PrinceWith999Enemies @ PrinceWith999Enemies @lemmy.world

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606

Joined

2 yr. ago

You are absolutely correct and this was very well stated. Television networks used to view news programs as a public service. They weren’t intended to generate revenue, but rather as part of the payback to the public in order to use the public airwaves.

Newspapers were always generally profit driven, but you had the distinction between the yellow journalism approach and the Grey Lady approach. There’s less of a distinction today, and you now have a phenomenon where the bad drives out the good via the Darwinian process that essentially boils down to being able to monetize clickbait.

In 2012 I voted against Obama because I thought he was too conservative. I didn’t think his healthcare program went far enough, I didn’t like his foreign policy of continuing the Bush wars, and I thought he turned out to be far more establishment than he had indicated as a candidate in 2008.

I voted for Jill Stein. I said it wasn’t a protest vote and that I was voting my conscience, but it was totally a protest vote. Stein would have been the worst president in US history, and I even knew that at the time. I did it because Obama had a predicted 99% chance of winning my state, so I figured it was safe and would communicate to the democrats that there was a preference for more left leaning candidates.

What I did not do was try to campaign for Stein to try to get swing state voters to vote for her. I didn’t try to get swing state voters to not vote.

Thanks!

I have always loved the OED. As a kid I used to sit in the library and just read it. It was always a dream of mine to buy my own copy and just have it the way people used to have encyclopedias.

That’s exactly my perspective.

I came of age with the birth of the web. I was using systems like Usenet, gopher, wais, and that sort of thing. I was very much into the whole cypherpunk, “information wants to be free” philosophy that thought that the more information people had, the more they could talk to each other, the better the world would be.

Boy, was I wrong.

But you can’t put the genie back into the bottle. So now, in addition to having NPR online, we have kids eating tide pods and getting recruited into fascist ideologies. And of course it’s not just kids. It’s tough to see how the anti-vax movement or QAnon could have grown without the internet (which obviously has search engines as a major driver of traffic).

I think you’re better off teaching critical thinking, and even demonstrating the failings of ChatGPT by showing them how bad it is at answering questions. There’s plenty of resources you can find that should give you a starting point. Ironically, you can find them using a search engine.

That was amazing! I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve seen this.

“Every customer should be greeted when they walk into the store.”

The singular “they” is traditional in English - it is very much proper English and has been around (iirc) since the 17th century. It’s only a big deal now because conservatives want to make gender a factor in elections.

The difference is that Elon would have said “And we can do this today!” back in 2017.

First “democrats” is doing a lot of work here. I’m assuming the voters that you’re talking about turning out were democrats. I’m assuming the politicians they voted for were democrats. So what you mean is some subset (eg Third Way types, which have already been mentioned).

Use numbers. What was the turnout for the previous years? What was the turnout for Obama? For Bill Clinton? Was it bigger when Dennis Kucinich was in the race? Other than Bernie, he was the leftmost candidate that I can recall - at least in the top 5 in recent years. State the point you are trying to prove clearly, then demonstrate it.

I’m a Bernie supporter - he actually helped secure a research grant I worked on, I’ve met him in person, and I donated to each of his campaigns since I started to be able to do that kind of thing. I’m a member of the DSA. I’m also a scientist, and I deal with this kind of thing all the time.

What you’re basically coming off as, to be honest, is that family member in the maga hat who keeps yelling that 2020 was rigged.

So should a cop respond with lethal force against a child because they have a garden tool, or has the rest of the planet been making a terrible mistake that only the Americans, with their off the charts levels of violence and incarceration, have figured out?

Do you think a militarized police force has a negative effect on violent crime and the rest of the world outside of places like Haiti and Somalia need to catch up with us?

You gave no competing hypothesis. I offered several.

Also the ability to burrow under the sand for protection from predators and the elements.

This is a hot take.

Here’s the problem with your hypothesis:

You’re mixing together people who don’t vote with people publicly advocating not voting. That’s completely unsupported. Let’s see some stats on why people don’t vote. Is it because they don’t have time because they’re working, because they’re uncomfortable with the process, because they’re being lazy? On the other hand, what are the predictors of voting? We know age is a factor, so that would encourage us to think about the time availability question.

The second part is that the disengagement approach you’re advocating has driven the Democratic Party to the right. The Third Way movement came entirely from seeing Reagan’s engagement numbers. Not voting casts a zero information signal. First, the numbers only move mildly from year to year, and even when they do it tends to come down to the charisma of the candidate, not the policy positions.

A surprising number of Americans want universal healthcare, support LGBT rights and are against racism, yet vote for Donald Trump or DeSantis because they can get the crowds riled up in the way that policy wonks just don’t.

I mean, when the republicans did that huge study that found that economic and demographic changes in the US meant they needed to adopt more progressive policies (eg not being openly racist) if they wanted to have a future, the gop said “screw that, we will just depress the vote.”

So, no, your policy is not evidence-based, and it’s unreasonable. It forces the country to the right. If that’s what you want, go for it.

No offense here either, but you seem to have fallen for the NRA-driven narrative that knife attacks are more common in Europe as if that balances out the enormous rate of gun crimes (including this one) in the US. Statistically, both the US and Europe have approximately the same rate of knife attacks - with some countries in Eastern Europe being a bit higher.

