I dunno - at first it was promising, but today I was actually thinking of leaving Lemmy and trying to find a larger site.
I'm not sure if the entire Internet has somehow become addicted to groupthink or if this is just a symptom of Lemmy's smaller size and a selection bias, but it's been getting worse and worse over the past nine months and it's definitely turning me off to the community here.
What I loved about Reddit was that on any given story you saw a number of well informed opinions debating the nuances of those opinions. You'd learn so much more by engaging with the comments than just reading the article itself.
But here it seems more and more to be turning into a confirmation bias machine, where discourse and nuance takes a back seat to conformity to locally populist narratives. I can't tell you the number of times I've been downvoted for linking to multiple recent research papers (from places like Harvard and MIT) because the implication of those papers was contrary to popularly held beliefs here.
While I've had a few good interactions, it's become less and less of a signal to noise ratio on those interactions.
It's possible this is a larger trend, but I haven't noticed it to nearly the same degree on other less generalized forums I spend my time, so I suspect it's just a Lemmy thing.
A shame, as I think the tech is outstanding. But as is often the case, good tech is only part of a product, and in the case of social media it's the community too, and I've been growing increasingly disappointed in Lemmy's community who likes to pat themselves on the back for a welcoming spirit with the apparent unmentioned footnote in small print that it's a welcoming spirit that only extends to people regurgitating their own opinions back to them.
Y'all are a bunch of bloodthirsty headline-readers.
Sources don't believe Ohebshalom was targeted because the assailant threatened a number of other people in custody as well.
This isn't a story about a slumlord being targeted for his past harms, it's just a story about how shitty prison safety standards are.
Not exactly the kind of thing I'd personally be celebrating. "Breaking people's face bones" shouldn't be a part of the US justice system, and the fact it was a part of that process - irrespective of the victim crimes - is a disgrace. Probably even worse is the number of stories of things like this that don't get published because the victim isn't click-generating.
What do you think the install base for neural implants is going to be such that Madison Ave is going to bend over backwards to rework multiple ad platforms to support it.
Aspects of tech are often correctly predicted in SciFi going all the way back to Lucian writing about a ship of men flying up to the moon in the 2nd century.
But surrounding what they often get right the authors always get things wrong too. For example, contrary to Lucian's ideas, in reality the ship of men that flew up to the moon didn't find a race of human like aliens that were only men who could carry children and had a bunch of gay sex with the men of Apollo-11.
TL;DR: Correctly predicting a technology in a story doesn't mean correctly predicting the social impact and context for that technology.
It's not the advertisers doing that, it's the publishers.
The advertiser has no real say in how a publisher decides to pimp their audience other than lining up with cash on hand like an eternally and unhealthily addicted John.
In fact, on the advertiser side it's mostly a prisoner's dilemma driving their addiction, pushed to spend money on poorly converting and too wide channels out of fear that if they don't and their competitors do that they'll lose market share.
Advertisers suck for a variety of other reasons, but let's not turn a blind eye to the publisher greed either.
Advertisers would absolutely love to augment your reality with ads or even just the ability to accurately confirm you've actually watched a traditional ad along with how you "felt" about it.
Your reality is already augmented with ads most places you look, and advertisers already do have significant ability to accurately identify how a sample feels about the ads.
Most don't bother because they don't actually care, and because it's easier and cheaper to just run an ad mix self-optimizing around sales results or conversions than to try and over-engineer the advertising impact.
Anyone betting on neural implants to make money because of 'advertising' is going to lose a lot of money themselves.
Yes, though it's also worth noting that there seems to be a reverse effect of 2016 where Trump was underrepresented in polls from actual votes to now where he seems overrepresented compared to actual results.
I suspect for the same reason in opposite application.
In 2016 it was embarrassing to be pro-Trump, and so a lot may have said "undecided." Now, particularly in conservative areas or households, it could be outright dangerous not to claim you are for him on a phone poll.
How many households have a fanatical pro-Trumper but other members planning to secretly vote against him who would never say as such on the phone to a pollster?
I definitely think anyone rational should be fighting tooth and nail to prevent the catalyst to the fall of democracy, but the situation may not actually be as dire as it seems and people's apathy in the face of what seems an unavoidable tragedy is probably misplaced - this is very much avoidable and primary polls were off by double digits for Trump in many places.
It's not like climate change where we really are fucked. This one is likely still up in the air.
It's not worth arguing with the folk that push this narrative.
If they are as poorly informed to make the argument it's likely in large part because of an affinity for the concept greater than an affinity for knowledge of any details surrounding it.
So providing a counterpoint or more details just falls on willfully deaf ears.
To be fair though, the blame falls more on proselytizers deafening so many ears with their bullshit than on the people with such an acquired distaste for the canonical Jesus that they feel the need to throw out historical Jesus with the bathwater. I definitely get the sentiment, even if the historical Jesus became one of my hyperfocus interests over the past few years.
After that, it’s largely survivorship bias, with every hint of writing about him being preserved, transcribed, recreated, or invented from whole cloth, and anything from his contemporary itinerant preachers being ignored or suppressed.
Not quite. In fact, there's a rather significant survivorship bias around the versions of Jesus. Literally the very earliest primary documents involve someone known for persecuting Christians telling Christians in an area he has no authority to persecute that they should abandon other versions of Jesus they accepted or other gospels in favor of the version he claimed based on spiritual visions of someone he never met in life.
We have nothing but fragments recorded by its critics of the Gospel of the Egyptians, for example, and the Gospel of Thomas we only have because of a single person burying it in a jar around the time it became punishable by death to possess.
The version of Jesus with female disciples that was talking about Greek atomism and Epicurean proto-evolutionary thought is actually super interesting historically given the overall philosophy, but it's barely extant and only is because of archeological discoveries after the church lost effectively mega-monarchal status to just become a mega corporation instead.
And even in the modern era discoveries the church has any purview over like the Mar Saba letter abruptly go missing before it can be further validated by scholars.
The survivorship around "other versions" of Jesus look like they were conducted by Stalin with a two millennia reach. It involved literally burning down the successor to the library of Alexandria (and with it sources potentially related to a "Gospel of the Egyptians").
...I found them all drunk, and I did not find any of them thirsty. My soul ached for the children of humanity, because they are blind in their hearts and do not see, for they came into the world empty, and they also seek to depart from the world empty.
But meanwhile they are drunk. When they shake off their wine, then they will change their ways.
An apocryphal statement nearly 2,000 years old that seems to have underestimated people's taste for the opiate of the masses
Because you aren't following "the Spirit" (aka listen to your religious leaders dogmatically and tell yourself you are correct because you misinterpret your confirmation bias as spiritual guidance).
Given the figure that most closely matches the projected boogeyman in something like 2 Thess 2 was Paul himself, they've been deceived for nearly two millennia now.
At this point, gravitating to a narcissist grifter is just par for the course.
You should be much more worried about the propensity for in-brain devices to cause life threatening infections no matter whose hands it's in.