This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
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These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
We also had the problem with the database earlier this month, so some of these comments aren't available in their original context. However I am reposting the comments themselves below; it's not a perfect solution, but in various ways it beats the alternatives I could think of. That said, if you find any errors in need of correction (misattributed comments, for example) please feel free to @ me. The number of copy/paste errors I made in the process of trying to put this together is... not small.
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Notes -
Always humbled when I am (surely mistakenly) included on these lists.
Extra-special thank you to @naraburns and other mod staff for doing this even after the server choked on its own tongue earlier in Feb. Y'all are the real MVPs.
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Hlynka and all the people supporting his QC confuse me.
It's confusing because it seems like there's a great deal of people who think the fact of the matter is that the 2020 election was unfairly stolen by Trump. They argue the facts and think their side is correct in a verifiable manner. I understand this perspective, even if I disagree on the facts.
Hlynka's post and subsequent comments aren't about this. It's about how election deniers have to be persuaded by the non-deniers that there was no ultimate theft. He interweaves this with references to attempts to suppress investigations into election fraud, but his subsequent comments in that thread make it clear that he assigns the election deniers no obligation to evaluate their own motivations.
If I talked with a person who disagrees on the facts, I know they would be willing to publicly state that the facts are the only thing that should determine the conclusion. Whether there was fraud or not, a stolen election or not, the facts are the sole method of determining this. But Hlynka isn't arguing the facts because his revealed preference is debates over policy. And no, elections are not the same thing as debates over policy.
I will ask anyone here who supports his view the same question I asked him - do you actually care about the facts of the 2020 election, or are you just interested in negotiating over policy? Because if it's the latter, just be honest and we can avoid debating a topic which doesn't actually touch upon your real concern.
I don't always agree with you, but I agree with this above comment absolutely.
Attitudes towards the legitimacy of the 2020 election is probably the one area where I feel most out of step with the modal opinion on this site, and I'm consistently surprised by the hostile reception that "no, the 2020 election was fair actually, and no one has presented remotely persuasive evidence to the contrary" comments get.
I don't have anything against anyone who thinks the election was fair or finds evidence to the contrary unconvincing, it's the idea that believing in fraud is unreasonable that bothers me.
I don't think it's unreasonable to think that a given election (even a given American election) could be fraudulent. But when no persuasive evidence has been presented that a specific election was, and when the "evidence" presented that it was is so uniformly weak and has been patiently, exhaustively refuted, it seems reasonable to conclude that this specific election wasn't fraudulent.
I also think it's a bit tiresome when I was agreeing with Republicans for four years that "Russiagate" was a load of hooey, a nationwide cope for Democrats to avoid confronting the fact that they lost an election fair and square. Then December 2020 rolls around, and the people who last week were loudly declaring that the 2016 Presidential election was fraudulent and compromised by Russian hackers - these same people immediately declare that the 2020 election was as fair and legitimate as they come, and you'd have to be a nutter to think otherwise; and vice versa. Like, do Republicans honestly not remember how recently the boot was on the other foot, how they spent the years 2017-20 (correctly) deriding Democrats as a pack of whiny sore losers, credulously falling for obvious rubbish like the "Steele dossier"? I guess we really have always been at war with Eastasia.
All of that is absolutely fine, and that's not the kind of talk that trips my wires and makes me react, let alone with any sort of hostility.
Fair.
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Think about this in terms of the external audit of a public company.
A public company has its own accountants. They may notice money going missing, track it down, and report the employee to the police for fraud.
As a public company it must also submit to and pay for an external audit. The external audit is not looking for fraud. The external audit is auditing the internal controls and the procedures. Are the internal controls sufficient (if the procedures are followed) to stop money going missing? Are the procedures being followed? It gets a little tricky because a big business is inevitably full of minor lapses and edge cases. The external auditors will not qualify the companies accounts unless the weaknesses of internal controls and breaches of procedure are material.
However, if there are material weaknesses, the external auditors will qualify the accounts, saying that they cannot be fully relied upon because blah blah. This is a big deal. Remember that the external auditors are not looking for fraud. Looking for fraud that is really there is often futile; the fraud only took place because lax procedures that were not even followed, provided an opportunity to get away with fraud. Once the accounts have been qualified the company takes measures (perhaps under a new board of directors) to remedy the problems.
The weaknesses of internal controls and the failures to follow procedures are treated as dispositive. It is presumed that there was fraud and action is taken to prevent it. It would be wrong to say that people don't care about the facts or whether fraud actually happened. If perchance fraud can be found there will be efforts to identify the perpetrators and prosecute them. But there is an acceptance that finding material weaknesses in procedures is as "we found fraud" as it gets.
Perhaps some-one will claim "Sure there are problems with the procedures that might in theory have allowed fraud to go undetected, but no fraud was proven, so I'm content that no fraud happened and no action is required." But where money is at stake, this is naive and silly.
The core of @Hlynka's claim is that votes are as valuable as money, so the same presumption of fraud applies.
I agree that - if there were clear and severe control / procedural problems - that's almost as bad as actual fraud. I think the cases for procedural problems is as weak on the facts as the case for actual fraud though.
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How far am I supposed to take this analogy? Because if I take Hlynka's position and apply it here, then we are left with the idea that outsiders have no obligation to actually consider the probability of fraud occurring, and that they should be free to accept payment to accept the idea that no fraud occurred.
That doesn't strike me as particularly rational and virtuous, respectively.
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His post isn't a disagreement over "policy," it's a disagreement over the default position. It's possible to show Hlynka wrong under his standard; the issue with the 2020 election is the "facts" which would do this are not available due to the shoddy and essentially audit-proof way elections are done in the USA as well as the total failure of the legal system to enforce any rule or standard in that environment, not to mention the laughably high levels of resistance by those who conducted the election to engage in real transparency or upholding of legal standards.
You want the default to be to assume legitimacy absent strong showing of facts meeting a high burden. The highest legal standard in the US which is rarely used unless the court likes the outcome is to merely show the number of "likely" illegally counted ballots is greater than the difference in the disputed contest. Is your belief, one which is likely higher than this legal standard, one of "policy" or "facts"?
No, Hlynka is clear that elections are negotiations and that the winners have to convince the losers to cede power. He says as much here. I can't show him wrong under his standard because it's not about facts - if the convincing fails because the losers don't like losing, Hlynka wouldn't tell them to accept it.
