andrewclunn

Are they still a minority?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/joe-bidens-approval-...

Yes, there is a clear political tribal alignment between the current "out-group" and skepticism of institutions, but the rise of that iconoclasm on the right seems to be correlating with its growth as a whole.

If they argued that Blockchain is not mature, and so (from a personal cost benefit analysis) is inferior to centralized systems, they would be on point. There is a difference between straight up pseudo science and novel developments. Conflating the two is nothing new.

Meaningful Use, ICD-10, more and more top down "big data" standards and approaches, that focus on qualitative data entry AS care. I mean this literally: thanks Obama.

Ad hominems (or attacks on the person or source rather than the argument) are only logical fallacies when applied to people on "my team." Please update your "Rational Skepticism Operating System" to the current year version.

Honest questions deserve honest answers. First, I am coming from a US-centric position (the article dealt with that, I am from the US, and the my response deals specifically with that culture... though Canadians likely would benefit from it too). As to education and degrees, there is a HUGE divergence in the types of degrees that are worth the money, and those which act more as institutional pyramid schemes. This distinction is well known on the example advice channel I recommended, but largely absent from mainstream culture.

As to what qualifies as mainstream culture, before the internet it was a clear delineation (based on broadcast and print), now there are perhaps tiers (and that's a broader conversation). One thing to note is that the more direct influence that institutional power has via gatekeeping (by directly promoting ideas through things like textbook publishers or narrowing discussion via tech censorship policies) the more the area caters to the desires of those in power, rather than those using / consuming the service. I steer clear of reddit myself because several times in the past when areas have become too divergent from "acceptable narrative" they have been closed down.

There's plenty more that could be said on this topic, but that would likely require a book on epistemology. Hope that answered your questions about my intentions and views at least.

> The people with the most money and education—the class most responsible for shaping culture and customs—ensure that their children are raised in stable homes. But actively undermine the norm for everyone else.

Yep. If you were raised in poverty, the WORST thing you can do is listen to "approved" mainstream advice. That culture / media isn't there to help you, but to sell you things or make money on telling you what you want to hear.

I'll go one step further and say that if you are a man born into poverty, check out Aaron Clarey's asshole consulting. Don't agree with everything he says, but as a starting point, that's 10 times better than what your guidance counselor will tell you.

> it's true, twitter == government but not twitter === government.

Let's not start coding political documents in JavaScript now. (Insert additional joke about the interpreter engine running on 9 robed meat processors).

We used to fund distributed disruptive technologies to subvert Soviet censorship. Chinese censorship was seen as proof of our superior freedom 20 years ago. Now it is viewed with envy by those in power. What moral high ground do we hold now?

This must be at an elevated space or in a dry area. Otherwise the water table would stop him. She should ask him to take a video of the tunnel for her so she can see what it looks like down there (without having to go in herself).

> I've only ever heard it said about eliminating the single largest source of death in human history.

Is this true? I'm not sure if you're being hyperbolic here, but if that is a defensible claim I want to hear how you arrived at that conclusion.

I wonder What Stallman would think of ROM hacking, and other mod communities that reverse engineer proprietary games, and fundamentally transform (either through direct hacks or rebuilding from decompiled source) them into something more akin to open culture. Legally? No, which is why I doubt he'll ever comment on it, but I imagine he might say that this is a distopian notion where people have to break laws to take ownership of culture because everything is fundamentally non-free.

Real support call centers will send you to numerous automated menus and make you jump through hoops to talk to a real person. There's going to be a heuristic adopted in a few years where real person = scammer.

I'd settle for a mechanism to update a "smart tv" to remove said "features" and prevent future updates. A rogue firmware update hack. Let's see them take users to court saying we're "not allowed to remove those advertisements... but not because we don't really own the device."

One of the often missed features of religions is that of cultural critic and cultivator. A group of people who find works of art that at least don't offend their sensibilities and which align with their didactic goals (child rearing, conversion, etc...) Having an explicit standard for judging art gives a means of determining what is that thick and thin: which pieces of entertainment are just that and which are meant to be shared, reenjoyed, and such.

Not endorsing a specific religion or philosophy here, but how is one to aspire to something more meaningful and deeper when they cannot even distinguish what that is?

Make it lucrative enough to be a victim and suddenly people will start wanting to be victimized (or at least pretend to be). Your comment speaks of religious fervor, and that righteous hatred will only make heretics and nonbelievers. Incentives cut all ways.

