I think part of the problem is that social media is normalized and it is easy. It is way easier to engage socially (or at least you feel like you're engaging socially) with likes and lurking and stuff. It is way harder to put on pants and go out and it is normalized to do so (phrasing like bedrotting is super casual, whereas it is actually really hard to maintain an eating disorder because you have to be constantly hiding it from people).
Also I think there's more groups whose social norms online teach you to be repulsive offline and again there's not enough social pushback against it. We do need to be harder on casual edginess online because it is teaching habitual behaviors that make it hard to engage socially. Your 50 year old hiking buddy is not going to understand your soycuck joke you are trying to show him on your phone. Your average wine mom at women-only book club is not going to love if you insist on talking about banning trans people from the club because they're "men invading the women's spaces" especially when there's very likely 0 trans people to exclude in the first place on account of trans people being rare.
Lastly there is usually a ton of stuff happening but the instructions on how to engage with it is nebulous. People who know the algorithm find it easy, the people who don't know the algorithm find it super hard. And IDK how to solve that because there's so much going on in people's heads that they don't realize the people around them seriously aren't scrutinizing them that much. There's like a socialization death spiral where every small awkward interaction hurts way more when you don't have enough experience to know that the small awkward interactions are normal. So you can't tell someone "just go to book club" because they'll go, have 1 normal situation like mishearing someone and then decide they are so embarrassed they can never go to book club again-- but since it is so normal it happens at every social event and they end up lonely.
You actually bring up the biggest obstacle to my tentative idea for this Sunday, of holding up a sign that points to a time/place for a casual conversation with strangers. I thought this would be a good way to get very lonely passers-by out of their comfort zone and into a situation where they have a chance to make friends and bond, but the absolute diversity of interests is the main show stopper. My first thought was to essentially avoid sensitive topics on the poster, such as religion and politics, but it still leaves the huge diversity of potential common interests open. So I started doing some research on the most common hobbies that people have in cities and that can be talked about casually, in hopes of finding like 5 ot 6 to write on the sign to get people into the coffee shop.
I think people who seek out activities assume you actually have to be interested in the activity. No. You're there to socialize. The activity is just an excuse to have a positive experience with people. I play board games. Do I like board games? Meh. Do I like hanging out with people and talking about a board game, sure. The difference is important. This is why its a common joke to attend book club without having read the book. The book is literally just an excuse to gather.
Inquiry, since I know anti immigrant sentiment is on the rise in other countries. How are other countries increasing their enforcement of their immigration laws? Are there also chaotic situations where their immigration enforcers are shooting people in cars? Are there better ways for rising anti-immigrant sentiment to result in stricter enforcement with less violence?
India has been deporting immigrants to Bangladesh/Myanmar and this includes Indian Citizens, because there is no due process being followed and court orders are being regularly ignored.
> authorities forced another 40 Rohingya refugees into the sea near Myanmar, giving them life jackets and making them swim to shore
> the police raided his home, seized his mobile phone, and tore up his identity documents, which were proof of his (Indian) citizenship. They then flew him in a BSF plane (…) Sheikh said he was forced to cross into Bangladesh with eight others.
I remember threads about this on HN back when the CAA Bill first dropped - you saw much of the same concern trolling back then, as if nobody could see what the real intent behind it was.
Now that you're mentioning, I'm surprised that, even though in some corners anti-immigrant parties rose to governing, they are only doing legislation and stricter enforcing immigration and border protection rules - not appreciated by everybody of course but somehow understandable where they're coming from. Might be somebody else knows more, or has seen more, but my one data point is: no nothing like that was ever hinted from what I can tell. And I'm appalled.
I’m in the UK. There is strong anti-ILLEGAL-immigrant sentiment, because hundreds of thousands of undocumented men originating in Africa and the Middle East have illegally crossed the English Channel from France and then made asylum claims, meaning the UK taxpayer is forced (by treaty) to house them and feed them. These are quite evidently opportunists. A large proportion are young fighting-age men, and most are fleeing countries where there is no current conflict.
As a taxpayer in a cost of living crisis I resent seeing hotels full of these chancers.
