Oops!

Not only that, but MediaWiki is FOSS, and all existing content on all Wikimedia Foundation (except for a relative few kept on fair use grounds) is at most as restrictive as CC BY-SA 4.0. So you’d have whatever exists on Wikipedia currently (plus Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, etc., keeping in mind too that there are many Wikipedias besides English) plus the software that interacts with that data, other countries which haven’t fully descended into fascism, the members of the Wikimedia Foundation, a bunch of pissed-off editors, and a pissed-off public… I think a new, substantially similar non-profit would crop up in the UK etc., and very few things would have to change about the content that’s on the platform (where the UK has more restrictive speech laws).

is it illegal for a majority of people to vote third party

No, we live in a first-past-the-post system where votes disappear into a black hole if they aren’t cast for the candidate with the plurality of votes, you smarmy fucking dipshit.

A starter home?! This home is a finisher home! A shelterer of gods! The GOLDEN GOD!

I am untethered, and my rage knows no bounds!

We as a species spent so, so long learning the painful lesson that eugenics is an awful idea. Can we please not relitigate it? That is, can we please not shift the Overton window back to the ideology that directly led to and inspired the Holocaust?

German wolf hounds (large dogs, full snouts, etc.) live maybe 8 years total.

You’re singling out a single obscure breed of dog for some reason (where I assume you mean “German wirehaired pointing wolfhound”?) and then also making a claim about their life expectancy without presenting any evidence. Not only can I not find something saying eight years, I can’t find any credible information saying anything at all about this specific breed’s lifespan.

My pug dog lived 15 years, died of cancer, and never had trouble breathing during those 15 years.

I’m sorry for your loss, but I’m glad they lived a long time.

• French bulldogs are being discussed here, not pugs. They both suffer from brachycephalic airway syndrome, but French bulldogs are substantially worse (see below).
• Even if your dog were a French bulldog, a single anecdote is not statistically significant data.
• French bulldogs demonstrably have a much shorter life expectancy than most other dog breeds. You can see in the data that pugs aren’t too far behind.

If you google “name of dog breed you think doesn’t have problems” + health issues, you’ll get a list of the problems that breed is prone to.

…Okay? The point is that we know this is a health problem for French bulldogs and pugs; there’s every reason to believe changing their facial anatomy would make things better and seemingly no reason to believe it’d make them worse. This feels like whataboutism.

I’m not against breed changes to improve health at all but the hurr durr I-just-learned-the-word-brachycephalic-and-now-I’m-gonna-act-like-I-invented-it shit needs to die in a fire.

I agree that the modern Internet is too capable of rallying people behind causes they don’t invest the time to understand, but I don’t see anyone underinformed here. We inbred this feature into dogs in the 1900s because it was considered aesthetically desirable. We now recognize this often causes severe medical problems. Changing the facial anatomy should help millions of sentient beings live their lives without said severe medical problems. Becoming aware of a problem and then advocating for a reasonable solution isn’t “acting like [they] invented it”.

Let’s make all dogs live longer and healthier lives without shitting on any of them.

They’re not. The reason French bulldogs were singled out here is because of their exceptionally low lifespans, and I think you’re thinking people who care about this are getting some smug, fart-smelling satisfaction out of this when really they’re just happy to see a glimmer of light in a world that’s falling into darkness.

One night ICE will see her and she’ll probably disappear

I was able to trace this story back to at least mid-2019. (image here via Instagram). She’s ostensibly in Andahuaylas in southern Peru.

OP, you found a random image on the Internet with a caption, assumed the story was true, assumed the image was real, and then somehow assumed without anything from the image or caption that this woman is in the United States where ICE has any jurisdiction. Please do better; we need a healthy information diet on Lemmy to set us apart from the rapidly sinking swamp that is the rest of social media.

I’m really disappointed not to see Okular there. It’s FOSS, and it’s very cozy and useful.

Are people even thinking for five seconds about the ideas they’re upvoting?

