Ideally the answers aren’t just political soapboxing.
That people in medieval Europe thought the earth was flat. Even had a history prof in college repeat this (granted she was an American history prof, so 🤷♂️. Makes the modern flat Earth movement even more perplexing.
My favorite bit of evidence for this is in Dante’s Purgatorio. He opens several cantos by mentioning where the sun is in the sky at different points on the globe at a given time, in Rome, India, and the island of Purgatory, which he puts antipodal to Jerusalem, so halfway between Chile and New Zealand.
The whole bit about Columbus proving it was round is bogus. He thought the earth was smaller than it actually was, which is why he said he could hit the East Indies before dying of starvation by sailing west. Lucky for him there was a whole other continent in the way. Could you imagine traversing the Atlantic, the entire breadth of North America, and the Pacific?
many people still ignore, or dont believe white privilege is still pervasive in western countries. aside from the racists, some people of those groups do not want to discuss it ever because they still benefited fom all that abuse, strip mining of resources centuries ago.
White people often forget (or don’t realize in the first place) that, if you’re a black person in USA, the police is actively looking for an excuse to put you in jail so they can make you do slave labor
Conservatism.
Just…all of it lol.
Being hesitant to change and wanting to temper out things and make sure things are implemented effectively is one thing. And ensuring we respect tradition and culture is another (though progressives are more in line with that lol.)
Today’s conservatism is just hate and bigotry. And they don’t even recognize it as such.
Yeah this drives me crazy. I grew up where the old white men loved boating and fishing in the rivers, bringing the family out to enjoy nature. Now that it’s all getting contaminated and turning gross, even the dumbest person who actually valued ‘conserving’ would realise we actually have to do something.
Instead, we’ve got billboards up and down the country trashing the Paris agreement and the old white men are only interested in attacking the other tribe. Not a hint of concern for the environment. They’re not interested in conserving anything other than their social status and corresponding power.
That science is rational and objective.
In reality, the way that science works is much muddier than most realise. It’s full of subjectivity, and this isn’t a bug, but a feature. Intuition and tacit knowledge play a big role in basically any research (and this is why I am confident that AI can’t replace scientists). Politics are also present at every stage of the process. Science is at its least objective when scientists convince themselves that they’re being objective. We can’t escape our biases, so we need to actively acknowledge them and embrace the subjectivity of our situated perspectives.
The problem is that talking about this is a great way to piss off other scientists. I’ve been accused before of “betraying the side”, by a scientist who was aware that science has a disproportionately large epistemic platform (epistemic means pertaining to knowledge — basically just that as a result of the huge benefits of scientific advancements in the last century or so, science has been on a bit of a pedestal in terms of trusted expert knowledge in society. Criticising this is seen by a betrayal by some because of the concerning rise in psuedoscience and anti-scientific rhetoric.
However, I’m of the belief that some of what has driven the rise of psuedoscience is that the average person doesn’t like to be told “shut up and do what the smart people say”. They feel a lot of mistrust towards society (which, in many cases, is entirely reasonable, especially in the case of marginalised groups who have been heavily exploited by science and scientists),
The problem goes far beyond just science, but I think this is certainly an aspect of it. I sympathise with scientists who want to continue to have the privileged position they hold, but I don’t think that’s helpful in the long term.
Yeah, I wholeheartedly encourage constructive debate and skepticism. However, it doesn’t excuse repeating shitty arguments without doing anything thinking or research just because it makes you feel less bad and lets you not do anything.
One example that particularly bothers me was “humans affect on the climate is less than a single volcanic eruption”. There are a lot of things you could not trust about scientific reporting, but the base premise of 8 billion people flying around the world using decomposed dinosaur mass is at least an order-of magnitude larger in scale compared to a single volcanic eruption. At that point, you’d have to believe that there isn’t really 8 billion people or that oil is actually from somewhere else.
In summary I agree, I just want to add nuance that this doesn’t excuse people acting in bad faith. It’s important that everyone, not just scientists, recognize their emotions and bias and challenge their own arguments against these (I.e. am I just making this argument because I feel defensive?)
volcanic eruptions can be pretty big btw
this one here caused a famine as a side effect for example
I’m aware. Do you have something more to say?
just saying, “humans cause less effect than a big volcano eruption” isn’t the gotcha that people seem to think
Ok, so what I’m hearing is that you’re agreeing with me that it’s a silly argument, but for a different reason - that volcano’s are devastating and we shouldn’t settle for just “less than devastating”. Is that right?
