

This talk puts the eccentric absent-minded professor stereotype to rest once and for all. - amichail
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj8IA6xOpSk

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alyx
It is amazing and inspiring to see such energy and enthusiasm in another human
being. I gave him a standing ovation when the video finished, not because he
would care but because I had to show my appreciation.

~~~
dcurtis
I felt a similar need to show appreciation that I have never felt before when
finishing a video on YouTube.

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maximilian
He has these eery calm moments when he's focused enough to stop the twitching.
Like when he was saying that to know the future of society, we should ask
kindergarten teachers.

All my professors are just super smart and busy all the time. No time for
absentmindedness for them.

~~~
daltonlp
That's a rhetoric technique. He can slow down and focus whenever he feels like
it. The stage antics are great for keeping attention. When he slows down to
make a point, it really grabs the viewer's focus.

It's the public speaking equivalent of using headlines and layout and
typography to create a good reading experience.

Teachers (and comedians) do stuff like this all the time. His presenting style
is pretty well developed, especially for being so loose :)

~~~
pmorici
Maybe he as Aspergers syndrome like the character Jerry on the television show
Boston Legal.

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bayareaguy
Is there a transcript or summary of this anywhere? I just can't stand to watch
or listen to this guy.

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nickb
Clifford Stoll on Internet: <http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554>

~~~
ojbyrne
Damn. Same thought, less karma!

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ojbyrne
That would be the guy who produced this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143333> It's fun to see him live having
enjoyed his books.

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noonespecial
I like him. He must be a good teacher, whether his "act" is contrived or not.

When you do something the first time, its science.

When you do it the second time, its engineering.

When you do it the third time, its technology.

Brilliant.

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TrevorJ
That guy rocks. What makes me sad is I just realized I had a chance to hear
him speak once and didn't know who he was and I didn't go.

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phony_identity
That's an act and I don't trust him. For the real thing, watch Steve Wozniak.

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RichardPrice
This is wild, but terrific too.

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ChaitanyaSai
He needs one of those nourishment pouches that adorn marathon runners. His
will have Ritalin.

Also, listen to him and pay no heed to his ideas about the future; he wrote a
book about why the internet was going to be a dismal failure.

~~~
daltonlp
I see the same false claim in a lot of comments - "That guy said the internet
would suck, therefore he sucks".

That's not what Stoll said and wrote.

His articles and books (there are several books, all good reading) were
written in response to the brainless hype that was so prevalent then. This was
right in the middle of the dot-com bubble.

He said that pure technology won't solve human problems, and that we shouldn't
assume more benefits than we can prove. He wrote that the internet doesn't do
magic.

And Stoll didn't say "Hey, the internet sucks because I say so and I am me".
He did some research and discovered that people have said the _exact same
stupid stuff_ about television, and about radio.

TV and radio did cause societal changes, but they never came close to living
up to the grandiose claims made when they were new.

Stoll said "hey, maybe the hype about the internet isn't all entirely true
either".

And he didn't try to tear down the whole internet as worthless. He tried to
find some examples of things it couldn't do. Not just any things, but major
things - things that if you screw them up, you really regret it.

Specifically, he claimed:

1) The internet can't teach kids to read and write.

2) Some types of human interaction don't work over the internet. And these
happen to be some of the really important kinds of interaction.

That's about it.

If there's one thing I think Stoll may not be considering, it's the ability
for human society and culture to evolve and accommodate.

I guess we'll see about that.

Right now, it's pretty hard to disprove the fairly narrow claims he makes.

~~~
ChaitanyaSai
Research's always going to throw up some cautionary tales that the author will
add as a caveat to not come across as a complete fool. Here are some of the
claims he has made:

<http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554>

There's a specific claim here too: baloney to people buying books on the
internet

I am not saying he's an Andrew Keen or a James Glassman, but he is a pretty
middling futurist, which is to say he is no better than a coin flipper.

As for the idea that similar grand claims were made about television and radio
and they did not pan out, well they weren't democratic media that allowed
equal participation. This of course doesn't mean that the internet is the
second coming of a virtual Jesus, but basing predictions on few archaic data
in a dynamic environment doesn't make you a futurist, it makes you a bad
historian.

~~~
Tichy
Well, did you buy Yahoo or Google stock in time and became an internet
millionaire? If not, why not? Perhaps because you didn't predict their
success? So why should we listen to you?

if you put your thoughts on the line, you risk being wrong sometimes. It
doesn't invalidate all your other thoughts.

~~~
ChaitanyaSai
Revealing the thought process as he did does allow me to draw conclusions
about his general predictive success.

My definition for a futurist is someone who is a standard deviation better or
reasoned in his/her predictions than the median. Let us say that I am no good
at presaging, so of course you shouldn't give much credence to any predictions
I might make. However, predictions aren't what I am offering here. It is a
critique of his ideas and the generative process behind them.

~~~
Tichy
You predict that his predictions are bad.

