Libra00 @ Libra @lemmy.ml

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Did you get the impression from my comment that I was agreeing with the article? Because I'm very not, hence the 'It'll definitely be true this time' which carries an implied 'It wasn't true any of those other times', but the 'definitely' part is sarcasm. I have argued elsewhere in the post that all of this 'xyz is making us dumb!' shit is bunk.

Yeah, the people who were used to the oral tradition said the same thing about writing stuff down, 'If you don't remember all of this stuff yourself you'll be bad at remembering!', etc. But this is what humans do, what humans are: we evolved to make tools, we use the tools to simplify the things in our life so we can spend more time working on (and thinking about - or do you sincerely think people will just stop thinking altogether?) the shit we care about. Offloading mental labor likewise lets us focus our mental capacities on deeper, more important, more profound stuff. This is how human society, which requires specialization and division of labor at every level to function, works.

I'm old enough to remember when people started saying the same thing about the internet. Well I've been on the internet from pretty much the first moment it was even slightly publicly available (around 1992) and have been what is now called 'terminally online' ever since. If the internet is making us dumb I am the best possible candidate you could have to test that theory, but you know what I do when I'm not remembering phone numbers and handwriting everything and looking shit up in paper encyclopedias at the library? I'm reading and thinking about science, philosophy, religion, etc. That capacity didn't go away, it just got turned to another purpose.

Oh lawd, another 'new technology xyz is making us dumb!' Yeah we've only been saying that since the invention of writing, I'm sure it's definitely true this time.

I mean my own counterargument to it as that no state should have the power to execute people, and if it should it shouldn't use it on criminals, and if it should it shouldn't use it on financial crimes. Yeah $12bil is a lot, and I am absolutely in favor of hard time as a punishment for financial crimes, but I don't think seriously think anyone should die over it.

No, this is the way. But the above article is a good start.

Guy's over here talking about a story involving tech and magic and you're talking about how sci-fi works? I think you're confused about how genres work.

We're talking about technology in the context of a story here, so whether or not it's high tech to the reader is besides the point. Which, as I was trying to elucidate, is that what matters is how the characters treat technology relative to magic, not the audience.

Like hunks of metal, but that's not how I treat smartphones or fusion reactors or whatever. Technology is change, and there is no evidence in Star Wars that technology ever changes. They treat supercomputers with world-altering computational power compared to what we have like old console TVs from the 70s that you have to slap occasionally to make work again. Doesn't seem like high-tech to me.

Don’t go near animals.

Animals breathe, just like we do, they can expel airborne viruses that can travel for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of miles. 'Don't go near animals' is like saying 'just don't get wet' in a rain storm: the world is full of animals and they utterly suffuse every aspect of our life in ways that might surprise you.

Vaccines work using either diluted toxins

I don't know what 'diluted toxins' has to do with viruses and immunology since toxins are a rather different matter entirely, but vaccines work (the non-mRNA ones anyway) by infecting you with a weakened version of the virus so that your immune system can learn to identify it without it overwhelming you. Once it learns to identify that disease it will know how to produce proteins and such that can attack the full version (same DNA) should you ever come across it.

The immune system works by enough of the population dying off until only those with the necessary mutations are left.

Let me state in the sincerest possible terms: lolwut?

It's not about mutation, the immune system can 'learn' and 'evolve' over the course of a single human's lifetime (see: the description of how vaccines work above), it's not something that you either have a good one or you don't (autoimmune diseases aside) and the people with bad ones don't live long enough to reproduce or whatever, your immune system - like your brain - learns by exposure. So being exposed to those diseased animals is literally the only means by which to become immune to them. Viruses do mutate pretty quickly though, so you get the occasional plague/pandemic that overwhelms people's immune systems when they change enough to not be recognizable to our immune system anymore.

They don't treat it like high tech, they treat it like their granddad's old beater of a car that somehow never dies or fails to get you where you're going, but somehow never does a particularly good job either. They treat technology like we treat trees: a brute fact of life with some occasional redeeming qualities.

We don't treat iphones and AI like we treat cars. Star Wars has literal instantaneous communication anywhere in the galaxy and literal thinking, feeling machines, and they're like 'lawl my 9 year old built a stupid robot that speaks 4,000 languages with some plans he downloaded from them thar interwebs!' Technology, like everything else, is a spectrum - except in Star Wars. There's no sense that anyone in the SW universe is going 'Meh we've had starships for 10,000 years, but these new laser swords, man those are some hot shit!' or whatever. There aren't tech enthusiasts in Star Wars; you get a little bit of the gear-head enthusiasm for ships, but no one is raving about the new must-have gadget or that cool new meta-material they read about. They treat technology in Star Wars like we treat trees: just a brute fact of life with the occasional redeeming quality. Technology is change, and even if it wouldn't change significantly over the course of the various shows and movies, there's no evidence that it has ever changed.

