The “experiment” is one you conduct on yourself, it’s not for thinking about a process and using your imagined results as the basis of further study. It’s very useful in a number of non scientific fields, and it can serve as an aid in scientific education though, so it shouldn’t be written off generally.

The paper clip thought experiment is a punchy, memorable example of the conflict between what input you give to a computer and what the computer interprets from that. The goal is for people who hear it to remember that they need to be thoughtful about what exactly they want and precise in their phrasing when they’re programming or training an AI.

Tbh, I think we’re going the Russia route. I wish we could have as graceful a transition out of being a superpower as the UK (I’m not calling theirs objectively graceful, just less erratic and batshit).

2031 still sounds like a year out of a sci-fi story to me, but it’s only five years away

Monkey’s paw: everyone is now from Newfoundland

I don’t know why I’m surprised that the sun doesn’t know the difference between affect and effect, but I am.

I’m an immigrant in Germany and my boss (from here) recently asked me if it was a jerk move to do laundry on a Sunday if she checked with her neighbors first.

It made me realize I’ve been such an unintentional asshole. I’ve been avoiding things like carpentry and band practice, not laundry. There’s a guy on my street who mows the lawn before nine in the morning on Sundays though, so I’m not the worst in my neighborhood.

Tbh, I used that phrasing specifically because you were snippy about someone else making a claim based on their own experience and I was trying to prod you about the evidence you’re using.

When people kill each other “for no reason,” there’s often still a reason (though not an excuse)- territory in the case of gang or murder of romantic partners, protection or survivor’s benefits for your own family for soldiers killing in war, or people accidentally letting a killer instinct loose during play for people who get into brawls or similar. Even horrific crimes like genocide are committed out of a dual protective of kin/and aggressive of outsiders instinct.

The Wikipedia lists possible reasons, but we don’t actually know why animals do this when it’s actively harmful to them yet.

I don’t see how that supports that humans are one of a few species that kills for no reason, if we know that other animals kill in scenarios where it hurts them and we don’t actually commonly kill each other for no reason.

You might not, but I do 🤷

6 7

That’s impressive as hell, tbh. I’m glad rehab centers focus on such useful, otherwise seemingly inaccessible skills

I don’t like chimps, but bonobos and gorillas are also very chill

I don’t know where you saw that fact being presented, but surplus killing has long been documented in many species, including those who don’t make caches for winter.

This guy would like Octavia Butler

Is it “hate” to think a platform sucks?

Many leftists started out as liberals, it makes sense they’d believe others could also change.

-signed, a vegan married to a butcher, so don’t listen to me lol (at least he’s a leftist)

I really want to see the cross examination

It wouldn’t compel me to hurt people, but I definitely get more into kinks the more time I spend with them (to a point). Violence in media has never had a noticeable effect on me though.

It’s tough, because I don’t want to give him or the American justice system the benefit of the doubt, but I really hate the misrepresentation of this in the media. Charging someone with treason doesn’t mean they’ll be imprisoned or executed, it means they’ll be put on trial. If this story had addressed the potential for the president to bias the country against these reporters by calling personally for them to be charged with treason, I would be a lot less annoyed by the headline, but it’s inaccurate and they didn’t put any actual investigation into this piece.

It might be splitting hairs, but I really do wish for exhaustive Nuremberg style trials when I call this regime criminal, treasonous, and genocidal. I wouldn’t mourn if a few of them didn’t make it to trial, but I don’t want them to be able to take their secrets to the grave en masse.

I think a cool solution would be to aggregate all of the tags that each user has received from other users and if there are frequent enough overlaps, a suggested tag might show up next to their name.

Of course, that would require user tags to be logged, which is not currently the case, afaik. It’s also not foolproof, because I’ve got at least one user tagged as “belligerent and stupid,” which, while probably helpful for others, is not likely to come up in other users’ tags. Most of my tags are probably pretty common though: troll, occasional troll, thoughtful, insightful, etc.

And finally, it might be susceptible to brigading or worse, if someone decides to make a bunch of accounts to tag LGBTQ users or something. Using the same federation rules as in other scenarios, where users or instances can be blocked or defederated at the instance level would help that, but I don’t know if it’s possible.

Pro tip: lie to the people around you about stupid stuff.