telmo

I love the idea of Mastodon and I would love for things like that to take us back to the less centralized and less corporate internet of before, but I am pessimistic that it will happen anytime soon.

The real reason why people are "migrating" to Mastodon right now (and can't seem to stop talking about it on Twitter) is one and one only: to signal their tribal affiliation. Twitter used to be controlled by the blue tribe and now it was bought by a member of the red tribe. That is all that is happening. Nothing more, nothing less.

I don't know if Elon Musk will destroy Twitter or if it won't matter in the long term. I suspect the latter, but I'm close to 50/50 on that. What I am sure is that the average Twitter user will not actually stay and use Mastodon right now. Most people are on Twitter for the audience and/or to follow those with large audiences, and Mastodon does not have that not will it in the near future (which makes it sound like a really nice place to hang out now that I mention it :)

I would also point out that, in my experience, internet communities are great until they get noticed by the mainstream. Once they become mainstream, they attract huge masses of users that want to fight for their political tribe with high hostility / low creativity content, and the eye of Sauron (politicians in general) falls upon it, and opinion piece writers start fanning the flames of moral panics, and the good times are over.

Hardcore punk is pretty close to left wing anarchism. Is this news to you?

Also: it is possible to criticize the capitalist system without advocating communism. Believe it or not, it is not a binary choice.

People will grasp at anything to avoid confronting harsh truths and personal responsibility.

We are facing an existential threat to civilization itself, but some kids have thrown some soup at a painting so I guess our hands are tied now...

I didn't claim that it was (or wasn't) a free speech issue. What I said is that "if it is not your server you don't get to complaint" is an overly simplistic (and untrue) take on this issue.

In fact there is already some amount of legislation on this, for example in the EU.

> It's an online bubble of polarised people looking for attention, not a public square and not representative of anything

I find that people who write things like this are expressing a distaste for politics taking place on Twitter. They tend to be expressing how they think things should be, and I can even sympathize, but that has no bearing on how things are.

How things actually are: the vast majority of politicians of any importance in the west (and probably not only) have staff dedicated to maintaining their Twitter presence. Most institutions use Twitter as an important communication channel, including the various institution the make up the EU, the USA and the UN. You can check this for yourself. If you actually talk with journalists, you will understand that Twitter is now central to everything they do, and that trickles down to everyone else.

10% is actually a huge number. The majority of people do not have a public voice nor an interest in actively participating in politics. Politics is made of "polarised people looking for attention". Always has been.

You have to be living under a rock to not be aware of all the major geopolitical incidents that take place on Twitter. It was the main communication channel for Donald Trump. We just recently witnessed the incident between Musk and Zelenskyy. A lot of interactions happened there during Brexit. I could go on, and on, and on.

I live in Europe and I can tell you that Twitter absolutely became the public square for politicians at all levels of government, in the various countries and in the EU. It is also where all journalists hang out, and many other type of actors too (academic researchers for example, all sorts of activists, etc). And I am pretty sure it is the same in the US.

I'm sorry but you do not know what you are talking about.

> If it is not not on your server, than you don't get to complain.

That is a rather naive slogan to be repeating in 2022.

Once your servers become the de facto public square, we absolutely get to complain. Not even talking about how your server is running on top of a huge amount of infrastructure that was created by our society, enabled by principles and laws that have been discovered and refined across generations. Your server does not exist in a vacuum.

Democracy requires a healthy public square to survive and thrive, and that is more important than some overly simplistic notion of private property.

I also prefer the Many Worlds interpretation and I do think that it is gaining popularity in relation to Copenhagen, but I'm not sure what you mean by "today's world view". And who is this "we" that you write about?

I prefer Many Worlds because it is a simpler explanation, so I follow Occam's razor. That's it.

Consciousness and the existence of qualia remains a fundamental mystery. There is something definitely special about it, in the sense that it currently does not fit any scientific model. It is also a deep philosophical problem that started being considered millennia ago and dates at least all the way back to Plato vs Aristotle.

In my experience, people who think that consciousness is somehow a settled matter simply haven't thought about it enough and are perhaps a bit naive on the many ramifications of the issue that have been explored do far.

For example: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/14/european-cou...

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

― Upton Sinclair

What do you mean? Nothing is perfect but the EU has been a net positive for its member states. It is approved of by a majority of its citizens across all countries. The EU created one of the most prosperous (for the common person), free and tolerant societies on earth.

You can make all the snarky remarks you want, but if you were reincarnating right now as some random human and you learned that you reincarnated as a citizen of the EU, you would probably sigh in relief.

In my experience, the strongest criticisms of the EU come from outsiders who would prefer to impose their views and preferences on how Europeans should live, and on the role that Europe should play in the world stage -- a more subservient one.

I find that the term "woo" suffered a semantic drift in the last few decades. It used to refer to things that pretend to be scientific by using the terminology and aesthetics of science without being grounded in real empiricism. One classical example of "real woo" is homeopathy.

