lennivelkant @ lennivelkant @discuss.tchncs.de

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1 yr. ago

X Corp. is majorly owned by Elon Musk

it will ruin the character of the neighbourhood

"Boy, I sure love the sound and smell of cars! Imagine if people walked quietly instead, that would be awful - who would I yell at for speeding?"

after someone [...] ran over a residents dog along the street.

Why does it seem like safety measures only ever get approved after someone died?

(Visibility bias, probably - a death is just a lot more noticeable than a "would have died in an alternative timeline but didn't because..." - but that doesn't make such deaths any less tragic)

I was contesting the general logic of this sentiment:

Which "experts" do you need for what's common knowledge?

I took this to mean "If common knowledge suggests an obvious understanding, an expert's assessment is can add no value, as they would either agree or be wrong." Put differently: "If it seems obviously true to me, it must be true in general."

TL;DR: If you think you know more than experts on a given topic, you're most likely wrong.

On a fundamental level, this claim in general holds no water. Experts in a given field are usually aware of the "common knowledge". They also usually have special knowledge, which is what makes them experts. If they claim things that contradict "common knowledge", it's more likely that their special knowledge includes additional considerations a layperson wouldn't be aware of.
Appeal to Authority as a fallacy applies if the person in question isn't actually an authority on the subject just because they're prominent or versed in some other context, but it doesn't work as universal refutation of "experts say".

 

For this specific case, I'm inclined to assume there is some nuance I might not know about. Obvious to me seems that large, central power plants are both easier targets and more vulnerable to total disruption if a part of their machinery is damaged. On the other hand, a distributed grid of solar panels may be more resilient, as the rest can continue to function even if some are destroyed, in addition to being harder to spot, making efforts to disrupt power supply far more expensive in terms of resources.

However, I'm not qualified to assess the expertise of the people in question, let alone make an accurate assessment myself. Maybe you're right, they're grifters telling bullshit. But I'd be wary of assuming so just because it seems true.

Yeah but wind power plants are ugly here instead of even uglier somewhere else that's NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard).

If experts disagree with your "common knowledge", it's probably actually a "common misconception" which, given the sheer complexity of information in our world, is a fairly common phenomenon. There's no shame in being wrong about things you're no expert in, just in doubling down on your error.

(Of course, if you're an expert too and have evidence to the contrary, it becomes effectively impossible for laypeople to assess without knowing the history current state of discussion in the field.)

This is one of the nasty cases of "multiple parties fucked up to let this happen, and all of them are to blame". The fascists themselves obviously bear the most blame, followed by their enablers, including various media outlets that went terribly softball on one side while picking apart the other at every opportunity. The Dems' continuous lurch to the right and resulting voter disillusionment also counts among those, the lack of education, the Reps' skill at pinning all the issues they cause on the Dems...

The list is long. It also includes the voters who, faced with the question "genocide with or without fascism?" threw up their hands in frustration and said "Do whatever you want, go install the fascist for all I care" as well as the relentless "bOtH SiDeS" bullshit.

The Dems fucked up, badly and consistently. They deserve to lose their political standing, to be usurped by an actually progressive left wing party. But achieving that through a fash victory is like weeding your garden with incendiary bombs: Sure, it might burn away the visible part of the weeds, but it'll probably kill the crop too and still leave an invisible part ready to become a nuisance in the future.

Yeah, let's maybe exhaust all the options that don't involve open conflict between nuclear powers before we start playing will-they-won't-they with escalation to mutually assured destruction

Until it does, we shouldn't exacerbate the climate and resource issues we already have by blindly buying into the hype and building more and larger corporate-scale power gluttons to produce even more heat than we're already dealing with.

"AI" has potential, ideas like machine assistance with writing letters and improving security by augmenting human alertness are all nice. Unfortunately, it also has destructive potential for things like surveillance, even deadlier weapons or accelerating the wealth extraction of those with the capital to invest in building aforementioned power gluttons.

Additionally, it risks misuse and overreliance, which is particularly dangerous in the current stage where it can't entirely replace humans (yet), the issues of which may not immediately become apparent until they do damage.

If and until the abilities of AI reach the point where they can compensate tech illiteracy and we no longer need to worry about the exorbitant heat production, it shouldn't be deployed at scale at all, and even then its use needs to be scrutinised, regulated and that regulation is appropriately enforced (which basically requires significant social and political change, so good luck).

George "Let's ignore half of history, take a superficial misrepresentation of the other half, sprinkle some sexual violence and betrayal over it all, then let everyone claim it's historically accurate" R.R. "The Dothraki were actually fashioned as an amalgam of racist stereotypes I didn't bother doing even the least bit of research on, but will pretend were an actual historical inspiration" Martin?

Not throwing shade on GoT as a work of fiction, mind, as long as people are aware that it's solidly in the realm of fiction. Its popularity alone attests to its literary quality. A piece of fiction doesn't need to be true to reality to be good (that's the point of fiction, isn't it?).

But the best people - all the best people - and these really are good people, you know? They're good, the best, just wonderful people, and they say - I didn't ask, they told me!

That is a very sweet compliment, thank you very much!