• As we understand it today – given the mix of studies that say it reduces crime, say it increases crime, and say it does nothing at all – a claim that the death penalty deters crime isn’t tenable.
• Over 4% of people who are executed are innocent. This is to say that after a trial and after often decades of appeals, they are still murdered by the state on false pretenses. So we’re talking 1/20 people killed for something that ostensibly does not reduce homicides.
• “Straight to the firing squad” reduces the cost from being 4x as expensive as life, but then we take that 4% figure and turbo-charge it to some ungodly number (I wouldn’t know what that is because we haven’t been fucking stupid enough to try it lately). The reason the appeals are so extensive is because the false conviction rate is so high. If it’s 4% after decades of appeals, imagine what it is with this stupid bullshit.
• Removing the appeals process would incentivize prosecutors even more than they already are to fabricate, misrepresent, and hide evidence and to falsely accuse. They know that this will never be found during appeals because there is no appeal.
• This kind of rhetoric normalizes the death penalty state-sanctioned murder, but it’s a fucking awful practice that doesn’t do shit. That’s why so many first-world countries and even many developing countries no longer have it and why the US is such an outlier. The US should be embarrassed about its continued use of the death penalty, not clamoring for more and worse.

This is just masturbating your rage boner to fantasy land punitive justice, not a serious policy suggestion to fix a single problem with the police.

To be fair, though, this experiment was stupid as all fuck. It was run on /r/changemyview to see if users would recognize that the comments were created by bots. The study’s authors conclude that the users didn’t recognize this. [EDIT: To clarify, the study was seeing if it could persuade the OP, but they did this in a subreddit where you aren’t allowed to call out AI. If an LLM bot gets called out as such, its persuasiveness inherently falls off a cliff.]

Except, you know, Rule 3 of commenting in that subreddit is: “Refrain from accusing OP or anyone else of being unwilling to change their view, of using ChatGPT or other AI to generate text, [emphasis not even mine] or of arguing in bad faith.”

It’s like creating a poll to find out if women in Afghanistan are okay with having their rights taken away but making sure participants have to fill it out under the supervision of Hibatullah Akhundzada. “Obviously these are all brainwashed sheep who love the regime”, happily concludes the dumbest pollster in history.

Psychology has an embarrassing history.

It really doesn’t?

Half their studies aren’t reproducible.

Replicable*, and also see here.

Their most famous study is basically a fraud.

Do you mean the Stanford prison experiment, which is famous because of how terrible it was? The one that’s taught in Psych 101 classes as a lesson on ethics and how not to design an experiment? Because while I would argue it’s not the most famous study, the entire reason it’s famous is because it was so shittily designed that psychologists going forward took lessons from it. No one’s holding that up to say “Wow, look at this great study we, the field of psychology, collectively did.”

They’re behind lobotomies

That was psychiatry and neurology, but I don’t expect you to know the difference.

They’re behind the Satanic panic

That a random quack psychiatrist came out and publicized this doesn’t mean that “the field of psychology” is behind the Satanic panic. Dr. Oz is a fraud who used his platform to sell bullshit supplements; does that make the field of medicine “behind” homeopathy?

They’re behind eugenics

This literally isn’t true, or at least it’s a ridiculous half-truth to put psychology at the forefront of eugenics. Eugenics is – surprise, surprise – rooted in biology after inheritance became more widely understood (read: we knew just enough to be dangerous). Eugenics had its hand in basically every natural science, and so you’ll find occasional psychologists like Henry H. Goddard showing up, but you’ll see biologists, statisticians, politicians, and so forth. Eventually eugenics spread into fields like psychiatry (note: different from psychology), but “they’re behind eugenics” is absolute fucking horseshit that you fail to back up with literally anything.

I’m not anti-intelectual [sic] or a Scientologist or anything

Uh-huh…

I guess what I’m trying to say is that psychologists like Jordan Peterson might want to clean up their own room before trying to lecture the rest of us.

Why are you bringing up Jordan Peterson? Peterson is widely despised among psychologists, he no longer works at the University of Toronto, and instead of contributing research to the field or engaging in clinical practice, he puts out self-help sludge. “I’m not an anti-intelectual, but I’m going to take an entire century-old field of science and compress it into Philip Zimbardo(?) and Jordan Peterson so I can say that science bad actually.”

You understand that the “hard sciences” are also affected by this crisis, correct? “Soft science” is a borderline meaningless term that stigmatizes entire fields of science to the sole benefit of anti-intellectuals.

Even when we take into consideration that the problem is currently worse in sciences like psychology, economics, sociology, etc.: “these results support the scientific status of the social sciences against claims that they are completely subjective, by showing that, when they adopt a scientific approach to discovery, they differ from the natural sciences only by a matter of degree.” Social sciences are science.

You don’t belong to “the hard sciences crowd”; you belong to a Sheldon Cooper-esque stereotype who devalues work you don’t understand.

On the plus side I guess: accessing good, robust information has literally never been easier as long as you’re media-literate enough not to fall into the landfill of trash information that you’re walking over.

