
Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995) - nostrademons
http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306
======
ChuckMcM
Priceless! Cliff would not doubt have a good laugh at what he got wrong.

I was involved in a discussion this weekend that had a similar tone around
people becoming _too_ future aware. Specifically when you know a lot about the
underlying technology (as Cliff does (and did) about networking) you tend to
extrapolate what you know, but when you don't know anything about the
underlying technology you tend to extrapolate your imagination.

People can imagine wondrous things. And when they tell an engineer to go build
it, that engineer starts working backward from what would have to be true in
order to have that amazing capability, and starts working on the pre-cursors.

Of all the things he got wrong I think there is a lot of resonance in the
online education thing. I've done a few Coursera and MIT-X courses and while
it could be my previous experience clouding my expectation, I personally learn
better when the teacher is in the room and I can ask questions as they arise.
Too often I start trying to answer a question to get clarity and get
distracted into a whole new train of thought. That makes the learning process
much slower and less satisfying for me.

~~~
ricksplat
Agree on education - it's not just the teacher, it's also about being part of
an actual class - the social dimension if you will - you learn as much from
your classmates as you do from your teachers and indeed as many opportunities
arise through the network you develop there too. Another benefit is that being
part of a herd forces you to keep moving briskly through the material without
getting to stuck on any one thing. There is a lot to be said too for the
social support that is available when you have direct access to teachers and
classmates. Doing any challenging course of learning is sufficiently taxing in
this regard. I do see many online and distance learning approaches trying to
tackle some of these confounding "emotional" aspects to education but I don't
think they're quite there yet.

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jwoah12
> _Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we
> 'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure._

Link to "Get Newsweek on your iPad" directly below the article. I love it.

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leejoramo
Alas, this Cliff Stoll's essay doesn't hold up well.

If you haven't read Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg, you really should. It recounts
online life in the 1980's and Stoll's own real involvement in uncovering an
online espionage ring.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg)

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jgrowl
I feel like hitting a paywall on an article that shows the irrelevancy of the
old media is somehow very fitting.

~~~
dublinben
PDF mirror:
[http://blogs.sfu.ca/departments/continuingstudies/wiredrepor...](http://blogs.sfu.ca/departments/continuingstudies/wiredreporter/wp-
content/uploads/2012/12/Clifford-Stoll-Why-Web-Wont-Be-Nirvana-Newsweek-and-
The-Daily-Beast.pdf)

------
SilasX
Semi-OT: Kind of an odd metaphor to use, the year after the band Nirvana
"ended" with the death of the lead. The web won't end with a shock to its
head?

I see this problem a lot: even if you know what a metaphor refers to, it can
be unclear how its use is intended:

arms-length transaction: so wait, _within_ arms length, or beyond arms length?
(The term is used for the latter.)

sanguine: sang ... blood? So you feel bloody about this? What does that have
to do with optimism? (I know, the four humors thing, but it's still weird.)

~~~
dragonwriter
> arms-length transaction: so wait, within arms length, or beyond arms length?
> (The term is used for the latter.)

Actually, its usually used to mean _at_ arms-length, _neither_ closer _nor_
farther: maintaining a distance that is close enough for the contact necessary
to perform the transaction, but no closer.

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jsnk
I welcome these kind of bold predictions, and unfortunately we see this less
and less nowadays. Perhaps it's because it's easier to get called out than
before with all the claims you make online nowadays being pretty much be set
in stone.

Anyways, I would enjoy reading bold predictions about the future that's
falsifiable rather than wishy-washy useless articles titled "7 reasons why
Uber is winning." or "Why less users are joining Twitter."

------
Nadya
Amazing how much everything has changed in 20 years as to make nearly every
single sentence of this article wrong to a hilarious extent.

Thank you for sharing this. It didn't tickle my intellectual curiosity, but
it's a nice reminder of how bad humans can be at predicting even short-term
changes. :)

~~~
api
He was right about at least once major thing: tele-presence is largely a
failure. It's 2015 and most of the Internet industry is concentrated within
the Bay Area because people need to be near one another to interact richly.
This is a direct demonstration of the failure of the Internet to permit truly
rich long range human communication; the very people who build it can't use it
to escape their local rent bubble despite strong economic incentive to do so.

~~~
wvenable
I don't think it's a failure, it's just not ubiquitous. We have huge tele-
presense units in most of our offices to facilitate meetings that used to
require plane rides and hotels.

