Why would we study Hegel, a philosopher who lived more than 200 years ago? I mean, if you ask a lot of modern or postmodern so-called thinkers, all they can think about is new ideas, new things, a new way of doing things. And they always present themselves like this kind of complete break with the past, although in reality they're just mimicking, they're just repeating what's been said many times before in history. But for these people, progress in history and progress in the history of ideas is just a figment of our imagination and has no reality to it. But if we take even a superficial look, we see that that's not really true. If we look at literature, didn't it change completely after Homer or after Shakespeare? Could it ever go back to the way literature was before that? Or if we take a look at music, could it ever be the same after Bach or after Beethoven or after Beatles? Is there a book called that? Bach, Beethoven, I think there is. Or within science, could it ever be the same after Newton, Darwin and similar people? Of course, all of this is just a closed book to these people because they never really actually take the time to even do a superficial inquiry of what they're talking about. But as Marxists, we never claim to be special or having found some kind of magical formula that no one accidentally thought about for all these thousands of years and come up with this solution. We emphatically put ourselves within a long line of thinkers going obviously through Trotsky, Lenin, Marx and Engels but even further through Hegel, the French materialist, Aristotle, Heraclitus, ancient Greek philosophy. All of these form our heritage and in fact, our heritage is not just these people but these people as a representation of the, how do you say, common experience of mankind itself. Marx and Engels are very, very keen students of Hegel and Hegel in fact had a similar view of history, of philosophy itself. He didn't see himself as someone who just threw aside all previous history. On the contrary, he saw the scientific thought not as a history of random ideas by random people but as this progressive unfolding of truth, of scientific knowledge from lower to higher levels. Each philosophy in its own day played a progressive role, an enormous role in developing our understanding of the world and our place in it but at the same time each advance carried within it the seeds to its own downfall. Each philosophy, each set of ideas within it had its contradiction which at a certain stage meant that they couldn't play the role that they used to and therefore those ideas were then negated by a new school of thought, a new way of looking at the world which was on a higher level. So every school of philosophy and every system of thought which negated another one was bound to collapse itself and give way to another so that meant that what was true at one point in history was inadequate to explain the truth at another point. But this didn't mean that these negated schools of thought just disappeared forever, that they were just lost and just thrown aside but that the rational kernel or their essence was in fact maintained within the development of consciousness and scientific thought altogether. We can look at a school such as the Pythagorean school. Now the Pythagoreans, a lot of people don't know this but in reality they were a mystic sect, it was a religious sect which worshipped ideas and basically they were the founders of philosophical idealism but not many people know that about them but yet what a lot of people, almost every school student learns today is the scientific developments that they actually did make and which were a breakthrough for science and for maths at that time. So the essence of that school of thought was maintained, was kept, whereas all the accidental elements and sides of it was discarded. And the same we can say about throughout the history of philosophy, history of thought, that there have been many, many people who think as schools that we don't really know about or don't really know what they were about but the essence of the conclusions that they reached has been maintained within our consciousness and within our thinking. At least in general terms that's the outline of the process. Now Hegel believed that his philosophy correctly was the culmination of all previous philosophy and that it carried within it the true essence of all of these previous systems of thought. And that He was kind of the final step in this progressive approximation towards the truth, this unfolding of the truth as He would call it and our understanding of the laws of nature and of society and our place within those spheres. Now He explained that everything which rises is rational at a certain stage, every school of thought which rises is rational at a certain stage but it's also doomed by its own inner contradictions to become irrational and pass away at a later stage. Now this process of negation, this process of everything rising and then being negated and falling into the opposite is according to Hegel the key to his philosophy because it's not just something in human thought and culture and within philosophy but it's something that permeates all of human society, all of nature, all of development. He compares this with the bud which by its own essence has to develop into a flower, into blossom but by doing that, by fulfilling its own inner necessity it completely negates itself, it doesn't exist anymore it gives way to the blossom which then again disappears as the manifestation of that plant when the flower comes. You see here three stages of development of the plant each of which completely negate the other one, they cannot coexist but at the same time they're necessary for the existence of each other. In his logic he starts off by asking the question, what is pure being? If we think about it, you can't really think about it, what is pure being? Being that's not determined, it's not limited, it's not in any way qualified, it's just pure being. You can't even say it because then you actually add some letters to it, you shouldn't do it because then it's not really true. It's nothing, eventually you reach to the conclusion that it's nothing, you cannot add any characteristics to it and therefore pure being immediately as you start to begin to think about it collapses into nothing because it shares the same characteristics with nothing. But this isn't just nothing now because obviously it's something because we know that it's definitely not being so it's not nothing, so it's not being we can say. And therefore even within this completely abstract thought experiment we see the fundamental law of nature that Hegel discovered that everything taken to the logical conclusion by their own inner contradiction fall into their opposite and instead of being what we have is becoming of development, of change which carries within it this constant movement from being to nothing, this constant movement from one thing to its other. This is the fundamental point that Hegel makes, that everything is in constant change and everything is constantly coming into being and passing away. As soon as a person is born you basically begin to die. Every cell which is created within our body has a certain time where it lives and then it passes away. In the beginning of our life more cells are created than die off but at a certain stage this changes to its opposite and you have the beginning of the decline or the period of decline of our lives and this at a certain stage again reaches a critical stage at which we see a rapid acceleration and then we die. Obviously our death is not the end of humanity or human society just like our birth wasn't the beginning of it. We can trace our cells back to our ancestors, to our parents and their parents and we can go back to our generations, our ancestors and we can go all the way back to the birth of humanity itself and link it again within the same process with the development of species going back through the primates and trace our roots all the way back to the first one celled organisms and even further before that before matter actually began to organize itself into living matter. Now at each step each new species or each new kind in this development represents a step forward it's on a higher level we can say within the organization of matter and that's why we see throughout the history of development of species we see the long line of species, the majority of which have gone extinct but the continuous onward progress from lower to higher levels of species and again just like in the development philosophy we see that each step forward is not like a completely random step forward and a complete reset but that it carries within it the essence and the seeds of the previous thing that it comes from every new species negates but at the same time preserves the essential aspects of the old one of course within the history of species and life there's all kinds of dead ends and steps back but in general terms that's the process that we're watching in fact we can see this whole process within the development of the human fetus which mimics the development of life since its early stages on our planet until the development of human being this constant change and the rise or fall of all phenomena from lower to higher levels that's the fundamental mode of existence of all matter but this change is not imposed from it from outside it's rather driven by its own internal contradictions just like pure being as we talked about inevitably becomes its opposite death is an outcome of the internal contradiction of life and so on and so on but this change once it happens it's not a gradual change necessarily but more like a rapid acceleration or a jump once we can see that a body reaches a certain stage of decline we see that the process takes on a rapid pace and death accures very fast or likewise after a certain period of the fetus being within a womb growing to a certain age birth is imposed very very quickly and a similar thing obviously we can see in social revolutions that once a certain society has reached a certain stage it enters into a state of decline and from here we begin to see that the contradictions between the rule of the old ruling class and the rise of the new revolutionary