I live around it. I know plenty of people who aren't all the way in the deep end but could eventually go all the way into the deep end. What really helps them not make that final leap is that there is an extremely well deserved stigma against Nazi ideology, the most notorious strain of fascism. There is a gradient and there are plenty of secondary believers whose minds are primed to support a strongman on the elimination of all the bad people keeping society down but would use nicer words to describe it, but tertiary believers who have just been immersed in a deluge of contradictory information can be reasoned with. On this instance at least there is not a lot of tolerance for appeals to popular prejudices which may work out in a general crowd where there isn't a sufficient challenge to it.

"We need to make room for misinformation on our platforms otherwise we won't have mass appeal. A lot of people love to scapegoat populations who can't effectively defend themselves, and leaving them out just because they're contributing to creeping fascism and and multiple ongoing genocides is just petty."

I will never participate in an instance which is federated with Meta or any other profit-driven instance. If profit is more important than responsibility and safety, then irresponsibility and danger can be the only consequence.

It's always important to take a step back and consider that the mega-rich exist in a totally separate reality than the rest of us do. They were raised in a way that they were never forced out of infancy into adulthood like the rest of us were. I hope that eventually we realize that it's not responsible to allow major institutions to be under the control of adults whose worldview has never progressed since the time they were toddlers.

Thanks for writing my autobiography is so few words.

It began on reddit as the general sub for the college dorm #196 at some university, one thing lead to another, and now it's a meme sub which exists everywhere.

I feel you. There's a ton of misinformation and bad faith argument out there. My favorite thing I've heard recently that resonated with me is "I don't care about being right, I care about being correct."

I've learned from my Autistic friends that so many ideas (including ideas people are taking political action on) are vibes-only because they didn't pick up the vibes themselves, investigated it to see why people thought it was true, and found out it made no sense at all and just felt true to the people who believed it. It's made me a lot more likely to investigate ideas which appear to make sense intuitively to me.

I agree with this, and to put it politely Voyager is far from my favorite Trek show. I understand that the main reason for this is that I didn't click with the main cast as so many who love Voyager do, and that is 100% subjective. Even though I like fewer episodes than I dislike which I've seen, the appeal for someone whose taste is different than mine is obvious. Every trek show has oddness or persistent issues but these are typically forgivable because of the other strengths of the show. That the strengths of this show didn't click with me doesn't mean it's nothing more than its bad parts. All this being said I love the character of Janeway and Kate Mulgrew's performance as the character. I also find it amusing the extremely high number of times the character has been performed committing atrocities even though in most ;) instances it wasn't the real prime Janeway.

Witcher 3 is my favorite game to be heroic in since the correct choice is often either not obvious or otherwise totally unpredictable. I got into character with Geralt's personality because even though I was trying to be a hero, the consequences of my decisions were often out of my control. As I got used to how things worked and was exposed to how terrible it was for most people, playing heroically became more rewarding.

This is interesting because when I was a kid I would always try to do every bad thing the game would let me because I found it hilarious that in the context of the game there could be no consequences for bad behavior. My favorite moment was in KOTOR during a trial where I committed numerous crimes, went on trial for those crimes as part of the story, admitted to my crimes proudly in a court of law, and was let off the hook for story reasons. Now when I play games I have more fun playing heroically and trying to help out as best I can because that's what I have more fun doing and would find trolling the hapless npcs boring since I used to do it so much.

This is an amazing resource. Thank you for putting it together and posting it here!

I had quite the ontological shock when I was exposed to methods of investigation and information which was systematically collected and reviewed by people who I became familiar at University. My formerly conservative beliefs were shattered under the weight of the scrutiny which I was now able to apply to them, which caused extreme discomfort because many of the premises which I had planned my life around were not only false, but easily disprovable with the slightest examination. Since then I've tried not to be stubborn about the beliefs I hold and will criticize new information instead of dismissing it (although some information can be criticized so quickly it can be dismissed rapidly).

There hasn't been hard evidence presented for the new claims of extraterrestrials on Earth to my knowledge, nor have the claims been disproven (these specific claims can be disproven). I choose to withhold judgement on the phenomenon until a sufficient amount of evidence is provided (in my opinion, I suppose) or the claims are disproven, but I'm not going to dismiss the possibility that the claims are true off-hand.

That particular Kuhn work is one that I often come back to in snippets even though I haven't read it through yet. It definitely made me aware how much the era I'm living in informs what others and myself consider to be fact. Especially in studying History I find many decisions which people really made completely baffling in a contemporary context, but norms were fundamentally different according to that place and time.

My worldview is not fundamentally different than the Christian worldview you described. Although I have a strong preference for Empiricism, I understand that it's mostly a subjective preference of mine rather than the ultimate method of epistemology. According to empircal data, application of empirical reasoning has yielded the most consistent with reality conclusions which we have currently made. Every aspect of the previous sentence is loaded and some elements may not be strictly true, but it would require a different method of reasoning to determine that which may not even be compatible. This makes me sympathetic to scientific anarchy even though I have my personal bias towards empiricism above other methodologies. It does make me curious as to what truths I myself am incapable of appreciating due to my practical adherence to material reality and preference for evidence and scientific consensus.

Probably, but it wouldn't be as easy since each instance has different design, admission criteria, and access to other instances. A bot would have to be based on a given instance, so a botnest instance could be cordoned off. If it becomes a bigger issue, each instance may have their own way of dealing with it so the bot would have to be capable of not only negotiating the above obstacles but also how to get around a variety of different ant-bot measures.

While I know why the Texas government would want to make sure children are exposed to nothing but official state propaganda, hopefully an unintended consequence of this is to put a massive hole in the monopolistic mainstream social media userbase since the uncontrollable web including the fediverse would be the only alternative in these states.

This is very similar to the development I've experienced, thank you for sharing the process itself. Our brains naturally chunk information, so the use of schemas to understand abstract concepts I think is completely intuitive. As you pointed out though sometimes a schema can turn out to be an over-simplification which falsely indicates a topic is less complex than it truly is. It's interesting to look over all of the cognitive traps we're vulnerable to which we could never escape if we didn't admit to ourselves we could fall into them.

This quandary reminds me of an experiment on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. A control group of toddlers were given paper and crayons and were advised to draw whatever they wanted, which of course they did. The other group was offered a reward if they drew a picture (candy I think). They found that the toddlers who were drawing only because they wanted to without any reward being involved drew significantly more drawings than the group of toddlers who were drawing to receive compensation for it.

There's something about commodifying the things you like to do that takes something away from them. Writing just on your own terms for a while without regard to an audience is not worthless because firstly it has meaning to you and secondly it can be part of a creative process which leads you to what you would want to publish in the future. Taking a break from writing and reading the work of others is similarly productive.

In our age of misinformation, how do you determine whether the new information is based in reality?

I strongly second the recommendation for the free online class Learning How to Learn. I've taken it twice, the second time as a refresher after a few years. It's light, well presented, easy, and really revolutionized my approach to learning new things.

The first thing I'll utilize these tools for is to finally teach me how to use Github so I can use the rest of these tools.