[HacktionLab] We need to talk about Facebook

[Garcon du Monde]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 09:09:43PM +0100, mp wrote:
> On the one hand you support social movements and autonomous
> information infrastructures and knowledge, on the other you stand
> firmly with the scientific establishment, is that it?

no, and i find that quite insulting actually. yes, i support autonomous
information structures, and yes, i have a postgraduate degree in
assessing (scientific) evidence, but the two are not mutually
exclusive. there is plenty that people on both sides of the divide you
have constructed can learn from others with different points of view -
and i certainly think that's one of the major problems of the world
today (not to learn lessons from past experiences)... and it seems
equally to be a problem that you have.

returning to the original point, i don't trust information that comes
from sources with an obvious vested interest in what they're publishing;
indeed, one of the first questions i ask is, "what was the motivation
behind this evidence being produced?" - and more so, "what is the
financial incentive behind this source?" with those questions, i feel i
can quite readily knock on the head pretty much all the suggested
references that have proposed in this thread... as an aside, i witnessed
chomsky dismissing one specific 9/11 conspiracy theory - not once but
twice! and each time a different way. the point is, that there are lots
of conspiracy or other theories out there, with some tangential evidence
that really isn't worth bothering about in the grander scheme of things.

personally, i have better things to worry about: global capitalism and
what we're going to do about it is one of those things. whether mobile
telephones increase the risk of brain cancer by 0.0001%, thus shortening
your life by a few weeks or a year or seven is not.

solidarity,

	--gdm

-- 
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