My dude, do you know what statistics is? The paper doesn’t say anything of that sort. Measuring the proportion of people who hold a particular belief is nothing like what you describe

Exactly, thank you for adding this.

The fact that AI is making reverse centaurs out of us really sticks out to me whenever I watch Star Trek. The way they interact with the computer in Trek makes me wistful for what AI could be, if it were being developed in a more human centred way.

Solidarity fist bump.

You are committing a logical fallacy called “affirming the consequent”.

Props to you for admitting you spoke prematurely

There’s so many hard hitting quotes in this game. The one that hit me the hardest was actually the thought cabinet thought you get for trying to open the unopenable door.

Edit:

Found it.

“There is no way to open the supply depot door. Accept it. You cannot open all the doors. You have to integrate this into your character. Some doors will forever remain closed. Even if every single other door will open at one time or another, maybe to a key, or maybe to some sort of tool meant for opening doors… But this one will never accede to such commands. A realization crucial to personal growth. Crucial.”

I felt so betrayed by this. I had spent a point to unlock this thought. I waited with excitement for its completion, which would surely allow me to unlock the door. But instead, I felt more called out than I have ever felt in my life.

This is a great article that lays out the problems with SRY testing in a clear way. I’ve bookmarked it, as I suspect I’ll find it useful to send to someone at some point

None of us are free until all of us are free. I have faith that this fight is winnable because I used to be the kind of cis person who wanted to consider herself a trans ally, but who didn’t really know what that meant. In hindsight, I was too concerned with avoiding saying or doing the wrong thing, feeling like I was walking on eggshells around the topic of transness I don’t mean in a virtue signalling kind of way, but because I didn’t want to cause any harm, whether to an individual, or to trans activism in general — it wasn’t my cause, so I believed that the best thing to do was to be respectful and stay back. There are many cis people who aren’t necessarily disgusted, but confused and anxious about how to react (people on the left do this kind of transphobia a lot, in my opinion).

It took a partner coming out as trans to kick me out of that. I learned a lot about trans reality very fast, including how foolish my previous approach had been. It was admirable, in a way, to be so keen to help but not knowing how. It was also cowardly and ignorant. Ultimately though, I’m glad for this experience because it has shown me not just that it’s possible to change, but also that this change was super beneficial to me too. Being in community with trans people has made me more comfortable and happy in my own assigned gender — turns out that gender euphoria isn’t just relief from gender dysphoria, and that cis people can experience gender euphoria too. That journey has also helped me to unpick a bunch of my internalised misogyny — solidarity is one hell of a drug.

Trans people are a much smaller demographic, it’s true. However, when I reflect on how it felt to change my understanding on this topic, and how impactful it was on me, it makes me feel like progress is surely inevitable, because of how much this felt like puzzle pieces sliding together as a definite step to discovering Truth has been found. This is absolutely my fight, and whilst it’s not easy to cause someone to have the self growth journey that I did, the prospect of exponential growth increasing our fighting numbers gives me faith. Iirc, a similar thing happened with gay rights — as more people came out, then more people became aware that they had a gay neighbour, or colleague, or sister, or uncle. Whilst unfortunately there were some who became estranged from their loved ones due to this, there were others whose families became advocates for gay rights. The town I used to live, at one timr believed itself to have no gay people living there. Then one guy came out. Then a few years later, we’re up to 5. Then a few years later, it’s at 50.

The small number of trans people will mean it will take longer to get this fire to roaring temperature, but I actually do feel confident that we’ll get there. Perhaps it’s because I think we will make progress on trans rights because that’s literally what’s necessary for the world — climate change and patriarchy and classism and so many other things latch together so intricately that I don’t think we can meaningfully extricate any one piece enough, so we will have to reckon with the fact that none of us are free unless all of us are free.

I think some of the people who are freaking out are scared because it feels like we’re regressing. Things definitely are better now than they were, but what if we continue on this trajectory and things get back to being that bad? I am too young to have been alive in the era you’re describing, but what gets to me is that I can remember that there was a feeling of progress when I was a teenager. Any given step forward didn’t solve homophobia by itself, but it didn’t need to when there were many small steps being made. Now it feels like we’re taking strides back.

