Actual Discussion

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

No, it's not a joke. I'm frustrated and I'm probably not choosing my words carefully.

This community has had steadily falling engagement - our last 3 weekly threads have had a grand total of 1 (excellent and well-articulated) response, and the number of topics not generated by myself (or the other mod) since the inception of the community has also been 1.

Very few people want to actually talk. From what I've seen, the masses want the same things that they wanted on Reddit:

1. Memes
2. Articles they don't read (but will bitch about endlessly) that reinforce their opinion
3. Angry responses to someone (who may be trolling) that reinforce the current politics of the reader (that they couldn't have given a fuck about a few years ago until it became heavily politicized)
4. Shitty easy jokes
5. Personal politics circlejerking

I hate that I can see a hundredth point-free meme post and view 200 replies on it. I hate that it's just the same talking points being strawmanned over and over again in every thread. I hate that any point outside common groupthink is downvoted to oblivion and buried instead of discussed.

The reason I'd like to back away from Lemmy seems to be the same reason I started this community: we need more people who can articulate points, and less downvoting, but it doesn't seem to be getting better.

Maybe one day, but today is not that day. Lemmy needs to mature in more ways than one.

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This weekly thread will focus on current political divisiveness occurring nearly worldwide. I'd post links, but I feel that everyone knows what I'm speaking about.

This issue has been especially prevalent in American politics as of late, but it is felt nearly everywhere.

Some Starters:

• What do you feel has caused it? Add proofs if possible.
• Once caused, what has added to it and why?
• What can be done to ameliorate the issue, if anything? On a personal scale or a national one.
• Can it be remedied or is civil war the only option?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This week’s Weekly discussion thread we will focus on Activism, both positive and negative.

Here is the definition we will be using, so please make sure your argument matches.

Some starters:

• What would you classify as effective forms of activism?
• What are ineffective forms of activism?
• How does a group know when their mission is achieved? What if the mission is ambiguous or changes over time?
• Do you feel they stop too early or too late?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This week’s Weekly discussion thread will be trying something new. We'll be focusing on the age old question "If you could change one thing positively in the world what would you change?"

Difficulty Level: (Pick your difficulty, let us know what you picked, and stick to it)

0. Go wild.
1. You can't harm others.
2. The change has to be somewhat realistic or believable.
3. If I could convince 1,000,000 people right now, it would work.
4. If I could convince 100,000 people right now, it would work.
5. Souls Mode: If I could just get motivated, I could do this myself.

(Also, let me know if these "fun" weeks are welcome here, or just stupid)

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This week’s Weekly discussion thread will be focused on Linux. I know that Lemmy is VERY biased towards Linux and FOSS, but I'm curious what non-technical people feel about it and what your thoughts are.

Some starters:

• Have you used Linux? If so, what was your experience like?
• Would you run it as your primary system? Why or why not?
• What would it take to get you to do so?
• Do you feel it's a solid option?
• Are there any changes that you'd think would benefit consumers and aid with adoption?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This week’s Weekly discussion thread will be focused on Capitalism / Economic Systems. Here is the definition we will be using so everyone can use the same terminology. If your argument does not use that definition, we ask that you reframe so that it does so that everyone can work within the same framework.

Here are some questions that should help kickstart things:

• Is capitalism effective? Is it good, or as evil as some Lemmy instances will have you believe?
• Are there better alternatives, and why are they better?
• How could we realistically move toward those alternatives?
• Is there anything you do not understand or would like to discuss about Capitalism / Economic Systems?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion). You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

I dislike this article. It's a little old now, but there are several things blisteringly wrong with this idea at its heart.

Purely for example, if you read a book on dragonflies and take offence because you see racial similarities between whatever race a person is and dragonflies, that's an issue with you, not the source. You are relying on your opinion on what the source says. Since opinion varies per person, you should not dictate policy based on opinion. It's an insurmountable hill to cater to whatever opinions are since opinion will always change - it's an unsound basis for any form of logic.

Let's do a thought experiment:

If a trailer-dwelling white person in the USA reads about the Vistani, and takes offence because they also live in a trailer, sees that as a negative, and assumes the Vistani are a potshot at him, is he right to be offended and call for a ban?

If a nimble Canadian POC (which is also a terrible term as it literally applies to everyone on the planet) reads about Elves and assumes they're talking about him because he also happens to know how to use a bow and is skinny with a lithe frame, is he correct in calling for a ban? What if he sees being nimble as a negative for some reason (because positive / negative characteristics are opinions and what people see as negative is not objective)? What if he sees it as being racist by saying the source is calling ALL Elves nimble and therefore good at sports? "But they stereotypically have a different skin colour!" I hear you saying. So do Orcs. That argument applies here and if you can't square that circle, then the logic falls apart utterly.

Personal identification with aspects of characters in a source material are not cause for alteration. You are an individual; you are not a group. Grouping people into camps based on visible traits or histories is a disgusting habit.

Treat people as individuals and racism dies. Treat people as groups and call out the differences constantly and you'll have people fencing themselves in while calling themselves inclusive.

