How Improperly Presented Facts Fosters Lies

I just wanted to post an article I put up on Medium that doesn't quite fit my normal topics.

https://deathshadow.medium.com/facts-can-be-used-to-lie-a-lesson-in-critical-thinking-a961fe2f949c

There are too many lies on just about every topic taken as fact, but worse SUPPORTED by facts. The lie of omission and falsehood of "share" both contribute to these false conclusions, so I thought I'd outline how/where/why it happens.

Because honestly I see right through it, and wonder why the blazes nobody else does.

 

Oh, but they do. Lawyers/politicians bend and twist the truth in order to win. And sheeple believe the lies because they want to, and also the lies fit nicely into their narratives, political and otherwise.

 

In other words what I'm quoting all the time. Wizard's First Rule.

"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true" -- Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander, Wizard of the first order, protector of the Seeker.

 

most people are sheep

 

My reaction in that situation is that it would trigger my fight reflex. I would either end up yelling and screaming "what the *** are you people doing?" or getting up, leaving, and slamming the door on the way out so hard it shatters the glass.

But I'm not neurotypical with my overactive vmPFC. Makes me hypercriticial, not want to participate in "bandwagon"... Even if I didn't know it was an experiment, just watching that sets my teeth on edge.

It's amazing what we're learning about the pre-frontal cortex. Damage or under-function being directly related to the willingness to believe without facts, complete dysfunction being the biological difference between a psychopath and sociopath, with many so afflicted turning into radical religious extremists, terrorists, and so forth.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3085837/

Whilst those with over-function like myself are immune to many propaganda techniques, and by extension the very concept of "faith" -- the biggest lie and greatest problem plaguing humanity. It's why I'm left flabbergasted and floored every time some nose-breathing half-tweet "believer" says "Screw reality, I've got God and a moldy old tome written by goat herders who didn't know where the sun went at night".

 

@deathshadow hehehe, why get angry for someone else stupidity?
I would sit there and laugh my ass off at them.
Also when I see those political rally's or some other. Especially those that last for days.
The first thing that comes to my mind is "who pays their bills when they have so much time to waste on some dumb things like that and in the end nothing will change. lol
About religion, south park explained Mormons quite well

 

Complaining about the opinion of others seems very much so aligned with your normal topics. The article was very bloated so I didn't have enough time to finish it. But what caught my eye was that you wrote it based on feedback you received on your other article "PHP is not dying". That article I found interesting....

I feel at times people form a negative perception about PHP based off from other peoples opinions or/and outdated information on an evolving language which is unfair. Personally I have always been a fan of PHP and I feel the language has grown to be very mature and reliable. I have always recommended PHP as a language for web development too. However, I did hit that wall with the language a couple years back. The old school traditional way of running Apache and using PHP is just dated. We had major performance problems and were forced into optimizing prematurely. We got to the point that it became a headache to deal with. We decided to switch to Golang and right out of the box it handled our traffic quite well. It was less expensive on resources and cost of operation too. I would never say PHP is terrible but I don't think I would recommend it again for a commercial project with high traffic. I just think for our use case of needing an API backend system Golang was more suited. I won't go in to all the details but I regret using PHP. I think most people perceive PHP as dying because it no longer is the right tool in todays worlds where Single Page Applications are making multiple calls to backend API system. However, if your web site is small with low traffic and is a multi page application it probably would be much quicker to write it in PHP.

PHP isn't dying... it's just paralyzed and smoking cigarettes until it passes. Golang, Node,js and Python are better choices.

 

That's not what it's about. It's about recognizing manipulative LIES people treat as "opinion".

Sorry, for my "regular fans" I should have said "Bald Faced LIES".

Which whilst I agree with, is also comedy gold. Why?

COMEDY!!!

https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.webserver.php

It's not quite production-ready, thus the big red warning box... but they're working on it. It can now self-host and doing so works an awful lot like how node.js does.

Honestly I'm sick of SPA being thrown at everything. Because it's inherently an accessibility violation unless you put the time and effort in to have it gracefully degrade scripting off (at which point why make it an SPA if you have to write it both ways?!?) It is a task complexity mismatch for the majority of stuff people are using it for.

Certainly there are legitimate usage cases. Stuff like Google Maps? Fine. Realtime chats or push driven sites like
Twitter? whatever. But for the vast majority of web content it causes far more problems than it solves, and seems to be used as a crutch by people who have ZERO business coding the front-end of websites in the first place.

Again, see all the quacks, morons, and fools who use rubbish framework nonsense to write two to ten times the code needed to do the job, violate the separation of concerns, and in general flip the bird at semantics and accessibility.

NOT saying you can't build SPA that meet all the standards, it just seems like most people don't. SPA have their place and are great for live push data driven sites... but for the majority of web content it's being used as a brush to sweep bad code under the rug. <broken class="record">MOST of the time if people would stop blowing 200k of HTML on 16k or less' job, half a megabyte of CSS across dozens of files to do the job of 48k or less in one file. and megabytes of scripting on pages that might not even warrant the presence of JavaScript, maybe they wouldn't be throwing good code after bad.</broken><!-- .record -->

I had a client recently who had an Angular driven / node.js mess that fit that description. They had half a megabyte of server-side code, gibberish to nonexistent semantics, six times the HTML needed to do the job resulting in heavy server load, no scripting off graceful degradation, for a twelve page website advertising two products, having no shopping cart, and one contact form for quotes.

The kicker was the reason they came to me was WCAG violations, and when I said "scripting off graceful degradation" their IT director vehemently insisted that people browsing the web without JavaScript wasn't a thing or numerous enough to worry about. To which I replied "The mere fact you say that explains why the complaint list includes users saying they were getting blank white screens instead of content. Proving you aren't qualified to flap your yap about any of this. Shut up, sit down, and learn."

Another set of clown shoes that in the end I had to tell their bosses to fire. His second was much more willing to listen and learn.

In the end, I switched them back from node.js to PHP and by recreating the entire thing from scratch without the SPA rubbish, I didn't just fix the accessibility woes. I was also able to make it load faster, consume a fraction the server load, and in general increase their traffic. Better still between me and what remained of their in-house staff, we got it done -- from scratch -- so fast the prosecutor dropped the case!

It's actually amazing how often if you get the company to admit fault, say "my bad, we didn't know", and actually fix the problems promptly, you can defuse the situation instead of letting it escalate. It's the number one advice I give to clients in that situation. Admit wrongdoing, and fix it. The faster you do both, the less you're going to face in fines, harassment, and general headaches.

Another reason Winn-Dixie are the adults in the room, and Domino's is the petulant child throwing a temper tantrum so badly, the Supreme Court slammed the door in their face.

Again, not saying SPA don't have places they make perfect sense, but if it's anything public facing involving sales or service, you're just begging to get bent over the log like poor Ned Beatty. It's another tool in the toolbox... and whilst some would say the typical lame excuse "don't blame the tool", I say stop trying to drive screws with a hammer.

 

Not quite production-ready is the key phrase. When it becomes production ready combining it with PHP JIT makes PHP more attractive. I still think there needs to be a bit more growth to keep up with what other "modern" languages are doing right now and have been for years.

For user interfaces for control panels SPA's have been great to work with. Having the web app operate much like a desktop app or mobile app has been a huge win from my experience. I would never use it to build a regular web site with though. But backend products and SAAS control panels I'll use it every time it makes sense.

Angular, React and Vuejs are mature frameworks for building SPA's. In fact, I can't think of a realistic scenario where it would make sense to author your own system if your web app is a true SPA.