And I don’t think women and girls are safe with them around, given the staggering sexual crime statistics
I'm from Russia. There's no such special department there, nor police shoots at anyone in a car. They do chase, then after some minutes, if nothing works, shoot at tires. There's no rule, nor drilling to shoot then think, nor to take a gun ASAP. There's no qualified immunity for police either. (Right-wing Russians, even die-hard Putin's supporters, in fact admire this side of the American police -- like "you don't stare at a policeman in America", they say.) The whole issue of detainees being shot -- that's not a problem there at all.
There is one department that's similar to ICE, the riot police called Rosgvardia (Russian Guard), which is anti-mass-protest force. When it was created, they hired all the normal police drop-outs, the worst. But they only carry batons.
The real issue with human rights in Russia is in courts and law application, and inside prisons, out of public eye.
Can confirm. Police will generally be quite gentle (even when they use weapons, they have to shoot a warning shot). Rosgvardia very likely will beat you up. Russian SWAT will for sure beat you up or shoot you.
Beating up and actual torturing may commence after you were apprehended.
But being shot during the ordinary police stoppage is not a wide-spread problem.
I want to agree with you, however, how do we guarantee that the people of Texas have recourse via their government? Didn't the Texas state government have national headlines recently to enact anti-democratic gerrymandering?
Correct, there is no recourse, they've used their 30 years of hard-core ideological Republican uni-party control to remove any possibility of opposition. Besides gerrymandering they're constantly attacking Houston's ability to self govern, kicking democrat voters off the rolls, making it harder for city residents to vote.
Discord is more analogous to IRC than voice chat. There's a constant set of channels/chats where people are chatting and then also voice/video channels.
IMO prior authorization needing to be done on the phone is a feature, not a bug. It intentionally wastes a doctor's time so they are less incentivized to advocate for their patients and this frustration saves the insurance companies money.
Heard. I do wonder why hospitals haven't automated their side though. Regardless, the recent prior auth situation is a trainwreck. If I were dictator, insurance companies would be non-profit and required to have a higher loss ratio.
2 quibbles: 1) a more ethical system would still need triage-style rationing given a finite budget, 2) medical providers are also culpable given the eye-watering prices for even trivial services.
I would love to know how much rationing is actually necessary. I have literally 0 evidence to support this but my intuition says that this is like food stamps in that there is way less frivolous use than an overly negative media ecosystem would lead people to believe.
I'm kind of confused how you got to your current statement so I would like to ask you: how would you define misogyny? what is the behavior of a misogynist?
additionally, how would you define the term "rape culture"? Are you aware of the term at all?
I think it is right to be skeptical that this is another media buzz. However I also think that there is a fundamental different magnitude going on. Being mentally ill requires careful handling that should be left up to professionals with licenses on the line and liabilities if they are found to be mispracticing.
> Being mentally ill requires careful handling that should be left up to professionals with licenses on the line and liabilities if they are found to be mispracticing.
Part of the trouble is that "undiagnosed but mentally ill" is not a binary checkbox that most people tick in their day-to-day lives, nor is it easily discernable (even for people themselves, much less people engineers who build apps or platforms). We're all mixed together in the same general populace.
I agree that this is part of the trouble. I don't think any of this is a binary checkbox. But I also think there's likely enough evidence or public pressure that the company is being found by the public to be responsible if their service encourages a mentally ill person to commit murder/suicide. I guess similar to maybe how non-flammable furniture is now regulated even though setting fires is not the materials' fault?
I don't know how related this is or not, but one thing that I've noticed is that a lot of the "How to awaken your LLM!" and "Secret prompt to turn on the personhood of your ChatGPT!" types of guides use role-playing games as a foundation.
One prompts the LLM: "Imagine a fantasy scenario where XYZ is true, play along with me!"
I think this is another part of the reason why these discussions remind me of the D&D panic, because so many of the dangers being pointed to are cases where the line is being blurred between fantasy and reality.
If you are a DM in an RPG, and a player is exhibiting troubling psychological behavior (such as sociopathy, a focus on death and/or killing, etc), at what point do you decide that you think it's a problem, or else just chalk it up as regular player "murder hobo" behavior?
It's very much not cut-and-dry.
> I guess similar to maybe how non-flammable furniture is now regulated even though setting fires is not the materials' fault?
Tort is not something I'm very familiar with, but adding "safeties" to tools can easily make them less powerful or capable.
Your analogy of flammable furniture is a good one. The analogy of safeties on power tools is another one that comes to mind.