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion). You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This week's Weekly discussion thread will be focused on Gender. Here is the definition we will be using so everyone can use the same terminology.

Here are some questions that should help kickstart things:

• Why do you feel it started entering public consciousness in regards to humans about 15 years ago?

• Was it needed?

• Did it do what it was intended to do?

• Are things better or worse now in that specific area?

• Is there anything you do not understand or would like to discuss about the idea of gender?

A bit of a lighter topic today: What is fun?

This seems like a simple question that would be tempting to hand-wave away as a "Well you know..." but the more I think about it the less cut and dry it seems.

Some prompts to get you thinking

• What are the merits and purposes of fun?

• What makes something fun? Though different people find different things fun, is there a common thread that makes those things fun?

• Is it easier for some kinds of people to have fun than others? What kinds of situations lend themselves to fun experiences, which make them difficult?

• Are there ways for people who have forgotten how to have fun to "get back in touch with fun?"

• Do you think you have enough fun? Too much?

• How much fun is the right, or a good amount?

When it comes to decision-making, perception and so on, what are your beliefs about the role and merits of feelings/emotions vs reasoning?

Some common positions:

• Emotions tend to get in the way of reasoning - we should primarily rely on our logic and rationality to guide us. When feeling strongly about anything we should block it out and try to think purely in a rational way.

• Reasoning can distract us when the right answer is to empathize or trust our gut feelings; it's easy to be misled by a convincing argument but gut feelings can see through that.

• Emotions and logic each play a role in observation and judgment. If both didn't have a use, why would we have evolved to have them?

A lot of people probably don't go all the way one way or the other. Even if you don't have a particularly strong reason for why you feel one way or the other, feel free to express what you believe.

First and foremost, let me say that I appreciate you actually engaging in a real discussion on Lemmy!

WHY?

This Community was made in response to the rest of Lemmy and the way many otherwise interesting discussion threads fall apart into downvoting, groupthink, and burying of posts composed by people asking for clarification or looking to understand the reasoning behind things.

We don’t like people making baseless accusations; we defend people on all sides when people are wrong about their opposition. We don't appreciate it when people think they know what others think and project incorrect (and often evil) bullshit on each other. We dislike people being wilfully wrong because their group fetishizes a certain angle of the truth instead of the boring reality of the situation.

It is important to maintain solid reasoning and conclusions, not just one or the other.

Ideas and discussion are important. We don’t feel we can get out of the current slump we’re in with political discourse unless we are able to clearly articulate ourselves and discuss the world we're all living in.

DO:

• Be civil. This does not mean you shouldn’t challenge people, just don’t be a dick about it. Disagreeing with reasons is fine, mocking or insulting someone is not.
• Upvote interesting points and things that are well-articulated, even if you may not agree.
• Upvote when you see others correct themselves or change their mind.
• Be prepared to back up any claims you make with an unbiased source.
• Be willing to be wrong. Admit when you are incorrect or spoke poorly. If you are the OP of a thread, feel free to edit the main post, and add an edit to the end to show your opinion has changed.
• Be a “Devil’s Advocate” if there's no opposition and you can see some arguments for the other side you'd like to see addressed. You do not have to believe either side of an issue in order to generate solid points on a view.
• Discuss hot-button issues.
• Use bracket tags to show the kind of post you're making (see below), and try to use the disclaimer if it's your style to help those coming in from outside the Community who may not understand it.
• Add humour, and be creative! Dry writing isn’t super fun to read or discuss.
• Post any rule, formatting, or changes here that you would like to see.

DO NOT:

• Call people names or label people. We fight ideas, not people here.
• Ask for sources, and then not respond to the person providing them. This means you're not here to better yourself or the discussion, and it's rude to waste someone's time by challenging them and then just walking away.
• Mindlessly downvote people you disagree with. We only downvote people that do not add to the discussion.
• Be a bot, spam, or engage in self-promotion unless explicitly allowed by the mods.
• Duplicate posts from within the last month unless new information is surfaced on the topic.
• Strawman.
• Expect that personal experience or your personal morals are a substitute for proof.
• Exaggerate. Not everything is a genocide, and not everyone slightly to the right of you is a Nazi.
• Copy an entire article in your post body. It’s just messy. Link to it and maybe summarize if needed.

SUBMISSION RULES:

All main posts should append a tag to the front to describe the topic type:

• (WEEKLY) Will be reserved for Mods as it will be used for the pinned featured weekly topic thread.
• (CMV) Change My View can read like a rant or some scattered thoughts on a topic that the creator is looking to challenge themselves on. You must start with some initial reasons along with some thoughts on how those reasons led you to feel the way you do. If you can articulate things that would or wouldn't change your mind, please add those as well. If your mind is changed, we ask that you place a link to the post that did so at the end of the main post as an edit.
• (OPEN-ENDED) for a general prompt to show that you're looking to see what people think. A good place to seek answers to questions that you haven't thought of yet.
• (ARTICLE) for a link to an article to be discussed. Please link the main source, not a news link already talking about the source and give a few initial thoughts.
• (STEELMAN) is discussion on hard mode and is the opposite of a strawman argument. This is someone making as close to an iron-clad argument as they can for a side or an opinion and challenging you to poke holes in it where you can. These should come with sources already.
• (OTHER) is, for now, what we call everything else. I think we covered most of it above, but just in case, there's OTHER.

