SatanicNotMessianic @ SatanicNotMessianic @lemmy.ml

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4

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930

Joined

2 yr. ago

Truth is an absolute defense in cases like these. They admitted to the facts of the case. The testing methodology is absolutely standard. There is no way Musk can prevail.

I just wonder if this will also fall under anti-SLAPP laws, since Musk is clearly doing it to shut down public disclosure and discussion.

The whole YOLO thing never made any sense to me. If you believe in reincarnation or an afterlife, then you have every excuse to risk your life doing whatever you want. There’s usually some kinds of moralistic restrictions, but except in the most extreme religious fundamentalist societies, I suspect wingsuiting on weekends is fair game. If you’re going to live forever no matter what you do, why not?

On the other hand, if you only live once - if you’re one and done - that seems like a demotivation to risk your life before you’re actually done with it.

Holy hell.

There’s an old borscht belt joke about insurance - “What if something terrible happens, and you don’t die?”

I think this bot literally just chooses random sentences from the article.

I remember this being said all the time in 2015. Both sides (legitimately used in this case) will always blame polling errors when the polls don’t say what they want. Among republicans, they say that conservative voters are more distrustful of authority and so don’t answer the phone or respond to polls, or that people are too embarrassed to admit to their support for Trump but will vote for him anyway.

Evolutionary biologist here.

This is actually a tricky one. Lying (and I’m going to fold the projection of false confidence in with that one because I’m talking about deception, intentional or otherwise, not a moral concept) is only effective if others believe you.

Humans, as the most highly social of the primates and ranking among the most highly social animals on earth, have adapted to believe each other, because this helps with trust, coordination, shared identity, learning, and so on. However, it also creates a vulnerability to manipulation by dishonest actors. Again, I’m not talking about a moral dimension here. There are species in which mating is initiated with the gift of a nuptial present (eg a dead bug) from the male to the female. Sometimes the male will give a fake present (already desiccated insect, eg) to trick the female, and sometimes it works. Deception and detection are an arms race, and it’s believed by many to be one of the drivers that lead to the development of human intelligence, where our information processing capacity developed alongside our increasing social complexity.

The problem is that when lying becomes the default, then the beneficial effects of communication cease. It’s like when you stop playing games with a kid that just cheats every time, or stop buying from a store that just rips people off. It’s a strategy that only works if few enough people play it. There’s tons of caveats and additional variables, but that’s the baseline. So why do we still see so much of it?

The first component of course is confirmation bias. If 90% of our interactions are trustworthy, the ones that stick out will be the deceptions, and the biggest deceptions will get the most notice. The second is that the deceptions as a whole have not been impactful enough, over time, to overcome the advantages of trust, either in biological time or in social evolutionary time. You will notice that more trust is given to in-group rather than out-group members, and a number of researchers think that has to do with larger social adaptations, such as collective punishment of deceivers - sending someone to jail for writing bad checks, say, is easier if they’re part of your community as opposed to a tourist from another country. We can also see cultural differences in levels of trust accorded in-group and out-group persons, but that’s getting into a lot of detail.

The third major operator is the concept of the self. This is a subject where we are just being able to start making scientific headway - understanding where the concept of a self comes from in terms of neurobiology and evolutionary dynamics - but this is still very much a new science layered on top of ancient philosophy. In the concept of the self there is a component of what I’m going to calll the physical integrity of the structure. People find being wrong painful - there are social situations that activate the same parts of the physical brain as physical pain and distress do. This is especially true of those ideas are seen as being held by other group members, because you now have the group structural integrity on top of the one in idea-space. That’s where you get people willing to literally die on the hill of Trump winning in 2020. For the evolutionary construction and nature of the self I’d recommend Sapolsky and Metzinger - it’s too new and too complex to get into here. If you want to just summarize it in your mind, call this component ego defense.

I think that’s most of what’s going on, at least as we understand it so far.

I have no idea why this bot isn’t banned. It’s fricking terrible. Almost every “summmary” would have been better off if they just pasted in the first two paragraphs.

I really think he’s just that stupid. Everything he’s done at Twitter and at every other company he’s run has been due to the same fundamental error - thinking that he’s smarter than anyone else in the room, including people who are experts in fields he’s never even heard of. He has every indication of clinical narcissism, exactly like Donald Trump. He’s wrong, and when it becomes obvious that he’s wrong, he becomes infuriated and doubles down - exactly like Donald Trump.

I think that Twitter is going to become the canonical example of Hanlon’s Razor. Elon at Twitter is going to be our version of Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra, except it’s going to mean someone not just shitting but having explosive diarrhea in the bed, and then showing it off like it’s something to be proud of. And still having a legion of followers who can’t help but say what a visionary position it is to shit in your own bed.

The oldest crpg I ever played was called advent, because the Vax computers could only use 6 characters for file names and so the people who ported it couldn’t use the actual name “adventure.” It was basically the same as the game infocom shipped as Zork.

