sparticus-was-wrong
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User ID: 533
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
I know what you mean and I saw that too but there was a certain kind of post, kind of a schema or template that appeared all over. Same arguments, same links (literally 20 or 30 or more), same reactions, same tone, different user name.
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
But what happened to all the people who were pro-Bernie and hated Clinton literally hours before? They should have still been there.
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
It needs to be clear that the existence of the "Slippery Slope" fallacy does not mean all Slippery Slope arguments are fallacies. Slippery Slopes do happen and it's a very common tactic, in fact. The fallacy is along the lines of your example but suggesting that censorship, once successful will expand is not a fallacy it's the most likely outcome. It's also an outcome we've literally watched in history on multiple occasions. Once you've been able to stop people saying something small you don't like hearing, why would you stop?
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
Personally I don't believe it's all that needed on Reddit.
Years ago I noticed something interesting related to GMO products. You could be in the most obscure sub you could think of and if you just mentioned GMO is a negative light at all, suddenly you'd get a 3 page post citing 100's of "scientific papers" proving how safe, or even healing GMO meat was, how anti-science you were, how evil, how much of a Nazi, etc. Pretty much the exact same post no matter where you were, but different accounts (as far as I cared to look anyway). Then if you brought something up (e.g. "yea but literally all of those papers you cite are from GMO companies?") then you might get silence for a bit, then seemingly instantaneously all over the site there would be a package response to that. It was such a bizarre phenomena but it was really like Beetlejuice: say "GMO sucks!" and they would appear.
Then came the 2016 election. All of the mainstream news subs were pro Bernie and hostile to Hillary (and to Trump of course, though he had that crazy meme sub at that point). Then Hillary won the primary and I saw the exact same thing happen with Hillary. The same Beetlejuice affect. You could be in /r/rollerskatesforpeoplewith3legs and say "those are cool skates but they remind me of Hillary Clinton and she's just not likable" and out comes the canned posts with all the exact same message stated the exact same way (e.g. "Most qualified person to ever run for president"... uh, what about a president running for a second term, wouldn't they be more qualified?). Highly aggressive. But this time it wasn't one or two it could be dozens of people or more. What made it stand out to me was how fast and how radical this changed. The die hard "Bernie or nobody" people seemed to literally disappear. Of course they were there but suddenly they were downvoted to oblivion.
I personally think reddit these days is 80% bots and "call centres" making comments. So there's no need to censor the site directly, just put backroom restrictions on what the call centres and bots are allowed to push.
NOTE: The above is purely from memory and I'm a human so some of it won't have actually happened how I remember it now but I think it gets the point across of what I was seeing and why I have come to this conclusion.
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
These days, we prefer the name "linguistic relativity hypothesis". Sapir-Whorf has some ugly ties to the Nazi's: they incorrectly used the theory as evidence for Aryan superiority (which is silly if you know German and some other language). Their usage was ridiculous but, like pedophiles, just the mention of their name taints the subject, hence the name change (and, of course, it more accurately states what the theory is about).
I should do a better job of keeping various articles that discuss the theory as it's kind of a pet favourite of mine. In my own life I've noticed Swiss-german native speakers tend to have a problem distinguishing smell and taste. They use the same word for both.
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
If you don't mind, I would actually like to speak to the health aspect:
My wife and I tried a vegan diet. We planned to go for a month and see how we felt and possibly keep it up for a while if we experienced the results some people were claiming. In reality we lasted less than 7 days. The issue is not that the claims we heard were lies, they may have been true but we needed to stick with it longer. The issue was not that vegan meals are somehow less healthy or taste bad or anything. The issue was the effort. If you eat a standard diet, even a vegetarian one you will manage to almost accidentally get all the stuff you need to the point that nothing bad is going to happen for years (or maybe never: maybe something not related to your diet gets you instead). With a vegan diet this takes radically more effort and we simply weren't in a position to put in this effort.
For me, I did find the health aspects compelling: I do get all kinds of injuries working out, so if this is some kind of inflammation that happens less (or not at all) on a plant based diet that would be sufficient reason for me to switch. I'm not moved by the arguments about ethics. Animals should be treated better than they are but you can already signal your concern about this by purchasing products that send these signals (even if the product is lying, you're still sending a signal by purchasing it).
