4 ms·

I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams' quote from Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to c

by Ygg2 7y ago

I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams' quote from Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

nothrabannosir 7y ago
Formatted for mobile: > Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
- thinkingemote 7y ago
  Thank you. I'd imagine a bot that does the same wouldn't be popult with the mods?
  - nvr219 7y ago
    Would sooner recommend adjusting the CSS
thinkingemote 7y ago
The huge ironic joke that made Adams a good writer was that the legend of the Tower of Babel was about nations coming together with a common language (which got up to haughty stuff)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- unityByFreedom 7y ago
  So, he was poking fun at the notion of a common language causing chaos (as in the Tower of Babel), right?
notacoward 7y ago
Very insightful. No, I'm not being sarcastic. The internet has in general been great for literally billions of people, but it's not an unalloyed good. It has a dark side, which Adams foresaw. Some people need to be kept isolated. It's great that people who suffer from some rare condition can find and support each other. It's not so great that Nazis can. I don't know the solution. I'm not sure anyone does, or even that there is one. Maybe this is why the rest of the universe seems so empty.
- spiderjerusalem 7y ago
  The darker phenomenon is that there seem to be a lot more Nazis (sympathizers at least) than one would deem normal.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    On the brighter side, things are not always as they seem.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    I think they've always been there. They've just been quiet about it, because they've been relatively isolated. The internet has allowed them to find each other, form stronger communities, and coordinate their actions (of which upvote/downvote brigades on sites like this one are the least of our worries BTW), making the whole much more potent than the sum of its parts. As I said, this same ease of communication is wonderful when it's all in a good cause, but it can also be used in a bad one.
dudul 7y ago
I've always loved this quote since war is so often presented as a failure to communicate :)
- n0rbwah 7y ago
  There's no incompatibility between speaking the same language and failing to communicate. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that most failures to communicate happen between people speaking the same language.
mistermann 7y ago
> by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures Often overlooked in my opinion is the significance of the unseen barriers to true, high fidelity communication. The ability to translate a written message from one language to another is surely beneficial, but even when sent between two parties who speak the same language, how successful is the "communication" really? Might we be vastly overestimating the magnitude of fidelity (the degree to which something is an accurate copy or translation of something else), where "something else" is often an extremely nuanced idea, with (often unseen) inter-relations to many other nuanced ideas? For the communication of any given idea, the sender must first attempt to get some reasonable conceptual handle on the idea themself (depending on the complexity of the topic, this is massively error prone right off the bat), pack it into a message in a relatively (compared to the complexity of reality itself) simplistic language (that they likely have a rather imperfect grasp of), put (using flawed communication/articulation skills) that message into some medium of transport (text, audio-only, verbal discussion via teleconference, in person verbal discussion, audio only presentation, audiovisual presentation, etc), each of which comes with it's own variety of shortcomings, and then the receiver must do all the same in reverse, subject to all the same problems, plus some additional issues like the human mind's tendency to subconsciously supplement received communications with additional information from mental storage, a process not detectable to the conscious mind. (This is what they said, but what did they really mean?). It seems to me a big part of the problem is that we've invested so much brainpower into figuring out how the physical world works, resulting in incredible technical achievements and tools that now have extremely widespread use, but we've invested a relative pittance into understanding how human minds and societies work. Just as nuclear weapons are dangerous in the hands of those who lack sufficient wisdom, might there be something similar going on with mass communication technologies? How would one even know the answer to such a question?

by Ygg2 7y ago

nothrabannosir 7y ago

Formatted for mobile: > Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

thinkingemote 7y ago
Thank you. I'd imagine a bot that does the same wouldn't be popult with the mods?
- nvr219 7y ago
  Would sooner recommend adjusting the CSS

thinkingemote 7y ago

The huge ironic joke that made Adams a good writer was that the legend of the Tower of Babel was about nations coming together with a common language (which got up to haughty stuff)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
unityByFreedom 7y ago
So, he was poking fun at the notion of a common language causing chaos (as in the Tower of Babel), right?

notacoward 7y ago

Very insightful. No, I'm not being sarcastic. The internet has in general been great for literally billions of people, but it's not an unalloyed good. It has a dark side, which Adams foresaw. Some people need to be kept isolated. It's great that people who suffer from some rare condition can find and support each other. It's not so great that Nazis can. I don't know the solution. I'm not sure anyone does, or even that there is one. Maybe this is why the rest of the universe seems so empty.

spiderjerusalem 7y ago
The darker phenomenon is that there seem to be a lot more Nazis (sympathizers at least) than one would deem normal.
- mistermann 7y ago
  On the brighter side, things are not always as they seem.
- notacoward 7y ago
  I think they've always been there. They've just been quiet about it, because they've been relatively isolated. The internet has allowed them to find each other, form stronger communities, and coordinate their actions (of which upvote/downvote brigades on sites like this one are the least of our worries BTW), making the whole much more potent than the sum of its parts. As I said, this same ease of communication is wonderful when it's all in a good cause, but it can also be used in a bad one.

dudul 7y ago

I've always loved this quote since war is so often presented as a failure to communicate :)

n0rbwah 7y ago
There's no incompatibility between speaking the same language and failing to communicate. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that most failures to communicate happen between people speaking the same language.

mistermann 7y ago

> by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures Often overlooked in my opinion is the significance of the unseen barriers to true, high fidelity communication. The ability to translate a written message from one language to another is surely beneficial, but even when sent between two parties who speak the same language, how successful is the "communication" really? Might we be vastly overestimating the magnitude of fidelity (the degree to which something is an accurate copy or translation of something else), where "something else" is often an extremely nuanced idea, with (often unseen) inter-relations to many other nuanced ideas? For the communication of any given idea, the sender must first attempt to get some reasonable conceptual handle on the idea themself (depending on the complexity of the topic, this is massively error prone right off the bat), pack it into a message in a relatively (compared to the complexity of reality itself) simplistic language (that they likely have a rather imperfect grasp of), put (using flawed communication/articulation skills) that message into some medium of transport (text, audio-only, verbal discussion via teleconference, in person verbal discussion, audio only presentation, audiovisual presentation, etc), each of which comes with it's own variety of shortcomings, and then the receiver must do all the same in reverse, subject to all the same problems, plus some additional issues like the human mind's tendency to subconsciously supplement received communications with additional information from mental storage, a process not detectable to the conscious mind. (This is what they said, but what did they really mean?). It seems to me a big part of the problem is that we've invested so much brainpower into figuring out how the physical world works, resulting in incredible technical achievements and tools that now have extremely widespread use, but we've invested a relative pittance into understanding how human minds and societies work. Just as nuclear weapons are dangerous in the hands of those who lack sufficient wisdom, might there be something similar going on with mass communication technologies? How would one even know the answer to such a question?