Apparently the original implementation was on the PDP-10 in 1976. There might have been a couple other games that predated it by a year or two, but adventure was the big one in my opinion because it led (eventually) to the creation of the infocom text based game engine and a whole line of games ranging from hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy to leather goddesses of Phobos.

It is a joke referencing an episode for the television series the IT Crowd in which a pair of characters have an increasingly amusing exchange of similarly misheard stock phrases.

Thank you for this - this was a fantastic explanation.

OBL had written and communicated frequently his opposition to what he saw as the US occupation of what he considers holy land, and it was very much a known driving factor in his actions. We knew about it since the Clinton administration.

I think it’s good and necessary to get rid of “they hate us for our freedom” as particularly stupid western propaganda. Of course they do. They see the West as a decadent cesspool that disobeys god. So does the Islamic Revolution government in Iran, so does North Korea, so does China, and so on. That’s not why you 9/11, any more than you invade Vietnam to end oppression and bring peace. And they’re definitely pissed about Israel too, but my point is that everyone up to and including (iirc) the Red Army Faction issued statements about Palestine. Palestine is a cause celebre. There’s a saying “When all was said and done, more was said than done.” That’s what we’ve been seeing since the Yom Kippur war. OBL could have gone after Israel. There could have been Al Qaeda fighters on their borders. Hell, they could have been funneling weapons in and training Palestinian fighters. It’s lip service and de rigueur.

The problem comes in when people view international relations like a Marvel movie with good guys and bad guys. Note that I am absolutely not saying everyone is the same. As a member of Team Rainbow, I’d rather live in the US than Saudi Arabia, and I’d rather live in California than Texas. The hero story - Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill - has deep roots in American exceptionalism and the beacon of democracy stuff. While not exactly false, it’s also not exactly true, and the idea was weaponized deliberately by people like Leo Strauss at Chicago to create a mythical America that people would think about using exactly the ideas you’re talking about. That’s where “they hate us for our freedoms” comes from. They don’t. They hate us because they’d rather be the ones in charge.

From a moral perspective, I consider something like 9/11 and the bombing of Hiroshima at the same level, just to be clear. That’s not a popular opinion with a lot of people.

But at the end of the day, you have to decide whether Hitler had a point, Pol Pot had a point, Idi Amin had a point, or whether, despite them having a point of view, we’d rather see an international order one way or the other.

I’ve stopped working on that kind of thing because I do believe it’s morally ambiguous at best. I do think people should be fully aware of the motivating factors of all of the actors involved - whether AQ, PLO, IRA, UK, USA, and so on. Just don’t take any of it at face value and instead think about actual, not idealized, outcomes.

The truth is an absolute defense in matters like these. Musk’s thermonuclear lawsuit is going to go off like a damp squid.

It means they lied, either directly or by omission, but seriously and materially enough for the board to make this move.

Or at least that’s the claim.

What if we move in the opposite direction and go with doctrix?

And I mean for everybody. Like a gender-bending neutral.

Ed is the standard text editor.

Isn’t that Bad Horse, the Thoroughbred of Sin?

This is a case of everyone having one of “those uncles.”

That said, I’m much more offended at John Yoo, author of the torture memos saying George Bush has the right to do anything because he’s the president, being hired as a law professor at Berkeley.

I was in downtown NYC when 9/11 happened, and I saw the second plane hit. I then went and did some military and intelligence stuff for about a decade and a half. All of that is to say I’ve been involved with 9/11 and what happened after since Day 1.

My question is this - we all knew this was OBL’s point of view. I mean, after the towers fell I was standing in a crowd outside of Penn Station on 9/11 waiting for it to reopen, and everyone was talking about how it was probably OBL. He has been on that narrative for a decade or more, had executed other attacks, and was a known major actor.

It was very widely known that what had really set him off was the alliance between the Saudi government and the US, and in particular the US military presence in SA, which he saw as a holy land now occupied by infidels.

Everyone involved in “terrorist” operations always gives lip service to the Palestinians. I’m using scare quotes there because I think we throw around the word too much and it has lost all meaning except “people fighting using unconventional means.”

All of that aside, I’m honestly curious if this is the first time what I’m assuming are younger people are finding out that people like OBL and Arafat had a point of view and were not cardboard cutout bad guys. Nobody really believed they hate us for our freedom. I mean, there is a conflict in worldviews between conservative Islam and liberal western culture, but there’s also a conflict between conservative Islam and everything that isn’t conservative Islam, and there’s a conflict between conservative Christianity and liberal western culture that also results in acts of terrorism.

There are multiple geopolitical and moral dimensions to US involvement in regions around the world including the Middle East. They’re all worthy of debate and discussion.

I just am confused that a) this is new material for anyone and b) that people are treating it like they discovered Mein Kampf or the Protocols for the first time and are taking them at face value.

Given the world’s “second greatest army” is unable to defeat a smaller nation directly on their border after having an unlimited amount of time to train, prepare, and move forces into position, it’s pretty much a defeat on their side.