Don’t Drink And Blog
Prokofy Neva was recently banned from Terra Nova. Why?
Prok and Csven are banned. I’m tired of both of them.
Posted Jun 24, 2007 4:16:53 PM | link
If you’re trying to work out what the new policy is, here’s your guide: don’t make Dan Hunter tired or you’re banned. I’m pretty sure they’ve already banned turkey and warm milk. You could be next.
Greg L. tweaked the original post about comment policies and may tweak it again. That’s what happens when you drink and blog… either that or he just didn’t think about anything he was typing, which I’d never want to imply about an academic.
Back to Dan Hunter for a moment: has that guy ever written anything intelligent? So much of what he writes can be boiled down to: “Know that thing people are talking about? It sucks!” I’ve been searching and searching… here he is completely missing the point about net neutrality (free registration required). This guy is an Associate Professor. The gods of academia and intellect are weeping.
Prokofy’s post about the whole debacle gets pretty in-depth on Terra Nova’s long history of failure in genuine academia. Somewhere in the first quarter of her post (I swear Prok writes a book a day), this really struck me about this whole situation:
[...] a statement I believe to be true is a fact until proven wrong. That’s the bedrock of an open society and open debate: the right to be wrong, the right to posit even false statements, statements made on assumptions that may have been mistaken. No one is in possession of the truth; that means subjectively, each person makes their way, discovering facts that they believe to be true, and standing by them, until they can be persuaded otherwise. That’s not wrongheaded; that’s liberty.
(emphasis mine)
Now, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I often disagree with Prokofy. Our last argument even got pretty emotional on both sides, I think. This, however, is bang-on. This is what it means to be a human, and like it or not, that’s all any of us can ever hope to be.
Yeah, it gets tiresome, but that’s the great thing about the text medium - you can just not read it. Seriously. Free will ‘n all. You can scroll down.
The fact is that we need forums where people challenge any and all ideas and propose new ones. We need intelligent discourse, and a good mix of radical thinkers really hammering the hell out of the things that matter to us. It needs to happen publicly, and it needs to happen constantly. Anything less and we’ll get orthodoxy, beaurocracy, and ultimately an imposed morality by the self-satisfied “powers that be”. Innovation will either become a quaint historical footnote or the domain of the insane.
So this is where we are: Terra Nova jumped the shark ages ago and is determined to become fully and completely useless. Gamasutra has the best gaming analysis online, but they don’t have much in the way of a discussion (it’s owned by CMP anyhow, so they have corporate interests to protect). Most forums seem to be either entirely sophomoric, randomly censored, or corporate controlled. What’s left?
Just blogs.
I’m extremely proud of what Nick and I have accomplished at Metaversed.com; we manage to get a lot of good discussion not only on the stories but in person at Nick’s events. There are also the blogs of the major pundits like Prokofy Neva, Eric Rice, and many many others who offer genuine insights and promote further discussion. (Those were just the two that came to mind at the moment because they’ve “made news” over the last 24hrs… please don’t feel slighted if I missed you.)
The blogosphere is full of genuine genius. It’s all over the place and disorganized, but it’s honest and true. A bit like real life, actually.
Maybe a decent blogroll is all we need for genuine discourse. Who would you list? They need to meet two criteria:
- They think before they type, and finish the thought before ending the post.
- They promote further discussion.
June 26th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Views about Terra Nova are starting to sound like the famous description of democracy: an awful academic site for academic discussion of virtual worlds, but better than the alternatives.
Maybe blogs and forums are simply not the right place for academic discussions….
June 26th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
So what is?
I haven’t found anybody saying it’s better than the alternatives, although I’m sure you could find a few things it’s better than.
June 26th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Mind you, it was Prok. It does tend to go on a bit! And there is such a thing as absolute truth. This relative truth rubbish is fashionably post-modern but ultimately a useless intellectual tool. If Prok truly believes that, why does it spend so much time arguing about these topics?
June 27th, 2007 at 11:05 am
Well because the argument itself is the only real truth.