It initially seemed like you were arguing that volcanoes are bigger that I was aware of, and therefore might be more impactful than humans on the environment. But that’s probably because people always argue online 😅
in pseudoscience, person will seek answers they want to hear, and not ones that will contradict them at all. an example, chronic lyme which is a pseudoscience, is a belief that Lyme is a ‘permanent infectious disease’, and you can get it numerous ways other than the known vector, a deer tick(it is the actual way to get lyme) theres a whole industry built over this surprisingly, and hazardous because MDs have jumped into the scams too, and its primarly amongst MIDWESTERN white woman/men, how this scam works is the “patient” will go seeking online forums, sources and eventually end in the office of LLMD(“lyme doctors” which are actual doctors peddling the fake disease) which often charges alot of money per visit, usually several hundred and they dont take insurance(red flag) or the insurance rejects the DOCTOR and they give all thESE BS excuses why you have this symptoms and then prescribe you a blood test for lyme(another red flag), and then have you multi-month ANTIBIOTIC regiments, which can be hazardous because of the side effects. i happened to find these forums along time ago. most of these people have underlying mental issues, or a psychosomatic illness.
Long Covid was also a goldmine for the medical quackery institutions.
The phrase I’ve heard is “epistemically privileged.” And deservedly because from a standpoint of pure ethics, “science” has done way more good than damage than competing ways of looking at the world.
But let’s say someone asks you how a car works. You go into a bit about the internal combustion engine. You explain how little explosions make pistons go. They ask you about these explosions, so you have to take them to a chemist to explain. Then they ask the chemist why does this reaction happen, and the chemist sends them to the physicist. You go through the Newtonian bit, which seems intuitive enough, but when you ask about atoms, you have to go into subatomic physics. Which is something you cannot experience without special equipment that you trust the physicist is telling the truth about.
So, yeah, while the empirical method is fantastic and the best model we have, in the end it relies on faith as much as any religion.
You had me up until,
So, yeah, while the empirical method is fantastic and the best model we have, in the end it relies on faith as much as any religion
I feel like faith is the wrong word because the works that science hath wrought upon our world are due in part to its repeatability. When you follow the steps to build an engine and refine fuel for it, that engine will always run, and if it doesn’t, it’s due to a parts issue or a fuel issue that can be remediated. It always works because the laws of physics always apply (local variables notwithstanding).
I don’t have faith that my engine will start; I have absolute confidence based on my limited understanding aligned with repeated observations. I have evidence; where faith is often analogous to belief without or in spite of the evidence. Not that you may use that definition of faith, necessarily, and that’s fine; but that’s the definition I’m accustomed to thanks to being raised in a Protestant cult bubble.
I still haven’t read it myself but you might be interested in the book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn
Looking up scientific papers of any kind will immediately blow up the notion that science is rational and objective lol
well i’ve made good experiences with the papers of NTRS (nasa technical report server) especially with regards to water on mars. some are very well written. but yeah, in general, there’s a lot of papers that suck, especially in psychological medicine and sociology field.
Great answer.
That they need to buy cases and cases of water in plastic bottles which they throw in the landfill instead of just drinking their perfectly good tap water.
Depending on your municipality, sure.
Don’t know why you got downvoted. I drank tap water in India and threw up 3 times before leaving the office. I’ve seen the data center water and it looked worse.
Ummm, my tap water isn’t “perfectly good.”
Ummm, my comment was addressing the millions of people whose water IS perfectly good but they buy bottled water anyway.
Well mine is actually perfectly good safety-wise, but it tastes like shit. I eventually got a reverse osmosis system so I don’t waste any bottles anymore. Instead I waste water. BUT… But, when I’m at other people’s houses, if the water tastes fine, I drink that and refuse bottles. This is the best I can do.
In most of Europe, it is.
Plenty of people saying their tap water is not good. Just buy/install an RO for your tap ya dummy. They aren’t that expensive or difficult to install. Or some kind of brita-type filter. I’m lucky enough to have an in-fridge filter. Cold, clean water on tap. It’s the best.
