AceTKen

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I dislike this article. It's a little old now, but there are several things blisteringly wrong with this idea at its heart.

Purely for example, if you read a book on dragonflies and take offence because you see racial similarities between whatever race a person is and dragonflies, that's an issue with you, not the source. You are relying on your opinion on what the source says. Since opinion varies per person, you should not dictate policy based on opinion. It's an insurmountable hill to cater to whatever opinions are since opinion will always change - it's an unsound basis for any form of logic.

Let's do a thought experiment:

If a trailer-dwelling white person in the USA reads about the Vistani, and takes offence because they also live in a trailer, sees that as a negative, and assumes the Vistani are a potshot at him, is he right to be offended and call for a ban?

If a nimble Canadian POC (which is also a terrible term as it literally applies to everyone on the planet) reads about Elves and assumes they're talking about him because he also happens to know how to use a bow and is skinny with a lithe frame, is he correct in calling for a ban? What if he sees being nimble as a negative for some reason (because positive / negative characteristics are opinions and what people see as negative is not objective)? What if he sees it as being racist by saying the source is calling ALL Elves nimble and therefore good at sports? "But they stereotypically have a different skin colour!" I hear you saying. So do Orcs. That argument applies here and if you can't square that circle, then the logic falls apart utterly.

Personal identification with aspects of characters in a source material are not cause for alteration. You are an individual; you are not a group. Grouping people into camps based on visible traits or histories is a disgusting habit.

Treat people as individuals and racism dies. Treat people as groups and call out the differences constantly and you'll have people fencing themselves in while calling themselves inclusive.

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This week's Weekly discussion thread will be focused on Gender. Here is the definition we will be using so everyone can use the same terminology.

Here are some questions that should help kickstart things:

• Why do you feel it started entering public consciousness in regards to humans about 15 years ago?

• Was it needed?

• Did it do what it was intended to do?

• Are things better or worse now in that specific area?

• Is there anything you do not understand or would like to discuss about the idea of gender?

So now that we've been around for a week or so and have tried to populate things with some controversial topics, how would you like to see this Community grow and change?

Should I add post guidelines? Maybe adjust the pinned thead?

Should I change the rules at all?

Our disclaimer is currently:

Remember: Up / Downvoting in this community is not an agree / disagree button. We upvote good or constructive conversation and downvote off-topic posts or badly-voiced opinions. If you disagree, you respond like a human in good faith and prove out your position.

Should the disclaimer be changed? It's primarily for people wandering in from viewing All threads (instead of just their subscribed ones), or for people on phones who never read the sidebar. It is there to show, in point form, how we operate to people who don't come to us purposefully.

Are there any topic you'd really like to see covered?

Are there any other Communities we should do a link swap with that have a similar ethos with?

Are there types of threads you want to see less or more of? More descriptors?

I'm open to any and all good ideas!

Remember: Up / Downvoting in this community is not an agree / disagree button. We upvote good or constructive conversation and downvote off-topic posts or badly-voiced opinions. If you disagree, you respond like a human in good faith and prove out your position.

The amount of "left-right" entrenchment seems to be at an all-time high and increasing.

No matter what side of the political spectrum you fall on, what would it take to get you to vote for a new party?

Would implementing a better electoral system that would eliminate the two-party see-saw and allowing for more granularity in candidates help (See Single Transferable Vote or STAR depending on the type of election)?

Do you have other solutions to this issue?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

I have found that many people "doing their own research" are only searching for confirmation to their beliefs, and also seem to have a misunderstanding about what "research" actually entails.

If you're a rational thinker and you believe you have a source that makes a good point, you'll simply link that source directly, and maybe even explain how it supports the thing you believe. However, if you're a conspiracy theorist who only has bad sources that can be easily disproven, you'll become wary about linking to those sources directly or trying to explain what they mean to you, lest someone in the discussion completely blow your argument apart and laugh at you.

That's why the imperative appeal to "do your own research" has developed - whether intentional or not, it's a tailor-made strategy to protect bad sources (and bad thinking) from criticism. By telling people to do their own research rather than being up front about your sources and arguments, you try to push people into learning about the topic you want them to internalize while there are no dissenting voices present. It's a tactic that separates discussion zones from "research" zones, so that "research" can't be interrupted by reality.