I always aspire to be better than my teachers, who were as competent in their subjects as they were boring and hard to listen to. I may not have the same depth of knowledge, but I try to make it more approachable at least.

Isn't that why we're all here? I assume the average layperson wouldn't concern themselves enough with the different definitions of "venomous" to make a meme about it or respond with an apt explanation and commentary for how that could be communicated.

ICC:
"We acknowledge that Hamas' attacks against civilians are crimes too."

Netanyahu and Hamas in unison:
"What do you mean, 'crimes too'?"

Meanwhile, the slaughter goes on because nobody wants to risk open conflict with the US and they have a raging hard-on for genocidal imperialism.

Not all of them, of course, but enough are either complicit or at least complacent that it remains a tenable political position.

Your conclusion mentions a term not present in the premises.

(Though we may assume that "this post" is synonymous with "this comment")

Specialists in a specific subfield being pedantic about their subfield? Inconceivable!

Technically, both assertions are true - under the respective definitions of their field.
Formally, if the question is ambiguous as to which definition it's aimed at, either answer without clarification is incorrect because it assumes a premise that isn't specified.
Practically, which answer is right for the question's purpose is a coin toss between coincidentally useful and accidentally misleading.

So really, both of them should respond that way.

Note the difference between "(contextually) right", "(factually) true" and "(formally) correct":
I can make formally correct statements based on factually wrong premises like "All cats are blue. My dog is a cat. Thus, my dog is blue."
Conversely, I can make factually true statements that happen to be right despite being formally incorrect: "Some cats are black. My dog is not a cat. Thus, my dog is not black."

Both of these assume the common context of the culture and vocabulary I am accustomed to: While some cats are blue and some are black, my dog is not a cat, falsifying both the second premise and the conclusion of the first example. The second example is formally incorrect, because the negative association of the minor term (my dog) with the middle term (cats) doesn't imply any connection with the major term (black, meaning the category of black things).

However, a different context can alter the facts of the premises: Suppose I'm doing an exercise where I assign animals to groups, visually coded with colors, and cats belong in the blue group. Further, suppose I have only one pet, a cat I nicknamed "dog" (for example because it acts like a dog). That would alter the contextual premises: "blue" and "black" would refer to the respectively color-coded animal groups, while "My dog" would unambiguously refer to the cat of that nickname, since there is only one animal I own that fits that label. In that context, the first conclusion would be both formally and factually correct, while the second would be neither.

Take away the second premise of each example, however, and the implication becomes formally incorrect, no matter which definition I use for the first premise, because there is no established relationship between my dog and the category of colors it does or doesn't belong to. The respective conclusion might still be factually true, but that would be a coincidence of context rather than a formally deducable result.

That has nothing to do with the topic at hand, I just felt like rambling about formal logic and its relation to reality and communication.

Fair point

The (ideal) most reasonable approach for public information organs, in my opinion, would be to use all the channels that are available - Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, but also X for the share of people that can't be arsed to move (or don't want to, because the people and communities they care about haven't). I'd even count Facebook, Instagram, Reddit among those channels, as much as I resent those companies, as well as Lemmy and the other fediverse services (I'm not super informed here), a blog, RSS feeds, maybe an email subscription service too, just to be sure.

In fact, I think diversifying your presence would be a great thing in general - platform exclusivity is turning out to be a quite toxic and disadvantageous concept. Well, it has been for a while, but it's starting to become more visible.

The real restriction is of course the technical infrastructure and personell to maintain all these presences. You could use of a content distribution system that takes a picture, a long text and a short summary to generate appropriate posts for all these platforms, but you'd still need people monitoring and responding on the various platforms, ideally people sufficiently familiar with the respective culture to communicate effectively.

Couldn't you set an alert in your calendar tool of choice with the comment link in the notes or title?

If you put things in triple backticks ```, it's formatted as a code block

    
Like this

  

I believe you can specify a language for syntax highlighting at the start of the code block.

 SQL

    
SELECT * 
FROM passwords
WHERE storage_method = 'plaintext' 
-- TODO rename storage method to something less obvious so the IT-Sec guys get off my case

  

 html

    
<p class="bold">Stop storing password in plain text, dammit</div>
<!-- TODO clean up the tags so the linter stops complaining -->

  

 java

    
if (true) this.code.makeCringe(this.reader);
else 
    { 
throw new NullPointerException("Unreachable code"); }
// Why, yes, I do love creating terrible code

  

I don't know what or how it guesses the language otherwise.

    
if (highlighting == "Python"): 
  System.out.println("Wait, that's not a Python command");
  std::cout << "Also not Python"
  print("This one is")

CASE highlighting 
  WHEN 'SQL' THEN 'I dont know any dialect-specific ways to check which one this is'
  WHEN 'sql' THEN 'Apparently its case-sensitive' 
  ELSE 'No clue' 
END 

(concatenate 'string "I can't be arsed to try everything I know" "So this will have to do")

  

Nah, there was another contender, but they were a fuckin' nerd with big, scary words and headachy sentences and got bullied out of the race.

(The nerd is a general analogy to reasonable people, not any specific person or group)