Disenchanted on the [evolution

of stupidity](//www.disenchanted.com/dis/humanity/brainbuilder.html?id=8Mir9Pz5):

“Michael Shermer once posed the question ”why do smart people believe

stupid things?” and answered it by saying that intelligent people are

very good at defending positions they arrived at by nonsmart means.

Everybody comes to hold opinions from some means other than logical

deduction, but then intelligent people can fall into a trap called the

confirmation biasD, where we leap on anything that justifies our

beliefs, but ignore or rationalize-away anything that contradicts

them. So the smarter you are, the better you are at self denial.”

And this…

“We could conclude that modern human intelligence is an unfinished

product, and something that nature hasn’t quite got around to

polishing yet. The problem-solving intelligence part can be tuned and

revved up to high levels, but it becomes unstable like early

supersonic jet prototypes that shook themselves to pieces just after

reaching the sound barrier. Nature has outstripped itself, producing a

freak organism with a feature that’s obscenely over-developed but

under-refined.”

Doc Searls asks what companies blog. Although I suppose he meant “which”, so far the answer

is: very few. I’m trying to change that. Around here anyway. Here’s his post

[Doc

Searls](//www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000813mag-boombox.html), speaking about the success of Google and Overture in the

ad market:

“Bye-bye to ad agencies. Bye-bye to creative, media and

account folks. Bye-bye to operational frictions and value-subtracting

costs and annoyances of all kinds. Give it time, and you’ll be saying

bye-bye to traditional media too.”

I suspect he’s once again exaggerating to make a point, but I’ll bet that he’s close.

The creation of small, perfectly-targeted ads are a holy grail that will be reached by

the geek community first, leaving (what remains of) agencies to scramble around trying

to figure out how to make sense of it all.

A discussion this week about discount codes during the checkout process prompted a debate about “society’s” perception of them. This study seems to suggest I was right arguing that “most people” don’t automatically look for and enter discount codes.

Craig Hughes (Deersoft) seems to be going through something similar

and [writes

about it](//www.hughes-family.org/craig/b2/index.php?p=53&c=1).

“At what point will I tip? Will the self-imposed pressure to actually achieve something

at some point swamp the feelings of guilt and the desire to maintain some element of

safety and certainty?”

There’s been some buzz about the new spam-fighting service, Mailblocks. Dan Gillmor comments

on Mailblocks terms of service agreement. Basically, it says that

Mailblocks can send you spam.

Looks like Dan Gillmor switched to Movable Type some time in December. A small blurb on his site explains what, but not why.

Shirky: Customer-owned Networks and ZapMail

Clay Shirky writes about the idea of customer-owned networks. He uses fax machines as an example.

“If the economics of internet connectivity lets the user rather than the network operator capture the residual value of the network, the economics likewise suggest that the user should be the builder and owner of the network infrastructure.

The creation of the fax network was the first time this happened, but it won’t be the last. WiFi hubs and VoIP adapters allow the users to build out the edges of the network without needing to ask the phone companies for either help or permission. Thanks to the move from analog to digital networks, the telephone companies’ most significant competition is now their customers, because if the customer can buy a simple device that makes wireless connectivity or IP phone calls possible, then anything the phone companies offer by way of competition is nothing more than the latest version of ZapMail. ”

I couldn’t decide if the New2Flash weblog

should be implemented seperately from my main weblog, or as an entirely

different blog. I wanted to play with a few of the blosxom plugins, so I

finally decided to implement it separately. Then I promptly changed my

mind, sort of. Today it hit me that one of the best thing about blosxom

and phposxom is a compatible and interchangable data format, duh. What I

ended up doing is symlinking the New2Flash data directory from within

the White Noise story directories, effectively giving me both!

Looks like Mary’s Hey! What’s for dinner has some competition from the idiots (like me). It’s called cooking for losers.