Jo

Ah yes, those well known scientists with absolutely no agenda.

Come the fuck on, this is ridiculous.

I doubt he's ignoring anything. And I know nothing but I think it's a little unfair to bash him for this.

Meta does not need the Fediverse to create a ready-populated instance all of its own. It doesn't need to federate with anyone, it can probably kill Twitter and Reddit with a single stone (if it pours enough resource into moderating and siloing). Just stick a fediwidget in every logged in account page with some thoughtful seeding of content and it's done.

The danger of federating with Meta is much the same as not federating. It has such a massive userbase it will suck the lifeblood out of everywhere else whether or not it can see us.

The possible silver lining is that there are other very large corporates which can do the same (some of which have said they plan to). We could all end up with multiple logins on corporate instances simply because we have accounts with them for other reasons. And that means a lot of very large instances with name recognition, and easy access, making it much harder for any of them to stop federation and keep their users to themselves.

Being federated with one or more behemoths might well be hell. Some instances won't do it. Moderation standards will be key for those that do. But multiple federated behemoths can hold each other hostage because their users can all jump ship to the competition so easily.

This is much, much more complicated than just boycott or not. They cannot be trusted one tiny fraction of an inch but this is coming whether we like it or not. We need to work out how to protect ourselves and I'm starting to think that encouraging every site with a user login to make the fediverse a widget on their account pages might be the very best way to do it.

Good stuff, thanks.

In solidarity with Naples' economic losses, we must force every port to ban super yachts. Apart from Blackpool, which needs the cash.

My thoughts exactly!

I found the link via this article from the always thoughtful A R Moxon*: What Is Lost

You'll probably enjoy that too. :)

*@JuliusGoat @ mastodon. social

(extra spaces above to stop the instance removing all mention of itself from the visible post. WTF?)

You can check their post history? Karma doesn't tell you anything, really. Mine went up tenfold one day just because I replied to what ended up as the top post in a top thread in a much bigger sub than those I normally post in. Some people spend all their time in big subs making short, smart remarks that get a lot of karma, others spend their time in enemy territory battling people they disagree with. Some toxic people have a lot of karma because they hang out in toxic subs.

The problem to be solved is how to order threads. Old skool bulletin boards just bump the most recently replied one to the top. Which works well on an old skool bulletin board as long as it isn't too large, but very badly on a big site where a few big active threads can drown out all the others.

I don't know what the solution is. But the numbers don't mean anything without checking the context. Karma is useful for ordering threads/comments, and giving users a bit of dopamine when they get some attention. But there (probably) are better ways to do it.

That works surprisingly well. Although maybe turn the TV down ...

Thank you!

The Mosuo (a Himalayan Chinese ethnic group) and the Himba (the Namibia and Angola border region) are both very interesting in this respect.

The Mosuo do not have marriage (although their now extinct aristocracy and nearly extinct priesthood did/do). They live in their family home all their lives. Mosuo women have sexual freedom; no one cares how many partners they have or whether there's more than one relationship ongoing simultaneously, and it's not always certain who someone's father is (the matriarchs keep tabs on relationships to help ward off accidental incest). Fathers are not expected to contribute; they raise the children of their sisters and contribute financially to their birth-family household. But, despite the freedom to have many partners on the go with no adverse social consequences at all, most Mosuo tend towards serial monogamy, with some relationships lasting years, others for a lifetime. Those that move to urban China for work tend to adopt traditional marriage because the Mosuo lifestyle is not practical without a whole household to help care for the children.

The Himba, on the other hand, do have marriage and, polyamory for men who are wealthy enough to support more than one wife. But wives are free to have as many other partners as they wish and many women, married or unmarried, will have several on the go at the same time. If a woman wants to sleep with a married man, she gets permission from his wife. Women will often have children before they get married and those they have after marriage are not necessarily fathered by their husbands. It's not an issue because they're herders; children are a source of wealth (more goats can be herded) so the men do not care who the fathers of their children are.

I'm no anthropologist, and I hope I've done these groups justice with my brief descriptions. It's a fascinating topic, especially with respect to polyamory in a rich world context.

I'm not USian but I'd be astonished if that was legal, even in the barbaric hellhole that is the US healthcare system.

Ask her to put it in writing and then challenge the insurance company.

The high rate of failure to replicate is not, in and of itself, evidence of fraud. It's primarily a problem with low power to detect plausible effects (ie small sample sizes). That's not to say there isn't much deliberate fraud or p-hacking going on, there's far too much. But the so-called replication crisis was entirely predictable without needing to assume any wrongdoing. It happened primarily because most researchers don't fully understand the statistics they are using.

There was a good paper published on this recently: Understanding the Replication Crisis as a Base Rate Fallacy

And this is a nice simple explanation of the base rate fallacy for anyone who can't access the paper: The p value and the base rate fallacy

tl;dr p<0.05 does not mean what most researchers think it means

Put a pissmat in front of your bedroom door.

Perhaps show more affection towards your flatmate? I mean, I'm not saying you treat her like shit. But perhaps the dog needs to know you're not a threat to her? Bring her food or something, I dunno.

Your knee jerked you right out of context.