As a Finn I'm more than moderately worried that we're, if not next in line, at least in line for a demilitarization by Russia. We're not a NATO member (mainly because our population is 90% idiots who can't understand that WW II was very different time), so there's a nontrivial chance that we'll get invaded just 'cause – and if we start talks to join NATO we're sure to get invaded just like Ukraine. Russia is much like the US; their culture is so deeply sociopathic that their existence as a nation is a threat to everyone. Unfortunately there's no way to unfuck that particular situation without a nuclear holocaust, but at this point I'm not even convinced that'd be a bad thing. We're going to destroy the planet and ourselves one way or another, we're not nearly smart enough to not do that.
This is just like our "totally not neo-Nazi" party here in Finland. Their members continuously get caught on photo with neo-Nazis but they're absolutely not affiliated in any wayHowever its party cadre has an unfortunate habit of serially getting caught in compromising situations where it’s clear they support the neo-Nazi far right
The situation here is unsurprisingly pretty complex. There's a lot of fairly well-substantiated anxiety that we're going to be next in line due to not being in NATO. Our Foreign Policy Institute said that it's fairly likely Russia will be using military force against us in the "next few years". This really hammers home the sort of anxiety we're talking about here. A couple of years ago the majority of Finns were against joining, in recent polls it's been about 50/50. It definitely says something that it's still only 50/50, though. The main argument against NATO seems to revolve around our supposed historical neutrality, but in all honestly it feels more like Finlandization than an actual argument; our "neutrality" has never been exactly neutral, starting with being allied with the Nazis (totally only for convenience, we swear, no ideological ties whatsoever, no sir). Another (and IMO more credible) argument is that we don't want to be dragged into a war by the US – people don't really trust the US especially after Trump, and the US's human rights abuses are often pointed out in NATO discussions. Some also feel a bit iffy about joining an alliance with Turkey, whose human rights record is also not exactly what you'd call stellar. Edit: many especially on the left (where most of the resistance to joining NATO is coming from, in addition to some of the ultranationalist nutballs who love Putin) also say that joining a military alliance makes no sense if you want peace. The debate you're referring to probably meant the various citizens' initiatives that popped up. We have an online initiative system where the parliament has to consider every initiative with over 50k signatures (done using an eID provider). They, however, aren't in any way compelled to do anything about them, and the majority of initiatives really don't lead to squat unless there was existing political will to do it in the first place. I'd give about 50-70% odds of us going for NATO membership, although the question is how do we do that without Russia eg. starting a border skirmish before the membership ratification round is done.
The climate pooch is so thoroughly screwed that I'm glad to be 40; I may not have to see the worst of what's likely coming up. It's no wonder just about everyone I know who's my age or younger has some level of climate anxiety. I personally feel pretty hopeless about our chances: we're just smart enough to be able to fuck things up at scale, but not smart enough to do anything about it once it's become apparent
Honestly, I'm this close to suicide. It's been a terrible 10 months, and the trajectory isn't for the better. My wife left me after finding someone better. My friends all evaporated after I got depressed, even my closest ones. Surprising health problems popped up. Can't concentrate so work's going to shit (and I own part of the company so that's a problem). It's been 3 months since I last got hugged. 2 weeks since I last spoke to someone who wasn't a cashier or the like. I get comfort from the thought that if things are still as shit as they are after about a year or so, I can just kill myself. I'm tired.
Weirdly judgemental. Should everybody just stay in situations that don't make them happy?
Near enough a ground zero for any missile so that you don't survive the initial strike
They've gone far enough to the authoritarian side that they're hitting what these studies reference. This snippet from one says it best: Indeed, the empirical literature reveals negative relations between cognitive abilities and right-wing social-cultural attitudes, including right-wing authoritarian (e.g., Keiller, 2010; McCourt et al., 1999), socially conservative (e.g., Stankov, 2009; Van Hiel et al., 2010), and religious attitudes (e.g., Zuckerman, Silberman, & Hall, 2013).Wonder why the GOP only can resonate with morons these days
Right-wing ideologies offer well-structured and ordered views about society that preserve traditional societal conventions and norms (e.g., Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). Such ideological belief systems are particularly attractive to individuals who are strongly motivated to avoid uncertainty and ambiguity in preference for simplicity and predictability (Jost et al., 2003; Roets & Van Hiel, 2011). Theoretically, individuals with lower mental abilities should be attracted by right-wing social-cultural ideologies because they minimize complexity and increase perceived control (Heaven, Ciarrochi, & Leeson, 2011; Stankov, 2009). Conversely, individuals with greater cognitive skills are better positioned to understand changing and dynamic societal contexts, which should facilitate open-minded, relatively left-leaning attitudes (Deary et al., 2008a; Heaven et al., 2011; McCourt, Bouchard, Lykken, Tellegen, & Keyes, 1999). Lower cognitive abilities therefore draw people to strategies and ideologies that emphasize what is presently known and considered acceptable to make sense and impose order over their environment. Resistance to social change and the preservation of the status quo regarding societal traditions—key principles underpinning right-wing social-cultural ideologies—should be particularly appealing to those wishing to avoid uncertainty and threat.