Intellect is, to a certain degree, an over-valued concept anyhow. Unlike creativity, which is universal, for practical purposes intellect is only effective in select situations.
Intellect is vital to science, for instance. When it comes to psychology, however, intellect can override better judgement to the detriment of the patient. It’s this type of moment that something else needs to come in… something not based in the perceived solidity of fact.
When it comes to business and getting things done, too much intellect can impede the decision-making process and bankrupt you. The world is full of rich idiots.
Post-modernism, like all philosophy, is useful only in its application. I’m not a big fan of spending a lot of time with philosophy in general… but then again, that’s my personal philosophy.
Oh god. What the hell am I doing? I’m going to crack open that bottle of rum and play Half-Life 2 tonight… shoot some bad guys…
July 2nd, 2007 at 12:12 am
“Post-modernism means never having to say ’sorry’”
July 25th, 2007 at 5:40 am
First of all, many people are in possession of the truth. Unless you are a complete skeptic, and only believe “Cogito ergo sum,” there are all kinds of things that we all understand as being “true.”
Secondly, even if you believe that everyone’s truth is equally deserving, and that nobody is in possession of “the” truth, that doesn’t mean that some statements are demonstrably untrue. I can sit here at my desk and say I’m commenting from Lebanon, in the year 1972. Mmmm… Not so much.
So while some people may not be in possession of the truth, some people are definitely in possession of not-truth.
Prok says that he never made comments over 400 words on TN. In a quick search of the archives at TN, the *first* comment I found from Prok contained 1,129 words. See:
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/06/censoring_sexua.html
So… while I may not be in possession of “the truth,” I am in possession of a word processor with word-count, and eyeballs, and memory. Prok and I both went over 400 words on many occasions.
I’m just not delusional about my particular brand of silliness.
July 25th, 2007 at 7:07 am
Andy - What is the point you’re trying to make exactly? Prokofy types a lot?
July 25th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Caleb: No. Not at all. And I think, though, and said that the 400 word limit on comments was odd/bad/dumb. And I often type a lot, too. I never had a problem w/ the length of Prok’s posts, per se.
The point I’m making is that he denied ever writing comments longer than 400 words, and challenged his readers to find an example. So I did.
When discussing stuff, rationality isn’t just related to “truth” in terms of big, soft, philosophical ideas. It’s hard enough to have civil discourse about things that are essentially related to feelings and opinions, where disagreement is really based on a point of personal preference. Which is all good.
But if Prok is ready to deny and challenge something as readily measurable as the length of his responses… that’s disconnected to a level of reality in a way that I (and, I suspect, many) aren’t ready to participate with.
We can go back and forth for days on stuff we disagree on. That’s cool. That’s what open forums are about. But you can’t just say stuff that’s demonstrably false and expect people to then go, “Oh, well… just a difference of opinion.”
July 25th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Enh… because it’s SO black and white it’s really hard for me to see that as anything more than a random flub. I’m getting the sense you’re implying that this is an example of a larger issue than that though.
July 25th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Well, now Prok is saying (on his blog) that he was referring only to comments after the 400 word limit was put into place.
But on the comment policy post itself:
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/06/comment_policy.html
comment lengths from Prok include 501 and 428.
Now… I don’t normally pick nits at this level. But I read his response/challenge on his blog to be about all comments:
“Seriously, Rhys, I challenge you to do a simple thing. Go to Terra Nova. Read my posts. Even in this last thread only, or go to many of the last ones. I challenge you to find a single one of the following: personal attack, vulgarity, nastiness, off-topic, more than 400 words.
I read the “many of the last ones” to mean “recent.” He says he meant just the ones made after the new rules.
The word-count thing was the easiest (and most quantifiable) to check. I’ve often enjoyed Prok’s comments on TN and elsewhere, but don’t think he gets how irritating he can be, nor what constitutes “nasty,” “personal” or “off-topic.” Those are, of course, subjective qualifications. But on many posts, the comments went back to earlier/other issues that had nothing to do with the topic. And if Prok’s definition of moderately polite, online discussion isn’t up to the standards of multiple blogs… well, that’s the price for being an iconoclast.