Ed Zitron’s newsletter has some incredibly useful resources to reference. (I would link it, but I am sleepy at the moment, I apologise).

My opinion is that unless you feel like it’s putting your career at risk, it’s worthwhile to discuss the negatives of AI. When people who aren’t very techy are surrounded by people bigging up AI and there’s no-one dissenting, it’s quite common that they will assume that this is just something that’s too complex for them to understand, so some people are sort of conditioned to believe that AI must be magic, even if their own personal experience or intuition tells them that it’s bullshit.

I also believe that anti-AI takes will age like wine; even though there are some legitimately awesome uses of this tech, overwhelmingly, the majority of the shit that’s being pushed is dumb as hell. AI can be a useful tool in certain cases, but not in the way it’s being rolled out. Instead of empowering humans, it’s just making more slop and hallucinations to wade through. I’m reminded now of a good post from Cory Doctorow that discusses AI and “reverse centaurs”. I can’t explain it better than him, but you could probably find it easy by searching, if you’re interested.

And if they show their decency and use their position of power to unequally enforce the law in the pursuit of genuine justice, this is them being a bad cop, in that a cop’s individual sense of justice is not meant to sway them. To ignore or undermine unjust laws also undermines their own role as a cop — one might even say it makes them less of a cop.

Even without corruption or the use of excessive force, policing as an institution is inherently fucked up. When laws are unjust, an impartial enforcer of them is also unjust. Some go into the job with the admirable goal of trying to be a force for good, but their efforts will only strengthen a broken institution that will gradually leech the goodness from them.

I actually considered linking, but couldn’t remember the dude’s name.

When I was in high school, in the 2000s/2010s, our final maths exams included a calculator and a non calculator paper. As far as I’m aware, that’s still typical today. The advent of calculators required us to rethink our approach in teaching and setting tests in maths, but that doesn’t diminish the usefulness of learning long division.

I think the person you’re replying to is arguing that whilst exercise can have myriad health benefits, that when it comes to weight loss, it’s more practical to focus on one’s diet. I also hold that view, and it seems to be the consensus amongst weight loss specialists. You can’t outrun a bad diet when the difficulty of burning calories is so much higher than the ease of consuming calories. If someone who wanted to lose weight was going to focus on either changing their diet, or increasing their activity level, then diet is the sensible choice.

Of course, framing it like that is a bit of a false dichotomy, because the health benefits associated with exercise are so significant that I’ve seen some research that suggests it may be healthier to be fat and fit than to be at a healthy weight and unfit/sedentary. Personally, I struggled with disordered eating for many years, but I was finally able to lose weight in a healthy way after I started powerlifting. The impact was mostly one of morale: whilst the increased muscle mass and activity level increased the number of maintenance calories I needed, it wasn’t too huge of an impact when compared to how much I was eating before. What actually changed was how I felt about my body, and how I thought about food, as well as my overall energy levels.

I’ve also seen that kind of homophobia amongst straight girls and women, though it manifests somewhat differently. The most uncomfortable thing about same-sex changing rooms as a person who experiences same-sex attraction isn’t actually the attraction (because checking out people in that context would be weird, regardless of gender or sexuality), but people who treat you like a predator because you’re queer.

It’s really trippy to reflect back on my pre-ACAB days. I recognised that the ways things currently work is far from just, but I was still in the “surely not all cops” mode of thinking; even if I understood how much of this injustice is a systemic problem. Whilst it was several years ago now, it still feels recent enough that I am baffled at how misguided I was to hold the beliefs I did and still consider myself anti-ACAB

I remember vividly that one day, it occurred to me that if ACAB seemed excessive and unreasonable a to me, that perhaps I was operating on incorrect assumptions about what ACAB actually meant (because me being wrong surely is more likely than everyone who says ACAB either being deeply misguided, or inflammatory edgelords). This led to me googling “why ACAB is right” and finding a lot of things that made sense to me.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I think perhaps my overall point is roughly that I think it’s good to label these things with ACAB, where appropriate, because whilst the acronym itself doesn’t have much explanatory power, it is useful as a distillation of a bunch of beliefs about the justice system that are actually somewhat commonly held. It makes me think of the saying “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”. Years ago, I was a silly horse who complained of thirst while standing next to water; sometimes it’s useful to say “dude, you’re literally standing in water”.