We would encourage you to also have our Disclaimer bolded at the front to help show how we're different to those coming in from browsing New or All posts which should hopefully help curtailing the drive-by downvoting that was so common in our early days:

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

And finally, none of these are so set in stone that we can't change them. If you want to see adjustments or changes, let us know here or in Private Message!

So now that we've been around for a week or so and have tried to populate things with some controversial topics, how would you like to see this Community grow and change?

Should I add post guidelines? Maybe adjust the pinned thead?

Should I change the rules at all?

Our disclaimer is currently:

Remember: Up / Downvoting in this community is not an agree / disagree button. We upvote good or constructive conversation and downvote off-topic posts or badly-voiced opinions. If you disagree, you respond like a human in good faith and prove out your position.

Should the disclaimer be changed? It's primarily for people wandering in from viewing All threads (instead of just their subscribed ones), or for people on phones who never read the sidebar. It is there to show, in point form, how we operate to people who don't come to us purposefully.

Are there any topic you'd really like to see covered?

Are there any other Communities we should do a link swap with that have a similar ethos with?

Are there types of threads you want to see less or more of? More descriptors?

I'm open to any and all good ideas!

I was originally going to post this as a response to a different thread and realized it would make a better post by itself.

One of my favourte expressions:

When America sneezes, Canada gets a cold.

When I was growing up and American and Canadian media were still relatively separate, it was widespread Canadian opinion that America was a political shitshow at the best of times and we were grateful that we weren't like it. I would even go as far as to say there was widespread cultural anti-Americanism.

Fast-forward to 2024 where most people are getting news/entertainment from almost exclusively American-dominated sources like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on, and increasingly our political culture has become blended in with theirs, and frankly, we have begun to inherit what I feel to be their distasteful way of doing politics.

An example: The sheer amount of hyperventilation I saw among my left-leaning Canadian friends over the Trump election victory in 2016 was unbelievable. I'm rarely shocked by things, but some of my friends were genuinely insisting that a second Holocaust was unironically about to unfold. I mean they were fully committed to the idea that minorities were actually going to be rounded up and put into death camps. Totally bonkers stuff. (Nevermind any of the economic or political context that lead to pre-WW2 Germany).

What's more, this election had felt extremely personal to Canadians in a way American politics had rarely if ever been before. And there was a certain point where I stopped and said "Huh, this is weird. How did we get here?"

I felt for perhaps the first time that politically my fellow Canadians had completely lost their minds in ways that felt previously reserved for the Americans. And increasingly I see Canadians wrapped up in American political slogans and battles that largely don't apply to the Canadian context.

Ex: People seem to think Canada's got some similar lines to Democrats vs Republicans but in the past mock elections I've seen the Democrats would win in Canada with something crazy like 80% of the vote. Trying to impose those dichotomies onto the Canadian political context (Conservatives vs Liberals) just doesn't make sense, but people still do it because it's what they're being shown.

I would say the government itself has been largely ineffective in ensuring that the Canadian voice doesn't get completely drowned out by the American perspective. (Canadian content laws have largely not worked with the internet, and it's been difficult to make tech giants like Facebook comply, as we've already seen).

So, am I the only person who's seen this and feels this way? Americans, if you're here, what's it like from your angle? Interested to hear people's thoughts.

Remember: Up / Downvoting in this community is not an agree / disagree button. We upvote good or constructive conversation and downvote off-topic posts or badly-voiced opinions. If you disagree, you respond like a human in good faith and prove out your position.

The amount of "left-right" entrenchment seems to be at an all-time high and increasing.

No matter what side of the political spectrum you fall on, what would it take to get you to vote for a new party?

Would implementing a better electoral system that would eliminate the two-party see-saw and allowing for more granularity in candidates help (See Single Transferable Vote or STAR depending on the type of election)?

Do you have other solutions to this issue?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

I have found that many people "doing their own research" are only searching for confirmation to their beliefs, and also seem to have a misunderstanding about what "research" actually entails.

If you're a rational thinker and you believe you have a source that makes a good point, you'll simply link that source directly, and maybe even explain how it supports the thing you believe. However, if you're a conspiracy theorist who only has bad sources that can be easily disproven, you'll become wary about linking to those sources directly or trying to explain what they mean to you, lest someone in the discussion completely blow your argument apart and laugh at you.

That's why the imperative appeal to "do your own research" has developed - whether intentional or not, it's a tailor-made strategy to protect bad sources (and bad thinking) from criticism. By telling people to do their own research rather than being up front about your sources and arguments, you try to push people into learning about the topic you want them to internalize while there are no dissenting voices present. It's a tactic that separates discussion zones from "research" zones, so that "research" can't be interrupted by reality.