Nowadays, "woo" is being applied to anything that science cannot model or explain. Science cannot explain consciousness? Well it must be woo then! You tell me that you experience your own consciousness, and that you are sure it exists? No, it's an illusion my poor child. An illusion of whom, you ask? That is starting to sound like philosophy, which is not science so it must be woo. Careful.

Woo is becoming synonymous with "heretic" and "science" no longer means what I thought it meant. In my view, the defining aspects of science, the ones that make it such a splendorous endeavor, are modesty and doubt. All scientific theories are under the permanent risk of being falsified, otherwise they are not serious theories. There are many things we do not understand, and it might even be that this will always be the case. Some things defy our current understanding or reality, and consciousness is one of them. That doesn't make it woo, and those that pretend that it does are like the fearful religious people of previous ages, as they shout "woo"/"heretic" at those who have the temerity of harboring doubts and questions.

> Sounds great to me, can't think of a better way to go about learning things well enough that we can say we know them to an extent.

> If not results from scientific methods, then what's the alternative that should be trusted?

I am not saying that there is a better way to obtain scientific knowledge than through science, what I am saying is that there are other modes of knowledge. For example:

(1) Philosophy. This very discussion is of a philosophical nature. What is knowledge? What modes of knowledge are there? What is science? Why is science useful? What is usefulness? What are the limits of scientific knowledge, if they exist? None of these questions can be answered by application of the scientific method. In fact, the very idea of science is not a scientific theory.

(2) First person experience. Science is about things that can be verified in the third person (measurements), but there are things that can only be experienced in the first person (qualia). Science has nothing to say about e.g. my direct experience of the color red. And is my experience of red the same of yours? Another question that cannot be answered by science (and that maybe cannot be answered at all).

(3) Math. Mathematical proof is a way of obtaining knowledge that is not based on empiricism.

> The part that's forgotten is that the body of scientific knowledge is constantly updated. They're merely the best answers we have at the moment, not final ones.

Not forgotten at all, please re-read what I wrote originally.

> anti-science rethoric

As a lover of science and a scientific researcher (according to my payslips), I have a certain aversion towards this current "defense of science" furor. In my view, science needs no such defenders, and they do more harm than good.

Science is empiricism. That is it. It is the idea that a theory about how the world works must be put to the test through experimentation. And it is also the idea that all theories are forever subject to falsification. There is no space for arguments form authority, personal preferences about how nature should work nor dogma. But this is exactly how many contemporary "defenders of science" are treating science: as an authoritative source that must be trusted. This is why so many people make fun of flat earthers without actually knowing how to verify by themselves that the earth is round.

The deeper aspect of this pathology is the attempt to replace all philosophy with just science. This does a disservice not only to philosophy but also to science itself (which is both a product and an important object of study of philosophy).

For example: flat earthers, or people who promote homeopathy, or any other brand of bullshit, are certainly engaged in peseudo-science, but so are people who pretend that neural correlates provide us with any insight whatsoever into the hard problem of consciousness.

Philosophy does not contribute to the economy. It is not particularly useful in creating new gadgets. There are no philosophy startups, nor philosophy tech giants. But discarding philosophy is short-sighted, and it leads to the hell that we can all quite see coming from the corner of our eyes.

The article points at the fact that many "defenders of science" make the ontological commitment of materialism, assuming that this is implied by science, when it most definitely is not. But again, this realization requires education (or self-education) in topics that are currently discarded because they do not help you pay the mortgage.

The slogan was always cut short. Here's the entire thing:

"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away."

Well, it's even slightly more complicated than that but you can read the details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

Deep thinkers were always aware of these tensions. Cyberpunk writers in the 90s and even 80s correctly predicted a lot of what is going on right now, namely the use of technology to cover reality in gaudy advertisements (that could look back at you), as well as corporations gaining powers that used to be associated with nation states (for example, policing speech). People just hoped it would not turn out like this... I still have a feeling that it didn't have to.

> vino verde

Not wanting to be pedantic or snobbish, but it is "vinho verde", because it is a Portuguese type of wine (I am Portuguese, and that is why I care about this :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinho_Verde

> While true in essence, I don’t think that the German society broadly shares the value of privacy to a level that warrants such excessive restrictions.

You are wrong. I have been living in Germany for almost a decade and it absolutely does. In fact, it is one of the things that I appreciate the most about German culture.

Maybe privacy preferences are a bit incoherent sometimes, but nothing is perfect, and I much prefer that we err on the side of protecting privacy too much than too little. Especially in this brave new world we live in, were culture is being slowly but surly manipulated by powerful interests to erode the right to privacy more and more.

Yes, this is exactly the reason. (I am a native speaker)

Successful at what and for whom?

> the political elite

I'm not sure what this means.