class begin to pile up and at a critical stage at a critical point any given accident can make all these contradictions come to the surface and we see the beginning of social revolution so it's not difficult to see that the implications of Hegel's philosophy were very revolutionary but Hegel never reached these conclusions explicitly himself it was more implied in his writings and although he sympathized with the French Revolution but politically he was a conservative but how the question is how can it be that you reached these revolutionary ideas conclusions in the sphere of philosophy and yet remain a conservative and that's what we're going to look into a bit now now throughout history we can generally divide philosophy into two camps very generally very broadly speaking we have on the one hand the camp of idealism which subsists of people who say that the fundamental basis of the world is ideas some form of ideas and that matter and everything else is kind of in one way or another a reflection of that and all religion falls into this category and all philosophies in this category inevitably will fall into religion on the other hand we have the school of materialism which claims that the material world is all there is is all there exists and exists independently of us and our ideas and that our ideas are just an imperfect reflection of this material world now Hegel was waging a struggle against the weaknesses of both of these camps at his time on the one hand he was struggling against the rationalist idealists who in their search for these eternal truths had completely cut off themselves from the real objective world by more or less denying its existence or our ability to interact with it and on the other hand he was fighting against the empiricists who believed that pure sense perception was all that human beings could deal with that knowledge in essence was just like an ever increasing accumulation of facts of more and more facts without really processing them without ordering them, without having a system of categorizing and understanding the relations and the philosopher who came immediately before Hegel was Emmanuel Kant who although he made some brilliant discoveries his biggest contribution perhaps was his failed attempt to unite these two worlds and these two camps and he ended up in a dualist philosophy a philosophy which accepted the real world as existing and independent of us but also accepted the world of ideas and basically did not accept that these two had any connection with each other Kant said that although the world exists outside of our reach and independently of us but we can never know the world as it is we can never know it or the thing in itself as he called it and instead our minds are kind of inhabited by these a priori ideas which he never explained where they really came from now Kantianism as opposed to Hegelianism is very very popular in bourgeois academia today but in philosophical terms it was a dead end from the beginning now nevertheless or perhaps because of this it became the basis it was on the basis of the critique of Kant that Hegel developed his philosophy he dealt a devastating blow to Kant's idealism first he pointed out that if we're unable to perceive reality as it is and if we cannot prove the existence of anything that we're experiencing then how can we be sure at all that it exists how can we be sure at all that anything outside of our mind also our being exists at all and if we don't know this then why would Kant even bother writing all these books about this world of philosophy for people that he didn't really know or could prove existed or at least if they did maybe they didn't even understand his language it doesn't really know what he was doing right he's scribbling on these pieces of paper but Hegel went further he said that philosophy and logic in particular is a special kind of science because what is it? it's thinking about thinking it's not just ordinary thought it's thinking about scientific thinking but in any other science you can make experiments you can come with hypothesis you can somehow test them out in the real world but how do you prove your thoughts are correct how do you prove that this way of thinking is better than the other one because every man can come and say well in my brain the way I'm thinking my logic is better than yours and you have no way of proving it because we're just fighting it out in our own heads now as long as philosophy, Hegel said was kept within the realm of pure thinking but as long as thinking and thought was kept kind of isolated from the real world from the objective world that we live in then it could never overcome this and logic was always bound to have at best a very mechanical and rigid character but he overcame this by replacing this dualism of Kant with what he called absolute idealism what we would call objective idealism and what he said was that there is no distinction between the material world and the ideal world because everything is the ideal world everything is this absolute ideal universal spirit he had several names for us although he never really explained what it was but that is all of the world and this artificial barrier that we have set up between our mind, our thoughts and the real world that we see and experience are artificial and it's only by removing them that we can actually test out our thoughts within the real world and prove them right or wrong now on the one hand and so everything that we sense and experience is a part of this world spirit or this world idea and on the one hand this had a reactionary side to it because it let obscurantism religious thought basically into Hegel's philosophy but at the same time we had a very revolutionary side which meant, which was that for the first time that we could begin to deal with this ever changing extremely complex and infinite world we could begin to develop our ideas on the basis of that and we can begin to develop general laws and notions on the basis of observing this infinity complex world of ours and according to Hegel he could prove his logic by applying it to the real world and by studying the history of the sciences and thereby building a scientifically approvable logic so according to Hegel his logic was just the highest form of all the positive sciences which would eventually give its flesh now continuing on criticizing the rationalists who argued that absolute truth existed outside of the material world which could only be attained by this pure type of thinking Hegel would say that this philosophical thinking could never really come up with these great ideas of eternal truths and eternal ideas, big things like God and spirit but however big and grandiose you would portray them you could never ever really explain the infinite complexity and change and interconnection of the real world so here you had a world in the 1800s especially where science was taking these immense strides forward and all this immense wealth was coming to our hands and these philosophers in particular were building a wall around themselves and saying we can't touch this, we can't have anything to do with this we can't learn, they were isolating themselves from this new world of knowledge on the other hand you had the empiricists who argued that pure sense experience was all that was needed to understand the world and that no abstract thinking was really needed but they couldn't really explain anything either so how would you ever choose and prioritize and recognize the relationship between this infinite amount of information that we're constantly dealt with even an empiricist would never do that because when I'm sitting here looking at you guys I'm not looking at this tiny speck of dust sitting here because although in a formally empiricist way of thinking that's equal to all the other things that I'm watching here like you guys and all the other things that we're talking about obviously no one would ever think about the world in those terms yes so Hegel argued that both of these assertions the fact that you can understand things by just general abstract ideas or just by looking at things empirically could explain you know had any depth to them for him they were both equally empty and the point of philosophy is exactly to sort out the infinite number of phenomena that we see and connect and are in touch with and make sense of them and see the interconnections and the relationships and how they interact with each other and see all of these things which are not immediately visible to the naked eye now if for instance we take a chair let's take one of these chairs here I can see that well yeah that's a chair but in fact the picture of a chair that we all have in our minds would probably be nothing like this chair or any other chair that we would ever see anywhere else before because that chair that we have is kind of stripped off of its accidental elements and in fact in a way it's more true it's just the essence of what we recognize as a chair but yet it doesn't exist anywhere in the real world it's only an abstraction that we have made but at the same time this abstraction is only the abstraction made by throughout human experience of humanity of having studied and seen chairs and how they work and come to the conclusion that this is the essence of a chair so within that abstraction itself every single chair that I've ever met and many many other people have seen in their lives is portrayed and in this way what is particular and what is universal is related that in order to understand the particular you need to have an universal we all have every time we see a person the first thing is we don't go and see every single molecule every tiny building way that they're built or build one way or another but we actually recognize them as this universal human being man woman or whatever with certain traits we begin to interact with them and they also have other aspects that we need to look out for and in understanding them again we enrich our understanding of that universal general idea of a man we have the essence of human beings that we have and we begin to understand human beings on an even higher level so for Hegel the philosophical truth is concrete it's not something you attain by sitting in your room sitting at the office