People who actually have good points with good sources don't need to do this. It's only the people who are clinging onto bad, debunkable sources (or simple feelings) that need to vaguely tell people to "do their own research". The actual scientific method is "help me disprove this theory. Only when we all fail can we consider this theory good enough for now, but we will continue looking for other theories that explain things better, and then try and disprove those too".

No researcher tells another researcher on a level playing field to do their own research. They say, "What have you found? Let's discuss it." This is the way progress is made. There's a reason we're calling all this the culture wars and not the new renaissance.

Hell, even culture war is generous branding. It's people living in reality against a loose coalition of people who just generally don't like them because they've been trained to by the moneyed interests who have spent the last 30 years building a propaganda machine to weaponize them for political and financial gain.

The truly strange part is that the research you do as a civilian does not matter. If you somehow got a degree and ran an absolutely bulletproof years-long study in CURRENT THING, the people telling you to "do your own research" would be exactly the people who would not believe you because it would go against their preconceptions. They don't care about research, they care about belief.

Looking things up online that conform to your viewpoint is not research, it is a means to entrench yourself.

Let's Do An Experiment!

Right. So by your downvotes, I see that you don't understand why the scientific method necessitates disregarding personal experience. Let's show you an extremely simplified but basic example:

Let's say that a person believes that cats simply do not exist.

Oh, they've seen cats before, but they think they're just really small people covered in carpet and refuse to believe any evidence to the contrary.

Everyone else knows that cats exist; we know there is something wrong with this person.

Regardless, the person decides to do an "experiment" to prove it. They walk into their living room, glue carpet to their spouse, and then claim victory. They then document it stating that in their personal experience, they proved the one cat they found in the area was just a person with carpet glued to them. They gather support online, and publish it in a for-pay journal. The article is never peer-reviewed because the person refused to tell of their methodology, but people repost the "study".

If science operated in a fashion that the "do your own research" people felt, then we should all believe this person.

Just because a single person has never seen a cat, or chooses not to acknowledge cats, doesn't mean that factually cats do not exist. Even organizing a poor experiment and claiming they have done "research" does not make them correct. The burden of proof is still present, and a poor experiment is often blown apart in the scientific community or unrepeatable. This is why peer-review without an agenda is incredibly important.

If everything someone "saw with their own eyes" were true, then ghosts, aliens, demons, every God that has ever been worshipped (even though they preclude each other), mythical creatures, and countless other things are all true. All of them. That, or there is a flaw in the logic you are using.

Also, to most of the people here who will no doubt not read this as it may challenge your world view - plugging your ears and screaming as loud as you can to drown out the world does not make truth vanish.

Being insulting, blocking, or downvoting doesn't mean that you're correct.

I like to believe that people can be reached and the only outcome isn't just shit-throwing matches and all-out war. However, if you're not willing to debate in good faith, then there is no debate.

You have lost at the outset by not being willing to be incorrect.

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

I've said that many current political movement and party leaders aren't liars, what do I mean?

Well, they don't lie, per se.

They bullshit. Which, frankly, is worse.

A successful liar must construct a lie carefully, and must first know the truth. Because the lie must be different from the truth, meant to conceal it. To lie successfully is to distinguish reality from fiction and attempt to convince the other person that one is the other, but always knowing yourself which is actually correct. The facts matter to the liar.

But these people do not do that. They bullshit. In order to further their goals, any actions and any words are permissible, because they see themselves as inherently good (and that goes for narrative and reality). In order to gain an advantage in the immediate "now", anything can be said. To them, it doesn't matter if it's truth or lie, as long as it serves their purpose right now. They craft a situation, a story, narrative, a reality, in which they convince The Other (and even their own) that they are right and good. You see, they must always be right because they are good. The narrative itself need not be consistent or even coherent.

Think of the hundreds of bizarre conspiracy theories in which they are the secret heroes opposing evil. Pizzagate, Satanists, autism vaccines, Qanon, baby-eating liberals, flat Earthers, you name it. Those aren't lies in the traditional sense of the word. Those are a constant, desperate struggle to be the Good side at all times in spite of evidence to the contrary, and without concerns about what is real and what isn't. Unlike with lying, the facts, truth, and objective reality don't matter here. They can be substituted and changed on a whim - the infamous "alternative facts." That is what bullshitting is.

Debating real-life issues with them becomes futile because their reality is completely fluid and can change in an instant. One day an "engineered bio-weapon Chinese death virus funded by the Clinton Foundation" is going to kill us all, and the next day it's just a harmless flu. Not because if anything they learned, but because of how it makes them feel, and as I've said again and again since age 14, feelings are the enemy of logic.

But if it suits their immediate needs, then something like COVID is a Chinese-Clinton-Gates bioweapon again. And if they don't feel like wearing a mask in the store, it's just a flu again. Or it could be a hoax and Fauci made it up. Doesn't matter as long as the bullshit helps them in the immediate situation. Maybe they believe it, maybe they don't. They can even apply a form of doublethink to believe two or more contradicting realities simultaneously.