• During its start in the 2000s and early 2010s, Wikipedia was like a shadow of what it is today. As an example, take a look at the article for the element oxygen in 2006 (ignore the broken templates) and the article today. Its editors were just as smart, well-meaning, and hard-working, but guidelines and a deeply entrenched culture hadn’t emerged around making sure things are as verifiable, reliable, independent, unbiased, inclusive, and comprehensive and as possible. It’s kind of insane how much you can find there now as a starting point for further research. Wikipedia also forced the web-ification of Britannica, meaning even if you deeply distrust Wikipedia for some reason, you no longer need to pay hundreds to have an encyclopedia in your home.
• Additionally, I imagine there are serious, experienced editors who are using LLMs to great effect as essentially a search engine on steroids to find obscure information, thereby speeding up their work (and they have the media literacy from years or decades of editing Wikipedia to wield this responsibly). Those who use it irresponsibly seem to be very quickly found out, although because I can’t prove a negative, I can’t say how much slop has slipped through the cracks.
• Extremely niche hobbies and specialties have e.g. YouTube channels, subreddits/communities, etc. dedicated just to them providing a fantastic wealth of knowledge. Right now, I can go watch Gutsick Gibbon on YouTube to catch up on various findings in primatology from a PhD candidate on the verge of becoming a doctor. I can watch Gamers Nexus for highly comprehensive breakdowns of tech products. Realistically, I can self-teach in ways I never could have 20 years ago as long as I’m responsible.
• Piracy has arguably never been easier to gain access to paywalled research papers, books, etc. There’s a movement in academia to make research open-access.
• Software is moving more and more toward open-source. This gives entrenched, capitalist power structures increasingly limited control over people and opens up this knowledge to everybody.

That all being said, things are really dire because so many people really lack the basic media literacy skills to utilize these tools and avoid the ocean of shit around them.

My dad: “The plain peanut butter sandwiches will continue until morale improves.”

Welcome to Arthropod Facts! Did you know that king crabs aren’t actually crabs? King crabs (family Lithodidae) sit in the hermit crab superfamily Paguroidea in the decapod infraorder Anomura, whereas true crabs comprise the decapod infraorder Brachyura. The current strong and widespread scientific consensus is that king crabs are hermit crabs which originated in the North Pacific about 15 million years ago and evolved a crab-like, calcified exoskeleton through carcinisation.

Evidence for this includes:

• King crabs exhibit the same asymmetries that hermit crabs do, such as the asymmetrical abdomen (underside) found in females but not males.
• Lithodidae can be divided into the two subfamilies Lithodinae and Hapalogastrinae. Respectively, these have a calcified abdomen and an uncalcified/partially calcified abdomen. This suggests that Lithodinae fully calcified whereas Hapalogastrinae only partially calcified.
• Many king crabs (mainly Hapalogastrinae) are exclusively distributed in the North Pacific and are adapted to only living in cold waters.
• Molecular phylogenetics (the study of things like how species differ in their DNA) strongly suggests that Lithodidae is most closely related to the hermit crab family Paguridae.

An easy way to distinguish a king crab from a true crab is to look at the number of visible legs it has. While all decapods have ten legs, the last (hind) pair of legs in king crabs are dramatically reduced in size and usually sit inside the branchial chamber – used for cleaning rather than walking. By contrast, crabs always have their last pair of walking legs, although in the crab superfamily Portunoidea these are flattened and used as paddles for swimming. Thus, when counting the chelipeds (claw-bearing arms) as legs, you’ll see eight legs on a king crab (four rows of two) and ten legs on a true crab (five rows of two).

Thank you for subscribing to Arthropod Facts!

Nah, I see nothing wrong with an information diet composed of random people with no background sharing their pet conspiracy with 5 million people on TikTok that they learned from three minutes with ChatGPT, furry porn accounts clapping back on Twitter to an out-of-context 29-word quote from an MIT Technology Review article (reshared so many dozens of times that the quality has noticeably degraded), or a picture generated in a Russian disinformation farm showing a muscular Donald Trump rescuing crying orphans from drowning in Hurricane Helene while corrupt FEMA agents loot their houses.

God fucking help us.

You can read the Technology Review article here discussing why this is problematic beyond a JPEG-artifacted screenshot of a snappy quip from a furry porn Twitter account that may or may not have read the article beyond the caption. We need solar power plants to reach net zero emissions, but even despite their decreasing costs and subsidies offered for them, developers are increasingly declining to build them because solar is so oversaturated at peak hours that it becomes worthless or less than worthless. The amount of energy pumped into the grid and the amount being used need to match to keep the grid at a stable ~60 Hz (or equivalent where you live, e.g. 50 Hz for the PAL region), so at some point you need to literally pay people money to take the electricity you’re producing to keep the grid stable or to somehow dump the energy before it makes its way onto the grid.

