I'm not convinced. This amounts to "there are no true believers in charge". I'm sure that advertising doesn't help, but there's nothing unusual about reddit doing this as a result of being run by true believers.
Jiro
1yr ago
You'd have a much harder time naming a piece of media that sprang up and grew into intense popularity without having some recognized and respected name attached, be it an actor, director, beloved character, or an established series.
Harry Potter.
Jiro
1yr ago
If they manufacture reasons, the media and Wikipedia, and the useful idiots, can report the manufactured reason, and what they actually did will get no publicity.
Jiro
1yr ago
It's not just that the engineering is up to snuff, it's that people think that it is, and want to force everyone else to act like it is.
Jiro
1yr ago
The people most likely to use a peace initiative are the ones least likely to need it (and vice versa). Scott had a relevant post about advice being followed that way.
I fear that doing this will just lead to another "scrupulous people become more afraid of hurting everyone, and actual aggressors ignore the advice", except with culture war.
Jiro
1yr ago
Using AdBlock isn't opting out of the service, it's opting out of paying for it.
The service is being distributed for free. If the producers hope you're going to pay for the free service anyway, they can, but if their hope doesn't come true, there's nothing wrong with it, just like there's nothing wrong with going to a store and buying only the product that's priced under its cost as a loss leader, or skipping ads on a recorded broadcast TV program, or visiting the blog of someone with a tip jar and not putting anything in the tip jar. Or playing a free-to-play gacha game without spending any money on random rolls for gacha characters.
For that matter, the service is being paid for by the advertisers, but the advertisers only pay for the service because they hope the ads increase product revenue. By your reasoning, it's not watching the ad that you're obligated to do--it's buying the product advertised in the ad.
Just saying that the payment is mandatory doesn't make it so. Like the Supreme Court decided about gun laws, the only payment methods that are actually morally obligatory to pay are ones where there's a historical tradition of that sort of thing being an obligatory payment method.
Jiro
1yr ago
I already made the point about the strong historical tradition--this strong historical tradition includes the user not being obliged to look at the ads.
It was always okay to record a program on your VHS and skip the ads, or to otherwise skip ads in any way physically possible.
Jiro
1yr ago
Every piece of intensely popular media is either new, or "ridden by the rights owners", short of improbable edge cases. It's nearly tautological.
I won't say that this is a troll, since themotte has seen real people with such an opinion and it doesn't matter that someone is a new user when the entire site is new. On the other hand, this is certainly an inflammatory post without evidence, and doesn't belong here for that reason alone. Even though it does show some "evidence", the evidence is for something extremely narrow; the general claim
The answer is that excavations would be extremely hazardous to the false narrative that's been created and weaponized,
makes a very broad inflammatory claim that is not supported by the evidence provided, even if you were to assume it's true.
(And Nazis tend not to report evidence accurately anyway.)
Jiro
1yr ago
Most people don't use ad blockers and many don't even understand ad blockers. Universalizing "should one person use ad blockers" into "should everyone use ad blockers" is like universalizing "should I move to Vermont" with "what would happen if everyone moved to Vermont".
Jiro
1yr ago
your opposition to ads, is in fact precisely due to the ads being not as effective as they might be
This is untrue.
Jiro
1yr ago
The current system violates the "limited times" part of that, even if the Supreme Court doesn't think so.
Jiro
1yr ago
If broadcast TV creators told you "give us an extra $5 a month and we'll agree that it's okay for you to skip the ads" it would still be okay to skip the ads without sending them $5 a month.
Jiro
1yr ago
All right, I concede. It's a troll.
(I don't actually disagree with Hlynka all that much, though he seems to hate me for some reason.)
it would all go much better if the SEALs program offered an option to be put on a mild steroid cycle under doctor’s supervision?
It's very difficult to create a rule "allow mild use of steroids, but don't allow more extreme use of steroids". If the Navy could easily get away with giving SEALs steroids, they would be motivated to give them enough steroids to maximize performance, not to maximize performance subject to the constraint "... as long as they are mild and don't affect health much".