Interestingly I did feel more alert, but I guess this was because I can only drink coffee with milk and all the milk replacements tasted so awful in coffee I just gave it up instead. The meals we did eat were fantastic. My wife just didn't have time to break out a spreadsheet and ensure that all the really important stuff (e.g. calcium) was being sufficiently covered (which absolutely can be, just not by accident) and I was scared to continue on a diet where some critical things might be entirely absent. We could probably have gone on for a few more weeks as we were without any permanent damage but even what she was doing was just a lot more effort and clearly not sustainable no matter the health effects.
EDIT: I guess that's not steel man but it's a practical truth for us and probably plenty of others as well.
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
Using ad-blockers is antisocial behavior and should be discouraged or banned wherever possible.
People are "voting with their feet", as they always have. As long as there have been ads people have been trying to escape them. When VCRs came out with a record function the first (only?) use I heard about from everyone was recording shows you want to watch and actually consuming them later so you could skip the ads.
Just because you like a certain financial model doesn't mean you have some right to it. I despise it, and given how much effort people are willing to invest to avoid ads, I think a strong argument can be made that it's simply incorrect. Content creators also don't have any right to making a living via their content. People do not want ads, for the most part, so if they can't find a way to sell their product without the ad model then it's just another business that failed like millions of others.
See the decline of the newspaper for what content creation looks like without advertising dollars:
Paid news content indeed lost to free content. I don't think that proves the ad model is somehow superior. People were happy to read news when they could ignore the ads and pages loaded fast enough. I suspect people might be more open to paying for news again now if a reasonable micro-transaction model existed, except that the news has gotten so poor it's hard to justify paying anything for most of it.
but not viewing any ads that pay for the content you consume is just expecting the world to provide you with something free of charge.
I don't expect it. But they do it. Is your expectation truly that I sit there and try to concentrate on some advertisement which I've already seen (well, had playing in the background while I wait for my content to start again) dozens or even hundreds of times before because of... I don't know, some capitalism-reglious piety?
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
People will find a way to game it. Ads are just one of the many cat/mouse games.
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
I had to start using them because everything is just simply too slow without it. Sites now feel like they have trackers in every pixel of every, otherwise static, page.
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
I'm not sure who's really doing what but everything I hear and see about Harris, she's even less competent than he is. I doubt she's allowed to even be involved in any meaningful decisions.
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
I think the issue is that IQ is measuring how intelligent one has managed to become. But racists like to use it to determine what one is capable of becoming. There was a very interesting case of the Dan Everett and the Piraha amazonian tribe (I can't find the article now, I believe it was in the Times or similar but it was more than a decade ago). He claimed that the tribe had no numbers in their language (only "many", "few") etc. and were completely incapable of learning to count.... if they learned after about 16 years of age. If they learned before then they could count just fine.
Of course there is much more evidence than this about forming connections before a certain age, etc. My point is that even if Africa truly has "naturally" low IQs, this is almost certainly do to with education and if that were fixed the IQs would rise. So again, the issue is that certain people try to look at IQ and point at something genetic but that's not remotely implied by IQ unless you could ensure the study group had the exact same education as the higher groups.
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
I don't think that's really true. I would give a listen to this video. There is an index in the description, the person to listen to is Dr. Mike Israetel. From what I've understood from him, if you keep the doses low you don't get most of the bad effects but you will see benefits.
People doing large amounts to look good on instagram is obviously terrible and deadly but that doesn't mean there is no proper way to use steroids. After all, we do use them for plenty of common medical applications.
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
I'm personally strongly against "woke"-ism, but did Tolkien exclude black elves? Did he mention their colour at all?
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
If you waited until everyone was already conditioned not to speak their mind then it wouldn't matter if they did ban theMotte, it would effectively be dead anyway.
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
Exactly, especially with things like Nate Silver taking tremendous heat for suggesting a Trump win was barely within the margin of error (edit: instead of completely mathematically impossible). That makes it at least appear as though most media outlets saw the polls as propaganda and not reporting tools.
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
But things like the Comey letter seem to just be part of the cycle. The "September surprise" or whatever it's called. It happened again with Biden, just this time the FBI choice to help influence on behalf of the democrats instead of against them.
sparticus-was-wrong
2yr ago
You were open to being convinced here?
You may not need it, but it seems highly unlikely to me that various actors wouldn't be out there trying to insure their voice wins out. Look at Twitter: the bot count seems to be higher than previously thought.
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