~~~
api
They also had hypertext in 1969:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

It's a failure in the sense that it's not generally available or in general
use. I've also used tele-presence rooms before and they're not that great.
Better than Skype or Google Hangouts, but not by much.

------
vezzy-fnord
Well, Stoll was correct about the governmental aspect at least. Of course, his
experiences pursuing Markus Hess made that quite evident, I'd assume.

------
n7c3c1
I wonder what the equivalent of this is today. What are people saying will
NEVER happen? Maybe self-driving cars?

~~~
SilasX
Passing the Turing Test. Understanding consciousness.[1] Communicating human
values to a computer so that it doesn't produce absurd judgments. VR
simulations indistinguishable from reality.

[1] Edit: people have different standards for this, of course, but something
like, "where have a global, working model of a large domain in which
predictions of consciousness aren't a special case, and in which people who
study it feel like it makes sense and is less mysterious".

~~~
Retra
Computers that can make ethical, legal, and moral decisions. Or ones that can
do all three better than humans can.

~~~
andreasvc
Sure computers can make such decisions, be it with /dev/random or some
sophisticated classifier. But we'd want justifications, and it's difficult to
define what that entails. Moreover, what does it mean for a computer to be
"better" at this than humans? The whole problem is ill defined.

~~~
Retra
Yes, it is ill defined _right now_. Are you willing to bet that it _can 't_ be
properly defined? Or even that is currently _is_ properly defined, and you
just haven't been exposed to the definition?

~~~
andreasvc
I am saying it's not a technological problem, it's a social problem.

~~~
Retra
You're certainly not saying anything _useful_.

I have personally made some headway on this problem, and I wouldn't be saying
it was possible if I hadn't. Your inability to find a workable framework is
more evidence to me of your lack of imagination than it is that the problem is
fundamentally unsolvable. There's a finite number of consistent models to
explore, and one of them will give us what we want.

It doesn't matter if you want to call that a technological problem or a social
problem; the world isn't actually divided in those terms. So saying "social
problems" strikes me as starting with a shitty model of what we are capable
of. It's also just corporate-talk and there's no reason to expect it to be
valid in this domain. The best that distinction has ever done is prime
somebody to employ an actual problem solving technique.

~~~
andreasvc
Are we talking about the same thing? You have made a definition of morality
that philosophers and other people will all agree on? Where do you get this
"finite number of consistent models" from?

~~~
Retra
>You have made a definition of morality that philosophers and other people
will all agree on?

No, I have one that works. I really don't care what any philosophers have to
say about it. And if you think everyone has to agree to something before it
can be useful, then I can see why you'd think this is a social problem.

>Where do you get this "finite number of consistent models" from?

There's a finite number of people, a finite number of configurations their
brains have been in, and thus a finite number of models provided by those
configurations.

~~~
andreasvc
Again, I could hand-wavingly claim that /dev/random "works". What does "one
that works" mean? You may not care for philosophers, but making claims about
morality is definitely within their territory, plus it's a philosophical claim
in itself to state that philosophy is not relevant.

The argument about finite brain configurations is not compelling. There's no
reason why only brain states that have occurred would be relevant. Morality
deals with hypotheticals and counterfactuals: what would be the moral judgment
in this or that situation. I think it would be uncontroversial to claim that
there are an infinity of such hypothetical situations, and each model of
morality can deal with them differently, ergo you get an infinity of possible
models.

~~~
Retra
I wouldn't claim that philosophy is not relevant, I would claim that our
current batch of philosophers are. _I 'm_ a philosopher in as much a sense as
it matters to this question, and I don't need others' approval to reach a
conclusion. I'm not trying to run a popularity contest, after all.

>What does "one that works" mean?

It means it is both consistent with reality and useful.

>There's no reason why only brain states that have occurred would be relevant.

The reason those ones are relevant is because those are the only ones
available for analysis. Those are the brains that determine what "human"
currently means. We could evolve into toads in 100B years, but you'd hardly
aspire to create a toad brain and call it a good human brain.

>I think it would be uncontroversial to claim that there are an infinity of
such hypothetical situations, and each model of morality can deal with them
differently, ergo you get an infinity of possible models.

You are confusing the multitude of possible moralities with the multitude of
counterfactuals they model. More importantly, you or forgetting that we are
only concerned with _relevant_ moralities and _relevant_ counterfactuals, and
that we have to make our developments _incrementally_ , and in finite time,
which massively constrains the possibilities.

There are an infinite number of ways to skin a cat, but that doesn't mean we
can't have a useful notion of the "right way" to do it.

