From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Sun Jul 20 2003 - 00:27:37 MDT
matus, Thu Jul 17, 2003 10:51 am:
>There are no doubt a lot of people on this list who know a lot of
>things, and suggesting they are wrong in the face of overwhelming
>evidence is absurd. I would never, for example, suggest Amara's
>descriptions on the formation of dust clouds is incorrect, however her
>historical account and perception of US involvement in the Afghan
>Invasion certainly was, and I presented a clear, calm, precise argument
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>suggesting as much.
Matus: I wish you would have found somebody else with whom to make
your point. I am not subscribed here and I only read a small
percentage of the messages. Even when I was able to pay more
attention to this list in the past, I'm relatively sure that it was
obvious that I have a fundamental disconnect to your worldview, and
I know that I was unable to communicate my own worldview to you (and
the other aggressive and prolific posters). Usually now I lack the
resources and motivation necessary to try to write here. I write
this message now much more for the newer people on the list than for
you, since I don't often enter onto the extropians list any more.
My reason for writing this message is to say that I wish you
wouldn't be so confidently sure of your facts regarding the topic of
Afghanistan and other political topics. On that particular message
of Afghanistan, to which I think you are referring (I didn't read
through to the end, it was very long), my memory of that message was
that you presented information from a number of documents which you
found on the Web, and I presented words from a documentary book, and
from Afghans with whom I have spoken and/or were friends. I know
that I lacked patience at the time to write more, and because of
my usual ongoing limitations (lack of time to write, frequent travel,
lack of access to Internet, RSI typing hands), I probably did not
do a very good job to present my view.
If one considers that our information sources were vastly different,
I don't think one can ever say absolutely you were right, and I was
wrong or vice versa. Perhaps my friends or the documentaries I read
were wrong about the sequence of events, but then that would mean
that a chain of related events and other people were wrong too.
Well, that's possible. Or perhaps the duration of time covered in
the documentary I read (to 1986) or the places where the writer
interviewed people were different than what was covered for your
data. Or perhaps what was written in official government documents
were never manifested in the real lives of the people living there.
Well, that's possible, too. In the end, on that topic, I trusted my
people sources because, to me, direct sources of that kind (words
from people through which I've already filtered by different means)
seemed to be the most reliable. I did not write further on this
topic at the time to present my side (for obvious reasons), so hence
the reason for writing this particular message.
I urge you to choose your information sources wisely, and gather
your information from a variety of sources. 'Facts' regarding
political and cultural issues can be fuzzier than you think.
-------
On gathering data on political and cultural topics -
My own hierarchical scheme for the best ways to gather information on
political and cultural topics is the following, with the heaviest
weighting, starting at number 1), and usually combining a number
of sources to reach my own synthesis and/or perspective.
1) Live in the location of the news.
(Note: this is very different from the experience of being a visitor)
2) Visit the location of the news.
3) Talk to the people, who are from that region.
4) Read media in the language of that region.
5) Read media from that region translated into English.
6) Read several world media (English).
The Economist is my favorite source of high-quality, world news,
printed in English. One reason I like them is that they have some
reporters (I don't know how many) who are native, living in the
regions from where they gather their news.
The other newspapers and magazines in English drop steeply for me,
in terms of reliability, so I tend to read several in English from
different countries, if I want more information, in order to get
different perspectives.
--- ... miscellany ... Since 1996, I have not owned a T.V. I try to practice healthy skepticism, especially with regards to what emerges from the mouths of politicians. I try not to weigh anything that I read on the Internet (it's called the Web of Lies for a good reason), until I have found other sources of information which can support the writing and/or the writer. Of course, I get lazy sometimes. And yes, sometimes the Web provides the only information source on a particular topic. Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario (IFSI) Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), Adjunct Assistant Professor Astronomy, AUR, Roma, ITALIA Amara.Graps@ifsi.rm.cnr.it
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