Mokka mit Schlag » Religion

When I was a young child I believed in God for the same reason I believed in the president or England: other people told me and seemed to act as if there was such a thing, so it didn’t even occur to me doubt it. I also believed in Santa Claus until maybe the age of 8. Fifty years later, I’ve seen lots of evidence that the president exists. I’ve been to England. I even believe in a lot stranger things like neutrinos and mitochondria, mostly because almost everyone who seems to know anything about these things believes in them and tells me I should too. It also helps that believing in them doesn’t seem to lead to any obvious contradictions or problems.

On the other hand I don’t believe in string theory because some people who seem to be smart and have deeply investigated these topics either don’t believe or actively disbelieve. I’ll even say I don’t believe in quantum gravity. I don’t disbelieve in quantum gravity, but there are enough contradictions and problems with every quantum gravity scheme anyone has ever proposed to make me cautious.
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Today is Quit Facebook Day, and I have deleted my account. Bottom line: Facebook’s culture, beliefs and attitude all seem to indicate that they want everything to be shared with everyone. Nothing they have done indicates any change in their core values and beliefs. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with a service that shares everything with everyone by default. That’s what this blog does, and Twitter. However Facebook promised something different, and then they took it back, exposing users’ private information in the process. Furthermore they have given every indication that they intend to keep doing so just as soon as they can get away with it.

Even if I trusted Facebook to keep their promises for more than a week, the bottom line is I just don’t need the service they want to provide. Facebook’s value proposition was always a way to share content with friends and family that you didn’t want to share with the whole world. For sharing with the whole world we already have Buzz, Blogs, Twitter, and many more options. For sharing one-to-one we have e-mail. Facebook, for a time, sat in-between; and it was useful. It no longer is. If there’s an existing service that offers what Facebook used to offer, I haven’t found it. Linked In comes closest, but its focus is different.

In any case, I mostly used Facebook to keep up with a few old, geographically diverse friends. I never used it much for writing. In fact, in the years I’ve had a Facebook account (going back to when you had to have a .edu address to join, and your network was your university) I think I’ve only written one significant item I’d sort of like to keep. So here it is for posterity, after a little editing. In the meantime, if you need to find me I’m easy enough to google and I put my real, unobscured e-mail address on most of my web pages.
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