In fact, your own post shows this. You mention "mild" steroids, but then go on to point out that we ask SEALs to sacrifice their lives. Do you really think the Navy wouldn't also ask them to sacrifice their health?
What a waste.
Just like the proper amount of a crime that is costly to stop is non-zero, the proper amount of "SEALs killing themselves by violating the rules" is non-zero.
Jiro
1yr ago
The political climate in general was different pre-2014. That's what happened. The already employed social justice advocates can get away with more now than they could then, because they had fewer tools to use against other employees in a different political climate. And people who weren't social justice advocates then either became advocates or were replaced by advocates.
Jiro
1yr ago
If they can run a "properly used steroid" program, they could also run a "dangerously used steroid" program (while still calling it "properly used", of course). The only significant forces that would stop them from doing that are forces that would stop them from having a steroid program at all.
technically, idk about politically
The main forces that would stop the Navy from any sort of program are political.
Could you really imagine, say, a well done argument for homeopathy? I could imagine an argument for homeopathy that deceives in a well done way, but I can't imagine an honest argument for homeopathy that is well done.
If I have position X, that implies that I think that opponents of X have bad evidence, are making logical fallacies, etc. If I didn't think that, I wouldn't have position X. Of course, in everyday life where a lot of people believe things for social reasons, they may believe X without considering evidence or arguments at all. I can imagine such a person thinking an opposing argument is well done. But I find it hard to imagine that to anyone who arrives at their positions by rational thinking, they could really find an opposing argument well done.
There may be an edge case where someone uses premises I disagree with but they argue well based on these premises, but in practice nobody seems to argue that way. Even abortion opponents don't say "I am trying to convince you that abortion is wrong, based on the premise that a fetus is a human being". They try to convince other people using those people's premises, regardless of whether they share them themselves.
Furthermore, quite aside from all that, the problem with any measure to prevent the use of votes as weapons is that votes work as weapons. If your system hides posts or otherwise does things weapon-like based on votes, you'll never solve the problem.
Rationality can only work once certain premises have been accepted.
But that's not how arguments to convince other people work. If you want to convince other people, you either have to go by their premises (which leads to the problem I described), or you need to sneak in your own premises (which makes it inherently a low quality argument because of the sneakiness). Just openly arguing based on premises that another person doesn't share won't convince him.
Nobody says "Well, I'm going to convince you of homeopathy. You just need to assume that molecular patterns are a thing...."
In the abortion context, for example, if someone starts from the premise that it is always wrong to take an innocent human life
That doesn't even work. You can think it's wrong to take an innocent human life, but disagree that a fetus is an innocent human life (or a human life at all).
Jiro
1yr ago
This is like saying that hospitals can't use fentanyl as an anaesthetic sometimes, because the only thing stopping them from doing that are what's stopping them from selling fentanyl on the street.
I'm not making a generic argument about when you can do X. I'm making a fact-specific one. There could, logically speaking, be things that stop the Navy from using steroids to excess without stopping them from using steroids at all. I'm just not convinced that these logical possibilities exist in reality, for the actual Navy.
Any good ideas on how to call out and shut down this particular dis-ingenuity, perhaps?
Yes, win on everything else and gain control of the media and the discourse.
Saying "it's tiresome that people twist language to call people evil" is like saying "it's tiresome that people beat me up". It's not false, but it misses the point.
Jiro
1yr ago
«If not Putin then who?!» for 20 years straight is how Russia got into this mess.
That's availability bias. The fact that the person in this category you remember the most was terrible doesn't mean that such people are, in general, terrible. And your caterory is pretty weird anyway. Exactly how do Trump and Putin get put in the same category?
Jiro
1yr ago
This could be summarized as "superhero movies are low status. It's okay to be snobbish about low status people."
There have been plenty of superhero movies that crashed and burned because not enough effort was put into craft, including the majority of DC superhero movies that aren't about Batman. You can't just put in CGI and expect to make a ton of money from people who'll buy anything, because that just isn't true. People won't buy anything, and CGI doesn't substitute for craft.
Jokes are one thing. Jokes that are not obviously jokes are another.
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