Moreover, Hlynka was never clear if he was a principled election fraud investigator (in the sense that he only cares about ensuring valid elections) or if he's only being that way because he doesn't like that the Republicans/conservatives don't have their man in the White House.
Facts, obviously, because my contention is that there isn't evidence of the election ultimately being stolen from Trump. I ultimately wouldn't have had a problem accepting a possible Trump victory in 2020 if that was the verdict at the time.
Hlynka is bucking because you're trying to smuggle in your default position by attempting to put burdens onto "election deniers." Assuming a default position isn't an argument based on facts, it's a choice of how you're going to analyze the conflict.
There were 74 million people who voted for Trump according to Wikipedia. Even if we think that number is too low, or that Biden had some part of his supposed 81 million votes forged from nowhere, it seems like reasonable to say that Trump supporters were not sitting out election day hoping that only others would vote him. They probably went and voted for him as well. If you accept this premise, then we seem to have the basis of an agreement to a contract - using established election rules, both sides would vote and the winner would be who got the most votes (nominally speaking). Trump supporters added their bit of strength to the validity of using the election as it ran to decide if Trump would continue to be the president.
Given this, I don't see why it's attempting to smuggle in my position as the default to say that the party who alleges the agreed-upon method was invalid due to fraud has to demonstrate why that is the case.
Because you're trying to shift the burden onto the people who are "election deniers," using terminology itself which is smuggling in your default position the election should be assumed to be legitimate unless there is a strong showing of facts to meet some high standard. It "seems reasonable" to do what? You think it's reasonable to have your default position and burden obligation and evidence standard. And that's fine by itself, but this language is all part of how you're attempting to simply assume the default position by fiat to shape the field against anyone who would question the results of the election.
Hlynka's point is that this default position is wrong in this context, the "agreed established election rules" were not followed or enforced, and additionally this is not the normal state of human affairs and that elections are negotiated "default positions" anyway and therefore it is wrong to use assumed legitimacy as the default position.
what agreed-upon method? election rules were changed by fiat in the months leading up to the election and courts wholly failed to address these issues leading to a even more clownish election than usual
much of the way the election was conducted was declared illegal after the election when the outcome could no longer be changed; much of the way the election was conducted in explicit contravention to state law, i.e., the "agreed-upon method"
Why would random people or even Trump be required to agree to the election is assumed legitimate standard because "his side" lost a bunch of court challenges about illegal election law changes? Your argument in support of the election is assumed legitimate standard rests on the claim the negotiated settlement and dispute resolution system is legitimate and then when I or others buck at that argument, are you going to zoom further out arguing the ___ system is legitimate therefore the negotiated settlement system is legitimate? It's smuggling your default position because it relies on another assumed default position in the first place and that one likely relies on another assumed default position. It's turtles all the way down.
the 2020 election wasn't decided by 7 million "votes," it was decided by
50,000 "votes" in5 stateswe're not talking about millions, we're talking about tens of thousands
What's the non-presumptive phrase to describe people who deny the 2020 election was legitimate, and why would it not be subject to the euphemistic treadmill?
What's the source for this?
"Required" is a strong word. But the case gets weaker with each failed court challenge. At some point, there's no vitality to it left.
That's not the point. The point is that millions of voters, who I suspect didn't think they could ignore the results of another state simply because the laws in that state changed, still went out and voted for Trump.
This isn't, in other words, a case where a disinterested party is being approached to accept the validity of the 2020 election, this is a case with a very much interested party.
Ultimately, this still leaves me no more persuaded on the "and then?" part of Hlynka's position. Even assuming that the truth of the 2020 election is unknowable, why is there no obligation for those think Biden didn't win fairly to consider how much of their motivation is simply losing the election?
Describing election disputers, election fortifier, election revisionist, election skeptic, etc., etc., doesn't need to be absent all presumption, but when you write a phrase like "election denier," you are at the extreme end of presumptive and it is another example of smuggling in your default position (not to mention your distain).
I'm not playing the "source?! source? You have a source?!" game in a dialogue about another user's statements around disputing the default position to judge a disputed election. Additionally, examples of election procedures, guidance, application, and rules in PA, WI, and others which were declared illegal are easy to find.
It depends on the challenge and the court holding. If a court declares your challenge isn't going to be heard because you cannot show you, specifically, will be harmed by this illegal rule, this has nothing whatsoever to do with whether some rule or procedure or application is legal let alone to the point where one can buttress a claim of an "agreed-upon" set of rules. This is the reason garbage journalists print "TRUMP LOST COURT CHALLENGE" headlines dozens of times to create this sort of narrative and implication, but it's nonsense.
If you're going to attempt to argue "then we seem to have the basis of an agreement to a contract," then this is required. Your statement itself also smuggles in a bunch of disputed assumptions around participation meaning something which it doesn't. Trump famously and repeatedly claimed he would not "concede" to the winner if he thinks the election is unfair, but somehow he accepted "the basis of an agreement to a contract" because he ran anyway? Or he voters/supporters did because they voted anyway?
Your argument is built on top of another default position argument whereby the shitty court system which wholly fails to address large parts of the electorate's concerns with elections, not to mention flatly ignoring explicit statutory language to the contrary, is legitimate and their declarations are presumptively right and form the basis for agreements. Is your response to this argument going to be another default position assumption about the system generally being legitimate therefore courts declarations are legitimate, no matter how stupid their decisions, therefore elections should be presumed to be legitimate? This is why I describe this as a turtles all the way down argument.
I suspect many millions of people who voted would answer "yes" to the question, "If another state has fraud in the way their election was conducted and it possibly affected the outcome, should the results be contested/set aside/redone/etc.?" Especially given there are outlined legal procedures, including an explicitly outlined process in the US Constitution itself, about going about doing exactly this.
Some voters discovered this process after they lost and may have been partly motivated by losing, but then what does this have to do with you adopting your default position? Unless someone declares they don't care who won/lost, they just care about the integrity of an election then what? The only people who actually do anything in the world are interested parties. Correctly described "disinterested parties" aren't typically involved at all.
obligations must be justified in the first place, they don't just exist unless I provide a reason they shouldn't
why should election losers be obligated to do this? and if they are, then therefore what? if they fail to meet that obligation, then therefore what?
It would only take a short amount of time before any of the phrases you used would be seen by the people they are being used to describe as just as hostile and presumptive as "election denier".