People who actually have good points with good sources don't need to do this. It's only the people who are clinging onto bad, debunkable sources (or simple feelings) that need to vaguely tell people to "do their own research". The actual scientific method is "help me disprove this theory. Only when we all fail can we consider this theory good enough for now, but we will continue looking for other theories that explain things better, and then try and disprove those too".

No researcher tells another researcher on a level playing field to do their own research. They say, "What have you found? Let's discuss it." This is the way progress is made. There's a reason we're calling all this the culture wars and not the new renaissance.

Hell, even culture war is generous branding. It's people living in reality against a loose coalition of people who just generally don't like them because they've been trained to by the moneyed interests who have spent the last 30 years building a propaganda machine to weaponize them for political and financial gain.

The truly strange part is that the research you do as a civilian does not matter. If you somehow got a degree and ran an absolutely bulletproof years-long study in CURRENT THING, the people telling you to "do your own research" would be exactly the people who would not believe you because it would go against their preconceptions. They don't care about research, they care about belief.

Looking things up online that conform to your viewpoint is not research, it is a means to entrench yourself.

Let's Do An Experiment!

Right. So by your downvotes, I see that you don't understand why the scientific method necessitates disregarding personal experience. Let's show you an extremely simplified but basic example:

Let's say that a person believes that cats simply do not exist.

Oh, they've seen cats before, but they think they're just really small people covered in carpet and refuse to believe any evidence to the contrary.

Everyone else knows that cats exist; we know there is something wrong with this person.

Regardless, the person decides to do an "experiment" to prove it. They walk into their living room, glue carpet to their spouse, and then claim victory. They then document it stating that in their personal experience, they proved the one cat they found in the area was just a person with carpet glued to them. They gather support online, and publish it in a for-pay journal. The article is never peer-reviewed because the person refused to tell of their methodology, but people repost the "study".

If science operated in a fashion that the "do your own research" people felt, then we should all believe this person.

Just because a single person has never seen a cat, or chooses not to acknowledge cats, doesn't mean that factually cats do not exist. Even organizing a poor experiment and claiming they have done "research" does not make them correct. The burden of proof is still present, and a poor experiment is often blown apart in the scientific community or unrepeatable. This is why peer-review without an agenda is incredibly important.

If everything someone "saw with their own eyes" were true, then ghosts, aliens, demons, every God that has ever been worshipped (even though they preclude each other), mythical creatures, and countless other things are all true. All of them. That, or there is a flaw in the logic you are using.

Also, to most of the people here who will no doubt not read this as it may challenge your world view - plugging your ears and screaming as loud as you can to drown out the world does not make truth vanish.

Being insulting, blocking, or downvoting doesn't mean that you're correct.

I like to believe that people can be reached and the only outcome isn't just shit-throwing matches and all-out war. However, if you're not willing to debate in good faith, then there is no debate.

You have lost at the outset by not being willing to be incorrect.

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I've said that many current political movement and party leaders aren't liars, what do I mean?

Well, they don't lie, per se.

They bullshit. Which, frankly, is worse.

A successful liar must construct a lie carefully, and must first know the truth. Because the lie must be different from the truth, meant to conceal it. To lie successfully is to distinguish reality from fiction and attempt to convince the other person that one is the other, but always knowing yourself which is actually correct. The facts matter to the liar.

But these people do not do that. They bullshit. In order to further their goals, any actions and any words are permissible, because they see themselves as inherently good (and that goes for narrative and reality). In order to gain an advantage in the immediate "now", anything can be said. To them, it doesn't matter if it's truth or lie, as long as it serves their purpose right now. They craft a situation, a story, narrative, a reality, in which they convince The Other (and even their own) that they are right and good. You see, they must always be right because they are good. The narrative itself need not be consistent or even coherent.

Think of the hundreds of bizarre conspiracy theories in which they are the secret heroes opposing evil. Pizzagate, Satanists, autism vaccines, Qanon, baby-eating liberals, flat Earthers, you name it. Those aren't lies in the traditional sense of the word. Those are a constant, desperate struggle to be the Good side at all times in spite of evidence to the contrary, and without concerns about what is real and what isn't. Unlike with lying, the facts, truth, and objective reality don't matter here. They can be substituted and changed on a whim - the infamous "alternative facts." That is what bullshitting is.

Debating real-life issues with them becomes futile because their reality is completely fluid and can change in an instant. One day an "engineered bio-weapon Chinese death virus funded by the Clinton Foundation" is going to kill us all, and the next day it's just a harmless flu. Not because if anything they learned, but because of how it makes them feel, and as I've said again and again since age 14, feelings are the enemy of logic.

