Why People are so Nasty to One Another About What they Decide to Post Online

Here's how it happens:

Level 1: for a while people just post whatever they like onto the Internet, right? Because it's so vast, and so many people partake in its vastness, trends emerge in the ways people use the Internet to express themselves. These trends expand. People start to notice the trends. People start to get annoyed by the trends. Then:

Level 2: People start mocking the trends, calling out the internet cliches. But again, the Internet is vast. Trends emerge in mocking Internet trends, which people begin to notice and get annoyed by. Then:

Level 3: People start mocking the people who are mocking the initial trends....
&c.

Listen: just chill out, people. Stop depriving yourself and others of joy by heap commentary on top of commentary. Quit repeating things until they appear meaningless. Try to remember there's another person on the other side of that post with real emotions and personal issues. And most importantly: ignore me entirely.

Come to Indiana!

Workplace Tips for Being Funny & Making Everyone Love You

1) Be Sarcastic
They say sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but you don't care about that, do you? Your coworkers are idiots, I know. Besides, the lowest form of wit is still wit, right?
Here's a classic: When someone accuses you of being sarcastic say, "I don't even know what sarcasm means," but, and here's the key, when you say it, say it sarcastically. Master this, and you've got the comedic Midas Touch, my friend.

2) "That's what she said."
Use it! No one has ever gotten tired of this, despite our best attempts to kill it, so use it often. One TWSS per six sentences is the ideal ratio.

3) LOLcats
If the Internet has taught us anything, it's that people find misspelled words in inappropriate grammatical constructions to be adorable. Mimic this idiotic trend. It might not be funny, but it will make everyone everywhere love you for always.

4) Arbitrarily Insult
This is dangerous. Some coworkers report things to HR, and some carry guns. Use with extreme caution.
Now, everyone has something slightly odd about them. Find that thing about someone, exaggerate it, and mock it. If you smile when you say it, people will be okay with it. Once that happens you will be allowed to say oddly malicious things at work with impunity.

5) Mock Your Superiors
Listen: you aren't the only one with an unwarranted belief that you deserve a promotion. Yes, everyone is just as delusional as you are. Mocking your boss taps into these feelings, making your coworkers laugh, and making them like you. That's a double whammy.

6) Fake Inability to Hear
If the subject of not being able to hear something comes up, ALWAYS say "huh?" or "what?" This is the evergreen of workplace comedy.
If you have an accomplice, one of you can say "Come again?" and the other can say, "That's what she said." Another double whammy!

7) Respond to Someone Who is On the Phone
Easy to start, but hard to maintain. When someone answers their phone, "Hello," say back to them, "Hello" and continue interacting with them. This will require some improvisation, but the comedic benefits will outweigh the risk of failure, particularly if you are able to completely derail the other person's conversation.

8) Send New People to Look for Equipment That Doesn't Exist
"This memo is too long. I need the paper stretcher to make it all fit on one page." Need I say more?

9) Forward Hilarious Emails Other Comedic Gurus Send You
You can't always appear to come up with things on your own, but you can show your coworkers just how good your taste is.

10) Be Arrogant
Respond to every compliment with "I know."

11) Make Lopsided Lists
Never end a list of anything on an even multiple of five.

Stand Up Appearances 9.25-10.1.110

Hi folks!
I figured I'd post a list of upcoming stand up shows/open mics I'm participating in for this coming week. I'm gonna try and keep this up, so check back.

9.25 Louisville Comedy Underground 9pm $? The Bard's Town
9.27 Bard's Town Variety Shack 8pm FREE The Bard's Town
9.28 Caravan RAW 8pm $3 Comedy Caravan
9.30 The Young, Dumb, and Full of Comedy Show (on the spot competition) 9:30pm $3 The Bard's Town

(all of these are in Louisville, for the unaware).

Sorry to be so self-promotional, but it's a blog. I mean, isn't the point to blather incessantly about yourself and your ideas?

My Facts Trump Your Facts

Here's a relatively simple example of a big problem we have to deal with in some way: Sarah Palin misquotes a Wall Street Journal story to back up her earlier incorrect analysis of grocery store prices.

The actual details of the story aren't all that exciting. She said in a speech in Phoenix that grocery store prices had risen substantially. This was shown not to be the case by a journalist from WSJ, and she quoted the WSJ as supporting her statement: a quote from an article that actually contradicted her statement.

Grocery store prices aren't my concern here. Neither is Sarah Palin. In a minute when I start talking about government, don't think I mean Palin. What is my concern is that this case gives us an example of disagreements on two different levels. The first level, what do we do about the set of facts that we are faced with. That's a healthy, robust, necessary discussion. The second level, what the set of facts are. That is a dangerous, dangerous place to have a disagreement.

It's dangerous because disagreement on level 1 and disagreement on level 2, you'll find, are often used as mutually-supportive. When this happens, when two sides of a disagreement don't even have a common arena (e.g. the factual world) in which to disagree, the whole conversation is a lost cause.