If you're going to claim the election laws were changed and found illegal, that's a claim you are making. It's entirely reasonable to ask you to explain what you're referring to with a source. I assumed you were referring to PA and WI, but I wanted to be sure. Regardless, the legality of the election methods themselves is of very little importance if you're not from that state - if a state had legalized letting non-citizens vote, that would hardly be a consolation to those who think the election was stolen.
This matters greatly because simply saying those rules were illegal isn't the same as saying the vote counts were inaccurate due to fraud, to say nothing of whether the outcome in WI or PA was actually changed as a result. For example, the WI court ruling on the drop boxes being illegal also said there was no indication of voter fraud in the election, though their citations might leave someone questioning the election frustrated.
Sure, not every failed court challenges was due to the facts/proof, some were dismissed over jurisdiction and standing. But ultimately, court challenges aren't, in my view, some lynchpin against Trump's claims.
I have no problem with a candidate declaring the election is unfair and then wanting investigations. But there is an obligation, I think, to accept that this claim is falsifiable. If the evidence coming back is that there's no clear evidence of fraud, then Trump ought to rethink his conviction on the matter.
A common argument against this line of reasoning is that fraud is undetectable, so not having clear proof is an unfair standard. But I rarely see people advance this to the conclusion that we therefore don't know who necessarily won the 2020 election, I only see it being used to argue that Trump did have the election stolen from him. That's a stronger argument that does need to have proof shown.
You should be obligated to do this because this because it divides the country further if matters of truth are subordinated to one's partisan/ideological goals. You cannot claim to be a rational or reasonable truth-seeking person if you cannot accept a truth which might hurt your in-group.
Speaking practically, denying the outcome of the 2020 election matters more to the people who lost than the people who won. If you cannot convince people that you are not reasonable or rational, that you cannot be persuaded that you might be wrong, then people will rightfully dismiss anything you have to say. You can sit back and revel in the supposed ignorance of your opposition, but they're in power right now and it seems like they're going to be there for a while.
But if losing while truth is apparently on your side is what you want, then I suppose you can ignore this obligation.
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@Rov_Scam's original comment:
I can't comment about your specific situation, since I don't know what kind of committee you sat on or how it was structured. But I sit on the board of directors of a nonprofit organization, and while there are no concerns about entryism right now, since I became involved we've restructured to put up guardrails against it. The bugbear of the ad hoc organization that is formed by a group of like-minded individuals is an overreliance on consensus, and the feeling of ownership among the founders. This is fine for very small, informal organizations, but if you're at the point where you want to start soliciting money from other people, you have to start thinking about making things a bit more formal.
In my case, it's a group focused on outdoor recreation. It was initially more or less a social club in a mountain town that was formed by a retired local businessman, the owner of one of the outfitters, and a friend of theirs who says he "manages money" because he doesn't think he's old enough to call himself retired. They got some seed money from some of the other outfitters in town and just sort of existed for a year or two until a younger friend of theirs came along and started organizing events on social media and growing the membership. That's how I initially got involved around 2018, at first as just a regular member. By this time the group was getting into trail construction and had an agreement with the State Park to take responsibility for trail maintenance in certain areas. The group had big dreams for what they could accomplish. It went from a recreational club that did trail maintenance to a group who wanted to make the area a "destination".
It's at this point where I can tell you how to implement the first fail-safe against entryism: Don't let anyone onto your board of directors unless there's a specific reason why they need to be on the board. The fact that someone is reasonably active on the board and has occasionally agreed to run certain functions isn't enough. I was active in the group for about 2 years before I was asked to join the board. And by active I mean I donated money and showed up at nearly every event. This is part of why I was asked to join the board, but not the whole story. The group had initially formed as a 501(c)(7) social club because the president's attorney at the time said it was less paperwork than forming a 501(c)(3). The problem is that donations to a 501(c)(7) aren't tax-deductable, and most grant money is only available to 501(c)(3)s. I was brought onto the board because I'm a lawyer and I was able to take care of this problem as well as various other legal-related issues that may arise. Of course, my role on the board encompasses the full gamut of what the club does, but that's part of it — you need people who are brought on for a specific reason, but are willing to accept the full range of associated responsibilities.
One of my first orders of business was drafting a set of bylaws. There are two general ways an organization can operate. The first is similar to a publicly-traded company, where members vote on board vacancies and other leadership positions each year. The second is one where the board controls itself, i.e. who sits on the board is determined by the board. There are reasons why a group might choose the first option, but, for small groups especially, I highly recommend the second. One potential downside to this is that active members will start to feel invested in the group but frustrated that they have no voice. Now, if someone is so active that they're showing up for almost every event and are among the first to volunteer whenever there is work to be done, then I'd offer them a board seat. But this isn't most members. A fair amount of people will volunteer a fair amount and want a say in things, but won't rearrange their lives around the organization. The solution to this is to implement committees. The board will form, say, a budget committee, and offer seats on the committee to whoever wants one. One board member will chair the committee to start, but the chair will theoretically be available to anyone who wants to take that ball and run with it. The powers and responsibilities of the committee will be strictly defined by the board, and the board reserves the right to limit membership on the committee. That way, if someone starts causing problems, the board can just remove them. This also significantly reduces the workload of the board itself, who don't have to spend meetings hashing out every detail but can think big picture. For the budget example above, instead of hashing out a budget for three hours they can leave that to the committee, and then discuss the committee's proposal at the next meeting. Or if they want to have an event, they can have an Events Committee who will do all the planning. This is good for the people and the board. Most people don't want full board responsibilities but want to be involved in a more limited way, and planning an event or leading up one project is a good way to include them and give them some real power without having to make them members. It's also good for the board in that if you want to give them certain privileges, like access to a bank account, it's easier to do that for someone with an actual title than for some random member.
This is interesting to me because I am also on the board of a local nonprofit. However, we are a neighborhood organization - not a mission-based org. The dynamics are going to be different because entryism is kinda-sorta desired on my end.
I can understand how a mission-based org wants to protect entryists from threatening the ability of the org to handle the tasks at hand. Sometimes they require specialized skillsets or networks, and access to those things must be a high priority. If they are good at maintaining a pipeline to keep around people with those skills dedicated to the mission, then they should be in good shape for years to come.