Disregard objective reality, absorb only the reality you choose to take in. One moment Democrats / Liberals / "The Elite" (but only the ones they don't like) run a global vampiric cabal that rules the world from the shadows in humanity's single greatest feat of secrecy, and the next moment they're bumbling idiots who can't tie their shoelaces, unfit to govern anything.

Climate scientists are making billions by convincing people that climate change is real, and at the same time are a bunch of poor hippie losers stuck in a dead end university job. And those stats that you can measure yourself? Uhhh... SHUT UP! WHY'S THERE STILL SNOW THEN, SMART GUY?! Biden is a weak coward bending over for anything Putin says, and simultaneously a warmonger who's destroying good relationships with Russia and starting WWIII.

Jan. 6 protesters in jail are good, innocent people who are victims of a witch hunt, because Jan. 6 were just peaceful tourists. And they were also violent BLM actors performing a false flag operation. The fact that those rioters filmed and so outed themselves is not in their advantage to say because it goes against the narrative, and so it doesn't enter that reality.

A liar wouldn't get away with such internal inconsistencies in their crafted alternate reality. They would immediately be found out, and they would be a terrible liar because a lie needs that internal consistency to be believable. But with bullshitting, the concept of truth never even played a part in it from the very beginning. Bullshitters don't care if you believe them or not. Their reality is whatever they want it to be at any given time. They are no longer part of "consensus reality", that which everyone can show, see, and test to be objectively true. And being detached from consensus reality is an extremely dangerous position to be in for further radicalization. They become unable to distinguish fact from fiction anymore, and can eventually turn their imaginary beliefs into real actions. Like shooting up the Pizzagate place. Bombing abortion clinics. Breaking into Pelosi's home and assaulting her husband with a hammer. Trying to kidnap a governor.

Those people you saw in the news had already left consensus reality long ago, and they were without a doubt True Believers in whatever new reality they found themselves in.

Whether they created that new reality themselves or whether it was pre-made and spoon-fed to them is another matter.

Open question: What do you think a normal person's moral responsibilities are and why?

Some angles you can (but don't have to) consider:

To themselves, family, friends and strangers?

Do you have thoughts about what it takes to make a good person or at what point someone is a bad person? (Is there a category of people who are neither?)

What do you think the default state of people is? (Generally good, evil or neutral by nature?)

Conversely do you believe morality is a construction and reject it entirely? (Even practically speaking when something bad happens to you?)

Remember: Up / Downvoting in this community is not an agree / disagree button. We upvote good or constructive conversation and downvote off-topic posts or badly-voiced opinions. If you disagree, you respond like a human in good faith and prove out your position.

I'm going to keep this apolitical and not talk about any side in specific, but how does a government tell the truth when people don't want to hear it? I want some actual discussion from this ESPECIALLY from those who think the Government correcting anyone on anything is censorship because the logic doesn't seem to be cohesive.

Let's say somebody fucked up badly and now you (yes you) are a leader of whatever federal government side you'd like and your side happens to be in power.

Someone posts a blog article on a social media site that says "(YOUR NAME HERE) Is Going To Kill Us All And Does Horrible Things To Animal Butts". It's filled with all kinds of scathing insults and made up crap that you didn't do. It focuses on the fact that you went on a vacation last year for a week. But the blog post says that it wasn't a vacation, it was a trip to plan how to kill everyone and put things into animal butts. So many things. Gross things. You've not done anything they're talking about, but people DO know that you had a vacation.

It continues to get shared enough that opinion-based media sites start covering it. Not saying it's true, simply covering the initial post and saying that someone else says it's true. That way they can't be sued, y'see. Someone posts a badly photoshopped picture of you with one hand holding a stack of paperwork with the title "Secret Government Plan #127 - How to Murder Everyone I don't Like and Continue Molesting Animals." It's badly edited, but dumb people continue to share it because they don't like you and some people are calling it real.

You release an official statement stating your innocence, but the people who are on the opposite political side from you are saying you're lying. They want to have you stand trial. You've done nothing, but some are already saying you're using your power to NOT have to stand trial otherwise the police would have stopped you. Some are saying the police are in on it! So... how do you solve this?

How, as a government in power, do you combat disinformation spread by people who genuinely don't know or care what the truth is?

And I mean something long term, true, and without pissing off half the population because you're "telling them how to think" (even if "how they think" is just made up bullshit designed to piss them off and emotionally manipulate them).

How, as a government in power, do you combat disinformation spread by people who genuinely don’t know or care what the truth is?

In short, how, as a government in power, do you combat disinformation spread by people who genuinely don’t know or care what the truth is without outright censorship?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

PREFACE:

These dumb chat "A.I." programs are... not A.I. and even people selling it even recognize that.

THE CRUX:

We don't have real A.I. - we have generative models trained on massive amounts of data which in effect attempts to compress it down into a trained model which it can run to try and regenerate answers based on the data it was trained from. It is a lossy compression, as the model itself is too small to contain the whole of the information it ingests. As such it makes things up along the way in order to fill in the blanks. You can see this in how chat models like ChatGPT will confidently give you incorrect information. Researchers call this "hallucinating".

