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Terry Pratchett - >'OK, lets say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely r
by inflatableDodo 7y ago
Terry Pratchett -
>'OK, lets say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research that has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It's all there: there's no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it all up.'
Bill Gates -
>'Not for long. Electronics gives us a way of classifying things. You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something. For all practical purposes there'll be an infinite amount of text out there and you'll only recieve a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says, "Hey, go read this", or a brand name which is associated with a group of referees, or a particular expert, or consumer reports, or the equivalent of a newspaper... they'll point out the things that are of particular interest. The whole way you can check on someone's reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the net than it is in print today.'
Well, it appears that a children's comedy novelist had more insight into this subject than the guy who ran Microsoft. How would Bill's mystical reputation system deal with this?
edit - I did not think that calling Pratchett a children's comedy novelist would raise so much ire. I think there might be one or two books of his I have not (yet) read and I am currently in a mania of fear and excitement over whether Sky will do justice to 'Good Omens' in the upcoming TV series.
For those who think I am denigrating Pratchett in some way by the description, I am put in mind of the quote from C.S. Lewis - “A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
- captainredbeard 7y agoMaybe Bill is complicit due to the political usefulness of fake news?
- inflatableDodo 7y agoI was thinking it might just be a fox vs hedgehog thing. http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/jan/26/why-foxes-are-better-forecasters-than-hedgehogs/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/jan/26/why-foxes-are-bette... On tech, Gates is more of a hedgehog and Pratchett is more of a fox, so we might actually expect Pratchett's predictions to be better.
- mistrial9 7y agoGates was a blue-blood capitalist, and literally could not imagine people cooperating in a commons with sophisticated computers, because money. Whatever Gates is referring to in that quote very likely has some hobbled assumptions that are hard to conceptualize in 2020.
- pteraspidomorph 7y agoChildren's comedy novelist?
- ptah 7y agoare you saying windows is a weak joke?
- inflatableDodo 7y agoOne of the best children's comedy novelists to have ever put ink to paper, in my opinion.
- codingdave 7y agoBill Gates is smart and successful, but that doesn't mean he is omniscient. He has made mistakes and said many things through his career that turned out to be false. As have we all. This isn't a personal flaw, it is just being human. But people do need to remember that his success doesn't make him wise or prescient, just successful.
- goto11 7y agoI think what Gates suggest is something like the "web of trust" which W3C was working on as part of the semantic web. The idea is basically if I trust A and A trust B then I can trust news articles written by B. I'm pretty skeptical it is workable online as a technical solution. But basically this is how trust worked in the newspaper age. ("This was published in the reputable newspaper XXX")
- tjoff 7y agoThough that's how it works today isn't it? It's just that ads are more important so google and facebook et al couldn't care less.
- 013a 7y agoTo be fair, there's some accurate insight in Bill's response that shouldn't lead anyone to just conclude that he was totally wrong. Terry correctly predicted fake news, but Bill also correctly predicted our response to it, which would be to form centralized authorities (like what Facebook is doing), algorithmic newsfeeds, sharing systems, reputation systems, etc. He even says "not for long", like he agreed that it would happen but we'd solve it. Though the jury's still out on whether we'll solve it.
- Fellshard 7y agoYou undersell both Pratchett's target audience and his already-known deep insight into his humanity tends to operate.
- quirmian 7y ago> children’s comedy novelist Do you also consider HHGTTG to be a toddler’s bedtime story? - A butthurt Discworld fan in his mid 30s.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago>Do you also consider HHGTTG to be a toddler’s bedtime story? Wrong person to ask. For me it was a toddler's bedtime story. My dad used to play the radio series for me when I was very little. Though I have read the books countless times since then and used to be able to quote the first one in its entirety.
- josephorjoe 7y agoNo one who has read Terry Pratchett will be surprised that he has deep insight into human nature. His books are full of explorations of what motivates humans and how humans misunderstand each other. They are also frequently hilarious. Bill Gates quote seems to reveal an expectation that humans would respect authority and be guided by it in their decision making -- which shows a shallow understanding of human nature. The quote also anticipates that information distribution would flow through personal and professional connections and interests rather than being organized in a way to generate the most ad revenue possible.
- sbmassey 7y agoThe Pratchett's I have read seem to be full of basic human archetypes, riffed off for comedic effect, rather than anything approximating how real people think. He's no Shakespear/James Joyce/Henry James.
- ptrott2017 7y agoI was not a fan until I recently re-read all his work - but I dont think he ever would have claimed to be a shakespeare or a Henry James. I would say a more apt comparitive group would probably be Rabelais, Swift,Verne, Vonnegut, Voltaire, Wells, Wilde and Woodehouse - all of which he certainly is an equal writer to and his overall body of work sits well with.