On my end...well, since my neighborhood is not an HOA, this org requires buy-in from residents to function effectively. Currently, less than 1% of residents are dues-paying members. It is safe to say that even though the neighborhood org makes statements to the city about zoning changes & attempts to oust the elected city councilor - they do not enjoy much support from the neighborhood itself. One bad round of flu could wipe out half the board due to advanced age, leaving the org little choice but to shut its doors. If the org is to survive its founding leadership, they must find a new generation interested in taking over the reigns. And the generational & demographic politics of that turnover is going to be quite interesting.
We are not in the same shape as @Rov_Scam 's org. Nowhere near. Entryists are not necessarily "barbarians at the gates" to all groups. Just specific ones.
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@TitaniumButterfly's original comment:
I'm broadly sympathetic to your overall point and would be on your side of such a debate 9/10 times but in this case I do want to push back a bit. I breed and hunt with birds of prey and have had a lot of time to consider this question.
Overall you're more than correct. People will see a falcon sitting on a perch in captivity and say things like "Oh that's so sad, it's tied down and it wants to be free." No, not really. Not at all, actually. Flying is hard work and if (actually when) they get to choose between flying around for a reward and simply sitting and being fed, they will choose the latter every time. And if they're pushed into the former it's not uncommon for them to try to weasel out of it by just sitting somewhere to see if they can outwait you into producing food to get them to return. This is a whole thing, most of them have to be trained out of that instinct, and more than once I've spent a night under a tree, refusing to produce a reward for a falcon until it's gotten back up in the sky and flown around a bit. Reward them for sitting once and they'll never want to fly again.
But there is an exception. Given the choice to sit and be fed, or go out and hunt some real game, they will about destroy themselves in their eagerness for the latter.
I will never forget the sight of my apprentice's hawk on his first live rabbit. He bound to it, we dispatched it, and then he spent roughly the next twenty minutes visibly trembling with emotion. His crest up, his eyes aflame, like every cell of his body was radiating golden light. It was clearly a transformative experience, and I don't think I'm prone to inappropriately romanticizing these creatures.
They live for this stuff. And I think other animals must feel the same way about a lot of things, including securing and defending territory, competing for mates, etc. Yeah, most of them are losers in such processes, but the winners get something I think they'd agree is worth having, and it is the impulse of life to shoot for the stars even if most must fall short.
Animals don't have any kind of abstract notion of freedom or self-determination. But they are wired to appreciate certain things, and I think that the zoo (or household pet) experience is rather like pod life. A lot of men, for example, would be 'happy' with something like state-issued ai robot waifus, plentiful netflix and video games, and enough industrially-produced food to satisfy them, but those who have felt what it is to be chosen by a beautiful mate, to have achieved mastery in their craft, to have lived in real, functional human community, would look at that and be horrified.
No, I don't think that captive animals, except perhaps those taken from the wild, have any idea what they're missing. But that doesn't mean they're not missing it.
To quote Doctor Alan Grant, the T-rex doesn't want to be fed. It wants to hunt. And huskies want to range hundreds of miles, and collies want to herd.
Does the T-rex want to hunt, or does it want to be fed through the process of hunting? Would it miss anything if, much like your falcon, it could engage in very authentic play that had no possibility of it failing and starving, or at least not starving as a result of failure?
Some falcons enjoy lure stooping (which is what you're talking about) while others treat it as a chore to be avoided. All of them love killing things.
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@Folamh3's original comment:
To be pedantic, these are AI-modified images. Twitch thots/OF girls are posting photos of themselves for public consumption on X, and the DignifAI account is replying with an edited version of the same photo. "Bob/Alice posts a public photo or video on a social media platform, and a bunch of people who don't know Bob/Alice create edited versions of said photo or video without Bob's consent" describes hundreds if not thousands of viral memes throughout the history of the internet (e.g. Now We are Homeress, Miss Teen USA, Chocolate Rain, Leave Britney Alone, Boom Goes the Dynamite, You Da Real MVP, the Trump mugshot, Yao Ming Face, Scumbag Steve). Occasionally Bob/Alice may give their blessing and say that they don't have a problem with said memes, but this is the exception rather than the rule (e.g. Kevin Durant made it quite clear that he did not appreciate people making his heartfelt expression of gratitude to his mother into a cheap joke), and generally happens months or years after people have been nonconsensually editing the original photo/video to their heart's content.
Unlike editing a photo of Trump so it looks like he's riding a skateboard or whatever, I don't think it's hard to understand why editing Alice/Bob's publicly posted photo to make it look more sexualised than the original is crossing a line: there's a significant possibility that people might mistake the edited photo for the genuine article, and Alice/Bob will take a reputational hit, as people will assume that they are the kind of person who shares thirst trap photos for public consumption. Even if the photos are obviously fake (as in the recent Taylor Swift "deepfakes", which look more like the kind of stylised fetish fanart which has been around for years before LLMs were a thing), I think it's still demeaning to reduce a real person to the status of a sex object without their consent. But DignifAI is the opposite of that - you're editing a photo clearly intended to titillate to make it look a photo which was not intended to titillate. It's easy to understand why people might be upset that their reputation has suffered as a result of strangers erroneously believing that they are the kind of person who posts thirst trap photos to titillate strangers - but if you are a person who posts thirst trap photos to titillate strangers, how will a photo of you edited to look like you're dressed more modestly affect your reputation at all? Taylor Swift saying "It's disrespectful and demeaning for people to create or edit photos of me which reduce me to the status of a sex object" is a legitimate complaint; a Twitch thot saying "I don't appreciate people taking photos of me which represent me as a sex object and editing them to make me look like an average woman"? Not so much - if for no other reason than, for most of her life, the Twitch thot in question is an average woman. The titillating clothing and makeup that a Twitch thot wears when she's performing is a kind of costume, and all DignifAI is doing is showing what she (might) look like without the costume. Is it wrong to distribute a photo of Corey Taylor without his scary Slipknot mask? I don't think so.
By analogy, if Bob posts a public photo of himself wearing regular clothes, and someone edits it without Bob's consent to make it look like he's wearing a swastika T-shirt, that's a shitty thing to do, and obviously created for the purpose of defaming Bob. But if Bob is an outspoken neo-Nazi who posts a public photo of himself wearing a swastika T-shirt, and someone edits it without Bob's consent to make it look like he's wearing a plain black t-shirt - well, so what? (None of the above is to imply being a neo-Nazi is morally equivalent to being a Twitch thot or OF girl, obviously - it's just to illustrate that reputational hits aren't symmetrical as some people seem to think.)