Bottled water companies don’t produce water. They produce plastic bottles.
They probably don’t even produce the bottles. They probably just put the water in the bottles.
Good point. And it’s often just municipal water too. So uh… Tap water.
I live in the US, I’m not drinking the tap water lol. That being said you don’t have to buy cases of individual plastic water bottles either.
And yet millions do. Maybe there’s something actually wrong with your water, but the vast majority of municipal water in the US is perfectly fine.
If the tap is chemically fine, but still tastes awful, I get buying bottled water instead
Why would you buy bottled water? Buy a filter
Money is real.
One of the big ones: motivation.
Most people when talking/thinking about “motivation” are referring to extrinsic motivation.
Even if they make a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic, they basically assume these add together to create “more” motivation.
However, they don’t sum together. One crowds out the other, like in a neverending battle.
i’ve always thought that it’s really simple. there’s extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation
extrinsic motivation is when somebody stands next to you and beats you with a stick when you do something that they don’t like. the result is i will do the minimum slop required to fit their criteria, like when i’m asked to do the dishes, i’ll just make them look clean without actually scrubbing them.
intrinsic motivation is when i see the meaningfulness of an action, at which point my body starts acting towards that goal automatically.
Either a strong religious belief or the belief that success is the result of hard work.
Most people here have been using AI in some form for their entire lives without knowing it. It just did its job quietly with nobody noticing. Then venture capital (or just capitalism itself) ruined everything and broke the contract: publicly acquired data must be given back to the public for free.
I could pontificate at length about the terminology and how it has gotten fucked. The blending of the terms itself is part of what makes it difficult to have a reasonable and nuanced discussion.
Let’s take a moment to separate out AI from machine learning from deep learning from LLMs.
AI is fucking old. It used to mean “any algorithms that create intelligent behavior”. Not a particularly useful definition these days, but it used to mean things like pathfinding and searching.
Machine learning is a more useful phrase: a set of algorithms to solve problem where we don’t know “how”, but we have examples of inputs and outputs. For example, I don’t know how I would define cute, but if someone showed me a bunch of photos I could probably say which ones were cute, not cute, and unsure.
Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that uses a specific set of algorithms: neutral networks.
LLMs are a subset of deep learning that use “transformers”. Which is a specific architecture that does a lot of things quite well, like determine how proteins fold, how drugs interact, how words interact in a sentence, etc.
If you’ve used Google Maps at any point since it was created, you’ve used classical AI.
If you’ve used email, you’ve used machine learning.
If you’ve used a photos app that lets you search for similar pictures of people, you’ve used machine learning.
If you’ve had more than one prescription filled in the past five years, your pharmacist has used AI (even if they don’t know it) to check potential drug interactions.
Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hate that the field I spent my whole life researching has been coopted into a way to siphon money from people into the coffers of the richest fucking parasites, but when people say “fuck AI” they have either lost the nuance or never had it. Everyone that hears the message experiences on the surface and it does them a disservice.
When the luddites broke the textile looms, did they hate the machines or did they hate the loss of their livelihoods?
When the early industialists broke into factories and smashed their equipment, did they hate the machines or did they hate the captains of industry that forced them to work inhumane hours in terrible conditions?
When people say “fuck AI” do they hate the math that, until this point, has led to a better world for us all, or do they hate the system that has enshittified it into one of pure exploitation?
This whole mess feels like a distraction to me. Tech should be a social good. It should be helping people. Not to say it’s without problems, but now when we say “fuck AI” it leads us to pushing back against technology itself rather than the system that’s using it to hurt people.
I like my professor’s view in AI from over a decade ago. AI is the term non commercially viable research. Once something becomes viable it gets rebranded, like automatic text recognition, computer vision, machine learning, llms. It worked great until generative AI was good enough to impress average people, then it became a great way to attract venture capital. It’s still not quite viable so the rule holds, but we are in a very messy and public era where several products are likely to emerge and separate from the AI title.
not all “sugar free” subsitute sweetner is sugar free. if you look at ingredients, maltodetrexin, dextrose or equivalent is just sugar in another form. these companies word it in a way to obfuscate that they use actual sugar to sell sweetener as"sugar free". misconceptions about gluten free products, unless you re actually have CELIACs, gluten products wont have noticible effects on you. leaky gut or whater gluten is asscotiate with in healthy people is just marketing and pseudoscience.
