I've heard a saying, two things you should never do on the Internet are argue or explain. It takes up a lot of mental energy and time to do it for no reward.
Not everything needs a source. There is such thing as "common knowledge" . Things get very out of hand and very messy if you try to source EVERY claim. Obviously there are limits to this and I put common knowledge in quotes for a reason but seriously I mean it when I say not everything needs a source.
ngl, I don't comment nearly as often anymore out of concern for anything I say to be misconstrued, argued, or wanting verification like this meme. Ya'll, I've got a job and a life, I can't/don't want to sit here and fight people. The worst gets assumed of anything and it gets difficult to have productive, much less positive discourse online.
This is also due to a distinct drop in reader comprehension. One of the largest parts of reading comprehension is being able to infer the intended audience for a particular piece of work. You should be able to read a news article, see a commercial, read a comment, etc and infer who it is aimed at. And the answer is usually not “me”.
People have become accustomed to having an algorithm that is laser focused to their specific preferences. So when they see something that’s not aimed at them it is jarring, and they tend to get upset. Instead of going “oh this clearly isn’t aimed at me, but I can infer who the intended audience is. I’ll move on.” Now they tend to jump on the creator with whataboutisms and imagined offense.
Maybe you make a post about the proper way to throw a football. You’ll inevitably get a few “bUT wHaT abOUt WhEElcHaiR uSerS, I hAvE a baD ShoUlDer aNd cAn’T thROW SO wHaT abOUt me, I haTE FoOtbAll wHY aRe yOU SHowiNG tHIs to Me, etc” types of comments. It’s because those users have lost the ability to infer an intended audience. They automatically assume everything they see is aimed at them, and get offended when it isn’t.
I have even noticed this started to affect the way media is written. Creators tend to make it a point to outright state their intended audience, just to avoid the negative comments.
I’m a professional writer for a newspaper. It’s something we inherently think about every time we put pen to paper as it were.
Usually we have a good insight as to our physical paper’s readership. They tend to be older, well-educated, decent reading comprehension, etc. But since our paper is also available online, we also have to factor in the wider readership when the articles get shared. That’s where it gets tricky.
As you’ve pointed out, reading comprehension has sharply declined in general. I love the internet, but there’s no denying it also had some bad consequences with regards to people’s attention spans. The ‘too long, didn’t read mindset.
Because of that, we tend to front-load articles with the needed info and make paragraphs easy to skim. We also tend to write shorter and with less ‘fancy words’. Basically, I need to dumb things down to about 70 percent of my normal writing level. And even with that, you get dumb questions and comments by people who clearly didn’t bother to properly read and understand the first paragraph, much less the rest of the article.
It can certainly be frustrating. People used to read things to learn and get smarter. Now they just want their biases confirmed in as few words as possible.
This is a very interesting idea. It would certainly explain why people seem to constantly "infill" everything everone says with whatever gets them the most angry - the algo feeds them ragebait, so that's what they see.
F'real I think my kids have had maybe one snow day so far, and my oldest is in second grade. We live in southeast Mass.
I thought about buying a new snowblower, but the fact is that I think we had maybe one storm in the past 5 or 6 years where I actually would've used my old one. The little dustings we had were easily cared for by a shovel.
I also have a part of my driveway that has a lot of tree overhang and never really gets much snow on it. It also happens that the winter morning sun has a direct path to this patch of asphalt, so if we get only an inch or two, it'll all melt away as soon as the sun comes up. Assuming it's not too overcast.
I asked my employer provided AI assistant if this is true and it assured me that natural snowfall was disinformation invented by leftists in order to destroy our capitalist utopia.
Yep. And they do it for things that you KNOW were covered in everyone’s basic education. Stuff everyone should already know without someone needing to explain it.
People used to have the decency to at least feel embarrassment if they needed to have something explained that a child learns in school. But these days people actually get angry if you tell them they’re wrong 🤷♂️
I've felt this exact feeling before. It feels like trying to discuss algebra with someone who didn't learn basic addition. If we can't agree on certain ground rules then discussion is never going to be productive, or will take 3x as long to come to the same conclusion. I feel like it's willful stubbornness as much it is not understanding. People just google points to support their argument instead of being curious and researching the topic.
Weird to think that human civilization will collapse out of a misplaced sense of fairness where we think it's better for uninformed people to have a choice even if that choice dooms us all. Liberalism is going to collapse in the silliest way
The evil version of this is when people cite a click bait article, you go to the article and read the attached study and the study is not backing up their claims in any meaningful way. Like come on bro you clearly haven't read this study don't cite it and claim I need to educate myself.