Huh, neat. Somehow it's both surprising and not surprising that the blackest of engineered blacks is just about equivalent to what we can find in nature
They definitely are. Conservatives and authoritarians don't care much about any sort of objectively verifiable reality, and this is plainly evident when looking at eg. the "war" on drugs, their stance on sex education (or education in general), their stance on crime (i.e. harsher punishments, which has been shown to not work at all), and so on and so on. Conservatism/authoritarianism in general appeals to people who can't deal with any sort of complexity, and this has been fairly comprehensively proven. The current situation is complex enough that they'd rather pretend it's all the Other's faultYou may be right, but I think Trump (and especially Pence) are gambling on public perception and media coverage
You can be a real ass sometimes. How about calm it down on the berating others for opinions for a change? OftenBen wasn't wrong about what they said about you previously. Just… accept that they have a different opinion, have a sensible talk instead of barging in like everyone else is wrong and you're taking heads. And I honestly, really don't say this with any malice. You just really tend to be overly critical of other people's opinions. They weren't even being critical of religion as such, as far as I could tell
Well, I mean… – Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact – Cognitive ability, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation: a five-year longitudinal study amongst adolescents – Conservatism and cognitive abilityDespite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.
We report longitudinal data in which we assessed the relationships between intelligence and support for two constructs that shape ideological frameworks, namely, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). Participants (N = 375) were assessed in Grade 7 and again in Grade 12. Verbal and numerical ability were assessed when students entered high school in Grade 7. RWA and SDO were assessed before school graduation in Grade 12. After controlling for the possible confounding effects of personality and religious values in Grade 12, RWA was predicted by low g (β = -.16) and low verbal intelligence (β = -.18). SDO was predicted by low verbal intelligence only (β = -.13). These results are discussed with reference to the role of verbal intelligence in predicting support for such ideological frameworks and some comments are offered regarding the cognitive distinctions between RWA and SDO.
Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated. The evidence is based on 1254 community college students and 1600 foreign students seeking entry to United States' universities. At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, Vocabulary, and Analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education (e.g., gross enrollment at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels) and performance on mathematics and reading assessments from the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) project. They also correlate with components of the Failed States Index and several other measures of economic and political development of nations. Conservatism scores have higher correlations with economic and political measures than estimated IQ scores.
Galapagos – being a remote smattering of volcanic islands in the middle of nowhere – at least has plenty of redeeming features like being a remote smattering of islands in the middle of nowhere, and it's something I'd personally want to experience. Windows seems more like the creepy uncle of operating systems. Everybody knows about the scandals, has probably been personally subjected to abuse (like you with your mouse), nobody really likes them much less actually wants to have anything to do with them, but you're sort of expected to get along because that's just how things work and you don't have much choice. Every Christmas you grit your teeth and pour another glass of wine, carry on. A friend of mine who's also an old-timey IT nerd does all his Serious Computer Stuff™ on macOS or Linux but has a Windows setup for gaming, and he jokes about the fact that with Windows, reinstalling the OS is pretty much "Tuesday". And here's me with my current setup which is based on a backup image that I've been using for almost 10 years old now; while I've obviously updated the OS and hardware (but not too often…) along the years, I'm not sure I've ever had to do an actual reinstall in OS X / macOS. This despite the fact that the disk image has absolutely archaeological accumulations of cruft in it that I'm honestly a bit astonished that some combination of obscure config files I've modified over the aeons to do god knows what to who knows what hasn't triggered enough edge cases to make the OS just give up and die. I mean, parts of this image have been with me since before Apple moved to Intel hardware which was like in 1875
Honestly the Apple walled garden that everybody has been going on about for quite a while hasn't really been all that walled. I moved away from Windows to Linux in the late 90's (Slackware!), then later on to OS X, and I've been coding for about 30 years now, so it's not that all I use my computer for is Facebook and porn. On my computer I get an operating system that allows me to use the exact same stuff I would on the Linux side (well, in the terminal anyhow) but is otherwise much less of a pain in the ass than any version of Windows I've had to use in the past years. Sure, the OS & hardware has had its problems and it's honestly been getting worse, but never have I felt like the OS or Apple have prevented me from doing something or limited me. My days of using Gentoo and a tiling window manager with painstakingly crafted custom configuration and constant tweaking are way behind me. Now I just want my computer to stay the fuck out of my way and not piss me off unduly much, I don't really care all that much about the price, but I need a lot of the UNIX-y under-the-hood stuff too. Not too many options out there, really. Every time I'm forced to use eg. Windows it just amazes me what an absolute garbage fire of an OS it still is (and god fucking help you if you need to deal with Windows servers or workstation AD/LDAP/whatever setups), and not just because it's unfamiliar but because shit breaks constantly, configuration is hard to get to, the update mechanism is downright sadistic, usability in most applications (consumer or not) is often questionable at best, yada yada yaa. With my phone it's the same deal. I used Android (or Maemo, or Meego, etc.) for years and eventually my "fucking Android" exclamations turned into an in-joke with my friends. iOS I simply just don't have to curse at as much, it stays out of my way and does what I need; and I honestly don't need much. Phone's 5 years old and I only switched the last time because the previous one got so borked that it wasn't worth fixing. While I think the direction with eg the M1 (which is apparently really locked down) is terrible, putting a fucking touch bar on pro-line laptops was fantastically stupid, and combining iOS and macOS development isn't going to lead to solutions that'll keep me happy, I simply don't get what the issue is that people have with Apple products.
