[Soup forgot his password]

Im laughing at how long it's taking you to get this. You've lectured me twice already on the rules of logic so I assume you understand the rules of debate. I actually answer the questions you ask when you ask them. If you dont like the answers, come up with better questions. That's the only advice i can give.


"Can you tell me how many authors have said we should stop using computers?"
Nope.

"Can you show support for your claim?"
Here's a whole passage that makes the same claim.

"That doesn't support your claim."
That wasn't a question.

"Can you show support for your claim?"
I already did

"Can you qualify the support you've given?"
Yes I can and then I did.

"Can I give my "evident thru scientific research support"?"
First of all "evident thru scientific research support" isnt even a noun, so no I can't give it.
Second if what you meant was "How is this scientific research?" Well heres a list of scientific research that i already gave.



Bonus video, Lecture by Gary Small, your brain on Google:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVoceQwjyWk
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...on-google.html

[dignan]

Originally Posted by dignan (View Original Post)

Soup, let's try and stay on this one topic of your claim in post #62 and your support for that claim.

Here is your claim: "Books allow for deeper concentration, contemplation, and memorization
than any other format."

Then you posted a passage from The Shallows.

Now staying within the context of what you said in post #62 can you please show me in clean, clear, and crisp examples of support for your claim: "Books allow for deeper concentration, contemplation, and memorization than any other format."

A couple of simple and hopefully non controversial examples of what I'm asking of you are as follows:

Example A
Claim #1, Soup is a mortal

Support #1, Soup is a man
Support #2, All men are mortal

Example B
Claim #2, Soup is 6 feet tall

Support #1, Soup is a man
Support #2, All men are mortal


Now both claim #1 and claim #2 can both be true claims. However, only claim #1 follows from both support #1 and #2, whereas claim #2 receives no support.


Hopefully this question isn't asking too much and I think your answer will help me understand you more clearly. Again, please try and stay within the passage you quoted in post #62

Sixth times a charm?

Anyways, let stay on one topic.

And I'm sorry, when I said,

"Can you please give your "evident thru scientific research support" (your words, post #62)?"

I put the quotation after the word support and it should have been placed after the word research.

Let me fix it for you. Can you please give your "evident thru scientific research" (your words, post #62) support?

I don't want to hear someone else show the support for your claim. I want to see you show support for your claim using the passage in post #62

And it was kinda cute that on post #74 you listed footnotes as scientific support.

[Soup forgot his password]

Originally Posted by dignan (View Original Post)

Let me fix it for you. Can you please give your "evident thru scientific research" (your words, post #62) support?

Already did. If you dont like an answer you receive don't get to demand I give a different one. Ask a better question.

Originally Posted by dignan (View Original Post)

I don't want to hear someone else show the support for your claim. I want to see you show support for your claim using the passage in post #62

You dont want me to support my argument with harvard published papers and a pretty fucking extensive list of research papers to go along with it. Well, again, too bad.
Let's move on.

[dignan]

I'm just trying to stick what what you said in post #62 which was along the lines of:

"Claim: Books allow for deeper concentration, contemplation, and memorization
than any other format.

Warrant: The claim is evident through scientific research

Support: Not given at the time because this is the internet and I don't feel like qualifying things unless someone asks me to, but here:"

Then you proceeded to post twelve paragraphs along with footnotes.

All I'm asking is for you to break it down for me in numbered supports that follow to your claim.

Or if you prefer you can say, after reflection, that you overstated your claim. Also, that looking back now, that you no longer can detect any cumulative support for your claim in the passage you quoted.

[Soup forgot his password]

Ok great. You disagree. If you have nothing to more to add to the article I posted we'll have to move on. I'm not going to give you cliffnotes so you dont have to read you lazy fuck.

[dignan]

I don't see any reason to have to move on. I'm not asking for cliffnotes and while I may be a lazy fuck I've read that Carr passage many times now.

8th time now asking you to make your case.

It's ok to make mistakes. Take a day, write it down on a piece of paper a few times and then maybe post it. It could be good.

[Soup forgot his password]

It could be, but it doesn't need it. You're trolling. The answer for that stands as it is. If you disagree then you disagree. Cool? Moving on.

[dignan]

You made the claim. You could have picked anything in the entire world to support it and you cherry picked that Carr passage for a reason. You saw something in that passage and I would like to see it too.

9th time, make your case.

Or just say why you don't want to try.