But if it suits their immediate needs, then something like COVID is a Chinese-Clinton-Gates bioweapon again. And if they don't feel like wearing a mask in the store, it's just a flu again. Or it could be a hoax and Fauci made it up. Doesn't matter as long as the bullshit helps them in the immediate situation. Maybe they believe it, maybe they don't. They can even apply a form of doublethink to believe two or more contradicting realities simultaneously.

Disregard objective reality, absorb only the reality you choose to take in. One moment Democrats / Liberals / "The Elite" (but only the ones they don't like) run a global vampiric cabal that rules the world from the shadows in humanity's single greatest feat of secrecy, and the next moment they're bumbling idiots who can't tie their shoelaces, unfit to govern anything.

Climate scientists are making billions by convincing people that climate change is real, and at the same time are a bunch of poor hippie losers stuck in a dead end university job. And those stats that you can measure yourself? Uhhh... SHUT UP! WHY'S THERE STILL SNOW THEN, SMART GUY?! Biden is a weak coward bending over for anything Putin says, and simultaneously a warmonger who's destroying good relationships with Russia and starting WWIII.

Jan. 6 protesters in jail are good, innocent people who are victims of a witch hunt, because Jan. 6 were just peaceful tourists. And they were also violent BLM actors performing a false flag operation. The fact that those rioters filmed and so outed themselves is not in their advantage to say because it goes against the narrative, and so it doesn't enter that reality.

A liar wouldn't get away with such internal inconsistencies in their crafted alternate reality. They would immediately be found out, and they would be a terrible liar because a lie needs that internal consistency to be believable. But with bullshitting, the concept of truth never even played a part in it from the very beginning. Bullshitters don't care if you believe them or not. Their reality is whatever they want it to be at any given time. They are no longer part of "consensus reality", that which everyone can show, see, and test to be objectively true. And being detached from consensus reality is an extremely dangerous position to be in for further radicalization. They become unable to distinguish fact from fiction anymore, and can eventually turn their imaginary beliefs into real actions. Like shooting up the Pizzagate place. Bombing abortion clinics. Breaking into Pelosi's home and assaulting her husband with a hammer. Trying to kidnap a governor.

Those people you saw in the news had already left consensus reality long ago, and they were without a doubt True Believers in whatever new reality they found themselves in.

Whether they created that new reality themselves or whether it was pre-made and spoon-fed to them is another matter.

Remember: Up / Downvoting in this community is not an agree / disagree button. We upvote good or constructive conversation and downvote off-topic posts or badly-voiced opinions. If you disagree, you respond like a human in good faith and prove out your position.

I'm going to keep this apolitical and not talk about any side in specific, but how does a government tell the truth when people don't want to hear it? I want some actual discussion from this ESPECIALLY from those who think the Government correcting anyone on anything is censorship because the logic doesn't seem to be cohesive.

Let's say somebody fucked up badly and now you (yes you) are a leader of whatever federal government side you'd like and your side happens to be in power.

Someone posts a blog article on a social media site that says "(YOUR NAME HERE) Is Going To Kill Us All And Does Horrible Things To Animal Butts". It's filled with all kinds of scathing insults and made up crap that you didn't do. It focuses on the fact that you went on a vacation last year for a week. But the blog post says that it wasn't a vacation, it was a trip to plan how to kill everyone and put things into animal butts. So many things. Gross things. You've not done anything they're talking about, but people DO know that you had a vacation.

It continues to get shared enough that opinion-based media sites start covering it. Not saying it's true, simply covering the initial post and saying that someone else says it's true. That way they can't be sued, y'see. Someone posts a badly photoshopped picture of you with one hand holding a stack of paperwork with the title "Secret Government Plan #127 - How to Murder Everyone I don't Like and Continue Molesting Animals." It's badly edited, but dumb people continue to share it because they don't like you and some people are calling it real.

You release an official statement stating your innocence, but the people who are on the opposite political side from you are saying you're lying. They want to have you stand trial. You've done nothing, but some are already saying you're using your power to NOT have to stand trial otherwise the police would have stopped you. Some are saying the police are in on it! So... how do you solve this?

How, as a government in power, do you combat disinformation spread by people who genuinely don't know or care what the truth is?