just writing and reading textbooks but it's something you attain by actually interacting with the world as it is and philosophical principles can't be predetermined in a schema and then pulled over the head or pasted on to the world as we know it what he said was that in order to what we need to do is to surrender ourselves to the world that we're trying to understand and discover the underlying laws and necessities that that dominated the laws and logics of his organic life so to say of the world and in doing so we'll begin to see the different patterns which replicate themselves throughout nature and throughout human society and once we begin to see this once we begin to recognize these laws and this necessity which permits all of being all of nature all of talk of abstract freedom is immediately we can discard immediately real freedom according to Hegel is the understanding of these laws which govern our nature and our society and the understanding of our place within that society and within nature but from his point of view all of these laws were merely the laws of the development of this so-called absolute spirit and you can say well this is something completely unhegelian because nowhere does this follow from his system nowhere Hegel will say don't presume anything go into the world discover it and discover its own inherent laws if we do that we'll never come across any form of absolute idea and in fact if you take the absolute spirit out of Hegel's work all the main points the essence of the main points they remain it's almost like a scaffold which is just left there after they build the house but for Hegel the history of nature and human society is the history of this absolute spirit and this spirit at some point in prehistory it's become alien to itself whatever that means and it's now returning to itself through the development of nature and especially through the development of philosophy of course within Hegel himself the spirit finally finds full cognition and supposedly is history and history as a whole is beginning to come to an end so here we have Hegel's who struck a blow to all schematism all formalism nothing is absolute nothing remains for everything rises and passes away there's no system we cannot drag any schemas over the real world and yet he creates the biggest system of them all and the most complex schema and tries to drag this onto the world although there's nowhere in the world any proof of the existence of the absolute spirit but how can we explain why Hegel did that first of all we have to understand that Hegel was a Christian and he came up through the school of German idealism that's the tradition that he belonged to a school of thought which at that time was far richer than the British empirical school of philosophy for instance and Hegel was looking at history and a society from the point of view of philosopher and seeing his field as the driving force of history but also why was he doing that the society that he lived in Germany was perhaps the most backward society of Europe because of the 30 years war the development of Germany had been withheld German capitalism came late to this scene and here you had this relatively backward country in which literature was the highest and most developed aspect and of course this formed the view that Hegel took to society he saw himself philosophy and literature as the decisive driving force of society and this he kind of imposed on the rest of history as well seeing the history of philosophy as the driving force of all of societies at least that's my hypothesis yes but the problem was also another one in that time of Hegel was just before the great breakthroughs that we saw in science in the 19th century in chemistry and biology and geology all of these sciences which took enormous steps forward and which proved the dialectical method within nature the dialectical dialectics is the mode of development and mode of movement throughout of nature all of this was kind of a closed book to Hegel and the sciences that he had access to were for most part mechanical sciences such as mechanics or astronomy which at that time was sort of mechanic because it was these great bodies and didn't go into the maybe finer details of it yes and exactly because he anticipated all of these developments because he came before it his system ended up being flawed and it was Marx and Engels who had to salvage the revolutionary kernel of Hegel's philosophy and as they put it turn him right side up now from a Marxist point of view there is no difference between the ideal and the material world there is only the material world human beings and human mind is a product of matter at a certain stage organized in a particular way and our thoughts are just the imperfect reflection of that material world dialectics is not the laws of thought and idea which is then imposed transcends all of nature but it's inherent laws of nature themselves and by our interaction with this world and with nature we're able to discover these laws Lenin said that Marxism was almighty because it's true and it sounds like a very prophetic and religious statement but actually it's a very profound thing to say in my opinion because in that Marxism stands out from all other philosophies that came before it in that it's not a system that tries to impose a certain way of being on nature but sees nature and the laws of nature that we can deduce from it as its own content and therefore whatever nature and laws of human society shows us that is the truth and that is what Marxism aims at incorporating into its principles and if it's not our principles which will change and not the other one therefore it's a method which which can last in any given situation in that sense it's also not a philosophy in the traditional form of philosophy it doesn't have a fixed schema but it's more like a method of viewing the world and human society mankind from Marxist point of view is nothing but matter conscious of itself and it also follows its own it also objects to its own laws individuals obviously we think at least that we're free to make the choices and decisions we want to in our lives but if we take just a little step back from a bird's eye view we immediately see that there are iron laws which operate independently and often completely opposed to the wills of every single individual I don't know if there was a lead off unfortunately I didn't see it about psychology but just the other day I was thinking about this explosion of big data that big companies and our mining data of how we act and they know every single move we make and then they have these algorithms go through and find patterns in the way that we behave and these patterns are actually relatively effective in predicting what we're going to do at any given time and this is just the beginning of this form of science the same we can say about psychology and other sciences it's only the beginnings of it but what we're beginning to see is that there are laws which control human behavior and human development that individual conscious human beings are not really loads over now for instance the majority of ordinary people want to live a peaceful life and in fact probably the people who want to have who are the most determined to live a peaceful and calm life are constantly running into capitalism as an insurmountable obstacle to living this where every single day we're pushed aside, we're pushed at the job we're put under all kinds of pressure in the family and society and everywhere we go by capitalist society which impedes our very very modest wish to live a perfectly ordinary non-eventful and harmonious life and hence because of these pressures the pressures of the crisis of capitalism puts on these people you see that the people who are most determined to live a normal and tranquil life are pushed towards drawing more and more radical and more revolutionary conclusions contrary to their wishes and that in fact is the driving force of all revolutions the time where this consciousness this conservative consciousness switches over and becomes a revolutionary one and catches up with the objective situation and if we look at human history the laws are even more striking before anything human beings have to eat have to sleep and they have to subsist themselves but in trying to do so we have to develop tools machinery and the means of production to do this essentially now at a certain stage in the development of human society the development of these means of productions mean that we create a certain a little bit of a surplus value we begin to produce a little bit more than we can all consume and that means that a small group of people are able to live without having to toil day and night basically and that's when we see the rise of class society which on the one hand was connected with enormous barbarism but on the other hand drove forward human development immensely and at each stage of class society we see that the development of productive forces leads to enormous steps forward for humanity itself the rise of class the early slave societies for instance especially what we see in Greece coincides with the explosion of flowering, of culture of philosophy on a completely unprecedented scale especially in in ancient Greece but here again we see that philosophy was not the driving force of this movement, the Hegel would say well the Greek had this beautiful artful spirit and that's why they reached this philosophy but the Greek philosophy was driven by the class contradictions which were rising in Greek society itself and in fact we see those class contradictions within the Greek philosophers as well for instance the idealist camp we see the most consistent idealist Plato and Pythagoras they were mainly from the aristocratic class and they had this idea it was a class in a complete dead end in a crisis and their ideas was all about escaping this world which is unreal and going to some other perfect world which is more real than the one that we live in on the other hand you had the materialist philosophers in ancient Greek who were mainly for the most part from the trading class you can say the embryonic bourgeois class maybe of traders people who would travel, who would study different sciences and who would look at society