What happens? No conversation. (In fairness, I should juxtapose that link with this one).

What's lost in all of that is that these disputes are being held at the level of governance. Which means, underneath some rather infuriating, obstinate fist-pounding ("My facts are the real ones, yours aren't!"), are real ordinary people, leading ordinary lives, who would rather have a functional government with some elasticity to handle the inevitable crises on our horizon.

But now we're faced with the problem of trying to sort out whose facts are correct (and convince the people who thought they had them that they really didn't. Good luck!). That can't be done perfectly, i.e. completely, but "most of the way done" or even half way would really be significant progress.

So, let me put on my Nostradamus hat for a second and predict that all kinds of candidates are going to be accused of blocking up the political process in 2012. When that happens, please remember, it's actually everyone's fault. Even ours.

I'll Back That Horse

Half as many 18-29 year-old voters came out in 2010 as came out in 2008. That wouldn't have turned the tide last night, I don't think. But I think it does tell us a heck of a lot about the demographic.

Not surprisingly, the young vote goes liberal (58% Democrat yesterday). Now, in 2008, 18% of voters were in that demographic, and this time 9%. In 2008, Obama was polling ahead of McCain, Democrats were projected to take over the Senate and the House, etc. The young vote backed the winning horse, after they had already been told who it would be.

Anecdotally, in 2008, when I voted, I saw several people in my generation at the polls. Yesterday, I was the youngest person in the building by a good 30 years.

This year, the projections were mainly in favor of the GOP, and young voters didn't turn out. Why? Well, it seemed like a lost cause to them. Of course, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in practice.

I stopped paying attention to baseball back in June when it was clear that the Cubs weren't going to put it together this year. The idea is the same: you minimize your feeling of loss if you make yourself apathetic about it ahead of time. And if you're apathetic about it, you'll certainly not bother to invest any effort, like voting.

Nevermind all of that "civic duty" talk, we don't want to hear any of that either. It reeks of Kant to those of us who know anything about Kant, and to those of us who don't, it sounds a heckuva lot like you're trying to tell us what to do. Well, buster, we are self-determining fully-fledged individuals, and goodness knows, we don't take orders from some vague concept like "duty".

I think the best way of getting my generation energized to vote isn't to hold Get Out the Vote rallies, or any of that. It clearly doesn't work. Instead, you should lie to us, and tell us we've got a sure thing here. We're going to win.

Heck yeah, I'll back that horse!

Oh my....

I'm posting a lot this week, but here goes...

In case you missed it, Glenn Beck claimed on his radio show that the theory of evolution is ridiculous and that he's never seen a half-man half-monkey before.

Now, call me old-fashioned, but I do so love when people who clearly have no clue what methodological science is all about pretend that their opinion of scientific theory matters. Let me explain something to you: scientific theories are arrived at and adopted by the scientific community. There are loads of criteria that determine their acceptance of any given theory: falsifiability--the logical possibility that the theory make a prediction that comes out false, fecundity--the property of a theory to create new avenues of research, explanatory value--the property of a theory to account for (at least as much, if not) more phenomena than its predecessor, & ontological cost--the number of things that the theory requires us to say exist in order to use it. That's a short list. (See Phillip Kitcher's "Believing Where We Cannot Prove" for more).

Now, when it comes to what we teach in our schools, the choice ought to be no choice at all. If we're teaching science, we teach what scientists use. We do this because we are preparing children for reality beyond elementary and high school. If your school board decides to teach Intelligent Design rather than Evolution, or alongside Evolution, as equivalently valid, when you get to a university and learn that Intelligent Design doesn't follow logically, requires that the Theory of Evolution be true, and isn't taken seriously by hardly anyone in the scientific community, you'll be in for a rude awakening, from a pragmatic point of view.

What the rest of the world thinks is irrelevant. What percentage of people accept evolution is irrelevant. If you'll pardon the vacuities, science is science, and opinion is opinion.

To teach anything but evolution (at least for the time being, barring the eventual replacement of Evolution by some other theory that better satisfies the criteria on the above list) is reprehensibly irresponsible.

Likewise, it is irresponsible to argue via a straw man against evolution. There is no claim that humans evolved from monkeys, or even apes. The contention is that we share common ancestry. We also share common ancestry with sewer rats.

One other point I'll make, regarding another idiotic thing Beck says in that clip: yes, it absolutely was difficult to convince people that the earth is round. Aristotle's cosmology is a concentric sphere model, which was a prevailing model between Ptolemy and Copernicus, yet still, in 1492 CE, the lay person thought the Earth was flat, scholars couldn't convince them, and people are still lied to about Columbus' grand vision of a round planet. Then again, between Copernicus and Newton, people were killed over claiming that the Earth revolves around the sun.

One more: look up the history of Einstein vs. the early quantum theorists, and that famous quote of Einstein's, "God does not play dice."

Yes, people are extraordinarily resistant to further developments in scientific theory. Luckily, science isn't interested in your opinion, it amounts to diddly-squat.