And I mean something long term, true, and without pissing off half the population because you're "telling them how to think" (even if "how they think" is just made up bullshit designed to piss them off and emotionally manipulate them).

How, as a government in power, do you combat disinformation spread by people who genuinely don’t know or care what the truth is?

In short, how, as a government in power, do you combat disinformation spread by people who genuinely don’t know or care what the truth is without outright censorship?

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PREFACE:

These dumb chat "A.I." programs are... not A.I. and even people selling it even recognize that.

THE CRUX:

We don't have real A.I. - we have generative models trained on massive amounts of data which in effect attempts to compress it down into a trained model which it can run to try and regenerate answers based on the data it was trained from. It is a lossy compression, as the model itself is too small to contain the whole of the information it ingests. As such it makes things up along the way in order to fill in the blanks. You can see this in how chat models like ChatGPT will confidently give you incorrect information. Researchers call this "hallucinating".

The model doesn't actually have any core understanding of the material it ingests - it can't, since it isn't actually an artificial intelligence. It can infer what things should look like, and it can do so well enough now to start fooling humans into thinking it knows what it's doing. We're in the 'uncanny valley' of generative language and code models. So that's one problem. It makes things up without understanding it, and can't reliably reproduce correct answers, only things that kinda look correct.

It's absolutely infuriating to people who actually understand the technology that we've taken to calling it "AI" at all. It's a stupid techbro marketing stunt and unfortunately for all of us it has stuck, and as a result we now all have to call it A.I., and only those of us with the right tech background to know better will understand just how misleading that label is.

The output is still garbage, but it's dangerously believable garbage.

Remember all those shitty chat bots that circulated around for a while? This is just that, but way more complex and easier to mistake for real intelligence. Imagine now, if you will, an internet full of such chat bots all set up by techbros and lazy hacks trying to cash in on the sudden easy ability to generate 'content' that can get past regular spam filters at a rate so fast that no human team can keep up with checking it all, and they're pulling this stuff down from the internet en masse to train their buggy models, then submitting it back to places that are indexed online where the next set of buggy models can ingest it, like an infinite Ouroboros of shit, so next thing you know you can't trust a damn thing you read anywhere, because it's all garbage generated from other people's garbage, and companies like IBM and Microsoft are even getting in on it.

And because the models learn based on statistical trends and averages over a large set of data? Guess what? This huge flood of new "A.I." generated data is now the norm, and as such it takes precedence over human generated data that by natural limitations cannot keep up with the speed at which the A.I. generated data is flooding the internet.

That's basically what's happening now. Because the average person making decisions about how to leverage this new, lucrative technology for profit doesn't understand (or care to understand) how it works or why it's a bad idea. All they see is the short term dollar signs from getting leg up on the competition by churning huge quantities of shit out faster and cheaper than any human can, in a market where increasingly only quantity matters, not quality.

It's already replacing journalists and authors as newspapers and publishing houses are getting backed up with a flood of "AI" generated submissions from people trying to cash in on it. A huge amount of recent content on the internet is entirely made up, imagined by these models, and very difficult to tell apart from actual researched information by real knowledgeable experts. Throwing this into the mix with the already problematic ecosystem of disinformation from entities like Cambridge Analytica, and even writing children's books to help human children learn to read? The future is very bleak indeed.

THINGS I HAVEN'T SPOKEN ABOUT (or only alluded to):

• The massive power usage
• Putting it into software that absolutely does not need it
• "Necromancing" dead people for clicks
• Making search nigh-unusable
• Further reducing the value of actual writers
• Mass layoffs because the idiots in charge think the tech can replace people (Spoiler - no, it can't)
• You know those shitty auto-generated "Radiant AI" quests in Skyrim that everyone hated? You know how whenever there's a randomly generated room in a game how you can tell just by looking at it that it wasn't designed with any semblance of thought? Like that but they want to use it for everything in games now.

Some Sources:

A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine

How Bad Are Search Results?

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Ignoring all political factors, I believe that overpopulation is real. Whilst it is true that the planet has enough physical space for billions more people than exist right now, it does not have the natural resources to support billions more.

Focusing on a singular issue that faces global civilization that highlights what I mean - food.