What are reasonable safeguards to place on powerful tools? And even with safeguards in place, people have still sued (and won) lawsuits against table-saw manufacturers -- even in cases where the users intentionally mis-used the saw or disabled safety features.
In this case, what can be done when someone takes a tool built and targeted for X purpose, and it's (mis)used and it leads to injury? Assuming the tool was built with reasonable safeties in place, even a 99.9999% safety rating will result in thousands of accidents. Chasing those last few decimal points in a pursuit of true 100% (with zero accidents) is a tyranny and futility all its own.
> Men are, on average, just more willing to put in the hours of social neglect in order to become good at such things as programming, or also gaming, or whatever other fringe unsocial hobby.
It is much easier to put in the hours of gaming when you're not repeatedly called for your rape or have someone trying to stalk you or similar aggressive behaviors towards people perceived as female in these spaces. I pretended to be a woman in gaming spaces for some time just to see if these women had a point and the level of harassment I experienced is way more than even my most unmoderated cod xbox days. It's a simple voice modulator in chat.
Point taken. I do think that it can be challenging to be a rare female amongst males (it would probably be similar the other way around). But the biggest contributing factor for such behaviours is certainly the anonymity of online gaming.
What is the good faith way to link to "(It doesn't help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks.)"? The link exists in the post but you object to that link as a bad faith way to link. So what is a good faith way to link to this tweet?
The subredditdrama post in question does in fact contain a link to the full tweet, which you objected to as bad faith. So I'm asking what is a good faith way to link to this tweet.
I don't think "Drama" implies which side of said drama is in the right. That drama surrounds a bunch of Blow's public statements is maybe the one thing everyone can agree on
That community has no oversight for what gets posted. It's a free-for-all for anyone to gather (read: cherrypick) low quality information and present it in an overtly sensationalist way and intentionally misrepresent what they quote.
They have no standards, no oversight, no formal methodology, so naturally it attracts gossip-oriented people who want to stir up drama for fun.
Why link you to the handful of individual links directly when you clearly can identify and sort through the source yourself? The poisoning the well clearly wouldn't work on you. Well, here the links are:
"This is true, the gaming press is super left-wing, but on the other hand they have almost no impact now. I would say that the social pressure keeping "indies" in line mostly comes from them being socially fearful in the normal way. (It doesn't help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks.)"
https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1854708962462982465
"Interest is not the same as ability. I believe it is likely that the sexes have different interests on average, and that biological factors play a large part in this. This is *NOT REMOTELY* a controversial opinion except on Weird Far Left Twitter 2017."
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DRT4vNEUIAEJgP3.jpg
"There's a weird disconnect in this vaccine mandate debate: many are still pretending that Covid-19 is of natural origin, which gives such mandates a different feel than they otherwise have."
https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1447601578123296769
Alright, I don't agree with half of what he said here, but really? Is that supposed to make him look like some irredeemably bad person?
Are we seriously going to pretend that men and women—on average—do not differ in their general interests, and furthermore get mad at people for pointing that out?
And I'm not fond of the current administration, but it's a bit extreme to write someone off as a person for liking who is president. You would be writing off literally half of the entire country, and no, that's not something to feel virtuous about, that's just nonsense.
Frankly I think I would rather have a conversation with someone like him instead of someone who would get disproportionately upset at those points.
Also I think there's more groups whose social norms online teach you to be repulsive offline and again there's not enough social pushback against it. We do need to be harder on casual edginess online because it is teaching habitual behaviors that make it hard to engage socially. Your 50 year old hiking buddy is not going to understand your soycuck joke you are trying to show him on your phone. Your average wine mom at women-only book club is not going to love if you insist on talking about banning trans people from the club because they're "men invading the women's spaces" especially when there's very likely 0 trans people to exclude in the first place on account of trans people being rare.
Lastly there is usually a ton of stuff happening but the instructions on how to engage with it is nebulous. People who know the algorithm find it easy, the people who don't know the algorithm find it super hard. And IDK how to solve that because there's so much going on in people's heads that they don't realize the people around them seriously aren't scrutinizing them that much. There's like a socialization death spiral where every small awkward interaction hurts way more when you don't have enough experience to know that the small awkward interactions are normal. So you can't tell someone "just go to book club" because they'll go, have 1 normal situation like mishearing someone and then decide they are so embarrassed they can never go to book club again-- but since it is so normal it happens at every social event and they end up lonely.
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