I haven't seen any actual significant numbers of lefties complaining about DignifAI, only people on the right crowing about how it owns the libs.
Touche.
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@FCfromSSC's original comment:
The modern era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. I gotta say, this is certainly one of the more amusing search results, at least in its initial form.
It's interesting watching people here try to figure out what the response is supposed to be. Is it that it's weird to post pictures of other people? No, memes exist, that can't be it. It's wrong to edit pictures of other people? Nope, memes again. It's weird to post pictures of people to make fun of them? Nope, people of Wal-Mart, faces of meth, mugshot collections, and about a million other examples. It's wrong to edit pictures of random people to make them look worse? These pictures are edited to make them look better, though.
Bonus points to the people claiming the objectionable part is politicizing the non-political. I welcome you to 2024, and wish you well in your recovery from long-term cryo-stasis.
So I guess we're down to "It's wrong to edit pictures of random people to make them look better as an implicit criticism of the way they've chosen, of their own free will and for their immediate, personal benefit, to publicly present themselves." But at that point, why not just speak plainly? This is criticism, and people don't like their ingroup being criticized, and they especially don't like criticisms encapsulating a hostile value system presented in a witty fashion by their outgroup. People are objecting not because there's some well-established general rule or value being violated here, but because they don't like having their ingroup's behavior critiqued by their outgroup, and they don't like seeing their outgroup's values expressed, no matter how anodyne the expression.
One option, as @To_Mandalay demonstrates, is to try to exaggerate the critique beyond all reason.
...And this attitude is how we get FBI investigations of "It's ok to be white" flyers on a college campus. The problem is that social critique is a game of subtlety, and treating what is, on the surface level, an extremely mild critique as though it's actually a straight declaration of genocidal hatred just makes one look unhinged. Likewise, it seems to me that the critique here is less "you're a whore and I hate you" and more "you're a whore and you don't have to be." Those two statements are pretty clearly not identical, and the bite of the latter seems, to me, undeniable.
The game-theoretic-optimal response, as with "it's okay to be white", is to simply ignore the issue entirely. The reaction is half the point, and it's the only half containing achievable value, unless you think people are lying when they say that the clothed versions of the pictures legitimately look better. Unfortunately, the social reality we've constructed disproportionately rewards handwaving freakoutery. I suppose we'll see if tribal discipline can beat the implicit reward structure. My bet is that it can't.
And of course, the search goes on. To_Mandalay is correct, I think, in that the hate is really there, and it yearns for expression. This version made me laugh; the ai race-swap-children filter someone else posted in the thread just made me feel sick. The distributed search continues, and the search results accumulate.
What was this in response to, originally? It seems interesting but without the original context it's hard to know what to make of it.
Unfortunately the dragnet did not catch context for me, just the comment. But my memory is that @MachineElfPaladin is correct: DignifAI is the opposite of the porn deepfake apps, it puts naked and scantily-clad people into tuxedos and gowns and the like. "Some people" were arguing that this also is sexist or somesuch.
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If I recall correctly, it was a thread about DignifAI, which was an image-gen model trained to edit photos to put people in "modest" or "respectable" clothing.
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@RandomRanger's original comment:
Have they read the IPCC reports? The planet is going to get marginally warmer over a century which is harmful but not a major problem. I ctrl-Fed 'existential' and there's no such risk in the reports, except to low-lying islands and even then it's manageable. See the Netherlands and their erosion of the North Sea. At any rate, there used to be jungles in Antarctica, we're still in an ice age.
Everything we do makes the planet less habitable from a certain point of view. More habitable from another. Mining rare earths uses toxic acids, releases radioactive materials, industry requires pollution. Drilling oil means oil leaking. But without oil and without mining we're going to starve in enormous numbers, we need fertilizers, mechanized transport and industrial agriculture to survive. If we suddenly lost access to fossil fuels tomorrow, that would be an existential threat to civilization, perhaps even humanity.
Team Blue's responses have not been very helpful either, there are a bunch of these phoney climate conferences where billionaires, celebrities and world leaders fly their private jets to places like Dubai, where the poor countries ask the rich countries for free money and everyone clever acknowledges that they're not going to cut emissions to reach a 1.5 or 2 degree target because it spells death for national prosperity. Blue's been sabotaging nuclear for decades now along with geoengineering, these people apparently won't accept the efficient, progress-based solutions. The harm is not serious enough to justify the cost of preventing it in this particularly silly way, just like how fertilizer runoff into rivers isn't severe enough for us to not use fertilizers.
Anyway, why should A give up coal when B will just burn more and take the profits instead? Team Red may not know what Nash Equilibria means but they at least understand the concept. Calls for unilateral nuclear disarmament also only come from the left wing of politics, something about competitive game theory escapes them.
Defending Saudi Arabia /= invading Iraq or Iran. America is a rich country, a diet of meat and V8 engines can be sustained on American resources, especially if they were competently managed. America's post-91 foreign entanglements make the price of energy rise, they're supremely counterproductive - sanctioning Russian, Venezuelan and Iranian energy exports, sanctioning and invading Iraq and creating a giant mess, bombing Libya into chaos, now this Israel-Yemen farce in the Red Sea. States naturally want to sell their oil, if the US just wanted cheap energy all they'd need to do is prevent anyone monopolizing energy supplies by invading other countries.
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@mitigatedchaos's original comment:
You can literally just say "it's OK to be black," and dare them to repeat "it's OK to be black." You can put up a sign saying "it's OK to be black" next to their "it's OK to be white" sign.
The reason progressives objected and called it "fascist" rather than counter with "it's OK to be black" is that if they agree that "it's OK to be white," this establishes a point of leverage on them. Progressives want to discriminate against people they deem "white," and that's not subtext, that's just literally the thing that they do. That's what is logically entailed in the combination of the words they say, and the very obvious, glaring, material reality around them. The 'progressive' view is that this will work to close racial outcome gaps somehow. (In general, they haven't actually checked.)
When progressives say what amounts to, "Google has too many whites and asians as a percentage of its staff; this is a problem (that needs to be solved)," the only reason it isn't explicitly a call to fire people for their race is because Google is so profitable that they could hire the difference to do nothing and still make money. At any normal company, with normal revenues, it's a demand to fire people explicitly for their race, to meet numbers that the attacker just made up based on crude demographic estimates that likely don't even match the surrounding area.
