The Problem of False Positives When Trying to Protect Your Website From Spam Comments on a WordPress Site

I've been running Dangerous Intersection since 2006, which now offers more than 7,000 posts.  When you are not running your own website, there are a lot of things that you need not worry about.  Technical issues often arise, and I've been doing my own tech work on my site.  That sometimes means I need to spend significant time to figure out why a Wordpress configuration, a widget or a plugin isn't working correctly. DI has generated a lot of comments over the years, almost 30,000 comments to date. It occurred to me today that there haven't been any comments for weeks.  I carefully analyzed my WordPress setup and could not see any problem.  No issues, which is typical of Wordpress, which is an amazing (and free) website platform.

Then I moved to my anti-spam protection plugin, Askimet, which has done a great job over the years.  But not anymore.  Recently, Askimet has been improperly identifying ALL of my incoming comments (even my own comments) as spam.  I tried to figure out how to reconfigure, but couldn't.  I have no intention of scanning thousands of spam comments each day (many millions of spam comments over the years) in order to identify the real comments, manually pulling them out of the "spam" folder. Thus, I thought, "Maybe it's time for a new form of comment spam protection."

I did some research and decided to install CleanTalk Anti-Spam, a comprehensive program with a delightfully easy installation.  There is no Captcha involved.  I don't quite understand how they do it, but it CleanTalk is a wonderful system with rave reviews on Wordpress and more than 430,000 installations.  I'm not getting paid anything for recommending CleanTalk.  I am writing this with the hope that others who are frustrated with the deluge of spam comments that you get when you run a blog will appreciate this option.

I've been testing out CleanTalk for the past fifteen minutes and it's working like a charm.  CleanTalk is free for one year, then costs $8/year, which is more than reasonable, given how well the program works. I have no problem paying low prices for excellent services that will save me many hours over the year.

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Infographic on Cognitive Biases That Are Distorting Our Political Conversations

Check out this cool infographic at the Visual Capitalist.  Here is what is at stake, according to the website:  "[T]hird parties can also take advantage of these biases to influence our thinking." These should be memorized and sent as reminders to all of your half-crazed friends on social media.

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New Study: Noise Impairs Productivity

Finding from new study from the University of Chicago:, "Noise, Cognitive Function, and Worker Productivity":

As the developing world continues to become more urban and industrial, noise pollution is destined to spread even further. Between 2001 and 2015, the number of cars per person in India tripled, and this growth shows no signs of slowing (Government of India 2017). While this should be celebrated as a sign of progress, it will undoubtedly bring with it even more noise pollution. The results in this paper suggest this is a policy problem that warrants both further research and policy makers’ attention. This paper presents evidence that an increase of 10 dB inhibits cognitive function and that this results in a decrease in productivity of approximately 5%.

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Kathryn Schulz Discusses the Possibility of Being Wrong at TED

It's difficult to imagine that I, at this very moment, am wrong about anything. Yet we all know, in retrospect that we were often wrong about many things. But it never felt like it at the moment. At TED, Kathryn Schulz discusses the dangers and opportunities of looking more closely at these moments.

Most of us do everything we can to avoid thinking about being wrong, or at least to avoid thinking about the possibility that we ourselves are wrong. We get it in the abstract. We all know everybody in this room makes mistakes. The human species, in general, is fallible -- okay fine.

But when it comes down to me, right now, to all the beliefs I hold, here in the present tense, suddenly all of this abstract appreciation of fallibility goes out the window -- and I can't actually think of anything I'm wrong about.

And the thing is, the present tense is where we live. We go to meetings in the present tense; we go on family vacations in the present tense; we go to the polls and vote in the present tense. So effectively, we all kind of wind up traveling through life, trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything.

I think this is a problem. I think it's a problem for each of us as individuals, in our personal and professional lives, and I think it's a problem for all of us collectively as a culture. So what I want to do today is, first of all, talk about why we get stuck inside this feeling of being right. And second, why it's such a problem. And finally, I want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling and that if you can do so, it is the single greatest moral, intellectual and creative leap you can make.

So this is one reason, a structural reason, why we get stuck inside this feeling of rightness. I call this error blindness. Most of the time, we don't have any kind of internal cue to let us know that we're wrong about something, until it's too late . . .

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A Television Fire Provokes Me to Check My Smoke Detectors

I watch very little TV, but Renée Youree Kennison recently convinced me to watch the pilot episode of “This is Us.” Wow. Incredible acting, writing, editing, lighting and music. We have been watching a few episodes per week and we are now almost at the end of Season 2 (out or four completed seasons).

I’m writing this post wondering how many lives might have been saved due to the most recent episode we watched. It involved a horrifically vivid fire of a family residence (I won’t say more because I don’t want to spoil it). Maybe I reacted so emotionally to this episode because 18 years ago I woke up out of a deep sleep (thanks to a smoke detector) with my own house on fire. I was astonished that the smoke hadn’t awakened me earlier. I emptied two fire extinguishers on the fire before the fire department arrived. After watching the TV episode, Renée and I found ourselves walking around our houses evaluating our needs for smoke detector and fire extinguishers. I suspect that other people watching that episode did the same thing. I have my fire extinguisher out in the open and visible. I have smoke detectors on every floor and several rooms.

I know that some fire departments are giving out free smoke detectors. Extinguishers and fire blankets are cheap. COVID-19 is not the only danger out there. Please be safe in all ways!

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