That’s a really concise formulation of my own beliefs on this matter. My opinions on how society should handle justice are experiencing extended renovations, so it’s useful to stumble across complex ideas distilled so effectively. Thanks!

I think the best solutions to problems like this take a sociotechnical approach. That is to say that in this case, I think that a crowd of people recording is more powerful than any app. I live in a country where police violence is less prevalent than in the US, and I have seen times when the police have tried to intimidate someone into stopping recording them. One of those times, it was successful, and the bystander got scared and stopped. Another of those times, someone who was better informed overheard the exchange and whipped out their camera too, and explained that the police had no grounds to ask that, especially given that we weren’t interfering with their investigation of the original person.

It is unfortunate about the ACLU app though. Tech tools like that helped protect individuals who were trying to hold the police accountable, which is a useful step towards normalising a healthy suspicion of the police. I haven’t read the above article yet, but I suspect the only reason why this footage wasn’t destroyed or confiscated is because the cops didn’t realise they were being recorded.

Indeed. Whilst many people (such as AlsaValderaan, based on their comment) understand this, there are also people who don’t seem to understand that unpredictability and more extreme weather is evidence of climate change, not against it.

As you say, “global warming” hasn’t been used by scholars in and adjacent to the field in many years, but the term and it’s connotations seem to have stuck in people’s heads. As a scientist, I have an instinct to say “this is a messaging problem, and if scientists better understood how to use rhetoric, perhaps people would have a better understanding of climate change”. However, I think that’s an incorrect instinct that only exists as a form of “cope”.

I do think that scientists, on average, need to get better at communicating their research to laypeople and policy makers. However, it low-key feels like victim blaming to lay responsibility for muddy public understanding of climate change, given that the primary cause of this is moneyed interests who stand to profit from the ongoing rape of the planet’s ecosystems.

My expertise isn’t in a climate related field, but I have friends who do work in that sphere, and it feels like there’s a sort of collective trauma amongst researchers (I mean above and beyond the despair that many of us feel at political negligence exacerbating the climate crisis). I can’t imagine how it must feel to go to a conference and present some research that says “this extremely specific thing that I am a hyper specialised expert on is at risk of permanent loss, here is what needs to happen”, and find that despite unanimous agreement, and everyone else there is shit scared because they have their own hyper specific objects of expertise that are at risk for the exact same reasons; nothing will change because you’re preaching to the choir.

There are scientists who are good at shouting at public policy makers, but they’re outnumbered and outspended by the people and corporations that want more profit. Sometimes people fight for years to implement a particular scheme, but it gets corrupted along the way — usually not from a malicious sabotage of climate action kind of way, but through the kind of bureaucratic incompetence that arises when the people steering the ship fundamentally don’t care about the aims of a project. Policies get progressively watered down, or completely distorted from their original aims. It’s depressing as hell.

Honestly, the only reason I’m still alive is spite. I don’t think climate change will eradicate humanity, but it will put countless lives and ecosystems in jeopardy. For all my privilege, I know that to the ones in power, I am just as much an acceptable sacrifice on the altar to profit as a Bangladeshi textile worker, or a Congolese cobalt miner. The assholes with money are probably going to win this war against most of the planet, but ironically, they’re some of the least well equipped for climate resilience — money only gets you so far at the end of the world, after all.

My car’s infotainment system (a newish Honda Jazz) is running Android (which I understand is based on Linux — this is me saying “yes, and…” to the OP). I’m unsurprised by this, but also for some reason, I find it quite funny how it doesn’t look like Android — until you go delving in the settings and hidden menus to discover that the developer’s settings (and how you enable them) is exactly the same as my phone.