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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Apr 2018
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      Replying to @nils_gilman

      Clearly I have smarter millennial friends than you 😀 Sure there’s some availability bias but that’s true of all media. Academic western libraries have their own biases.

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
    2. Nils Gilman‏ @nils_gilman 21 Apr 2018
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      Replying to @vgr

      Obviously all archives & data sources have their limitations. But the peril of the Internet isn't just that it makes people more heavily weigh their judgments toward the latest news & information; it's also that the myth of the Net is that it's the only data source anyone needs.

      2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Apr 2018
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      Replying to @nils_gilman

      In general people triage, and pick their beyond-the-internet digging battles. If you’re not a professional academic with access to a good library and no cost to digging deep whenever, you have to pick battles. The Wikipedia gloss usually replaces ‘nothing’, not a scholarly tome.

      1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
    4. Nils Gilman‏ @nils_gilman 21 Apr 2018
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      Replying to @vgr

      Wikipedia strongly encourages intellectual satisficing.

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Apr 2018
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      Replying to @nils_gilman

      You’re judging random curiosities by academic research standards. Basically, in 1988, a random nerd who wondered about a question would conclude “too much trouble to figure out” and move on without ever learning *any* answer. In 2018, they’d look up Wikipedia at least

      1 reply 2 retweets 3 likes
    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Apr 2018
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      Replying to @vgr @nils_gilman

      Most random curiosity does not, and should not, seek more than satisficing. It’s better than knowing no answers, and better than trying to dive deep on everything indiscriminately. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing sure, but I prefer it to elites+illiterates condition.

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
    7. Nils Gilman‏ @nils_gilman 21 Apr 2018
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      Replying to @vgr

      Well, if the standard is “satisfying random curiosity” then yes, Wikipedia is the best thing ever. But if the standard is producing more knowledgeable (the OP said “better informed”) citizens, I beg to differ.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Apr 2018
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      Replying to @nils_gilman

      They *are* better informed. Just not about the things *you* think they ought to better informed about. Things that will give them more agency and opportunities and community in their own lives. “Better citizenship” is your priority for them.

      2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
    9. Soham Chowdhury‏ @evertedsphere 21 Apr 2018
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      Replying to @vgr @nils_gilman

      I think Nils and you are talking about slightly different things: his "knowledge" is more in line with how it works in soc-sci or philosophy, where you are expected to understand the heritage of an idea and how it responds to everything that came before it

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    10. Soham Chowdhury‏ @evertedsphere 21 Apr 2018
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      Replying to @evertedsphere @vgr @nils_gilman

      Wikipedia does encourage people to acquire CliffsNotes-style overviews of things, which is excellent for maths and physics (the radius of the first orbit in a hydrogen atom needs no context) but perhaps less so for the kind of "liberal arts" knowledge that citizenship goes with

      3 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Apr 2018
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      Replying to @evertedsphere @mrkgrnao @nils_gilman

      And I disagree about the context/history part. Wikipedia lets you go into massively long context bunnytrails. They just don’t stay on the paths academics think you ought to stay on for a subject, but jump around.

      9:21 AM - 21 Apr 2018
      • 4 Likes
      • Jeff Coleman 40% Evil Educator an end Soham Chowdhury
      2 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
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        2. 40% Evil Educator‏ @twneslscience 21 Apr 2018
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          Replying to @vgr @mrkgrnao @nils_gilman

          This makes argument from assumed shared knowledge foundations immensely frustrating. Nobody reads the supporting text an interlocutor links. The only thing I've found that works is mysterious quotes that they look up themselves.

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Apr 2018
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          Replying to @twneslscience @mrkgrnao @nils_gilman

          I have no sympathy for that frustration. We live in a post-canoncity age. Get used to persuasion by means other than everybody having read the damn Great Books syllabus.

          2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
        4. 1 more reply
        1. Soham Chowdhury‏ @evertedsphere 21 Apr 2018
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          Replying to @vgr @nils_gilman

          not all academics, I suppose http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/potentialstudents.html …pic.twitter.com/411OfuxMd0

          0 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
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