But if it's OK to be white, then it isn't OK to do this sort of "corrective" discrimination.
If the target agrees, then later, when they attempt to pull this again, someone can say, "Didn't you say it was OK to be white? So shouldn't this mean it's wrong to discriminate against them?" Progressives objecting to "it's OK to be white" is about this, not about genocide. That's one key reason why they didn't just use the cheap and obvious fork "it's OK to be black" to demonstrate for all on-lookers that the IOTBW guys were genuine white nationalists. (There's also "don't give them an inch!" tribalism, the mechanics of which I could go into, but bottom line, they can't do the strategy because they're not liberal on race - exactly the thing the strategy is supposed to reveal! IOTBW would have just caused confusion back in 2003.)
Leverage is a big factor in the treatment of "Black Lives Matter" - notably, rightists actually did respond with the fork "All Lives Matter" and have it loudly rejected.
Leftists want to get leverage so they can force concessions, rightists don't want leverage established on them. And sure, part of it is that rightists don't want to spend money, and part of it is that rightists don't want to endorse "race conscious" policy, but part of it is also that rightists can't actually give the thing being demanded, because they can't close group outcome gaps - not through any morally acceptable means. This is part of what made "Black Lives Matter" such an effective slogan at the time, only discredited later by the rise in (disproportionately black) homicide victims - as part of the racial peace, Republicans didn't want to unnecessarily antagonize racial minorities in America, and that meant not going out of their way to spread demographically unflattering information. That's the kind of gap Folam3 discussed for right-to-left attacks elsewhere in this thread.
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@felis-parenthesis's original comment:
I want natural selection to also apply to God. That is: there are multiple "gods"="meme space egregores" inhabiting the noosphere. Humans are symbionts. They live in symbiosis with meme-space egregores. The humans provide the egregores with the information processing substrate that the egregores (live on | live in | need in order to exist). In return the egregores help humans two ways. They transform human individual intelligence into human group intelligence. They stop intelligence self-destructing.
Is intelligence a good thing? Robinson Crusoe on his desert island had better be clever or he is not going to survive. That is the man-versus-nature context and intelligence is purely positive. But most of the time we live in groups, creating a man-versus-man context. Individual intelligence is what makes you defect in a prisoners dilemma. On its own, more intelligence means more treachery and back-stabbing. Think Lebanon. The Lebanese are intelligent; but in the sense of willy and cunning. Goes badly.
The key observation is the travellers dilemma
We notice individual intelligence turning a tricky situation into a tragedy. We do much better as members of a group, all of us sacrificing for the benefit of the group, and doing well individually through membership of a thriving group. Our egregore orchestrates this transformation of individual intelligence into group intelligence by existing as the ideology to which we submit and which binds us together.
Human rationality isn't really a thing because humans live in groups and what is rational for each individual is in conflict with what is rational for the group.
Meanwhile the human body has animal origins and the human race exists through instincts. Broodiness and lust. Broodiness: we want children so we have sex. Lust: instinctive and pleasurable, children come automatically.
But humans are clever, so we invent contraception and get to enjoy sex without having children and the human race dies out. Maybe broodiness comes to the rescue, maybe not. But while we are inventing contraception we are also inventing super-tasty food and getting too fat for sex. Being clever generally leads to subverting instinctive reward systems and self-destructing. A good egregore teaches us eudaimonia instead of hedonism. It saves us, and since we are its substrate, it saves itself. Symbiosis both ways.
I mean the religious technology is pretty simple. It’s a group that believes in a central text that contains morals and further believes that the book is 100% true and cannot and will not be altered. The reason most other things ultimately fail is that the text is alter able and therefore cannot hold as a standard for group behavior. The first entryist who alters the religious texts gets his way, and therefore it cannot provide the stability that society needs.
I prefer a zoomed in view of religious technology in which the details are subtle and difficult to get right. There are interesting thoughts in a post to /r/neology claiming that Islam and Marxism are both examples of a certain kind of thing, more specific than religion or ideology (and asking r/neology to invent a word for it)
The central text must hit
So I agree with you that the religious technology works by insisting that the text is 100% true and cannot be altered. But that is a tricky constraint.
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@100ProofTollBooth's original comment:
I know this wasn't your intent, but that sounds like scientism. Furthermore, any reading of basic epistemology will show that "science" isn't the Master Truth Substance that exists in the popular conception. Science is far, far more about an ongoing process of discovery and discernment than a universal record of unimpeachable facts.
As @WhiningCoil's excellent posts in this thread point out, rationalism was and is the attempt to Science All The Things (including emotionally influenced human thinking). I would say that, taken to its extreme, it leads to the Effective Altruism shenanigans (self-delusion, and self-absolution for deception and worse offenses) or the often paralyzing over examination of outlets like LessWrong and SSC. Don't get me wrong, I love reading Scott's 10,000 word posts just as much as most Mottizens, but you have to admit that the RAT community discourse can quickly devolve almost to the level of "depends on what the meaning of "is" is".
Rationalism's core flaw, in my opinion, is that you're trying to debug the firmware with the firmware.
"A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with." - Cormac McCarthy, The Road.
Humanity just hasn't found out how to "debug" the brain. Various religions try to do this by focusing on transcendental exercises and appeals to divine intervention (prayer, meditation). I give them credit because they, at least, often state explicitly that you can and should do these things, but you're not going to ever truly "succeed" while still remaining a human on earth.
Rationalism does a sneaky thing in that it admits no one can actually think "perfectly" yet self-ranks ahead of any other way of knowing by kind of gesturing towards "science" and "better thinking." The retail version of this is companies and people who say they are "data driven." Bayesian inference is the real eye roller here. People who "update their priors" surely don't have a record of all of their priors to understand the system of thought that led them to their present situation. Those that do are fall into the trap of hyper-over-examination and probably fail to make any decisions of consequence in life.
When people (not you) worry about "science deniers" - it's just a very shiny "boo outgroup." The irony of ironic examples here is, in fact, COVID. All of the people who really care about people who are vaxx-suspicious are also probably double masked outdoors in 2024. There's bidirectional "science" denial, but one group's direction is bad and my group's direction is good.
So, what's the cure? Doubt. I've written before about how negative emotions are utterly misunderstood and undervalued by modernist thinking. Guilt is bad because it makes you feel guilty and it's really only a social construct or something, whatever, keep having an affair! Disgust is wrong because you aren't appreciating differences in cultures, you colonist! Doubt is bad because you should just "Do You" and believe that "the universe" will take care of the rest. Believe as you feel!
