Linked List: December 29, 2016

Thursday, 29 December 2016

From the DF Archive: ‘Short and Curlies’ 

Yours truly, back in 2003, arguing for proper typography on the web:

Cory Doctorow says he hates curly quotes in web content. While I agree with him that there’s a problem, I completely disagree about the solution.

Let’s be clear: I’m the author of SmartyPants, a plug-in for Movable Type (and soon, Blosxom) weblogs which automatically generates the typographically-correct punctuation Mr. Doctorow is complaining about, so I’m not exactly an unbiased observer — I’m partially responsible for the growing movement toward using proper punctuation on weblogs.

And I couldn’t be prouder.

Doctorow’s solution is for everyone to just stick with 7-bit ASCII characters. My solution is to fix or discard any retarded software that still insists on such restrictions. It’s 2003, right?

And here we are 14 years later, still arguing about this, and struggling with CMSes that don’t make it easy despite the fact that, algorithmically, it’s a solved problem.

(My 2003 self has successfully amused today’s self with the headline and sub-heads of this piece.)

Glenn Fleishman: ‘Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes?’ 

Glenn Fleishman, writing for The Atlantic:

Many aspects of website design have improved to the point that nuances and flourishes formerly reserved for the printed page are feasible and pleasing. But there’s a seemingly contrary motion afoot with quotation marks: At an increasing number of publications, they’ve been ironed straight. This may stem from a lack of awareness on the part of website designers or from the difficulty in a content-management system (CMS) getting the curl direction correct every time. It may also be that curly quotes’ time has come and gone.

Major periodicals have fallen prey, including those with a long and continuing print edition. Not long ago, Rolling Stone had straight quotes in its news-item previews, but educated them for features; the “smart” quotes later returned. Fast Company opts generally for all “dumb” quotes online, while the newborn digital publication The Outline recently mixed straight and typographic in the same line of text at its launch. Even the fine publication you’re currently reading has occasionally neglected to crook its pinky.

I solved this problem with SmartyPants back in November 2002, three months after starting Daring Fireball. The key appeal of SmartyPants is that you can keep your source prose in dumb ASCII — the transformation to proper typographic punctuation occurs in the output.

Unsurprisingly, the third post ever published on Daring Fireball was devoted to the topic. Over 26,000 posts later, I just fixed a few broken links in that post to point to versions of those pages cached by the amazing Internet Archive.

Many Americans — Especially but Not Exclusively Trump Voters — Believe Crazy, Wrong Things 

Catherine Rampell, writing for The Washington Post:

Many Americans believe a lot of dumb, crazy, destructive, provably wrong stuff. Lately this is especially (though not exclusively) true of Donald Trump voters, according to a new survey.

The survey, from The Economist/YouGov, was conducted in mid-December, and it finds that willingness to believe a given conspiracy theory is (surprise!) strongly related to whether that conspiracy theory supports one’s political preferences.

Speaking of Deepak Chopra and Bullshit 

While searching the DF archives prior to posting the previous two items on bullshit, I came across the single previous mention of Deepak Chopra — mocking his bullshit in Microsoft’s short-lived 2008 “I’m a PC” ad campaign. Perfect.

Why Bullshit Is No Laughing Matter 

Speaking of bullshit, this piece by Gordon Pennycook for Aeon is excellent:

To understand how we investigated bullshit empirically, consider the following examples:

The invisible is beyond new timelessness.

As you self-actualise, you will enter into infinite empathy that transcends understanding.

These statements are, definitively, bullshit. I can say this directly because they were generated using two websites: wisdomofchopra.com and the New Age Bullshit Generator. Both select buzzwords at random and use them to form sentences. They have no intended meaning and use vagueness to mask their vacuity. They are bullshit.

Across four studies and with more than 800 participants, we found that people consistently rate blatant bullshit such as this as at least somewhat profound. More importantly, this tendency — which we referred to as bullshit receptivity — was more common among people who performed worse on a variety of cognitive ability- and thinking-style tests, and who held religious and paranormal beliefs. Put differently, more logical, analytical and skeptical people were less likely to rate bullshit as profound, just as you might expect.

And an important conclusion:

Bullshit is much harder to detect when we want to agree with it. The first and most important step is to recognise the limits of our own cognition. We must be humble about our ability to justify our own beliefs. These are the keys to adopting a critical mindset — which is our only hope in a world so full of bullshit.

(Via Michael Lopp.)

Harry Frankfurt’s ‘On Bullshit’ 

I could have sworn I’ve linked to this book before, but apparently not. I’ve read it at least twice, and plan to read it once again over the holiday weekend:

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, “we have no theory.”

Frankfurt, one of the world’s most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.

Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner’s capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Essential reading in the era of Trump. Don’t think it’s silly because the word bullshit is in the title — it’s a magnificent, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book.