The model doesn't actually have any core understanding of the material it ingests - it can't, since it isn't actually an artificial intelligence. It can infer what things should look like, and it can do so well enough now to start fooling humans into thinking it knows what it's doing. We're in the 'uncanny valley' of generative language and code models. So that's one problem. It makes things up without understanding it, and can't reliably reproduce correct answers, only things that kinda look correct.

It's absolutely infuriating to people who actually understand the technology that we've taken to calling it "AI" at all. It's a stupid techbro marketing stunt and unfortunately for all of us it has stuck, and as a result we now all have to call it A.I., and only those of us with the right tech background to know better will understand just how misleading that label is.

The output is still garbage, but it's dangerously believable garbage.

Remember all those shitty chat bots that circulated around for a while? This is just that, but way more complex and easier to mistake for real intelligence. Imagine now, if you will, an internet full of such chat bots all set up by techbros and lazy hacks trying to cash in on the sudden easy ability to generate 'content' that can get past regular spam filters at a rate so fast that no human team can keep up with checking it all, and they're pulling this stuff down from the internet en masse to train their buggy models, then submitting it back to places that are indexed online where the next set of buggy models can ingest it, like an infinite Ouroboros of shit, so next thing you know you can't trust a damn thing you read anywhere, because it's all garbage generated from other people's garbage, and companies like IBM and Microsoft are even getting in on it.

And because the models learn based on statistical trends and averages over a large set of data? Guess what? This huge flood of new "A.I." generated data is now the norm, and as such it takes precedence over human generated data that by natural limitations cannot keep up with the speed at which the A.I. generated data is flooding the internet.

That's basically what's happening now. Because the average person making decisions about how to leverage this new, lucrative technology for profit doesn't understand (or care to understand) how it works or why it's a bad idea. All they see is the short term dollar signs from getting leg up on the competition by churning huge quantities of shit out faster and cheaper than any human can, in a market where increasingly only quantity matters, not quality.

It's already replacing journalists and authors as newspapers and publishing houses are getting backed up with a flood of "AI" generated submissions from people trying to cash in on it. A huge amount of recent content on the internet is entirely made up, imagined by these models, and very difficult to tell apart from actual researched information by real knowledgeable experts. Throwing this into the mix with the already problematic ecosystem of disinformation from entities like Cambridge Analytica, and even writing children's books to help human children learn to read? The future is very bleak indeed.

THINGS I HAVEN'T SPOKEN ABOUT (or only alluded to):

• The massive power usage
• Putting it into software that absolutely does not need it
• "Necromancing" dead people for clicks
• Making search nigh-unusable
• Further reducing the value of actual writers
• Mass layoffs because the idiots in charge think the tech can replace people (Spoiler - no, it can't)
• You know those shitty auto-generated "Radiant AI" quests in Skyrim that everyone hated? You know how whenever there's a randomly generated room in a game how you can tell just by looking at it that it wasn't designed with any semblance of thought? Like that but they want to use it for everything in games now.

Some Sources:

A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine

How Bad Are Search Results?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

Ignoring all political factors, I believe that overpopulation is real. Whilst it is true that the planet has enough physical space for billions more people than exist right now, it does not have the natural resources to support billions more.

Focusing on a singular issue that faces global civilization that highlights what I mean - food.

Current food production is heavily reliant on fossil fuel derived fertilizers. It's commonly accepted that oil production will peak and eventually decline if it has not done so already. Some argue that it has, some say it is imminent. Nonetheless, eventually oil production will become exponentially more expensive as demand increases and supply shrinks and thus anything that relies on oil derived fuels or products will also become more costly. Global farming is reliant on oil derived fuels such as diesel and petroleum for the tilling, planting, fertilizing, spraying of insecticides and harvesting of crops. Not to mention transportation, processing, packaging and preparation. Natural gas, the most important input for the production of fertilizers is required during the Haber-Bosch process. Natural gas is also a finite fossil fuel subject to the same limitations as oil.

If we then look at the macro landscape we also learn that top soil, the soil that crops are grown in is being eroded by constant farming processes, poor land management and natural processes. It is estimated that at the current rate of erosion there could be no top soil left globally within 60 years. If I remember correctly, topsoil is being eroded approximately ten times faster than it can be replaced.

Now there are arguments to be made that we could reduce wastage, reduce demand and manage land better. Doing these things could buy extra time for a static or shrinking population.

Anyway, the point is that the global population rising means that there is more demand for food. Our ability to produce more food to satisfy the extra demand of a growing population is being reduced due to the factors I've mentioned above and these are only a subset of a far greater set of issues we face.

The idea that we can continue to grow the population further and that the planet can support this indefinitely is not reasonable. There are limits to growth in finite systems.

Population growth means that there are more people that both want and need a slice of the pie. The problem is there's only a limited amount of pie available. We can slice that pie into ever smaller pieces and we can even redistribute the pie that exists more equitably. This will help keep people fed in the short term but not in the long term.