I honestly thought this was a parody article based on the headline. We've crossed the parody horizon long ago and fallen into some sort of infinitely dense bullshit singularity
I watched about half; I'm never getting that 50min of my life back. This has to honestly be one of the worst movies I've seen, and that's saying a lot considering Battlefield Earth exists. It's like the plot is so fantastically stupid just so people can feel smart watching it. And I'm not necessarily all that discerning: I thought Soldier was great.
It's great that there's more and more discussion about biases in technology. We have this tendency to view any sort of technology as being somehow completely value neutral and incapable of having biases built into it
The two-handed drinking could be essential tremor too. Pretty common in men, especially as we age. I've got it myself and I have to use two hands to drink or I'll end up spilling everything.
Americans are deeply weird. I honestly have a hard time processing the whole mega-church televangelism thing; it's like a capitalist fever dream version of religion
This subject is really endlessly fascinating. Peoples' propensity towards thinking that rationality and emotion are somehow separate, that emotions are something that need to be suppressed because they make you less rational is something of a pet peeve of mine, so this ties into that in interesting ways
Oh, and great job with the site. I especially like the clean and simple layout
I'm honestly not sure there's much hope of humanity collectively looking in the mirror and really try to fix this. It'd require drastic and far-reaching changes more or less now if we want to stick to the "1.5C" handwavy goal we've been globally discussing. And it's not just about insects, it's everything; ocean acidification, overfishing, logging, mining, meat production, electronics production, energy production methods and so on.
I'm frankly somewhat convinced we're going to see multiple authoritarian dictatorships in Europe in the coming decades. Poland and Hungary are already fairly far down that path, Germany has AfD gaining popularity, hard-right parties are gaining popularity in all the Nordics, and similar stuff's happening down South as well. Here in Finland our nationalist right-wing party just had an internal schism due to the original leadership not being racist enough, we spawned the whole Soldiers of Odin shit, national socialist "resistance movements" are gaining popularity and so on.
Actually, OftenBen's description sounds more like what cjdns was designed for. One existing cjdns mesh is Hyperboria
I was expecting this to go in a much different direction than it did; I'm happy it turned out, well, happy. My maternal grandmother died (back in the 70s) after slipping on ice. My mom's nearly 80 and slipped just a couple of weeks ago, but thankfully only banged up her head and hip a bit, but didn't break anything. I would imagine she had a moment where she thought "this is how I go."
I've been reading about the nature of consciousness today, and I really wanted to share this thought. So, turns out that our experience of consciousness isn't actually real-time; what we perceive – sensory input, our thoughts, the decisions we make and so on – as happening right now has actually already happened. Everything we perceive is tens to hundreds of milliseconds in the past, and when we become conscious of making a choice, the choice has already been made. It's like our consciousness is the brain's/mind's way of letting "me" know what's going on, and actually being the "me"; it gives us a narrative. I was sort of blown away by this idea that what I experience as "me, here and now" is in a way only the tip of the iceberg of my mind and what my brain does. Like I'm looking at a movie of my own life
Great article. I've been thinking around the same themes lately, and one thing that stuck out was the argument that banning someone from e.g. Facebook isn't as close to censorship as "meddling with trust and attention." While I absolutely agree that these new tactics powered by behavioral data really do amount to censorship, I'd say that the big platforms have such a disproportionate impact on our lives that bans are effectively censorship; just because someone can still access the Internet doesn't mean a unilateral Google or Facebook ban couldn't have a tremendous impact. The simplest case would be a political dissident getting banned from Facebook, but it doesn't have to be anything that "foreign" to most of us. Many of us are completely reliant on the megaplatforms for data storage, mail, calendars, communication and so on; our lives are increasingly digital, and whoever serves your digital life to you is the one holding the reins
Funny how OpenAI keeps on being everything but open. Well, "funny" probably isn't the right word here. Elon Musk is just such a prime example of what's wrong with the world and the economic system that all of his projects feel indelibly tainted by him. The man is a tax-dodging and union-hating billionaire calling himself "basically a socialist". That's just… no. No. Noooo. No.
Furze is great. I'm honestly surprised he still has the standard amount of limbs & digits and is alive and well. For anyone who's not familiar I highly recommend watching the bunker stuff too, or anything he's made for that matter