from GOA reports. Or very well-connected, with secret government sources leaking us valuable data.

Are you trying to ruin it for us?

I suppose next you’re going to tell people about algebra, showing them how a little simple math can yield answers about percentages. There goes my plan to look like a mathematical genius.

Bastard.

12

By the way, that was a bit of deliberate misdirection. I didn’t want anyone to actually be able to track down GAO reports except us sneaky types.

13

Well, in many cases what’s more important is that you know the fact that they actually said it to be true.

14

Along the lines of what manhattan is saying, one of the things I really liked about the Clinton Whitehouse, was that I could get the actual transcripts—right down to the “uhs,” “ummms,” and “ers”—of Clinton speeches (and press conferences and executive orders and a bunch of other stuff) had delivered right to my e-mail inbox. Frequently I’d get them even before a story had about a particular speech had hit the press. They had a rather comprehensive topical tree so you could easily select only what you were interested in. I found it often enlightening to have a verbatim transcript at hand when reading news articles. The mistakes and omissions made by reporters were often quite surprising. I was much disappointed when the Bush guys decided to not continue this program upon his assumption of the office.

15

This is a sort of delayed April Fool’s Joke, right? Both Manhattan and Uncle Beer saying nice things about Gore and Clinton, respectively, in the same thread. I guess winning has made you guys magnanimous?

FWIW, I’ve had some kind thoughts about both Bushes (father and son, not brother and brother) in the past couple of months, but neither is internet related, so I’ll save them for another time.

16

Just a little side note, in another forum, I was debating someone on gay marriage, and I was able to pull up the exact text of the decision in Massachusetts, and show how his exact arguments against gay marriage was countered in the text.
Hillary GOODRIDGE & others [FN1] vs. DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH & another.

17

I used to do that on a military-oriented message board I was on. It leaned towards frothing-at-the-mouth, there was little standard for actually checking facts. Almost no one did it. It was just full-on screaming debate, often citing World News Daily, absolutely no citations, fact-checking, or searching for new sources. They were absolutely flummoxed when someone could provide an ACTUAL QUOTE about something. Or do some math.

It was sort of exhilarating. For about three weeks, anyway.

You can imagine how well the gay marriage threads went over there.

18

What manhattan fails to take into account is that 87% of all statistics are just made up on the spur of the moment in order to lend credence to a statement like this one.

19

While I agree with you in principal, I don’t think the example you gave is a particularly good one. While I wasn’t a participant in that thread, your link prompted me to go check it out. What it appears you are complaining about is someone who is taking a particular stance on the bill based on filtered information, as opposed to the text of the bill itself. I found several problems with the linked thread, though.

  1. They admitted they haven’t read it and aren’t planning to, but you’ve been unwilling to show that you have (I’ll happily admit I believe you have, but would also happily bet large sums of money that others who are making the same argument as you, such as Shodan, hadn’t read it at that point). Traditionally, in a situation like that, a person such as yourself would have simply pointed to the text of the bill that counters their argument. You didn’t. So, we have a person on one side providing a link (which you have to admit was written by a fairly influential looking bunch, and if I wanted someone to filter something about bankruptcy, they’d be good candidates), while the person on the other side, who very well my be in the right, is unwilling to counter with evidence to back it up.

  2. You fairly acknowledge that sometimes we have to let others filter the information for us, due to real life time constraints. Given that, which entity do you think would do a better job of filtering such as large volume of information than those who drafted that open letter that was linked? I’d certainly trust their opinions over even my own opinions if I had read the thing in its entirety. If you consider them to be biased, and that’s quite possible, as we’ve seen large groups with agendas in the past, then pointing out the bias would do the trick. I didn’t see that you had done this either.

  3. The bill itself is HUGE. I’m not talking about “well, it will take you an hour to get through” huge, I mean it’s “there’s no freaking way I’m going to read all of that for less than five figures” huge. The congress could have slipped a million things in there, including counters to things that appear elsewhere in the same bill (let’s not pretend they don’t do this kind of shit all day long) without the average person having a chance of catching it, even with a thorough reading. In situations like that, I’ll happily let the experts do the grunt-work. For those who aren’t familiar with the bill, below is the table of contents to give you an idea of its size. Which of you would feel more confident than a group of bankruptcy lawyers as to its contents?

20

And not one I use. :cool: I agree with Cranky that Manny should shut up. Correct use of the net is the secret weapon that makes me look smart IRL but most of the people I impress are unlikely to take advantage of the tool no matter how gently we lead them to it.

Crap! The plotter stopped some time in the not recent enough past. Best get back to work.