from a materialist point of view and it was within that kind of context that these form of ideas essentially developed now of course slavery as well as slave society reached its apex in ancient Rome and buckled under its own contradictions and from its ruin we saw the rise of feudalism and from within feudalism we again saw the rise of capitalism and at each stage the development of a given class society develops to its full extent which then again leads to its downfall and its supersession by a new form of society and also within each of these societies we see that the revolutionary classes carry within them their own revolutionary history capitalism is sorry philosophy revolutionary philosophy capitalism itself came to power on the basis of a very ferocious struggle against feudalism and religious obscurantism it came to power fighting for the truth of shedding light on everything that was hypocritical and irrational in human society and its victory was a huge step forward for humanity as a whole and under its rule the means of production was developed to the productive forces was developed to unheard levels which means that today essentially as we know we have all the means at our disposal potentially to solve all the main problems of humanity and raise all of humanity out of this barbarism but the system itself is incapable of doing so and instead pushing humanity further down this line of this line of barbarism and therefore it becomes irrational and its no longer in fact is no longer in favor of the truth and the truth is the Marxist or the working class who is now the revolutionary class is the only standard the barrage of the truth our philosophy is more than anything to find the truth because the truth essentially shows irrationality and the incompatibility of capitalist society with the the whole of society and human proxies as it is and within capitalism of course the society creates its own gravediggers in the form of the working class which can once and for all lead humanity out of this barbarism now freedom from Marxist point of view in this sense consists in recognizing this process in recognizing that in spite of everything we try to do all of us try to improve our lives and our immediate surroundings as best as we can some people go study engineering or to become doctors or they find one way or another to improve their lives and push society forward the way they can but Marxism is the understanding that whatever we do all of these things in the final analysis is going to be futile because we have this gigantic monstrous obstacle in form of capitalist property relation in front of us that leads humanity from all of this progress in general and therefore the only the freedom is the recognition of the only true thing the only way to spend our lives and spend our energy is to put it in the direction that history is going already in the direction of overthrowing of capitalism ending this dead end of class society that it has reached for a new society without classes for true free development of human society


Now let's look at elastic and inelastic, particularly as they relate to collisions. So as objects collide, different things can happen. And it depends a little bit on the nature of the objects. So some objects bounce when they collide. Some bend or even break. Some even explode. So let's look at this from an energy standpoint. Taking an interaction, part or even all of our kinetic energy can undergo some changes. It can be transferred from one object to another. It can also be transformed from one type of energy, kinetic energy, into a different type of energy. But remember that momentum is always conserved for these, their isolated collisions. So let's start with elastic first. In an elastic collision, the objects bounce off of each other. During the interactions, if I look at the energy, part of the kinetic energy goes into potential energy. But then that potential energy can be released and go straight back into kinetic energy. So I end up with the same kinetic energy that I started with comes back out at the end. So that means mechanical energy is not lost. In an inelastic collision, if I think about what's happening during the interaction, that part of the kinetic energy that's undergoing the changes, well, some of it goes into potential energy, but some of it also goes into other forms of energy. Now the potential energy can then be re-released as kinetic energy, but it's going to be a smaller part of the kinetic energy. So that means I am missing some mechanical energy in this case. But it doesn't go away completely, it just goes into other forms. For example, sound or heat or deformation. And by deformation, I mean that the object got bent. It might get really smushed up or just a little bent. It might even break, but it takes some energy to do that. Now perfectly inelastic is one of those inelastic collisions, but in this case, the objects stay together after the collision. In this case, during the interactions, you can think of it as the kinetic energy, part of it just goes into other forms of energy. There's no potential energy being stored and released during the process. Again, the missing mechanical energy is going to go into other forms of energy, like sound, heat, or deformation. Now our last case is a lot more rare, but sometimes we have these explosive interactions. In this case, if I look at exactly what's happening during the interaction, I've got some sort of stored potential energy and it's released into a larger kinetic energy. And that extra mechanical energy had to come from somewhere. And it was some previously stored energy. Maybe this is a object which has some sort of spring or elastic potential and it was compressed before the collision. And as soon as the collision happens, it suddenly releases that energy. Or there might be some sort of chemical potential energy and there's actually a chemical explosion during this interaction. But in the end, you end up with a larger kinetic energy. So summarizing, momentum is conserved for all of these cases. Inelastic, I've got no kinetic energy lost. Inelastic, I've got some kinetic energy lost. And in a perfectly inelastic collision, I lose more kinetic energy than in any other case, so we've got the most kinetic energy lost. In explosive, kinetic energy is actually gained. So depending on what happens to the kinetic energy, comparing the initial kinetic energy and the final kinetic energy, we can determine which one of these cases it is. So that wraps up our introduction to elastic and inelastic collisions.


I can put Matthew at ease, but it's not going to be... You've got calculations today? Yeah. I do actually have. So, we actually got an email in from a guy asking about one of their ancestors, Arama Karaka, and they said I was looking for information on a Māori chief called Arama Karaka. And they'd been up at 150th of New Zealand War's commemorations. And so, these are the kind of queries we often get within the ministry. So, where we first start off looking through is... I generally start with the NZB. Is there a Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry on this person? Because if we can, we can just direct them straight to that person. But in this case, there wasn't. There were a number of results if we search through the NZB and actually that's where I'll try and flip through here. That's not a problem. Sorry. So, just in case you're not familiar with the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, it basically has three and a half thousand New Zealanders in it and of those three and a half thousand New Zealanders, around 500 Māori, historical figures up until... covering figures up until people who sort of flourished around the 1960s. So, we're getting into a bit of a gap now. Largely done as a project around the 150th of the Treaty and Matthew's dad had quite a significant part to play within these biographies. So, they're pretty solid. So, we start there. So, I have a search through and find out that, yes, Ata Makaraka is mentioned through other biographies but there is no biography of Ata Makaraka. And the other downside was as I was looking through just the NZB biographies, it came clear that there was more than one Ata Makaraka. In fact, there were a number. And so, the very short answer to the question who is Ata Makaraka, Ata Makaraka is actually the Māori form of Adam Clark. And what happened is that he was sort of... his name was used in homage in a sense when missionaries went around New Zealand baptising Māori. And this is one of these really interesting ideas about we take it for granted today that you might have a first name, a surname, possibly a middle name, and that that is kind of the convention for names. Now, traditionally for Māori, Māori would often have one name or a variety of names used in different contexts, but a name. Not a surname, because you didn't need a surname because when we have Takaniā Takiro, he didn't need to say, my name is Takaniā Takiro Smith or whatever because what he would say is kōhikurangi tamāanga. So my mountain is hikurangi. So we had, and so I used to talk about this Māori in terms of identification, had this form of what she described as triangulation, that once you sort of take the name plus the pepeha, which includes the mountain, or who the important tepuna was, people could actually work out quite clearly who that person is. And you'll see that often when people start working through, rather than saying who are you and who your parents, they'll start very broadly out from me. We work their way into hapū and then say, oh, you saw into those child or whatever. So, but we're still left with this problem of āramakaraka and we have, for instance, one of the people we have is āramakaraka mokunuiarangi. So his first name or his original name was mokunuiarangi. He gets āramakaraka put on, that double banger first last name and then he can end up being either ārama mokunuiarangi, āramakaraka mokunuiarangi or just āramakaraka and that's when it gets really difficult because reflecting on some of the sort of digitisation issues that we have now where we think, oh, maybe if we've got all the stuff being digitised and coming along early New Zealand box and NZTC and the AJHRs, that kind of thing, maybe if we can