The problem is that the pie is going to shrink and the baker isn't going to be able to get enough ingredients to make more. Eventually the pie will be gone.

In our analogy eventually there will be no pie to go around and everyone goes home hungry.

This means that we end up with a predicament without a solution that I am aware of.

It is far more likely that globally populations will continue to rise until we overshoot our constrained resources. Once that happens human population levels will drop, whether there is intervention or not.

What do you feel about overpopulation?

I've been here since the great Reddit Exodus and have seen some good and some bad.

What have you liked and disliked about being on Lemmy so far?

Do you see your usage going up or down?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

PREFACE

Let me start by saying that I am not a centrist. I am not arguing that you should be a centrist or independent. I am arguing against mischaracterization of others.

Much of what I see here in Lemmy against centrism or Independents is made up of bad strawman arguments largely consisting of: “There are three types of people: reasonable people who agree with me, crazy fascists, and lily-livered wimps who can’t pick a side (and are also fascists)!”

The other (also poorly thought out and blatantly strawmanned) argument I see over and over here when discussing this topic consists of:

Left Wing: "Let's not kill trans people."

Right Wing: "Let's kill all trans people."

Centrists: "Let's kill some trans people."

THE CRUX

If someone says that they are “centrist” they are not telling you that they base all of their opinions on being dead-centre in the middle of any two positions. That would be an astoundingly stupid position to undertake.

They are telling you that they agree with neither major party on everything, and find that both parties have views that they don’t agree with. It’s pretty easy to come to that conclusion because the US two-party system packs in an almost incoherent mishmash of beliefs into exactly two sides (or 2.5 sides if you're from Canada).

There is absolutely no contradiction in being for police reform, and against riots lasting for days. There is no contradiction in being for gun rights, while also wanting massive limits on them. There is no contradiction in wanting functional government services including universal healthcare, and thinking that free markets can be made effective. There is no contradiction in wanting a more balanced budget, and government services to be funded properly.

The idea that there are only two sides in politics is a strange delusion created by the two-party system.

Now, I have been trying on Lemmy for months. I have frequently encountered wilful misunderstandings about centrists / independents. I have frequently seen discussions state that they feel these groups are all secretly right wing and just won't admit it, which is wild to me.

AND ONE MORE THING

In my estimation, the reason Lemmy members often run into situations like this is because they don’t witness the centrist also vehemently argue with right-wing policies frequently.

The posters only see the arguments with them and therefore have a skewed view of centrists / independents and their politics. In short, if you are left wing, and argue for left-wing policies in every case, that means you will also be argued with by somebody who believes political nuance and not just waving a party flag.

Remember, the right wing also shits on centrists because they think they are secretly left-wing since they argue with their stupider points as well. So no, these people are not secretly right-wing and just don’t have the balls to say it. That is a horrendous take no matter where you fall on the political spectrum and only serves to limit conversation.

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

I felt we should start in earnest with something I've seen repeatedly in other threads on Lemmy - veganism. I've tried to have discussions on it elsewhere, but they tend to heavily downvote me when I describe the complex communication systems plants and fungi have.

I am not arguing that you should not be a vegan or vegitarian. I am arguing against poor and misapplied arguments and would like converts to channel their energy into more productive approaches.

PREFACE

There are many sources and studies claiming how plants communicate via root systems, pheromones, and other mechanisms (some we’re discovering continually). As someone who worked in forestry (and lived on a non-corporate farm that produced mostly alfalfa), it’s somewhat more apparent once you’re there and present in that world.

Some brief citations:

https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/botany/plants-feel-pain.htm

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/24473/20191218/a-group-of-scientists-suggest-that-plants-feel-pain.htm

You can find many more if you look, however you can also find refutations based on what "pain" really means.

Regardless, we’ve known for quite a while that most plants have pain responses, and fungi are absolutely notorious for this. Speak to a botanist (or read the articles above) and they’ll tell you that plants respond to warnings from their peers about dangers, brace for pain, and signal pain to others. To be clear they don’t seem to feel pain (but keep in mind that they said this for years about crustaceans as well, but it was simply because we didn’t know how they functioned well enough) - not understanding the pain or "othering" the pain because it isn't one you'd care to recognize does not mean there is no pain.

There are several things that I feel are inarguable: Life for some organisms means death for others. Period. You can not avoid it on a micro or macro scale, all you can do is change WHAT you kill and attempt to eliminate suffering. Not all death causes suffering, and not all suffering causes death.

Plants are cool as hell though I suppose that understanding the above means that it can fuck with the worldview of vegetarians, and nobody likes that.

THE CRUX

Now, if what I’m interpreting from vegans on other threads (and real life) is correct, their argument stems from a moralistic one. Moralistic arguments are not solid stances to argue from; similar to a hardcore Christian seeing abortions as vile and evil because of a personal moral stance, they feel their moral position is better, therefore they look down on opposition. However that is a personal opinion and those aren’t convincing - certainly not for sensitive topics.

So let’s approach the debate from a semi-scientific standpoint because I want to make sure they are not being misinterpreted.