Recipes are even worse. “Low sugar” recipe, it uses a shitload of honey or maple syrup instead.
its marketing and obfuscation of the ingredients. if you look at the nutritional facts, you can tell its not the case, anything honey/fruity next to this product like bread or yogurt, you can guaranteed is sugar, although not added sugar.
It is really incredible how once you start reducing your sugar intake so much of the super-sugary overly-sweet everything everywhere just stops mattering because you just can’t stand to eat more than a bite or two of it
I used to like pickled beetroot but now what they have in shops is far too sweet. Normally find pouring the liquid out and replacing it with vinegar makes them taste like they should.
Hopefully growing my own to try pickling, time will tell how well they grow. Already pickled quite a few radishes. Not sure if I will keep growing them though, moving to more perennial crops and tubers/bulbs.
It’s amazing how much good just going “if it looks/tastes like it’s mostly sugar and unidentifiable calories it almost definitely is very unhealthy for you” is. My wife’s a big soda drinker and my kids are starting to hit the age where many people pick up soda addictions. I push hard for them to mostly drink water and make sure to tell them how bad soft drinks are, and when they get upset about seeing the difference between what I say and what my wife does I tell them “you can make that decision for yourself when you’re a grown-up”
Or that sugar substitutes don’t cause diabetes. Diabetes rates took off after diet sodas went mainstream.
that I actually give a fuck.
I don’t.
That “intelligent” and “smart” mean the same thing.
Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom is knowing to not put it in a fruit salad.
Tomatoes are both a fruit (botanically) and a vegetable (culinarily). “Vegetable” doesn’t have a botanical definition, so the old aphorism about tomatoes “not being a vegetable” is trying to conflate terms from two different domains and hoping you don’t notice.
And a large number of “fruits” aren’t even a fruit. We’re kinda bad at naming things sometimes
A large number of culinary fruits aren’t even botanical fruits, yes. Most of them are botanical berries (and some things that aren’t botanical berries are still culinary berries). Conflating the two linguistic domains causes lots of problems!
One of the biggest misconceptions is that internet discussion is political action.
11/10 answer
Pandas reproduce just fine in nature. The myth of them being bad at fucking and making babies was a myth started from before we understood zoochosis. No animal wants to have babies in a prison, it’s not just pandas.
Irs impossible to build beautiful citys like they used to. It is still possible and cheaper even
Climat ≠ Weather
Artificial leather is better than natural leather for the enviorment (its not. Atleast where i am from you are not allowed to rais cattle just for leather production. And i rather would use all parts of a slaughtered animal that had to die, than poluting nature with chemicals)
I think animal welfare is the bigger factor for most people avoiding leather, and while artificial leather is just plastic and certainly not great environmentally, traditional leather production is also very very much polluting nature with chemicals (Chromium tanning etc. ) plus it still supports the whole factory farming system which is terrible in its own right. I’m hoping fungus based leather or some lab grown variant will bring a real alternative someday.
Natural leather is durable and lasting and where its used can be repaired, unlike artificial leather.
If a cow has to be killed due to people wanting its meat, why waste its hide instead of using it? The poluter here is the meat industry. Not leather production. To turn hide into leather one can use chemicals yes, but natural tanning is still used widely.
In a perfect world lether can also come from animals that have died of natural causes.
Plastic leather also wears out so quickly. Real leather is much stronger and easier to repair/restore.
As the person highlighted (and you have expanded on), there are a lot of ethical and sustainability problems with the leather industry as it is, but I think it’d be far better to improve the problems with natural leather than to expect much from the plastic leather
They make vege leather nowadays, I think. Never got my hands on anything made of it because it was so expensive, though.
You’ve got to keep in mind that everyone doesn’t feel the same. I personally feel gross having anything to do with leather because I can’t shake the feeling it’s a corpse’s skin. It would be the same to me if it was a dead human’s skin.
I’m not asking for understanding on how I feel, but more just understanding that maybe natural leather is the best option for most people right now in terms of environmental impact - but it’s important we develop other solutions too and try to make them more environmentally over time, because not everyone is the same.