[Cunt_Eastwood]

Hey Soup, if you're fucking thread is about not using computers,
why don't you lead by example?

[Soup forgot his password]

Why would I leave when i can sit here and watch the suicide of American ideology? Freedom, individualism, rationalism... what do these terms mean on the internet? How absurd can we go with them?

Look at you taking advantage of this superficial sense of validation from this false sense of "community" this bulletin board has created for you. Humans are civic creatures yet we can't tell the difference between real and fake citizenship. Or maybe we can tell the difference, but when it's so hard in real life to not be a coward, introduce ourselves to our neighbors, rejoin a REAL geographic community, it's just easier to play pretend and go for the lowest hanging fruit.


You feel empowered on a messageboard by design. You type a few words into a text box and the bulletin board system generates a post visually equivalent to everybody else's. To you this is an improvement to your other life because here you feel a level of acceptance. Here you're not judged on physical appearance or intelligence. There's only one rule of anonymity: be as indifferent and uncaring as possible. Show any passion for anything and expect the wrath of Anonymous to wipe you from the internet. Make sure you're not the target by just going along with what everyone else is doing.

Chimpanzees can be trained to perform the same trick. Lock a bunch of chimps in a cell, put a ladder in the cell and on top of the ladder place a banana. If one monkey goes for the banana, turn a firehose on the entire cell. Soon the monkeys will stop going for the banana. Take out one of the chimps and bring in an uninitiated new chimp. Watch him go for the banana. Watch every other chimp beat the piss out of him before he goes for it.

One at a time, replace each original chimp with a new uninitiated one. Soon you have a bunch of chimps that have never even felt a firehose, but if one chimp goes for the banana they still beat him up.

That's you Cunt. You're as intelligent and self aware as those chimpanzees. Your'e little Baby Bear in the three bears, lapping up his milk, trying to sit up at the table with the rest of the three bears, just trying to fit in like a tiny, feeble, cowardly homunculus without a fucking clue why you even bother.

[dignan]

Soup-Lion, (I think we've bonded a bit now so I feel like I can say this. You've moved from Soup-Dogg to Soup-Lion). No reason to lash out at Cunt_Eastwood, he's simply referring back to your first post where you said, "from now until 2013 I plan on trying to unplug myself."

Anyways, you're getting off topic.

I'm still interested in seeing your claim supported by your Carr passage (post #62) in a clear way. You're not helping so I've decided to try and help you help me. In post #72 you posted a hint to your thought process. I'm going to try and put it in a clear, easy to read form and see where it actually supports your claim.

In post #62 you said this..

"Claim: What I want readers to believe'

Support: What I will use to support the claim

Warrant: A general principle that explains why I think me evidence is accurate, and
relevant to your claim."

Here's your claim: Books allow for deeper concentration, contemplation, and memorization
than any other format

Your warrant: The claim is evident through scientific research

Your support from post #72: "using the Net may, as Gary Small suggests, exercise the brain the
way solving crossword puzzles does. But such intensive exercise, when it becomes our
primary mode of thought, can impede deep learning and thinking. Try reading a book
while doing a crossword puzzle; that’s the intellectual environment of the Internet"



I'm going to experiment and change the order up in hopes of seeing what you see.

Warrant: The claim is evident through scientific research

Support #1: "using the Net may, as Gary Small suggests, exercise the brain the
way solving crossword puzzles does. But such intensive exercise, when it becomes our
primary mode of thought, can impede deep learning and thinking. Try reading a book
while doing a crossword puzzle; that’s the intellectual environment of the Internet"

Claim: Books allow for deeper concentration, contemplation, and memorization
than any other format

Putting it in this way helps me see that your claim is very different than what you said was support, and seemingly doesn't follow in any way. Carr doesn't even mention concentration, contemplation, or memorization.

Another important note is Gary Smalls actual findings in the passage you privided,

"...researchers found that when people search the Net they exhibit a
very different pattern of brain activity than they do when they read book-like text. Book
readers have a lot of activity in regions associated with language, memory, and visual
processing, but they don’t display much activity in the prefrontal regions associated with
decision making and problem solving. Experienced Net users, by contrast, display
extensive activity across all those brain regions when they scan and search Web pages.
The good news here is that Web surfing, because it engages so many brain functions,
may help keep older people’s minds sharp. Searching and browsing seem to “exercise”
the brain in a way similar to solving crossword puzzles, says Small."