Thanks. Yeah the friend might've also been asexual? He had one girlfriend in the entire time I knew him, but that didn't last very long. shrug The subject honestly never came up between us, it was just how it was and we had more interesting shit to do/talk about/etc with our time.

Re:puberty - yeah, my mom a couple times decided to ask me The Gay Question, like if you aren't bringing home girlfriends maybe you have boyfriends and are just shy about it or something? And I didn't have the words to explain (or really even understand myself) that I was into boys about as much as I was into girls: not at all. Like I went through some of the motions just because it was what everyone else was doing, but I never understood the point so it never worked out for long. Man, if only I had just been into boys instead, that would've been a massive relief. I'd have been parading that shit up and down the street in a pathetic attempt to get me some of that 'Look, I'm not broken; I may be a little weird but I'm just like you!' validation. :P

Yeah I’m definitely working on trying to get rid of the FOMO at this point in time. I have a lot of great people in my life tbh and I’m trying to branch out and be a bit more social with things that scare me. But even if I do, I’ll never really have the “standard” human experience. Gotta figure out how to eventually be ok with that.

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Once I got out of the depression of my younger years I spent a lot of years I still had to distract myself constantly from that hollowness I felt inside at not having what everyone else had, that loneliness that threatened to overwhelm. I was good at it, and thus I was able to mostly be a nominally-functional adult most of the time. But it did fade, and I think a lot of that had to do with age. The older you get the more you just get used to the way things are, you become more comfortable and pragmatic about who you are, and you don't miss the things that you decided were less important nearly as much. I was rather surprised to discover a few years ago that it wasn't gone forever, though. I got a surprise dose when the friend I mentioned died; I had also lost both of my parents in the ~8 years before that, so with that third and most shocking death I pretty much went instantly from feeling like a reasonably well-adjusted person to rudderless and totally alone in the world. In the first week or two I couldn't not have some kind of live TV or radio on, it was like I had to know for sure that there were definitely still other people in the world right now living their lives just like they always had. I couldn't sit in a quiet room by myself without feeling it creeping up on me for like a year afterward. But it does get better.

I’m not a spiritual or religious person, myself. I briefly looked into Taoism, but it seems that the westernized idealized version of it isn’t what Taoism necessarily is in reality.

Yeah, fair enough. If I had to slap a label on my spirituality it'd be 'It's complicated.' :P I spent a lot of my life looking for meaning and religion seemed like simultaneously the best place to look but also the hardest place to find it in, it was frustrating and confusing as hell, so I spent a lot of time reading everything I could get my hands on about it, was an atheist for a long time because of that frustration, and... let's just say that nowadays I'm more of a homebrew kinda guy. ;)

Thanks for your offer to chat! Hope you don’t mind if I’m just giving a long winded response here lol.

Not at all, you might've noticed I'm a lil long-winded myself. :P

I found out about asexuality in my teens.

That must've been an interesting experience. We often don't realize how hard it is to think about and understand a thing until we have a name for it, it's like we need that convenient handle to grab onto to be able to figure it out, and I didn't have that until years and years later.

Even today, whenever I approach asexual communities, I find that most of them are filled with very young coming of age people who are so extremely “terminally online” to the point where it makes me a bit uncomfortable.

Maybe it's because I didn't discover these communities until I was in my 40s, but I felt that pretty keenly myself, so I think I know what you mean. Because they're young and sexuality is normally such a huge part of peoples' lives at that time it's hard to escape the constant reminders from all around them of the fact that they're different, so they seek community online/etc and then turn that community's group identity (identification with this particular way of being) into their own personal identity, they make themselves so much about this one aspect of their lives. Meanwhile I'm over here like 'Yeah, I'm asexual, but also I'm a former IT guy, a life-long gamer almost since the birth of video games, an avid student of politics, religion, and philosophy, a big sci-fi nerd', etc. I have a lot of stuff going on, that's just one small - and, these days, not even particularly significant - portion of my life, so the idea of people who are all about that is just weird to me.

But it’s refreshing to hear from your perspective, as an asexual in the “real world”, with thoughts, feelings, and experiences based more in reality as opposed to in an online hypersensitive safety zone.

I dunno that I am any more 'of the real world' than anyone else, lol. I'm disabled and spend a huge amount of my free time in front of a computer, so I'm as terminally online as anyone else. :P I just had to mostly figure a bunch of this stuff out on my own because it was going on before the internet was a thing.

Hope the best for you!

Thanks, you too!

'HA ha!' -Nelson Muntz

Star Wars doesn't really do 'super advanced technology'. Like they've got space ships and hyperdrive and laser swords and shit, but they don't treat it like high-tech stuff, they treat it like we treat cars and swords.

Absolutely, I don't mind at all.