Current food production is heavily reliant on fossil fuel derived fertilizers. It's commonly accepted that oil production will peak and eventually decline if it has not done so already. Some argue that it has, some say it is imminent. Nonetheless, eventually oil production will become exponentially more expensive as demand increases and supply shrinks and thus anything that relies on oil derived fuels or products will also become more costly. Global farming is reliant on oil derived fuels such as diesel and petroleum for the tilling, planting, fertilizing, spraying of insecticides and harvesting of crops. Not to mention transportation, processing, packaging and preparation. Natural gas, the most important input for the production of fertilizers is required during the Haber-Bosch process. Natural gas is also a finite fossil fuel subject to the same limitations as oil.

If we then look at the macro landscape we also learn that top soil, the soil that crops are grown in is being eroded by constant farming processes, poor land management and natural processes. It is estimated that at the current rate of erosion there could be no top soil left globally within 60 years. If I remember correctly, topsoil is being eroded approximately ten times faster than it can be replaced.

Now there are arguments to be made that we could reduce wastage, reduce demand and manage land better. Doing these things could buy extra time for a static or shrinking population.

Anyway, the point is that the global population rising means that there is more demand for food. Our ability to produce more food to satisfy the extra demand of a growing population is being reduced due to the factors I've mentioned above and these are only a subset of a far greater set of issues we face.

The idea that we can continue to grow the population further and that the planet can support this indefinitely is not reasonable. There are limits to growth in finite systems.

Population growth means that there are more people that both want and need a slice of the pie. The problem is there's only a limited amount of pie available. We can slice that pie into ever smaller pieces and we can even redistribute the pie that exists more equitably. This will help keep people fed in the short term but not in the long term.

The problem is that the pie is going to shrink and the baker isn't going to be able to get enough ingredients to make more. Eventually the pie will be gone.

In our analogy eventually there will be no pie to go around and everyone goes home hungry.

This means that we end up with a predicament without a solution that I am aware of.

It is far more likely that globally populations will continue to rise until we overshoot our constrained resources. Once that happens human population levels will drop, whether there is intervention or not.

What do you feel about overpopulation?

I've been here since the great Reddit Exodus and have seen some good and some bad.

What have you liked and disliked about being on Lemmy so far?

Do you see your usage going up or down?

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PREFACE

Let me start by saying that I am not a centrist. I am not arguing that you should be a centrist or independent. I am arguing against mischaracterization of others.

Much of what I see here in Lemmy against centrism or Independents is made up of bad strawman arguments largely consisting of: “There are three types of people: reasonable people who agree with me, crazy fascists, and lily-livered wimps who can’t pick a side (and are also fascists)!”

The other (also poorly thought out and blatantly strawmanned) argument I see over and over here when discussing this topic consists of:

Left Wing: "Let's not kill trans people."

Right Wing: "Let's kill all trans people."

Centrists: "Let's kill some trans people."

THE CRUX

If someone says that they are “centrist” they are not telling you that they base all of their opinions on being dead-centre in the middle of any two positions. That would be an astoundingly stupid position to undertake.

They are telling you that they agree with neither major party on everything, and find that both parties have views that they don’t agree with. It’s pretty easy to come to that conclusion because the US two-party system packs in an almost incoherent mishmash of beliefs into exactly two sides (or 2.5 sides if you're from Canada).

There is absolutely no contradiction in being for police reform, and against riots lasting for days. There is no contradiction in being for gun rights, while also wanting massive limits on them. There is no contradiction in wanting functional government services including universal healthcare, and thinking that free markets can be made effective. There is no contradiction in wanting a more balanced budget, and government services to be funded properly.

The idea that there are only two sides in politics is a strange delusion created by the two-party system.

Now, I have been trying on Lemmy for months. I have frequently encountered wilful misunderstandings about centrists / independents. I have frequently seen discussions state that they feel these groups are all secretly right wing and just won't admit it, which is wild to me.

AND ONE MORE THING

In my estimation, the reason Lemmy members often run into situations like this is because they don’t witness the centrist also vehemently argue with right-wing policies frequently.

The posters only see the arguments with them and therefore have a skewed view of centrists / independents and their politics. In short, if you are left wing, and argue for left-wing policies in every case, that means you will also be argued with by somebody who believes political nuance and not just waving a party flag.

Remember, the right wing also shits on centrists because they think they are secretly left-wing since they argue with their stupider points as well. So no, these people are not secretly right-wing and just don’t have the balls to say it. That is a horrendous take no matter where you fall on the political spectrum and only serves to limit conversation.