Tags: truth

s19e01: Do Reply; Use plain language, and tell the truth

Very good writing advice from Dan:

Use plain language. Tell the truth.

Related:

The reason why LLM text for me is bad is that it’s insipid, which is not a plain language word to use, but the secret is to use words like that tactically and sparingly to great effect.

They don’t write plainly because most of the text they’ve been trained on isn’t plain and clear. I’d argue that most of the text that’s ever existed isn’t plain and clear anyway.

We Live In The Age of The Bullshitter ❧ Current Affairs

We also have a culture in which arrogance is rewarded rather than kept in check, and people can see that with enough shameless bluster you might become the richest person in the world or the president of the United States. There is no quick fix for the problem—if I offered one, I would be the very kind of bullshitter I strive to avoid being—but we at the very least need to recognize what it is we are trying to change. We are trying to create a culture of thoughtfulness and insight, where people check carefully to see whether what they’re saying is true, and excessively egotistical people are looked upon with deep suspicion. With time and patient effort, perhaps we can create a world in which the people who rise to the highest offices and reap the greatest rewards are not also the ones who are most full of shit. 

Some Thoughts on Hope, Cynicism, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves | Brain Pickings

Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.

Echoing Margaret Atwood’s observation:

If we abandon hope, we’re cooked. If we rely on nothing but hope, we’re cooked. So I would say judicious hope is necessary.

• Nobody writes on their own website any more. People write on Twitter, Facebook, and Medium instead. Personal publishing is dead.
• You can’t build a complex interactive app on the web without requiring JavaScript. It’s fine if it doesn’t work without JavaScript. JavaScript is ubiquitous.
• Privacy is dead. The technologies exists to monitor your every movement and track all your communications so it is inevitable that our society will bend to this reality.

These statements aren’t true. But they are repeated so often, as if they were truisms, that we run the risk of believing them and thus, fulfilling their promise.

I’ve tried to articulate my feelings about data preservation, digital decay and the loss of our collective culture down the memory hole. I’ve written about Tears in the Rain, Magnoliloss and Linkrot. I’ve spoken about Open Data, The Long Web and All Our Yesterdays.

But all of my words are naught compared to a single piece of writing by Joel Johnson on Gizmodo. It’s called Raiding Eternity. From the memories stored on Flickr, past the seed bank of Svalbard, out to the Voyager golden record, it sweeps and soars in scope …but always with a single moment at its center, a single life, a single death.

Please read it. It is beautiful and it is truthful.

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

—John Keats

Is Mike Arrington a Dick?

Best. Single-serving site. Ever!

CHARLES DARWIN HAS A POSSE! -- stickers in support of evolution

Brilliant! I need to get some sticker paper so I can print out this picture and put it on my laptop.