Please pay attention to the distinction Smalls makes here between searching the Net and reading book-like text,

"when people search the Net they exhibit a
very different pattern of brain activity than they do when they read book-like text."

In your support, Carr only mentions Small's research results of when people are searching the Net. Carr does not say reading actual books is better in any way than reading book-like text. I think that is something you may be reading into the text and not getting form the text, but maybe I'm wrong.

Again, that twelve paragraph passage is a critique of Net surfing and not of reading book-like text.


Seems to me there are some large gaps between your support and your claim.

[Cunt_Eastwood]

Originally Posted by Soup forgot his password (View Original Post)

Why would I leave when i can sit here and watch the suicide of American ideology? Freedom, individualism, rationalism... what do these terms mean on the internet? How absurd can we go with them?

Look at you taking advantage of this superficial sense of validation from this false sense of "community" this bulletin board has created for you. Humans are civic creatures yet we can't tell the difference between real and fake citizenship. Or maybe we can tell the difference, but when it's so hard in real life to not be a coward, introduce ourselves to our neighbors, rejoin a REAL geographic community, it's just easier to play pretend and go for the lowest hanging fruit.


You feel empowered on a messageboard by design. You type a few words into a text box and the bulletin board system generates a post visually equivalent to everybody else's. To you this is an improvement to your other life because here you feel a level of acceptance. Here you're not judged on physical appearance or intelligence. There's only one rule of anonymity: be as indifferent and uncaring as possible. Show any passion for anything and expect the wrath of Anonymous to wipe you from the internet. Make sure you're not the target by just going along with what everyone else is doing.

Chimpanzees can be trained to perform the same trick. Lock a bunch of chimps in a cell, put a ladder in the cell and on top of the ladder place a banana. If one monkey goes for the banana, turn a firehose on the entire cell. Soon the monkeys will stop going for the banana. Take out one of the chimps and bring in an uninitiated new chimp. Watch him go for the banana. Watch every other chimp beat the piss out of him before he goes for it.

One at a time, replace each original chimp with a new uninitiated one. Soon you have a bunch of chimps that have never even felt a firehose, but if one chimp goes for the banana they still beat him up.

That's you Cunt. You're as intelligent and self aware as those chimpanzees. Your'e little Baby Bear in the three bears, lapping up his milk, trying to sit up at the table with the rest of the three bears, just trying to fit in like a tiny, feeble, cowardly homunculus without a fucking clue why you even bother.

I'd say you're just wasting your time, but I know outside of the internet you have absolutely nothing going on. In the time it took you to write all of that garbage I guarentee you I accomplished than you did throughout the day

[Soup forgot his password]

Ok, prove it.

[shai]

Like drugs, computers are tools, or a means to an end. The best idea is to use them with a clear intent, and not idly fuck around with them just because you can. Most people take the fact that they carry the equivalent of a supercomputer from the mid 90s in their pocket for granted...and that is not a good thing.

Every new form of stimulation has a learning curve. A good example is when a "new" street drug comes out- you don't hear about the 90% of the user base who can hit it one time and quit it...you hear about people getting so beamed up that they do the most retarded shit, then turn around and say "Oh, but it was bath salts/crack/PCP that made me do it."

To that I say BULLSHIT. If you can't recognize your own limits, that was a problem from the jump....and computers are no different.

I'm not sure if I answered the question correctly, but I think I more or less explained why I probably won't stop using computers any time soon. I started off using BBSes in the late 80s then moved onto the internet, and so far it hasn't been a detriment to my life...the only problem I've been encountering lately is not being able to retain information I read online as well as if I were to read it from a book. That could just be part of getting old. Or it could be because I'm bombarded by so much more side-stimuli using the modern web as compared to when I was using text browsers like Lynx in the early-mid 90s.

Anyone who hasn't read "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson should do so. Even though it was written 20 years ago, it still raises a lot of relevant points regarding infomation and the web.

[Spambot5000]

Fuggedaboudit..

[Soup forgot his password]

Originally Posted by shai (View Original Post)

To that I say BULLSHIT. If you can't recognize your own limits, that was a problem from the jump....and computers are no different. .

It's not just knowing when to stop, you also have to be able to. There are biological and social limits to things. The problem with the computer and technology in general is that technology has superceded ALL ideology. There is nobody saying how much technology use is too much. Secondly, even if there was a reachable limit to computer/technology use, either socially or physically, your argument assumes you have the willpower to change your behavior whenever you want.