It's gotten even worse in the past year. Most of them sound like they're parroting AI summaries of blog posts and sprinkling stupid ass cutaway gags to memes. Like rather than actually consuming the entire body of context around a subject and having an informed take, they're just giving shallow thoughts and trying to monetize.
Any YouTuber whose whole angle is to spicy commentary on current events in tech/programming is definitely part of the trash heap.
Guess I’m just rankled by seeing so many people making baseless claims and then telling everyone to figure it out themselves when they get called out on it, and it’s not the same as this.
I literally had to cite the page number from the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 Public Law 117-328 that covered how the $800M that Trump keeps telling everyone FEMA spent on migrants was a completely different fund than the disaster relief fund that FEMA uses for hurricanes. Which the DRF was established originally as it's own fund in the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988 Public Law 100-707
It's page 4,730 where that item is located for anyone wondering.
I fucking hate what online interactions have become. I think I've easily read over 200,000 pages of government legislation, federal regulation, and legal proceedings since June because of the lies one orange shit stain keeps telling. I really do hope that the Republicans can move past that fucker, it was a lot easier to talk politics.
what do any of us do when logical, good faith arguments fail and the future of the world depends on convincing idiots that the sky is blue? serious question.
I remember when one conservative parent was absolutely furious with GW Bush over invading Iraq. Then they were all in MAGA for nine years. They've finally disavowed that one, but I don't know how much time they have to come further left, or how the trajectory may shift. We actually had a pleasant few days together, with each of us clenching our teeth and walking away a few times, but that's any relationship. Some things we (everyone) feel strongly about really aren't worth that argument. In fact, a lot of them.
Because they want to exhaust the person engaging in a good faith discussion. It’s far more labor intensive to have to look for, find, verify for contextual correctness, quote and link said sources, then argue why one’s position is factually correct.
And all the other person has to do is cite some patently false bullshit in 5 seconds and disregard the argument.
It all boils down to bad faith. They don't care what argument you make, you'll never sway them. They're not interested in the debate with you as much as as they are just getting their bullshit out there for randos to read. Like you say, while you're finding sources and making sure everyone agrees on terminology they've already said 3 more things that are completely wrong.
Yeah, I decided this a couple years ago unless someone seems unusually reasonable. No source will ever be good enough. The block button is the best way forward for most people who ask for a source. Because you can tell most people think asking for one is "winning" as soon as it's asked
Lets not forget that it's about more than just that person. It's about the massive pile of data on the internet that will be read in the future and trawled for chatbot training.
Same here in Slovenia. 15 years ago we had at least 30cm ofsnow each winter that would stuck around. Now if we even get any snowfall and not just rain it either rains the same day and the snow is gone, or the rain comes a day later and the snow is once again gone.
The one on the right is a bearded 8 year old who never saw snow. He has a beard due to micro plastics. He thinks all pictures online of snow are AI generated. He’s also an asshole to everyone and rightfully so because his life and planet has been doomed. Welcome to 2034.
Winter is on its way out due to climate change. In around the year 2100, it's estimated that there will only be 3 seasons left, no winter. And summer will be much longer and much hotter. So the 3 seasons will be spring, then a 2-season long summer basically, then fall. That's it.
But you can already see the disappearance of winter today because there's much less snow and it's much warmer than like 30 years ago. (Speaking for Germany)
30 years ago we definitely had snow in winter. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But I remember playing in snow basically every winter as a kid. And I’m living in a very mild region of Germany. Now I’m considering all season tires (just for legal purposes) to not change wheels twice a year, since there is maybe some snow for one week in total.
Spoke with a guy this week who was born in the 30s. He said winter back then was much harder. Whole lakes or even rivers were frozen solid. I can’t imagine being able to walk to the other side of a major river…
I remember ice-skating every winter as a kid. Rivers were frozen over solid, too. Sometimes, there were two separate layers of ice on top of each other, each being several cm thick. It kind of went away in the late 90s. I guess everybody just thought the ice and snow would return someday. Now even snow has gotten really, really rare where I live.
I grew up in Ohio in the 1970s (which was admittedly a rough decade as far as cold weather was concerned). Generally, the first snowfall was some time in September and at some point in October the ground would be completely covered in snow and you wouldn't see grass again until April. The snow wasn't completely gone until May. So essentially it was six months of Winter, three months of Summer and a month and a half each for Spring and Fall. It is certainly not anything like that any more.
That's a bit unfair. You can actually buy a flying car today. A few companies recently got their vehicle fully certified and are doing commercial sales. It's not cheap. If you can't afford a second Ferrari don't bother.
The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.