amio

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

So why can’t ordinary people step up and upvote, share, publish, and promote factual information?

They can, it just doesn't work terribly well. Persuading people is not necessarily about actual facts or rationality, even at the best of times, without even involving any strong feelings, or identifying with outcomes, or other interests of conflict.

Facing profit motives, politics, power dynamics, organized propaganda, and bad faith argumentation in general, it's even more grim. Russia and the other troll farmers are making a concerted specific effort out of this. The numbers, resources, and, sadly, human psychology, are on their side.

Making up some bullshit about 5G mRNA causing steel beams takes 10 seconds, maybe add another 5 for calling you a sheep once you rightly ask what the fuck whoever's been smoking. If you wanted to debunk the actual claim, you'd spend orders of magnitude more time and effort than they did, only for them to refuse to even glance at your arguments and studies. Assuming the entire belief isn't fake just to fuck with people, "facts and logic" certainly weren't involved in arriving at it, and are unlikely to budge the actual reason for that belief.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

It's perfectly fine to withdraw a bit from the angrier politics, news and doomscrolling, even more so if you're noticing that it's actively bringing you down. It's an easy pattern to fall into. Turns out fear, annoyance, distrust and anger are pretty engaging. They are also extremely easy buttons to push for fun, political power, and, above all, profit.

We weren't built to deal with every one of a zillion things wrong with the world every hour of every day. Still, that is what happens when a combination of blind machine learning optimization (for profit, of course), sensationalist greed, and some rando's political opinions decides what you see. In the long history of the human race, borrowing more and fresher worries from all over the world has never been the norm.

I tend to go out of my way to eliminate politics from my life, aside from voting, pretty much. By all means stay informed enough to do what little you can as a random individual, but you can do that without wallowing in every fecal particle of political drama.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 years ago

If nothing else, eggs were a way of producing offspring many millions of years before anything you can reasonably call a chicken.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Giant white page

??

Entered "metastem" just to see if anything happened

"I could not find any results"

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (6 children)

It doesn't actually mean fear in those contexts. Etymologically yes, it comes from the Ancient Greek for fear. For all other purposes, that doesn't really matter. If you're anti-gay then you are a homophobe - case closed, just another English term with slightly odd etymology that is irrelevant to how it's actually used by literally everyone. There are thousands of those.

People starting in on "well, achkchually that means FEAR" just want to either nitpick irrelevant trivia, or hide behind a difference that doesn't really exist. It's like pretending the term "hydrophobic" is wrong "because water can't feel emotions": incorrect, irrelevant, just... a weird argument, and if someone brings it up all the time, you sort of have to wonder what their deal is.

The hypothetical "unwilling bigots", the ones genuinely afraid through no fault of their own, causing no harm and carrying no ill will... I'll empathize with them when I get a reason to believe they exist.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

The default for IP holders is to be a twat. If they focused on making their portfolio available to the most people, there might pass an un-pinched penny through their claws. As a result, any kind of IP license must, apparently, be the maximum amount of pain and circumscription and sheer, bloody-minded pettiness it could possibly be.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

"What will help me connect with my base? Ah yes, the haircut of a child molester!"

Both the guy and his barber must've been on PCP. At a certain point "just fuck my shit up" doesn't even cover it anymore.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Maybe it would help if you gave examples?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

The "argument" is idiotic enough to not really need or deserve rebuttal. People like that are a waste of skin and nothing can be gained by arguing with them. Since it would be a waste, I might as well waste that time in a more pleasant way.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

Google doesn't do that properly anymore, either, much like the "literal search" (quotes) - used to work, now it's a crap shoot.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Wrong, you absolutely can. It's considered a fallacy, logically or formally speaking, because it doesn't deal with the actual "point", but casts aspersions on whomever's motives or fitness to deliver it. If you are strictly debating Topic X then that is technically (or logically, or whatever) irrelevant. In reality, if someone is moralizing at you then their being immoral or amoral is actually pretty significant.

If any given person is saying [something you're doing] is morally wrong, then you'd be naturally less inclined to take that feedback from e.g. Hitler. I hope. Formally that is an error, in reality it's still sort of a reasonable thing to keep in mind.

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