automate this, maybe we can pull all that information in together. But one of the real big problems with that is how do you tell which person is which? So, I wasn't expecting a blank slide. There we go. So here are just some of the ārama karakas that you will find from 19th century New Zealand. ārama karakata rai uaua taranaki, ārama karaka haututu te uri o hau at North, ārama karaka kukitau, ngāti tūpa around Waikato, ārama karaka te aho, also Waikato, ārama karaka of Ngāti Raukawa, ārama karaka mokonuiarangi, ngāti rangitihi, ārama karaka pi wau ma, who named his son, Wurumu ārama karaka just to sort of make it all a little bit confusing. So, in terms of, I've actually got examples of, ārama karaka mokonuiarangi, leading Te Arawa chief, head of the Ngāti Tūwhareti hapu based at Matata. He gave his early support to the Crown during the New Zealand wars. Karaka led his people in campaigns against the hoho followers of Kiti Opa in 1865, and is a member of the Te Arawa contingent led by Captain Gilbert Mere. Played a prominent role in the hunt for tukoti. Often, hideously mispronounced as tukoti. So, very easy way to remember that one there is that kō te rhymes with me, like from the Simpsons. Kō rhymes with or, shok and or, and when people saw tukoti, there was a bit of shok and or, and te, te for two. So, te kōti, nice and easy. So, Arama Karaka, Arama Karaka P of Te Mahūri Hūri, and he was Pat's most well-known for marrying Harayata, who was previously married to Honiheke, another well-known figure. And as I noted, his son was Wurumu Arama Karaka P. Arama Karaka P also signed the Treaty of Waitangi at Mangungu, and this becomes relevant right at the end of my talk, around Treaty signings. And another one we have, and this is in DNZB, which sort of illustrates one of the issues is Arama Karaka from Taranaki, who is just goes by Arama Karaka and talking about, made the following year, Rāwiti's people who had rallied under the leadership of Arama Karaka, relative of Rāwiti, were besieged at Niniopā by Katatoria Tarangitaki with their Te Atiāti Awa followers of Ngati Rau Nui allies. As it was a desperate situation, Arama Karaka sought aid from Ihaia. So, I mean, the obvious thing here is when we're talking about differentiating, that if they have you know, part of that name through, that's an obvious way. Except of course that in secondary sources, the historical secondary sources, often sometimes of the right, sometimes the writers are confused which person we're talking about. So, they'll get it wrong. They'll give you the name of another person, but be kind of not quite right. Now, we take for granted the fact that today we kind of have this unique way of identifying, differentiating ourselves from other people. Which is basically the birth certificate. But this is a relatively new-ish thing. It wasn't until 1930 that official Māori birth and death records were kept, but not reliably until the Second World War. So, what we have is up until kind of around 1950, this really uncertain issue around who people are. And if we're doing kind of authoritative historical research, that becomes a potential difficult liability. So, one of the things looking through was what do we do? What's a way to approach this? And the first place I started actually was internally we have a database, the BIS database, brief information sheets, which whenever someone was potentially up to have a Denzi B entry done of them, then someone would fill out these brief information sheets. And sometimes this information, which is, it's held internally, so this is not online currently at the moment, so it's held internally. And some of this information is actually amazingly good. Like it's really good it's referenced and that. So, the initial thought was there's 500 Māori Denzi B entries and 2,000 Māori entries in here. Maybe I should just look at sort of tidying that up and doing some work around there and starting there. The problem is as I found out working through that there was some really useful content in there, some average to poor content in there and some just really pointless content. There was one for Tutaka Ngahu, who's a well-known Tuhoe chief, who's had been put in as first name Tutaka and last name Ngahu, which isn't, you know, they just broken his name in half. And there was no other information, no iwi information or whatever. So if I worked through that there would be a lot of effort and time going into tidying up something which was a very variable quality. So what we did instead was cherry-picked and pulled out the good stuff to start working on. And then I had Mark Darby sort of work through and write up short biographies which I'll get onto that. But before we do yeah, so anyway, that wasn't going to work in terms of your sort of identifying a person I looked around at other things. There's also Fletcher's Māori Names database. I don't know if people have come across that. It's Waikato University has have digitised that with the help of I think they got the records from National Library and so that's actually a really good resource. It's got about 13,000 names on it. I should add Māori names there means any Māori name so a person, a place, a thing, a pa. But it's often a good little starting point I went up and had a talk to them so it's the library that's currently running it and but what they don't do is they don't create an authoritative name within there. So they'll say this person here go and see also these are the variations of the forms and name. Whereas what I'm looking for is kind of an authoritative form of the name so that you can say yes also this name, this name, this name but this is who we consider it to be. And so sometimes you sort of look afar and end up coming back a little bit closer. I was talking to Nancy Schwalbrick who's now the senior editor for Te Ara and she said I have you thought of the indexes in the DNZB biographies and actually I hadn't but when I looked at the indexes what happened was any time anyone obviously is mentioned within a biography their name then appears in the index and what they had done is when they did their name they might just mention their name within the index but sorry within the story but within the index they would put what they believed to be their kind of full authoritative name. So there's a couple of thousand names there that have both been macronised and also in the form that kind of follows a set methodology through there. So what we've done is we've digitised those and got a researcher whose job and I didn't envy her this at all, she had to go through and check the original version against the digitised version and make sure all the macrons were in the right place. Very careful about it I would say, she's very, very cheerful about it. Because that's one of the key things is that as well as having a kind of a particular form in terms of the name we want the macronised version of that name because that's what people are kind of interested in and I often come to Te Ara for the macronisation of the place names in the people's names. So there's an example of one of the digitised pages. Now the red pen there is actually it was printed and then someone meticulously went through checking all five volumes and I think it was actually it was, it was Angela Balara so fortunately I had Angela Balara's copies that she'd gone through and checked and she'd gone through and made the changes around the macrons so we have not just a printed version but the kind of 808 printed version and so actually that was what our researcher had to deal with sort of these horrible scribbly little red lines but we got there. So in terms of how I kind of envision our biographies, a little bit like a pyramid that at the top we have the DNZB 500 odd very in-depth research going into those and the reality is that the time and research it takes to do a full DNZB biography means that we'd actually need a lot more resources before we started doing that doing that again but what we can do in the meantime is these short bios 250 to 300 words and the name authority will be basically a single line indicating iwi affiliations and the sort of date that person exists so we can kind of differentiate between these people. Right and that's just a description of that. Macron's a name form following DNZB and Tatawhiti naming conventions. Right so what we found when Mark who I mentioned before started doing his short biographies is in terms of time and resource obviously it's sort of best-being for Buck he said was he found that if he was doing similarly related biographies he could get through a lot quicker which sort of makes sense I mean it's kind of logical and so I got him to look at the New Zealand Wars biographies of Māori involved in the New Zealand Wars we have David Green internally who's written a handbook on New Zealand Wars so I asked him if he could put up 50 of the most important Māori that don't have DNZB entries or online biographies and we'll sort of work our way through that and so that's what Mark did and he went through that list putting together those biographies and so here we have on the left Ahumai Te Porata and she kind of has an extraordinary story and I still find it actually amazing that we don't have a DNZB biography of her so Ahumai Te Porata who was Ahumai Te Porata is a young woman she fought alongside her immediate family Ngāti Raukaua Kinfolk at the 1864 Battle of Ōrākau she was accompanied by her father Te Porata, her uncle a brother named Hiziri Te Porata and her husband major mayor then an officer in the cavalry defence force that was besieging the fortifications at Ōrākau called on the people with them to allow women and children to leave Ahumai is said to have replied kitu mati ngā tāne me mate ano ngā wahine me ngā tamariki if the men are to die, the men and children will die also now you've probably heard that or some of you would have heard that along with ka whawhaito ne mātau and variations of you know we will fight on forever so they said you know let the women and children out and they said well what's the point she's going to kill the men, you might as well kill us as well she ended up being one of the few survivors of the insuring attack her father, uncle and husband all died she survived despite being shot through the torso her