> in the major (remaining) EU countries, or it wouldn't be the policy, right?

It is not some policy, it is an international treaty signed by every current in the EU. This would be like saying that NATO is "a policy". By the way, the remaining countries are 27. 13 of those joined since the year 2000 and one left.

> except for the currency integration which will never happen

Yes it did. What a bizarre statement.

> Try ordering an espresso in Berlin without speaking English.

I live in Berlin. You can order anything in German anywhere. This is at best a gross exaggeration, at worse an outright lie. It was exactly this type of "fact" that was used to convince a lot of British people to commit brexit.

I am a continental European and I have lived in the UK for some time. I always lived under the impression that the goal of the EU was to increase integration. I think the majority of continental Europeans feel the same and support this idea to some degree. I always felt that this was only news to the British.

I also support brexit. I would prefer for the UK to be in the EU because it would make all of us stronger and closer, as I think we should be, but I have to accept that current UK culture is just not compatible with the European project.

Good luck to my British friends, who I know see me as "foreigner". I don't see you as foreigner.

> is there some kind of "commerce clause" type loophole for this

The EU is not just a commercial organization. It is an actual political union. The English-speaking press tends to hate mentioning this, but it is the truth. The treaty of Lisbon says that the goal of the European Union is to create an "ever closer" union between the member states. Every member state signed up for this.

> I would've thought that this was outside the scope of the EU

Few things are outside the scope of the EU.

> was power constitutionally transferred to the EU parliament at some point?

It is a very complex topic, but the short answer is "yes". Member states agree to translate EU parliament decisions into national law at their own time. They have the ability to veto any initiative through other channels.

> If a member nation refused to obey an EU law (or whatever it is), what sort of punishment or sanction could be applied to them?

This things are usually dealt with through diplomacy. There is a lot of tolerance. Often nothing happens but many types of sanctions (usually economical) are possible.

I have been using Firefox as my main browser for years (on a mac). Firefox is fine. For my taste, it is better than Chrome.

My suspicion is that the majority of people in this sort of thread will never use anything other than Chrome, because it is not Chrome. Maybe the web will survive until a more idealistic generation takes over.

> Mathematics is not related to the natural world at all.

This is your personal belief, unless you can justify it. I won't hold my breath, because this discussion has been raging for centuries with no end in sight.

> For example, infinite numbers exist, but the natural world cannot have an infinite or infinitessimal amount of things, there are upper and lower limits.

Nobody knows if the natural world is finite or not. Consider for example the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. We just don't know enough to assert such as thing.

> mathematics is not necessarily a reflection of the physical universe

Nobody knows if it is or not. It could also be that the physical universe is a reflection of mathematical truth.

> It can be, in cases like addition, but it doesn't necessarily need to be. Which was the parent's point.

Again, nobody knows if it what you claim is true or not. What we do know is that all scientific models are based on math, and if there is something wrong at the foundations of math, then all science is pseudoscience. Gödel's theorems are at the foundations of math. You can't just decide that you are skeptical about that part of math being applicable to physical models but addition is fine.

The real problem with Gödel is that it says something that a lot of people don't like to be true.

We were out of oranges. Then Mary left an orange in the kitchen. Then Bob left an orange in the kitchen.

Q: How many oranges are there in the kitchen? A: 2.

Not so fast. Addition is a mathematical model and doesn't necessarily reflect the physical universe.

Everyone calls it AI. It just so happens that it became a large field, so people tend to say that they work in Machine Learning, or Reinforcement Learning, or Evolutionary Computation. The same as in any other field really.

Also: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/artificial-intelligence

What a coincidence that something that was claimed for years to be a likely outcome of Brexit happened right in the aftermath of Brexit.... but it turns out that it was mostly unrelated to Brexit.

What. A. Coincidence.

> Correction: they happen in what you believe to be a theatre of consciousness. Belief without evidence is religion.

I have the highest possible level of evidence: direct experience. It just happens to not be communicable. Not everything is.

> You can demonstrate that such a theatre might exist by demonstrating some phenomenon which cannot be accounted for via mechanistic processes.

All the mechanistic processes that you can account for where observed within the theater of your consciousness. So was everything you ever learned about science, and also this present discussion with me.

What I am pointing at is just Plato's Cave. Not a new argument, nor a settled one.

> There are monks that would say that with some practice, you would realize it's not. And they call that direct experience too.

I am aware, and I do happen to maintain a practice of that nature. My question to these monks: who is this "you" that realizes it is not? (I don't fear so much offending the monks, my understanding is that many actually enjoy this sort of question :)

> Something you can't measure objectively cannot be so easily hand waved.

Everything that I can measure objectively, including the act of measuring and the concepts of "measure" and "objectivity" happen within the theater of my consciousness (the only thing I have direct experience of is my consciousness, everything else is relative to it).

So I say: Something you experience directly cannot be so easily hand waved.