Well, no. Use doubt as the road to humility. "Here's a bunch of shit I truly believe down to my very bones and I'll literally DIE for it ..... but, shit, I could be wrong" is a far healthier way to go through life than just the first part of that sentence.
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@FarNearEverywhere's original comment:
Speaking as a former minor local government minion, I recognise this person. No, not the blankface (though at every level in every job and situation in life, there are indeed little tin gods who love exerting whatever scrap of power they possess) but the person making the "appeal to facts, logic and plain compassion".
I don't have a fancy label for them unlike Mr. Aaronson (Dr. Aaronson? Professor Aaronson?) since I don't have the creative big intellect he undoubtedly possesses, but every bureaucrat in a public-facing role (indeed, every worker in a public-facing role) has encountered them at some time.
The people who rock up late after the deadline for submission, without the necessary paperwork or supporting documents, who didn't bother applying and want you to fill it all out for them, breathless because they dashed here at the last minute. The ones who want an exception to the "rules and regulations" because, well, they're just that special and exceptional and their case is unique and not at all like the other fifteen people waiting in line, that they are holding up for the past hour because they've been arguing - sorry, I mean "making appeal to facts, logic and plain compassion".
(I would also venture a lot of people here have been stuck in line behind such a person).
The fact that what they want is against the regulations, because they don't qualify? Irrelevant, and besides, have you no compassion for their special, unique case which should get an exception?
The fact that they had three weeks to get this done, and showed up half an hour after the cut-off? Not their fault! They have busy, important lives unlike you, minor official of no consequence, hence being such important people, they deserve an exception!
The fact that if I accept their application, I'll have to do the same for everybody else who also does not qualify? So what, that's nothing to do with them.
The fact that (1) this is against the regulations and (2) I will get into trouble with my boss, my boss's boss, and the department head? So what? That's not their problem. Why are you being so unreasonable?
The fact that I have explained three different times, in three different ways, why your application is defective? Ah, here we go again with the "same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare".
Clearly, the fault cannot lie with me, Important Busy Smart Person With A Life And Impactful Job. It lies with this blankface who is hiding a contemptuous smile as they tyrannically wield the power entrusted in them to make others miserable. Yes, that must be it!
As I said, I don't deny there are people who won't budge an inch because they like making others squirm. But the 'blankfaces', be it in public service or private businesses, often are not doing this to spite you. We'll like to help, we want to help, but we can't because (a) oftentimes the ability to exercise initiative has been deliberately stripped from fears of setting precedent (if you do this, then all the other applicants/clients will want the same, and will go to court to force us to treat them the same - and yes, this does happen) and in order to keep costs down (b) you are the one genuinely at fault because you don't have the necessary supporting documents. This may or may not be your fault, but if the regulations say "must have proof of identity", I can't take your application just because you show me a crumpled envelope with an address on it.
Often times, other people are at fault - I've mentioned on here before when I assisted in processing student grants, and one award was held up because the parents were in a pissing match after the separation and the father just would not provide three lines of notified statement that he was not paying child support. There's nothing I or anyone else can do there, much as we really do want to help.
Aaronson strikes me as the kind of guy who takes things personally - if there's a holdup, it's not because "well, there are screw-ups in systems all the time", it's because that official there wants to tyrannise him just like the Nazis against the Jews and he's going to be dragged off in chains if only that guy could do so, it's because he's Jewish, he knows it:
I assume this is in reference to this post from 2021, but the response seems to ignore the update that was added the day after it was originally posted.
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@gattsuru's original comment:
Mediated group hallucinations and consensus reality
There's a joking-not-joking post, a while back, from JonSt0kes. At the risk of pulling the setup apart from the punchline, the setup is what I'd like to highlight.
It's a bit of surrealism, and probably intended as foil to comment on more immediate political conflicts outside of the scope of this discussion.
There's certainly people who'd love augmented reality avatars, and while none would want to force them on others, well, tomorrow is another day. It's not even really possible right now. VTubers are a small genre focused on presenting a virtual avatar to their viewers, sometimes in surprising genres, but they generally depend on carefully calibrated cameras and nearly-ideal lighting conditions to correctly recognize precise pose details. Body tracking (and even estimation) works, sometimes, for incredibly controlled environments. Even the best augmented reality systems are too bulky and have too short a battery life to be worn around all day, or even for long parts of a day. And heaven help anyone who wants to implement a standardized communication protocol that works between different headset vendors without a ton of unreliable jank. Some of these technical limitations might not be solvable, period: modern tech has done amazing things with microlenses, but optics are a cruel mistress.
There's spaces where these technical limitations don't exist, or can be maneuvered around. Hence the many references above to tech driven by virtual reality gaming, primarily but not solely chatrooms like VRChat. You can control lighting, and have multiple calibrated cameras at set distances and angles, and have everyone in a room wearing multiple inertial measurement units all speaking the same language. There is little background noise that makes audio transcription and voice manipulation jank in the real world. Far fewer chances for reality to break the illusion, excepting when you find furniture the hard way.
In those environments, it's not only common to define how you and others are presented, and where. It's often unavoidable. In VRChat specifically, some clients ("Questies" and more recently cell phone users, as opposed to those using full-blown computers with connected VR displays) can't see more complicated avatars or even enter some environments, if they use too many resources to be practically implemented on their headsets. Individual users also have a complex system of less direct control through a privileged user system, as well as more traditional block/mute capabilities.
And that, if anything, is the low end: VR environments tend to think of a person's self-presentation as sacrosanct, and as a result, it's much harder to make someone into something they aren't than to hide them.
That's just not some fundamental part of technology.
As a comparison, Final Fantasy XIV is an (acclaimed) MMORPG. Like many MMOs, it officially prohibits third-party modifications. Like many MMO mods, they still exist, and unless you're cheating on a world first race or being incredibly obvious about it, there's not really a lot that the game-runners want to do. There's actually some fascinating technical work being done here; where earlier tools swapped references to asset locations on disk while the client is closed, modern tools can dynamically reload or redraw on arbitrary triggers at arbitrary times, and there's even a tool for synchronizing between users in certain configurations, even transferring mods from one user to another (with accompanying security concerns). This can quickly get bizarrely recursive: there are now mods that exist solely for the purpose of overwriting other people's vanilla glamours.
