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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Humans can do something, doesn’t mean humans only do that thing and nothing else.

    Humans have many models of the world running in different modes in parallel, enabling us to make sense of things other than just process language and come up with plausible sounding answers within the rules of a given language.

    Our understanding of concepts is different than how we process language, demonstrated in that there are perfectly intelligent people who can’t communicate using spoken or written language (including sign language) but can do so using other methods which demonstrate language processing isn’t essential to our intelligence.

    The way we learn information and integrate it into our neural network is vastly different than how we train our artificial models using machine learning. Even if we just take language processing, we definitely don’t learn by reading the entirety of written human language many times over regardless of what language it’s written in, until we can understand how it’s underlying mechanics work so that we can form plausible structures of word-chunk strings without necessarily understanding the concepts behind the word-chunks.












  • TIL I didn’t know the meaning of normies.

    It’s not a word I use but when I saw it first, I thought it meant neurotypical, then after a while I saw it in a more political context and thought it meant centrist. Turns out, it just means mainstream. I think.

    What exactly does this word mean?


  • Or conversely, a Christian apologist coming to an atheist community and saying “if god isn’t real why do good things” as if declaring you are a poorly educated sociopath is a good way to challenge people’s well formed ideas.

    I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to explain to some people why “woke leftists” are so quick to shut them up that they feel like they aren’t given a right to speak their minds. “Woke” ideas are generally more developed and complex than “common sense” ideas, which requires some thought being put into them while they evolve from basic to their current level, so when you challenge a person’s developed idea with a superficial, usually knee jerk level question or critique, you’re most likely engaging in a line of thinking they were done with quite early in their evolution of the idea you’re trying to challenge.



  • I just preemptively blocked the community for my account. I’d recommend everyone do the same until, and if they prove to be a problem.
    I think instead of calling for pre-blocks or defederation of entire instances, we have to be vigilant and keep a close eye on the discussions going on around us.

    I’m saying this not because I’m an “enlightened centrist” living in a delusion of tolerance or a fascist in disguise. I am as left leaning, antifascist, and antiauthoritarian as they get. I’m just saying this as I know from experience that there’s no real way to eliminate people with bigoted views from our communities other than on an individual basis.

    Ban an entire instance, you’ll still have to block the individuals if they come one by one to stir shit up on your turf. Just skip the first part and go for the individual communities and users. They will simply find each other and form groups, as instances or otherwise anyway.

    I know it’s not ideal, but there’s no real way to prevent these fascist groups from forming anywhere there’s a large enough number of people. We can only block our own interaction with them and form counter groups, and actively fight against their bigotry.

    I believe this is the sad truth we all have to live with, at least for the time being, because I can’t see defederation as an effective tool.


  • Agreed.

    With the submarine story, it’s like a film scenario. Every detail is something unusual, and not tragic in itself. Well, depends on who you ask. There are many people who think billionaires existing is a very real tragedy, and rightly so, but I digress.

    With billionaires in a comic-book-supervillain submarine lost on their way to see the Titanic wreck, you can laugh at the $30 controller, or wonder where their brains were, or if anybody looked at their financials because this also would work as a movie scenario where 4 billionaires pay someone to disappear them because they didn’t pay taxes or something.

    Refugee boat sinking is actual tragedy, with the added bonus of the entire western world having some level of guilt in creating. When the average, empathy having person hears about it, they feel complex emotions from sadness to guilty conscience for casually hearing about it from the comfort of their couch… It’s difficult to deal with.