Some reasons I have seen to be on the vegan side of things (and some responses to those) are:

• If you want to be vegan because you enjoy it? Go for it. That is inarguable. It’s no more or less valid than someone liking the colour red.

• If you want to be vegan because you feel it’s healthier? Rock on. Go you! You are probably correct if you monitor your diet. I would argue against it being healthier than a vegetarian diet however.

• If you want to be vegan because it’s easier on the environment? Well, for individuals I would agree! You can make a good case that it would be better for the planet, but only because we’re overpopulated in respect to how we've been doing things and haven't adjusted as a species to account for the extra population. At the moment (statistically), being vegan is unsustainable if the entire planet were to switch tomorrow. A smarter case to make would be for a reduction in humans as being vegan is an extremely minor step of harm reduction compared to fewer people. Also, most food fed to livestock is not human-consumable and is often byproducts that would otherwise go to waste. Creating more food from waste is more efficient than discarding it.

• Factually and inarguably, humans are omnivores and are we are predisposed to eat meat. Nearly every other non-insect animal species eats meat to some extent either intentionally or not. Cows eat bugs in the grass they consume, deer will eat chicks when they can, many species will eat eggs if they find them, and the list continues. Heck, most of the food coming from other species who can’t eat mean is non-vegan in that it is a product from another animal (either as waste or otherwise). Being functionally able to be vegan is an extraordinarily privileged and unusual position to be in as far as humans go as there is a greater cost with some places on Earth completely unable to do so even if they wished to. Among animals in general I feel this is even moreso, and I consider humans just another animal. If anything, I see the vegan position as removing humans from the animal kingdom and positioning us above them. I find this supposition to be arrogant.

• If you want to be vegan because you don’t like factory farms? Sure, I hate them too, however quitting animal products altogether is not a logical jump to make from that feeling. There are plenty of smaller suppliers you can procure from that do not have those issues; the more logical jump is to just not use bad providers no matter what the product. For example, I have raised bees and worked in a co-operative apiary. There was no abuse, and the likely alternative to us creating the hives was death for the entire bee community. I would heartily disagree that being vegan and refusing this particular honey is more of a positive act than essentially creating hives and colonies from scratch.

• If you want to be vegan because it’s eliminating suffering (or death)? Again, kind of. This is simply making substitutions for death that you’re comfortable with, be it non-sentient (or sentient in a way you don't recognize) life or otherwise. You can make an argument that it’s somehow lesser because an animal death is more comparable to human death, but it’s bad logic and therefore a bad argument. This is also applying your own morals (because again, this is a strictly moral standpoint) to other people, which is silly no matter who is doing it. From activists to religious extremists, your morals apply to you and only you and you must prove out that the choice you view as moral is the intelligent choice, and not a strictly emotional one. Do not try to enforce them on the outside world. You can argue for them, but getting mad at anyone with a differing view is silly and unproductive. As I said, you can lessen suffering or death, but you can not eliminate it. Your existence causes death. All existence does. Everything alive is only alive because it feeds off other living things who have their own way of existing, be it sentient (which is a differentiation humans created) or otherwise. A suffering or death being a style you choose to not recognize is not only not a valid defence, it makes you just as guilty as those you attack. Some anti-vegan opposition also feel that their being is higher than those they ingest and they also do not recognize the deaths of those they consider lesser, they simply drew their line elsewhere on the scale of life.

Let's do a thought experiment!

If you could have a choice to either painlessly shoot a deer though the head, or (elsewhere and in accordance with nature) a lion would tear the animal apart over the course of an hour while slowly eating it alive, which is the more moral choice?

Would not eating the meat be wasteful?

Is the lion immoral?

Are you better or more moral than the lion?

AND ONE MORE THING

The way vegans are going about it in these threads on Lemmy isn’t helpful to their cause. Mindless emotion-driven downvoting and anger-posting does not change hearts or minds. Yelling at people making stupid "bacon = good" jokes doesn't convert people, it only entrenches them.

A better outreach would be to use the Food subs and post legit great vegetarian food and entice people that way. I feel that doing it the way they are now will accomplish nothing of value. Well, unless they secretly work for a factory farm and want to piss people off so they eat more meat, in which case those psuedo-vegans are doing exactly what they should be in these threads which is mindlessly downvoting instead of engaging.

First and foremost, let me say that I appreciate you actually engaging in a real discussion on Lemmy!

Why did I make this community? Well, mostly in response to the rest of Lemmy and the way many otherwise interesting discussion threads fall apart into downvoting and groupthink.

I don’t like people making baseless accusations and defend people on all sides when people are wrong about their opposition. I hate it when people think they know what others think and project incorrect (and often evil) bullshit on each other. It’s important to maintain solid reasoning and conclusions, not just one or the other.

I hate people being wilfully wrong because their group fetishizes a certain angle of the truth instead of the boring reality of the situation.

Ideas are important and I don’t feel we can get out of the current shitty slump we’re in with political discourse unless we are able to clearly articulate ourselves and discuss the world we're in.

So let's talk like people. What do you want to talk about?