Crime reduces property value. If your main investment is your home, you are incentivized to pretend it's not an issue.

When reviews became numerical and used to recommend content via algorithms, was it any wonder they became as broken as any other form of rating online? Incentives and emergence shape everything. Want a good critic? Find someone (an individual) with tastes similar to yours. The aggregate is always a distorted mess of corrupt business practices, incompetent hot takes, and people you disagree with mucking up the waters. That there is or was ever "critical consensus" should be the least reassuring thing.

Telling these institutions that if they want more trust, that they should earn it, is missing the point. The entire reason for ensuring trust in an institution is so that you can then cash in on it. It's marketing. The notion that these institutions were ever trustworthy is the remnants of whatever messaging you've internalized from them.

The freer expression and archival powers of the internet allow for people to see through the scam more and more. The division is hardly "right" and "left" (having almost nothing to do with economics). It's cultural at the low end, but higher up it's about trust, and whether one feels that institutional authority can or should be trusted at all.

Or stable software.

Be legally restricted by fiduciary obligations and prevented from purchasing more stock in order to gain... what exactly? Elon made the right call here.

Bird Bird, yes. Elmo, No. This heuristic will serve you well.

Waiting until there are consequences (in general) instead of merely the prediction of consequences (reactive instead of proactive) has two effects: 1) Delaying costs and potentially setting off consequences that cannot be avoided. 2) Not being taken in by those who use scare tactics to control you based upon consequences that might not happen.

Is this a matter of deferred gratification and societal-level self control, or of epistemology and institutional trust?

Not in many culturally conservative households. These parents exert a lot more control over what their children are exposed to / allowed to engage with.

Well that's not entirely true. Instagram (a Meta property) is more the competitor to TikTok. And this isn't crying to the government. This is trying to push the dangers of TikTok on right wing cultural outlets. The thing is, this is true, the incentives of TikTok are not pro-social. Then again, neither are those of Instagram (or Facebook for that matter).

I think we can disagree with a policy without saying, "The people who agree with this policy are racist.". I mean weren't the elimination of standardized tests also justified on them supposedly being racist? At this point I couldn't care less what people assume the motivations of their opponents are.

The old ways persist. Good games are easier than ever to find and in great quantity. So what, now you want lawsuits and legislation to destroy the fremium model? I'll just be over hear playing games I want to play, unaffected by the network effect because I don't care what strangers play. I play with my friends and we play games that are old, indie, fun, run on anyone's machine, and can be played in person on a couch if we want. There's free bots for discord poker with friends. There's countless pick up and play fremium online titles to chose from. There's decades' worth of system's libraries available on emulators. What are you complaining about again?

If I split people along a single axis, I would be able to find all sorts of correlations. Does that pattern hold even as the lines and makeup of political parties change? Believing transient patterns to represent powerful truths is why so many social scientists theories are as temporal as their finding.

Whichever group seeks to push its values on others via force or compulsion will find a reason to dismiss or vilify freedom of expression and speech. Then all other groups will band together to oppose that first group of would-be tyrants. Claiming that there's something psychologically distinct about one political party or another at an individual level (which goes beyond a mere snapshot or moment in time) is to see them as ideologically driven monoliths, when they are in fact hodgepodge collectives of various interest groups.

Conservatives will support freedom of speech so long as it is a winning strategy politically and they make a cultural space for those seeking to circumvent top down censorship. Blasting this approach as disingenuous is clear cut coping. If liberals want to champion free speech, then let them do so. People are flocking to conservative parties because the ostensibly liberal ones have given them no other option. Don't blame the conservatives, even if you think this is opportunistic. Instead get your own house in order and be glad that oppositional politics provides enough incentives to ensure at least one party will champion the cause for freedom of expression, regardless of the ideological justifications they use to get there.

I imagine a theoretical programmer who only used while loops, or did everything using recursion. Not reason to ever touch a for loop really. There are plenty of shortcuts that obscure what's happening under the hood. If you can do it all "closer to the metal" as it were, then why bother?

Internet shaming is selectively applied and therefore more a tool of oppression and compliance than valid social signalling. "Politeness" and "political correctness" are entirely distinct, and the internet has no concept of that. Or to use their own language, internet shaming is Californian imperialism, attempting to impose it's values on other cultures.