Some of this goes exactly the direction anyone who's seen Skyrim modding would expect, and there's no small amount of comically oversized dick and/or boob mods, sometimes even for different genders. Some of it's more subtle modifications down that path, as the default models are about as featured as a ken doll even above the hips, or to smooth things out when desired.. Sometimes it's weirder than you would expect [bonus for those willing to log into the site (cw: no genitals or female nipples, possible spoilers? SAN damage for those familiar with those spoilers?)].
But a good portion of it's far more expressive. Tired of Dark Knight being Shadow The Edgehog? Swap to Devil May Cry, floral, or light-themed. Instead of naruto-running as a Ninja, you can practice your gun-kata. A lot of design-space exists and revolves around fluffy tails, goofy dances, capes, bizarre accessories, even posture. And then there's pages after pages of hairstyles, or mods that just turning on hats. Want to get rid of Lalafel or replace every PC with their alternate universe Roe version? There's a tool for it!
Yet it results in a world that's not just distinct from the what the developers designed, or what some unaffiliated observer might see, but where multiple people in the same room might have wildly different worlds that they're interacting with, even when sharing some mods. And there's some easy objections, here.
Sex is the easiest. Someone running male nudity mods in FFXIV will find out the hard way (hurr hurr) that several comedic quest chains normally involve a very animated older gentleman running around in his smallclothes, who is now Very Happy to see you; someone aggressively doing so can change every single player and (humanoid, non-special model) NPC into their desired gender and species. And, of course, someone who wants to do something intentionally has far broader space available.
There's no small number of other ways to embarrass people, of course. If you think a three-foot dong would be a little beneath your standards, there's some political statements that could have far more impact. And that's at the low end of the discussion space, and going into video games is the lower risk environment. Trace has spoken about someone beaten as a nazi in part due to time spent with a (stupid) Garry's Mod avatar. It's easier to think of things that offend Blue Tribe sensibilities that can play that role, over Red Ones, but it's not actually that hard to come up with Red Tribe or more general offenses. As ironic as "don't misgender me" will be when it's some social conservative getting involuntarily catgirl'd, I'm not sure what'll happen if thirty people start passing around screenshots or video of a well-known person's character marching like a member of the SS, but we're probably going to find out eventually. And you don't have to be Neal Stephenson or Cory Doctorow to come up with heavy-handed approaches that these technologies could use.
From the other direction, this (cw: censored 'female' nudity) particular description of events could genuinely reflect someone with neither correct boundaries nor behaviors, and maybe that's more likely than not -- minors getting into adults-only spaces, and adults not acting responsibly in unsecured or insufficiently age-gated areas, have been genuine problems on the internet since usenet. But it could also have happened if the interviewer running default settings was the only person in the room seeing everyone there.
Of course, VR(/AR/XR/spatial computing) is doomed. MMORPGs are funny, but they aren't going to change society, and game mods, no matter how technically impressive, are even less likely to do so. Beyond that, there is an argument, and not an entirely wrong one, that these environments are 'fake' in some philosophically important way. People (mostly) exist playing VRChat, but they don't actually live in VRChat. FFXIV has a single source of truth on its servers, but they're probably stored as a mess of position information and arbitrary numeric values, and definitely not some litrpg virtual world. Even if this expands to other purely-digital or even digitally-augmented fields, why should you care if someone does the 2028-equivalent of a lazy photoshop? This isn't even as life-like as deepfakes, or as humiliating as a really dedicated adversary could go -- the possibility someone on the other end of a conference might be putting your camera feed on top of some nudes would be offputting, but the risk of someone Toobining it has predated modern telephony.
Who cares?
And, perhaps worse:
There's an old joke, by modern standards, about how once one could be certain that the man in a corner of a subway angrily shouting into the air at a person who wasn't there was a schizophrenic, until cell phones and bluetooth meant that could just be a businessman talking to someone you couldn't see. What happens when ten million people see something you don't? Can't?
To cut to the chase, quite a lot of things that you care about either aren't real (do you think your bank account is a bunch of coins in a safe?) or hasn't reflected the real thing, already. There are already tools, some of which you should already be using (get uBlock!) to filter what you see, in your normal usage of the web. An increasing and surprising amount of your world will be passing through these sort of mediators, unless you put increasing efforts into avoiding it.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this! The hallucinating cameras are just trying to get the picture you wanted to take. Blocking results you were never going to check in Google Searches can be one of the few ways to avoid the Dread Pinterest. There's a block function on this site, after all. I try to avoid blocking as a matter of principle, but there are definitely ways that has hurt, rather than helped, my ability to seriously engage with both reality and some political perspectives; it's not something I would recommend for everyone or even most people. And there are defiiiiiiinitely people and tags even I block aggressively in, say, the context of a certain furry booru.
The bare concept is not even new. Filter bubble was popularized as a term in 2010, with Eli Pariser writing a book on it. BlockBots date back to 2015, if not earlier, and filter lists to the usenet era. From the other political valience, progressive views on talk radio or Fox News as a conservative bubble aren't entirely right, but there certainly are a lot of people who even then only listened to (and later, watched) what they wanted to hear.
But I think we're going to see things no one thought anyone would want to implement in 1997, or 2010, driven by forces far more varied and far more subtle than anyone expected.
St0kes mostly highlights the filter bubble from the context of politics, even if he sees, rarely, where it breaks against him. Eli Pariser considered algorithmic (and business drives) toward the separation of filter bubbles. There's no shortage of modern-day writers discussing AI, and a Dead Internet where people find it easier to talk with carefully-tuned ChatGPT instance rather than fight increasingly-useless Google is definitely a possibility.
I think they all overlook the power of human meat and spite.
As far as I know, there is no tool that will filter your Google Map search results by the political donations and rumors thereof. Yet. There is no flight planning website that drops flights where layover or transfer involve states with undesirable gun or gender politics. Yet.
I don't know of a crowdsourced tool to check your phone contacts and Facebook friends for (alleged) criminals or bad actors or meanies. Yet. There's no way to crosscheck a dating profile against social media phrenology. Yet. No off-the-shelf tools to use Nextdoor to hide the neighbor with the yappy dog from my phone or doorbell. Yet. No headphones that noise cancel people you don't want to hear from. Yet.
And a thousand, thousand other things that could be possible, as we invite others have more and more influence on how we see the world in the most literal sense, and make it harder and harder to avoid doing so.
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