One of the major ways this problem is being offset is via storage so that the electricity can be distributed at a profit during off-peak production hours. Even if the government were to nationalize energy production and build their own solar farms (god, please), they would still run up against this same problem where it becomes unviable to keep building farms without the storage to accommodate them. At that point it becomes a problem not of profit but of “how much fossil fuel generation can we reduce per unit of currency spent?” and “are these farms redundant to each other?”.

This is framed through a capitalist lens, but in reality, it’s a pressing issue for solar production even if capitalism is removed from the picture entirely. At some point, solar production has to be in large part decoupled from solar distribution, or solar distribution becomes far too saturated in the middle of the day making putting resources toward its production nearly unviable.

The replication crisis is real, but I’m going to give some pushback on the “ssssh” like it’s some kind of conspiracy “they” don’t want you to know about™. We live in an era of unprecedented and extremely dangerous anti-intellectualism, and pushing this as some kind of conspiracy is honestly really gross.

• The entire reason the crisis became known is because scientists have and are having the integrity to try to replicate results from existing studies. They want the science in their field to be sound, and they’ve been extremely vocal about this problem from the minute they found it. This wasn’t some “whistleblower” situation.
• Arguably a major reason why it took so long for this to come to the fore is because government agencies which administer grants focus much less on replicating previous experiments and more on “new” stuff. This would ironically be much less of a problem if more funds were allocated for scientific research (i.e. so they weren’t so competitive that researchers feel the need to publish “new” research lest their request be denied). This “ssssh” rhetoric makes the voting public want the exact opposite of that because it tells them that their tax dollars are being funneled into some conspiratorial financial black hole.
• This happens in large part because concrete, replicable research on humans is extremely hard, not because the researchers lack integrity and just want to publish slop. In CS, I can control for basically everything on my computer and give you a mathematical proof that what I wrote works for everything every time. In physics, I can give exact parameters for my simulation or literal schematics for my device. A psychological or sociological experiment is vastly more difficult to remove confounding variables from or to properly document the confounding variables in.
• This doesn’t invalidate soft sciences like anti-intellectuals would want you to believe. While some specific studies may not be replicable, this is why meta-analyses and systematic reviews are so important in medicine, psychology, sociology, etc.: they give the “average” of the existing literature on a specific subject, so outliers get discovered, and there’s far more likelihood that their results are correct or close to correct.
• This is actively being worked on, and researchers are more aware of it than ever – making them more cognizant of the way they design their experiments and discuss their methodologies.
• One of the major reasons for problems with replication isn’t actually that the original studies were bunk within the population they were sampling. Rather, it’s that once replication was attempted on people from diverse cultures rather than the narrow range of cultures often sampled in many (especially older) papers (“Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic”), the significance observed disappeared. As noted in the linked article, 50% given that fact is actually not half-bad. With much more extensive globalization in the modern day and a larger awareness of this problem, it should become less and less severe.

EDIT: I just noticed that they also got their facts wrong in a subtle but meaningful way: the statistic is that 50% of the published papers aren’t replicable, not reproducible. Reproducibility is taking an existing dataset and using it to reach the same conclusions. For example, if I have a dataset of 500 pictures of tires and publish “Tires: Are they mostly round and black?” in Tireology, claiming based on the dataset that tires are usually round and black, then I would hope that Scientist B. couldn’t take that same dataset of 500 tire pictures and come to the conclusion that they’re usually square and blue. However, replication would be if Scientist B. got their own new dataset of say 800 tire pictures and attempted to reach my same findings. If they found from this dataset that tires are usually square and blue but found from my dataset that they’re usually round and black, then my results would be reproducible but not replicable. If Scientist B. got the same results as me from the new dataset, then my results would be replicable, but it wouldn’t say anything about reproducibility. Here, a lack of replication might come from taking too narrow a sample of tires (I found the tires by camping out in a McDonald’s parking lot in Norfolk, Nebraska over the course of a weekend), that I published my findings in 1985 but that 40 years later tires really have changed, that there was some issue with how I took the pictures, etc.

Too much plastic/botox? Too much narcissism? Too many drugs? Too much trauma from being married to this lunatic?

“Both. Both is good.”