Drug addicts, like all human beings, need the assistance of a support group to help them lock in good or bad behaviors. If everyone thinks that computer usage is in no way detrimental, then there is no support group to help people stop using computers.

[shai]

Semi-related-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine_receptor_D4

I think we're still figuring out how to integrate technology that allows us to be in constant contact with each other into our lives without being trivial or obsessive. How long that will take is another matter of conjecture.

Then again, with some people it's always something. We all know the person who gets inordinately bent out of shape over gossip/drama in general- now their medium has spread to email, IM, FB, text, forum posts, blog posts, Youtube comments...it's what spoils having a smart phone for me. I recently acquired an iPhone, but haven't hooked it up because a) it does what I need it to do over wifi adequately, and b) I simply don't want to be that connected.

For the same reasons, I also don't think technology has replaced ideology. It's simply another medium to get the message out...how it's used is up to the people with the message, and if you look at past patterns of behavior it's not hard to see who's going to do what with it.

[Soup forgot his password]

Dopamine is the completely related to what a lot of people see as a problem here.

Couple excerpts from "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr

MICHAEL GREENBERG, IN a 2008 essay in the New York Review of Books,
found the poetry in neuroplasticity. He observed that our neurological
system, “with its branches and transmitters and ingeniously spanned gaps,
has an improvised quality that seems to mirror the unpredictability of
thought itself.” It’s “an ephemeral place that changes as our experience
changes.”32 There are many reasons to be grateful that our mental
hardware is able to adapt so readily to experience, that even old brains
can be taught new tricks. The brain’s adaptability hasn’t just led to new
treatments, and new hope, for those suffering from brain injury or illness.
It provides all of us with a mental flexibility, an intellectual litheness, that
allows us to adapt to new situations, learn new skills, and in general expand
our horizons.

But the news is not all good. Although neuroplasticity provides an escape from
genetic determinism, a loophole for free thought and free will, it also imposes
its own form of determinism on our behavior. As particular circuits in our brain
strengthen through the repetition of a physical or mental activity, they begin
to transform that activity into a habit. The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes
Doidge, is that, for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking
us into “rigid behaviors.”33 The chemically triggered synapses that link our
neurons program us, in effect, to want to keep exercising the circuits they’ve
formed. Once we’ve wired new circuitry in our brain, Doidge writes, “we long
to keep it activated.”34 That’s the way the brain fine-tunes its operations.
Routine activities are carried out ever more quickly and efficiently, while unused
circuits are pruned away.

Plastic does not mean elastic, in other words. Our neural loops don’t snap back
to their former state the way a rubber band does; they hold onto their changed
state. And nothing says the new state has to be a desirable one. Bad habits can
be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones. Pascual-Leone observes that
“plastic changes may not necessarily represent a behavioral gain for a given
subject.” In addition to being “the mechanism for development and learning,”
plasticity can be “a cause of pathology.”35
It comes as no surprise that neuroplasticity has been linked to mental afflictions
ranging from depression to obsessive-compulsive disorder to tinnitus. The more a
sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched
into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to
be sick. Many addictions, too, are reinforced by the strengthening of plastic
pathways in the brain. Even very small doses of addictive drugs can dramatically
alter the flow of neurotransmitters in a person’s synapses, resulting in long-lasting
alterations in brain circuitry and function. In some cases, the buildup of certain
kinds of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, a pleasure-producing cousin to
adrenaline, seems to actually trigger the turning on or off of particular genes,
bringing even stronger cravings for the drug. The vital paths turn deadly.
The potential for unwelcome neuroplastic adaptations also exists in the everyday,
normal functioning of our minds. Experiments show that just as the brain can build
new or stronger circuits through physical or mental practice, those circuits can
weaken or dissolve with neglect. “If we stop exercising our mental skills,” writes
Doidge, “we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned
over to the skills we practice instead.”36 Jeffrey Schwartz, a professor of psychiatry
at UCLA’s medical school, terms this process “survival of the busiest.”37 The mental
skills we sacrifice may be as valuable, or even more valuable, than the ones we gain.
When it comes to the quality of our thought, our neurons and synapses are entirely
indifferent. The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our
brains.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t, with concerted effort, once again redirect our neural
signals and rebuild the skills we’ve lost. What it does mean is that the vital paths in
our brains become, as Monsieur Dumont understood, the paths of least resistance.
They are the paths that most of us will take most of the time, and the farther we
proceed down them, the more difficult it becomes to turn back.