- gubbrora 7y agoI think they were both kinda right. What Gates didn't foresee was the extent to which trust became centralized and how that created a need to keep the authorities in check and how keeping them in check enabled fake news.
- chongli 7y agochildren's comedy novelist Technically accurate, but extremely crude. Terry Pratchett was brilliant. The Discworld novels are absolutely jam-packed with insightful commentary on our society and its strange values and all of the contradictions we seem to ignore on a daily basis. Terry is an absolute legend in the hacker community, so much so that he and his works have been immortalized in the official version of NetHack [1] (itself an icon of hacker culture). [1] https://www.nethack.org/download/3.6.0/announce.360 https://www.nethack.org/download/3.6.0/announce.360
- inflatableDodo 7y agoI do not underestimate the level that Pratchett's comedy can operate at. It took me maybe 15 years for the penny to drop between first reading 'Unseen University' and connecting it to the Invisible College of Robert Boyle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College May I note that being brilliant does not stop someone from being a children's comedy novelist. If people are annoyed by this, perhaps they should think better of children's novelists, rather than insisting I call Pratchett something different so as not to injure the egos of adults who enjoy his writing.
- dTal 7y agoIf adults enjoy his writing, in what sense are they children's novels? Speaking personally, they were all fairly over my head when I was a child. As an adult, they sparkle.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago>If adults enjoy his writing, in what sense are they children's novels? In the sense that novels by people like Joseph Conrad or J. G. Ballard are not. 'Empire of the Sun' was one one of my favourite novels as a young teenager, but it was hard work in comparison to Pratchett. The difference in intended audience was utterly clear.
- pdpi 7y agoThat description seems more appropriate for, say, Roald Dahl than it does for Pratchett. Pratchett was, for the most part, a comedy fantasy author. Most of his writing was appropriate for younger audiences (with exceptions, like Monstrous Regiment), but I wouldn’t call it children’s books. The fact that his Tiffany Aching books are specifically aimed at the Young Adult market suggests that he agreed.
- epicide 7y agoI mean, Bill wasn't really wrong. Just maybe naive? People have been lying/wrong in print forever. This is not new [0]. What's new is the vast amount of information. He was definitely correct with "for all practical purposes there'll be an infinite amount of text". What he got wrong is that he seemed to have expected these "referees" to grow vertically when they grew horizontally. Instead of multiple levels of referees filtering the output of one another, we ended up with a few players that vastly outpaced the rest [1]. The rest is the same thing that happens anytime you have a monopoly or relatively few big players. The big players get bigger and bigger. The barrier to entry grows with them. Before long, they control the space. That space includes the information and the flow of information within it. Sure, they don't have perfect control, but they control enough of it to shape it to however they need (Facebook is a great example of this). Today, we can all rattle off maybe a dozen companies that clearly control the internet. It is not the wild west anymore. There is the odd exception that might wrestle control of a niche space for a while (e.g. GitHub, Reddit), but once they get big enough to show up on Google's [2] radar, they're bought, threatened, replaced, or somehow otherwise removed. And then there are things like analytics. [0]: No, I don't have a source or example, but surely I don't need it to say "somebody has lied in a book or newspaper before". [1]: Namely, Google. [2]: Or some other Big Internet Company™.
- orpheline 7y agoI'm gonna play optimist and note Gates' "not for long" in his response. I think we're still early days in fake news, and I think society has been here before: broadsheets, polemics, and a lack of trust in news sources in the 19th century ultimately drove improvements in the 20th. Now in the 21st that's been destabilized; we'll ultimately craft mechanisms to winnow out the chaff, but it's a reactive process: the problem needed to exist before we could address it.
- dmfdmf 7y agoThis is exactly right. We are (still) in the midst of one of the greatest social revolutions since the invention of the printing press. The invention of the internet has changed the assumptions behind sources of reliable news, funding journalism and control of the political agenda. It is an open question how this revolution will play out but it is clear that the major newspapers such as NYT, WashPo, WSJ, etc. cannot dominate the social narrative as they did in the past which is one reason why everything seems so divisive and scary today. The current uncertainty is not sustainable, so it won't be sustained. But what will take its place is still not clear and the fading influence (and mistrust) of what used to be reliable news sources is all part of the process. For those interested in this viewpoint I highly recommend reading Clay Shirky's excellent article from 2009 "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"[1]. [1] http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...
- lioeters 7y agoThat was a relevant and prescient article, especially drawing the parallel between our current uncertain news/media situation with the social changes that occurred after the invention of the printing press. I guess it comes down to how big leaps in information technology act as catalyst for a disruptive reorganization process in society. Interestingly, the transition from paper to digital media is turning out to have unexpectedly larger implications, disrupting institutional power, control of narrative, facts (and "facts"), knowledge, public awareness, intellectual property, ideologies.. --- Pithy lines I liked: "If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?" "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism." Added to my reading list: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Elizabeth Eisenstein)