On the 8 Spot

from Seth here:

All I know for sure is that it gives me a headache. I think there’s a huge opportunity for a trusted media source that takes on spin from all quarters and throws it back in the face of the spinner. Show them video of themselves from last week and ask them to respond. Oh, I’m probably just being a hopeful idealist.

Do we have to be victimized for us to have compassion?

Damn, just got this idea for an Alan Moore Graphic Novel:

The main idea is that for people to be compassionate we need to be victimized, and in 2059 the government institutes a law that people have to be victimized to help them in the pursuit of happyness!

From Overcoming Bias here:

Guiltless Victims

When we are reminded of when others have victimized us, we are less able to see that we victimize others:

Wohl and Branscombe randomly divided [US] volunteers into groups. One group was reminded of the terrorist attacks, while another was told about Nazi atrocities in Poland during World War II. A third group was reminded of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. … Volunteers reminded about the Sept. 11 attacks were less likely to perceive the distress the [Iraq] war has caused many Iraqis, and less likely to feel collective responsibility, compared with volunteers told about the tragedy in Poland. … it makes no difference whether you remind them about the Sept. 11 attacks or about Pearl Harbor. …

The psychologists re-ran the experiment with Canadian volunteers. Two groups heard reminders of the Sept. 11 attacks and Pearl Harbor, while a third heard about a deadly terrorist attack in Sri Lanka.  None of these tragedies affected Canadians personally. Wohl and Branscombe found no differences among the groups in whether they felt distress on behalf of Iraqis, or a sense of collective guilt.  … The psychologists similarly found that Jewish volunteers in North America feel reduced guilt and responsibility for Israeli actions that cause suffering among Palestinians when they are first reminded about the Holocaust, compared with when they are reminded about the genocide in Cambodia.

Sometimes form is an art unto itself! Think Comedy!

but often times people write just to write. There is nothing wrong with this.

The thing is at least once a week we should try to write something we are proud of, to at least try to fool ourselves that we are trying to do write something worthwhile!

from the Overcoming Bias blog here:

If you just want to look insightful yourself, then you’ll want to ape insight like everyone else.  Use big words, attend to anal formatting rules, use many citations in academic articles, clever turns of phrase in popular articles, and so on.  In literary articles give many quotes, in science articles show many data tables and statistical tests, etc.

But if you actually want to be insightful, you face a harder problem.  Once you realize that most folks are merely aping surface features thought to correlate with insight, you see that doing this yourself may not actually help you to be insightful.  You may face a choice between looking insightful and being insightful. Yes for some factors that correlate with insight, increasing your score on such factors will tend to cause you to be insightful, but for many other factors such an increase will reduce or have no effect on your insight.

This is the non obligatory but much obliged post on the week passed event: WordCamp Philippines 2008!

Let me just say that the volunteers , organizers, speakers, and the event was top notch!

The place had wifi, even the cafeteria, and all the CSB guards, custodians, and the few people in campus were very accommodating.

The Mindanao bloggers really did an excellent job with organizing the event!

Special Thanks to Chowking that sponsored the lunch !

Thanks to Markku Seguerra for a very excellent presentation on wp plugins

And

Thanks to Karla Redor for the wp as a CMS presentation.

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg for attending the wordcamp!

My only caveat was i had friends who wanted to go but wasn’t able to register on time, if only those who registered but didn’t go to the event were more respectful with the slots that they reserved the people who really wanted to go would have been able!

the Organizers:

The following are the organizers and coordinators of WordCamp Philippines 2008:

• Blogie Robillo
• Andrew dela Serna
• Ria Jose
• MiGs Hipolito
• Winston Almendras
• Juned Sonido
• Dave Quitoriano
• Paul Pajo

wordcamp sponsors thank you!!

Chuckie Dreyfus