WHAT DETERMINES WHAT we
remember and what we forget? The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness.
Storing explicit memories and, equally important, forming connections between
them requires strong mental concentration, amplified by repetition or by intense
intellectual or emotional engagement. The sharper the attention, the sharper the
memory. “For a memory to persist,” writes Kandel, “the incoming information must
be thoroughly and deeply processed. This is accomplished by attending to the
information and associating it meaningfully and systematically with knowledge
already well established in memory.”35 If we’re unable to attend to the information
in our working memory, the information lasts only as long as the neurons that hold
it maintain their electric charge—a few seconds at best. Then it’s gone, leaving
little or no trace in the mind.

Attention may seem ethereal—a “ghost inside the head,” as the developmental
psychologist Bruce McCandliss says36—but it’s a genuine physical state, and it
produces material effects throughout the brain. Recent experiments with mice
indicate that the act of paying attention to an idea or an experience sets off a
chain reaction that crisscrosses the brain. Conscious attention begins in the frontal
lobes of the cerebral cortex, with the imposition of top-down, executive control
over the mind’s focus. The establishment of attention leads the neurons of the
cortex to send signals to neurons in the midbrain that produce the powerful
neurotransmitter dopamine. The axons of these neurons reach all the way into the
hippocampus, providing a distribution channel for the neurotransmitter. Once the
dopamine is funneled into the synapses of the hippocampus, it jump-starts the
consolidation of explicit memory, probably by activating genes that spur the
synthesis of new proteins.37
The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not
only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes
to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation
can’t even get started. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal
pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—
to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained
attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even
when we’re away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting,
inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web’s information stores
may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our
use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological
memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the Net’s capacious and easily
searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers.

The changes in our brains happen automatically, outside the narrow compass of
our consciousness, but that doesn’t absolve us from responsibility for the choices
we make. One thing that sets us apart from other animals is the command we have
been granted over our attention. “‘Learning how to think’ really means learning how
to exercise some control over how and what you think,” said the novelist David Foster
Wallace in a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005. “It means being
conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how
you construct meaning from experience.” To give up that control is to be left with
“the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”38 A
mentally troubled man—he would hang himself two and a half years after the speech—
Wallace knew with special urgency the stakes involved in how we choose, or fail to
choose, to focus our mind. We cede control over our attention at our own peril.
Everything that neuroscientists have discovered about the cellular and molecular
workings of the human brain underscores that point.

Socrates may have been mistaken about the effects of writing, but he was wise to warn
us against taking memory’s treasures for granted. His prophecy of a tool that would
“implant forgetfulness” in the mind, providing “a recipe not for memory, but for
reminder,” has gained new currency with the coming of the Web. The prediction may
turn out to have been merely premature, not wrong. Of all the sacrifices we make when
we devote ourselves to the Internet as our universal medium, the greatest is likely to be
the wealth of connections within our own minds. It’s true that the Web is itself a network
of connections, but the hyperlinks that associate bits of online data are nothing like the
synapses in our brain. The Web’s links are just addresses, simple software tags that direct
a browser to load another discrete page of information. They have none of the organic
richness or sensitivity of our synapses. The brain’s connections, writes Ari Schulman,
“don’t merely provide access to a memory; they in many ways constitute memories.”39
The Web’s connections are not our connections—and no matter how many hours we
spend searching and surfing, they will never become our connections. When we outsource
our memory to a machine, we also outsource a very important part of our intellect
and even our identity. William James, in concluding his 1892 lecture on memory, said,
“The connecting is the thinking.” To which could be added, “The connecting is the self.”

As far as "integrating technology into our lives" When you look at every single piece of technology that has come along in America since the 18th century, it has always been a case of "integrating our lives into technology" In the 1800's, the printed word held a monopoly on public discourse. Then the telegraph did. Then the telephone. Then the radio. In the 1980's it was clearly the television. Today i would argue that the television still holds the throne of "public discourse monopolist" since the GOP primaries is still a tv show, and any media on the internet about our own presidential candidacy is owned and controlled by the same TV broadcasters that have controlled television from the beginning. That may sound like a conspiracy, NBC, CBS and their subsidiaries see themselves as a public utility service like the post office and electricity and I can find direct quotes from their CEO's of this if requested.


Edit: Fora.tv is one of those sites that keep me on the internet. Check it out.
"Has Malcolm Gladwell's Opinion on Social Media and the Arab Spring Changed?" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j7Yv...&feature=g-u-u