1. That's complicated. I grew up in the 70s and 80s when there wasn't a word for it, so I spent a lot of years just thinking I was broken/defective and hating the world as a result (I had some other stuff going on as well, medical problems and such, so I felt like I had just been dumped on and it was somehow the fault of the world and everyone in it.) Puberty was fuckin' weird because my younger sisters and cousins and such kept bringing home boy/girlfriends and everyone would look at me like 'Where's yours?' They did eventually stop asking questions, but the looks didn't stop for a long time. I didn't come across the word 'asexual' until maybe ~15 years ago, and even then it kind of took a while to realize that it was an accurate description. So.. anywhere from puberty in the late 80s to maybe 10 years ago depending on definition? I kinda went from 'I'm broken and unlovable', to 'This is just how I am and fuck anyone who has a problem with it', to 'Oh, there's a word for that. Hi, I'm Libra and I'm asexual.'
2. I do now. When I was younger I keenly felt like I was missing out on what everyone else took for granted, especially that life-partner thing, and I was depressed for many years as a result. What pulled me out of it and made me see the value of my life was two things. First, and this is kinda dark, but I got literally to the point of putting a gun in my mouth and realized that for whatever reason I just couldn't do it. That left me no option but to find ways to make my life even marginally less unbearable because I had no escape, it immediately got rid of all the excuses I had used to not work on myself, my situation, etc. The second, and this might sound strange, was philosophy. I've long been a student of religion (but not a member of one since I was a teenager) and in my 30s I branched out into philosophy as well. There I came across the works of the absurdists like Camus, and the Myth of Sisyphus especially (though it took some time) was a big help. It made me realize that if there is no meaning inherent to anything then I get to decide what it all means to me. I had been deciding sort of subconsciously that life was a hateful, burdensome thing to be endured rather than enjoyed, but I could decide instead that even if I wasn't leading the kind of life the people around me expected that I was still enjoying the moments, that I could even enjoy the struggle ('The struggle itself ... is enough to fill a man's heart'). I slowly stopped being an angry, cynical asshole who hated the world and learned to embrace the things I did enjoy about life until I realized one day that that was most things actually. It also helped that I had a good friend for ~25 years who was basically a life partner without being a romantic partner, though he sadly died a few years ago. I still miss having someone to share my life with now sometimes, but most of the time I can fill that void with friends, community, and hobbies (I'm disabled so I have lots of free time for tabletop RPGs, gaming, reading, etc.)

I'm still a little awkward in social situations too, but I've gotten much better about it, I'll actually talk to total strangers in the store instead of being weirded out that someone I don't know would talk to me, etc. I feel like I fake being a relatively normal, socially well-adjusted adult pretty well, to the point that most of the time I actually feel that way too. I have to imagine that the modern relatively easy access to therapy could speed that process along for most people, but I was born too early and was too poor/stubborn to try to get help so I had to bull my way through it on my own. It sucked, and it has had some lasting consequences that I hope others don't ever have to go through, but at the other end if it I'm a pretty content person, which I guess is all that matters.

I haven't really talked with other asexual people (internet or otherwise) myself, so I welcome the opportunity to do so. In fact if you ever want/need someone to talk to about this stuff you are more than welcome to hit up my DMs (does lemmy have DMs? I'm still new here.)

That sounds pretty good too, yeah. The program could be expanded to include safe spaces/training for teenagers and such too, probably include a rec center that always has stuff going on for them to participate in, etc. At that point it turns from a housing/job training project to basically a community, built around safe spaces, opportunities, and education for the future.

Humans need to go close to the infected animal to get infected.

To some extent yes, but 'get close to' is pretty broad: breathe contaminated air in the general vicinity of animals, drink water they've pissed or shit in, etc.

Oh, so being exposed to new viruses reduces the risk of dying to a virus you got … because you were exposed to it?

That is in fact how a vaccine/our immune system works, yes.

I don't want to say never, but probably never. Regardless of AI slop filling social media there will always be places where people congregate that are at least less-impacted by these trends than others. Personally I live in Texas and aside from a few family members everyone else I know lives elsewhere in the country/world and I would have no contact with them whatsoever if not for the internet, so that's always going to be a draw for me no matter what else is going on. Also I don't think it's quite as apocalyptic as you make it out to be; before AI the big concern was 'zomg the ads will be everywhere', but then adblock came along and aside from walled-garden mobile apps I virtually never see ads. Dissatisfaction with AI slop will lead to tools meant to find, identify, and combat it, just like it has with everything else. The only danger is if we let companies wall us totally into their little app ecosystems where it's illegal to modify them to block the stuff you don't want to see.

Nearly all of history's worst diseases have come from animals, and animals have those diseases whether we eat them or not. Factory farming certainly enhances the danger, but cows don't stop existing just because we don't eat beef. There is, however, also an upside to meat consumption: being around/eating animals all the time also builds up your immune system's defenses against diseases that originate in those animals. See: indigenous people in the Americas dying in droves to diseases they had no immunity to because they didn't farm/ranch animals. I mean and also the smallpox blankets, but you get my point.