shoulder had in the wrist hand and arm she succeeded in reaching her home at Waipapa near Lake Taupo with her brother Hiziri Te Porata and other survivors of Ngāti Te Kohira and Ngāti Raukaua in the following year Ahumai's people were led by their chief and priest Al-Katoa at the small village of Tātaroa near Taupo so holding pāimātiri ritual's lieutenant-meat of HMS Kura Kō wrote into the settlement he was seized while a council of war decided his fate Ahumai, whose wounds were barely healed walked across the marae and silently sat at Meade's feet and act which saved his life more than 40 years later a white-haired Ahumai Te Porata could be seen walking into Taupo township to collect her pension she died at Moorki near Taupo in 1908 so there are a number of other biographies that are kind of like that that are very significant New Zealand wars are a very significant part of our history but under-documented and but from this this also led to one of the projects working on at the moment which is for Waitangi 175 so next year 175th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and there's in terms of the Treaty we often focus on the Treaty at Waitangi but there were nine sheets that were taken around New Zealand around 50 signings around 500 people that signed it and there's a map of where it was gone so basically one of the questions that followed for me is who were the people that signed the Treaty of Waitangi and what we have at the moment oops I'm doing it on the wrong one I'll come back to that so we might come back to that yeah okay that's not going to work, oh here we go okay so what we do have at the moment is effectively this will work for me we've got the names, we've got the signing and what we do know is this basic bit of information about them the name, what their probable name was Iwi Affiliations and obviously where they signed and when but we actually have DNZB information on some of these people and also as we found out when Mark was doing the research he said oh and under the people I'm doing biographies for signed the Treaty but they don't have DNZB biographies so one of the things we're working over the next eight weeks is both writing out little short bits of information about each signing of the Treaty but also trying to do little short bios of every person that we can identify that signed the Treaty and obviously some of them we won't be able to but it will be there added bit of information so as well as just seeing the name there so there Wadamu Kingi Wadarapa then you would have a little bit bit more information about him and yes so I'll go back to my last man that's it okay current slide and this is kind of a really interesting idea and I don't know if you can actually can reasonably well I kind of like this because it's kind of like who have we got who there at the signing and this is one of these examples of how hard it is to find information this is kind of where people were settled we said we had number one there's Hobson and he's sort of in the middle-ish which you'd expect Nias and there's the captain James Busby we've got Henry Williams involved in translation some of the Missionaries Richard Taylor number five and Bishop Pompallier and so on and then this massive group from there to there running all the way there and across there which is 13 Māori so I mean to be fair 14 running down there is Europeans as well but it just means this information is kind of it's there but it's a bit sketchy and so the main aim of the project is to try and pull out the easily available secondary source information write it up and then most importantly make it available on the internet so people can find it and that is my tool oh wait before I go Julia you here Julia came to make me remind you at 1 and T there's it's the other stand there's like a little questionnaire which you can answer the question who is Arama Karaka for the possibility of winning a book and now that you know the answer you definitely was a good chat so yeah yeah sure oh well just I wasn't going to talk about a manga but just the relevance there was that he had been one of the treaty signatures so that particular Arama Karaka had been one of the treaty signatures so obviously once we start adding that little biography and there when you click on Arama Karaka there it will come up and say just the information we have about him that short biography yeah I think so I'm not actually completely sure I should have checked that this is all quite checkable on NZ History has all the various sheets with the kind of this form of the name so nothing that a control F I love this talk it made me so excited thank you Kirstie for telling me to come so I'm at Digital in New Zealand and we've just started well we started last year and I went away and I come back and we're doing a thing where we're trying to link together authorities so people authorities and this is I'm totally you're not going to be able to lead this room really good but are you going to put these authorities so obviously the DMZB records are up and that's wonderful are the authorities going to be up as themselves on the website as kind of each authority has its own URL that we can reference and that is something that's online that's certainly the that is the current plan I guess is a short answer and I mean I will just straight now say that I tend to have a textual content focus so I don't think pretty so I'm quite happy to just go bang hey there you are and if you have a look it's very similar it's very basic but hey you know sometimes when you're searching that is the only information you find and better that than nothing yeah just get it up the long answer is we're trying to work out what plan don't make it pretty I'm wondering Basil if what we're also seeing is something where a model of biography that is Western Pakeha and European coming against an idea of a corporate identity within a Maori context and I'm asking that question because I'm trying to probe what does biography actually mean in a Maori context and whether going through the process of disambiguation of names is one thing but I think the bigger issue is actually what are we trying to produce and what are we trying to lock in in terms of X having biography Y and contextualized Z where I would see biography as a networked kind of suite of relationships that seems more in keeping with the notion of identity formation within a Maori setting but runs counter to a European model of disaggregated, individuated decaporialized and effective. On there, if you have a look through the Maori biographies in DNZB what you'll find is not every single one but the majority of them have fagapapa in there so that you can figure out not just who that person is but how do they relate to other people and that of course if anyone's sort of tried to track to who, who, to, Kenals and who we happen to be talking at at any particular time becomes really valuable because of six of them all floating around using that title to who, to, Kenal and so that fagapapa is a really important part of it and the thing you do realise as you go and throw is as important as the information you find it out about them individually as who were what is that kind of surrounding fagapapa, who are there children you can't just pull them out in isolation Long was to lay just search 29 chapters Kia ora, thank you for that wonderful talk I was following on from Chris's question really but I'm also interested in name authorities being put on the internet not, I don't think there's anyone the name authority that's going to go up there's going to be a number of them. I'm with the Turnbull Library and we are putting up names that arise from groups of letters or that sort of thing we may not be able to determine which person it is to disambiguate it but we're going to put up an authority set which says this is what we know from this repository, this collection and it's going to be encoded to the EAC standard encoded archival context which is a way of structuring information and separating the name, the alternate name the dates the relationships and so forth so I guess I'm just putting in a plug for whatever you put up as the raw data to have some sort of standardised encoding around it so that we can maybe talk to each other over time I've got two answers to there and Matthew take note of that because that sounded important and something we need to know about because it makes sense to do that and then secondly in terms of what the sort of longer term plan for this content is first just get it out and get it up but I've talked with Nancy around bringing together that with the DNZB biography so have the long form biographies but we don't have a long form biography have the shorter form biography and then but once we get it up if we put it up on Te Ara then we'll sort of make it fit with the look and feel of Te Ara but also the style guide and all that kind of things but that's sort of probably in my thinking that's kind of like slightly two-ish years away because that also involves going to bring all our Māori content into a single place as well so all of it as well as the biographical. If I could just do a follow on just a follow on because it does make this link very nicely in pro-zipographical studies where people are building what they call digital people databases they don't talk about the facts they talk about factoids and factoids are those constructions of what we think of as the knowledge to date but that's historically specific knowledge that as long as you can track where it's come from who is the authority of the time who has expressed that and how you've evaluated that as a piece of information then you can go back and have actually a very dynamic and live way of creating the lives of people that are historically situated but also contemporaneously as in now manufactured and I guess that's the point extra sort of reflective level of how we're actually creating these lives even if it's trying to just disambiguate names. I'm going to thank Basil and just to pick up on your point Nicola we will talk we're very good at text back end systems to be honest not so good so working to talk to anyone who can help with that but thank you Basil for that talk and thank you to everyone who came to the session and enjoy the look.