But let’s reason that through a bit more, just to be scientists. If an officer is willing to fire a gun at the literal drop of a hat, and that was somehow a deterrent to knife crimes, then we might hypothesize that the fact that in European countries officers use de-escalation first and engagement with pepper spray or tasers second would in fact see far higher rates of knife crimes. They don’t.

So logically speaking, I don’t think either the statistics nor the models support your hypothesis.

I think I remember reading he was basically released awaiting trial. I had honestly given up on seeing any justice in this case, so this is a positive development.

As the other user pointed out, cigarettes kill far more Americans than cars or guns. I’m with you on the gun thing. But the car safety stats are always increasing because we do in fact put a huge amount of effort into them - from seat belt laws to firewalls to airbags to automatic braking… there’s too many to name. Now there’s the recent move of making them bigger, harder to stop, and with reduced visibility, so we might see those gains flatten out in the next half decade or so.

We’re also going to start to see a decline in cigarette related deaths as fewer and fewer are smoking them these days. There’s an intersection of public health messaging, government policies on age of access, taxes, and other efforts that are really starting to pay off. I think the e-cigarettes are also helping, but that’s a whole discussion of its own.

So cigarette related deaths are still pretty high, but it will start to fall off. I can’t remember the exact prediction but let’s just call it falling by half in the next decade. Cigarettes are deadly, but they take a long time to kill.

Smokers born in the 40s and 50s are the ones dying from things like cancer and heart disease today, and the replacement rate (new smokers versus loss from people quitting or dying) isn’t working in tobacco’s favor.

Here are some stats.

Oh for Christ’s sake. What other countries does this happen in? Is the US so profoundly filled with dangerous gardening tools that they present a clear and present danger in the hands of a child facing armed and armored officers? I believe they have garden tools in places like England and New Zealand and such.

Maybe if we didn’t arm every cop like they’re supposed to take Baghdad and train them that their first job is coming home alive, huh?

Ironically you’d get paid less money for working in Tx or FL. Most companies I know scale worker pay to cost of living in different areas. A job in Silicon Valley might pay 30% more than the same job in Austin. I think a lot of people anticipated a brain drain from these red states as they pass more and more restrictive legislation.

Especially when you’re talking places like tech companies and academia, you’re going to find overall that the employees skew left. They’re going to be among the first to go. Similarly, people in medicine who might be directly impacted by these idiotic laws will have both the motivation and the incentive to move.

There’s a couple of factors at play. First, there’s a lot of logistics and inertia involved. Even if they don’t have family in the area, there’s a ton of planning. Some of it you can sort of just through money at, but other things like kids and school take a bit more planning. Second, this is a tough time in the market for tech and for housing. People are going to be more financially conservative as a result. Also, at least some of the most egregious laws have been modified or stated by the courts.

So it’s not going to look like Dunkirk or the fall of Saigon, but I bet we will be able to tell in about five years that there was a demographic effect.

I fully agree with you on your response. My attempt at being brief (as a perusal of my post history will show I have a really hard time with), I sacrificed accuracy for brevity.

And just in case you’re hitting your weekend and bored, I am also able to have a full scale discussion on the semiotics of pick up trucks and the surrounding culture in general.

I can give you my impression and that of the people I spoke to about it. I’m coming from the perspective of a theoretical biologist who was heavily involved with computational models of complex systems - particularly ones with biological foundations. I worked with simulations ranging from molecular cell biology up to ecosystems.

I don’t want this to sound dismissive, but CA are cartoonishly simple versions of complex systems. Once you get past illustrating the idea that simple rules can give rise to complex behaviors, that they’re Turing complete, and that there are neat and interesting phenomena that can arise, I think you’re pretty much done. They’re not going to show you anything about the evolutionary dynamics that drive carcinogenesis. They’re not going to let you explore the chemistry that might have given rise to the origin of life. They’re not going to let you model how opinions and behaviors cascade on social networks.

Topics like emergence are core to complexity theory, but CA can only illustrate that it exists, and it does so in such an abstract way that it doesn’t really translate into an understanding of how emergence is grounded in real world systems.

Wolfram’s problem, in my opinion, is that he was largely disconnected from the complex adaptive systems community, and for some reason didn’t realize we had largely moved on. I don’t know anyone in the CAS community that thought his work was groundbreaking.

I do have to say that Robert Sapolsky seems to have found his work interesting, and I am very deeply interested in Sapolsky’s work. But he’s a neurobiologist, not a complexity scientist, and he doesn’t draw a concrete connection between Wolfram’s work and his own, other than the generic connection that complex systems can arise from simple rules. That’s something we’ve known since Conway and Lorenz.

My mind is open to counter arguments, but that was my impression and as far as I could tell, the same was true of my colleagues. I think that the general academic reception to his book bears this analysis out. It’s like if someone wrote a comprehensive book about all kinds of Prisoner’s Dilemma models long after we’ve moved on from PD to modeling more complex and accurate depictions of cooperative versus competing interactions. Students should absolutely study PD, and they should study CA. It’s just not something you want to hang your academic hat on at this point.

Mathematica, on the other hand, is pretty neat.

My favorite example so far was when a person asked a car dealer chatbot intended to talk to customers about their cars to write a python script, and it complied.