So our next speaker is more of getting the word out there again and do novel techniques. So Shane Greenup is a graduate of the University of New South Wales where he studied molecular biology, philosophy and history of science. So naturally he founded and owns an internet business and is the creator of Arbutter or Rebutter and today he's going to tell us about what he hopes is the great global debate. So please welcome Shane. So thanks Dr. Hall. As I said I'm going to talk and tell you a little bit about my story on working on my project for Rebutter and then I'm going to tell you where I think it's all heading. So you see the idea behind Rebutter really didn't start out as an idea. It was more of a frustration that I had. See a friend shared this article on Facebook one day and I went and read the study behind it and it was quite clear to me that the article was severely flawed. It was junk science and it was rubbish. But that left me with a problem because a good friend of mine had just shared this on Facebook. So that meant not only do they think this was a good article with good information but it was good enough to share with everyone they knew. So I felt obliged to try and help them correct that perception. I needed them to see what was wrong with it, the errors of the study and why it wasn't good information and should be ignored.  You can't do that. They'll ignore it. They'll say that you're biased and move on. So what I really needed was a well written, clear, compelling rebuttal of this article. Not just, you know, I couldn't send them to Wikipedia that says vaccination is safe because this is a new study that's just been released that says vaccines are harmful. So I needed a rebuttal of this article. Now of course I could have written one myself. I knew what was wrong with the study but that would have taken me a couple of hours maybe and I knew the internet well enough to know that someone else had already done it. So why add another redundant article to the pile that was already there when I could just use one of them? So all I had to do was find one. So where do you go to find things on the internet? Google. So I went to Google and I tried to find rebuttals to this article. The problem is Google is useless at finding rebuttals especially to new articles. But what happens is particularly for an article like this they do a press release and you get hundreds or thousands of copies of the original article. Google has no way of knowing who's rebuttal and what. It's a keyword search engine, not an intent search engine. They don't know the intention of the author. So Google was no help to me. And of course the article that I was trying to find rebuttals of itself wasn't going to tell me where they were. So I knew what I wanted. I could picture it in my head. I just needed something which listed all of the articles which rebutted this article. Just show me a list of it preferably sorted by best to worst. Like Google when you search for a keyword you get a list of articles best to worst. I wanted that but directly related to this article, rebutting it. I spent almost a year looking for someone else who had done this. It seems too obvious. Connect rebuttals to claims. How to have been done. Couldn't find it. So that frustration became rebuttal. Let's make a list of rebuttals for each page on the internet. So this particular image here is how we represent that relationship on our website. The page on the left is a Wall Street Journal article and on the right is a list of articles which argue against that specific article. We have 11 in this case. If our users write or find a rebuttal they can connect it to the article that they're rebutting and then anyone who looks at that rebutted page can find those rebuttals either through a plugin that we've developed or they can just search our website and find the listed rebuttals. The core idea behind rebutter is that simple. Connect rebuttals to the claims and it's already up and running. But what I think is far more interesting than how rebuttal works is what I think successfully mapping all of these rebuttals can achieve over the coming 10 or 20 years and that's what I want to talk with you about today. First I think we need to look at the current state of affairs. Something is broken. We live in a world which is permanently connected to all human knowledge and somehow we still have people that believe things which are just demonstrably not true. They're crazy things which are just disproven centuries ago even. And I think while the sentiment expressed in this image is very appealing I believe it misses the point entirely. It's funny Eve was talking about Mark Twain because I think Mark Twain's got it right. I don't believe ignorance is a problem. Ignorance doesn't spread. False beliefs on the other hand are scourge and they're all over the internet propagating and promoting themselves. So why is this the case? How did misinformation become so prevalent in our information age? Isn't Wikipedia well-known enough? Are our science communicators failing somehow? Well of course not. Wikipedia is one of the most well-known websites on earth and we've had and continue to have amazing science communicators as well as numerous organizations, media outlets all doing their best to try and share science and knowledge with the public. So it isn't lack of trying or lack of availability of the information which has allowed this misinformation to spread. I think the disconnect between this permanent connection to all knowledge and the huge number of people who don't seem to understand basic science, logic and evidence-based analysis and comes down to two main things. First of all, the internet rightly offers equal opportunity to express all ideas equally. And secondly, our brains have a whole list of psychological flaws and biases towards our current beliefs over new information. So this creates a situation where people are free to go to the internet to find information that they want to find and reaffirm their current beliefs rather than have their false beliefs challenged. And even if they do happen to find a page which challenges their current beliefs thanks to the power of confirmation bias they'll be able to easily ignore or distort or reinterpret the contrary argument anyway. So no amount of having the correct information available is going to make a difference. I'm slightly generalizing here because minds can be changed but it's really hard. So I think it's worth saying though that we can't just give up on this because it's really hard to change minds but at the hands of this epidemic of false beliefs they cost us. They cost us resources. They cost us lives. They distract us from spending our time and money working to improve what does work and making the world a genuinely better place. So just to recap, we have a situation where people believe things which aren't true and merely presenting them with the factual evidence which contradicts their beliefs, doesn't change their minds and these false beliefs cause us individually and as a whole to make bad decisions which waste time, money and energy. So how do we destroy these false beliefs and fix this situation? I think the key is the philosophy behind skepticism. Now I know this is awesome this weekend we covered this quite a bit I think and of course we're all skeptics here but I think we often get lost in the outcomes of skepticism and sometimes forget what skepticism really means in a philosophical sense because skepticism isn't a body of knowledge. Philosophically it isn't arguing with homeopaths it isn't protecting people from balanced bracelet bands or about convincing people that vaccinations are safe, effective and beneficial skepticism isn't about trying to change people's minds. Skepticism is about rigorously interrogating the universe it is about demanding evidence for claims it is about critically appraising all information before you form a belief and that is the key right there catching people at that magical moment before they form their belief changing minds may be hard but getting people to be careful in their belief formation process I believe that that is doable you see no one wants to be wrong so helping people get better at forming the right beliefs to begin with I think this is something that everyone will sign up for so this is my suggested approach instead of fighting back against false beliefs by telling people what to think we instead work to build a framework around the internet which communicates question this to everyone who uses it on every page that they hit every page that provides some sort of argument makes a claim give them the sense that they should be questioning this information and then give them examples of how to question it sure this framework may not change your minds but it will change some and far more importantly than changing people's minds I want you to think about all of the people that haven't made up their mind yet about the millions of ideas and claims out there we all know something about a couple of things or maybe experts in one or two fields but there's far more that we don't know than what we do know and far more and even more importantly than that think of 134 million new minds which join us every year and the growing number of teens who use the internet every day now and how they are just starting to form beliefs which will guide them for the rest of their lives if we could encapsulate their experience of browsing the web with the constant question this vibe maybe they will carry that skepticism with them into adult life maybe every belief they form will be well informed critical analysis and evidence backed reasoning this is my long term vision for Rebutter for me Rebutter is not a tool for skeptics Rebutter is a tool for making skeptics I see a future where every single page on the internet is connected to numerous rebuttals some are great, some may be terrible but every time someone reads a claim on the internet they will be able to access one or more criticisms of that claim and when I say every page I mean these rebuttals too each one of them on the list on the right hand side should have their own rebuttals to them we won't be telling people that they are wrong we won't be sending them to just one belief over all others we will be teaching them how to critically analyse all claims, all beliefs and doubt everything simply through exposing them to examples of critical analysis in action the good and the bad and through this repeated exposure they will quickly learn to recognise weak claims and flimsy evidence faulty logic, the weak rebuttals will be ignored the strong will shine through and sure enough false claims will be easily identified I think the first generation who grows up in this world will become master skeptics the false beliefs will have no new vulnerable minds to take root in before that can happen though we need to build the map and build the users we need help we need more users like Bob who you saw up here yesterday talking about the Buzinski clinic, the other patient group we used David Gorski's article on science-based medicine and systematically submitted that to over 100 different pages supporting the Buzinski clinic we need more users like Pepin who wrote an article himself debunking a series of articles that were published in newspapers and magazines that claimed that students had shown that Wi-Fi kills plants he wrote that article and submitted it to all of the copies of the article that he found and he then used a Twitter widget which we've developed and tweeted his rebuttal at people that were sharing the rebutted page he ended up driving over 50,000 visitors to his article we need more users like Mary who uses her passion for the GMO debate to regularly submit rebuttals of topical articles in that field and we need more users like Out on a Boat who submitted her first rebuttal and used the Twitter reply widget to send two tweets to people who had shared the rebutted page and within minutes her rebutting tweet was retweeted to 112,000 people so how's that for impact on the fight against false beliefs? but what we really need is you we need all of you we need you to help us build this map of rebuttals and to help reach out to others because more than anything else rebuttal is a community of people who care about the spread of false beliefs and the losses of time, money and lives which they cause help us build this technology help us build this map help us build a huge community and maybe we can turn the internet from a passive information delivery system into an educational system which creates critical thinkers thank you and we have time for questions for Shane do you have any statistics about the success rates of your algorithms in terms of false indicators or whatever that and an idea of how it might be trending toward 100% it's hard to hear some of that regarding the success of your algorithm how many, was it 4 out of 5 how many false ones do you get and how is it improving? oh so in finding the rebuttals we don't have an algorithm it's all crowdsourced so we need people to as you're browsing the internet whenever you read a rebuttal and you identify it as such you submit it so at the moment there's no natural language processing software capable enough to identify the intention of the articles to identify whether they're rebuttals or not first of all congratulations on a fascinating I think very important tool I was wondering do you have any concerns you mentioned the all important confirmation bias effect that it can be used in fact to enhance that effect or for people who are looking for those rebuttals which simply confirm their own bias and perpetuating that I can see that perspective but I think that the current situation is far worse because the confirmation bias is saying it allows people to go to the internet and just look for what they're after and never accidentally come across the opposing perspective if you start at answers in Genesis you will never see talk origins but with this sort of process if someone goes to answers in Genesis then the next rebuttal connection will be to something like talk origins or skeptical rational wiki or whatever it's automatically a pro against pro against all it's not um and one of the things I do know a lot of people worry about is false balance in the media for us we are providing effectively as the name of this talk is a global debate we're providing a discussion a claim, a rebuttal, a counter rebuttal so it's not black and white for against it is reactions to each previous article so I don't see definitely someone gets exposed to an article they disagree with it then they click straight through to the side that agrees with them but at least they're looking at the side which disagrees with them somewhere in the mix yeah I thought this was a great idea last year's time and since then I've sort of looked around for it and it really hasn't made a huge impact yet and I was wondering if you've looked into possibly having the rebutter add-in come up by default in Firefox and maybe have keyword searches automatically bring up a reference to rebutter when there's something that might be of interest in skeptical basically negotiating with Google and Mozilla absolutely when they'll listen to me we'll do that but this is the start we need to start somewhere we need to build the map at the moment we're small, small user base small number of rebuttals but systematic growth we need to have a solid foundation and something to offer before they'll be interested but absolutely in the end default in Firefox, default in Chrome that would be fantastic but that's the long term a two-stage question first stage is there any moderation or is this completely free and open to the crowd? there is a level of moderation but at this point in time it's purely for spam and having said that we haven't had any yet so far things have been great as we grow we will react to the problems as they arise because there's a risk there's only two of us working on the project at this point with some assistance and it's very easy to fall into the trap of trying to predict everything that can go wrong and every possible risk and get stuck at the beginning not even getting the first step done so it's a reactionary thing the second part of that would have been are there concerns about say the democratization of knowledge or false balance for that matter if you just allow any rebuttals to grow from whatever I think this was I sort of answered this a little bit before but it is the most common question I get and it's definitely worth saying again is that the internet already has a democratization of knowledge anyone can access anything I think the value of this as I try to in the talk I try to sort of really convey this fact is that I think the idea of skepticism of just knowing that when you encounter a claim you should critically analyze it and ideally you know how to critically analyze it that's the value that we're conveying it's not about hey you've read this you should read this as well consume more information it's not about consuming information it's about how you consume information and I don't know of any other tool on the internet which teaches people how to do that while they consume information thank you Shane