fear

Man people are judgy as hell. I like to think that I’d notice and stop too, but at 11pm, tired in the middle of nowhere with no street lights? How many of us know 100% that we would have stopped in time? It’s understandable how this happened.

After an entire decade of directing people to drive off a goddamn bridge, Google should apologize to the family and settle. It’s shameful. Get a better update team if you’re going to provide a mapping service.

1. Don’t use Tiktok (and other low quality social media like Twitter) and encourage people you know to do the same. Suggest alternatives like federated sites, and help people navigate it if you can.

2. Firmly correct disinformation when you see it. If you have a topic of interest you find yourself repeatedly addressing, keep a short copy/paste response with easily digestible sources to make the process quick and painless.

3. Engage as little as possible with disinformation, since any kind of engagement is exactly what they’re looking for. When you stumble upon it, state a brief sourced correction and quickly leave. If someone beat you to it, simply leave and avoid in the future.

4. Teach your friends and family about the dangers of misinformation, and the importance of vetting sources. Peer reviewed journal = great. Random youtuber/tiktoker = needs sources to confirm validity.

5. Try to be as polite as possible when addressing disinformation because aggression can cause people to dig their heels in and push them further into the false narrative.

6. Learn terms to describe the spread of disinformation that are easy for people to grasp. Learning and teaching others about things like “good/bad faith arguments” so you can spot and effectively counter trolls, recognizing “irony poisoning” that is a driving force behind the normalization of extremist views, and understanding how “woke” actually means “tolerant and respectful of the differences between human beings” can all help people to see what’s happening and protect against disinformation.

7. If you’re motivated enough, start your own publication that provides accurate, well sourced information on your topics of interest, or join an already established publication as a freelance contributor.

8. Don’t give up. Don’t let anyone convince you that the fight is already over and that we’re doomed to live out 1984. The real fight hasn’t even begun, because so many people are too caught up in their own stressful lives to realize there’s a full blown culture war going on here. Once more people open their eyes to it, sanity will prevail. These points here are exactly how you can begin opening people’s eyes.

Pretty sure you could substitute “autism” with any topic at all and the point would be accurate.

Your assessment seems spot on to me. I’m connecting some projected dots to late stage capitalism. Perhaps the AIs will trickle down and such if we hold off on regulations.

Of course it’s possible for the government to impose regulations without sticking their face in and motorboating the AI’s contents. Google, Microsoft et al. would love to prevent this from happening because they actually do have their faces in there.

This is such an important distinction. Current AI is incapable of wanting to cause any of that harm, yet it’s already happening. The danger won’t be skynet, it will be and always has been human greed and ignorance.

Hmm, this makes me think of the tradition on certain parts of the internet where people publicly announce the name and crime of this convicted rapist. They’ll explain where he’s currently living, the name he’s trying to go by, and bars he was seen at. This activity seems to stem from the outrage at the excessive leniency he was shown by the judge, although could also be protecting other potential victims.

I wonder if this kind of vigilante doxxing would fall under the scope of such a law, especially when his name is already in so many publications.

Stop closing in on me!

First the Streisand effect led to her home. Now it leads to her entire discography. Poor Barbara Streisand.

why do the author’s politics make a difference?

In this case it makes a difference because there has been an alarming increase in harmful lies made by the far right. This is a purposeful spread of misinformation that many people hesitate to get involved with in any way, and for good reason.

I do not trust the creator of Brave to be aligned with the far right and to still be guided by ethical conduct that I can trust. If you align yourself with people who lie and put others in danger for profit and control, you’re condoning such behavior and may be capable of it yourself.

Yeah, I took a look at the code they used in the article that might help someone generate functional attacks. A rando experimenting without permission would likely get banned from the service.

I just tried this on ChatGPT, it doesn’t work.

Don’t give France any ideas.

this study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute under grant numbers R21 HL135300 and R01 HL150053, as well as by contracts from the NIH/NHLBI funding the four field centers.

It says right on the study how it was funded, that guy was being sarcastic and rude which is why he was downvoted. If there is a bias in this study, it’s not immediately apparent from the funding.

I mostly agree with your point, just substitute “genetics” for the actual array of reasons why we have an obesity epidemic. Environment, upbringing, emotional state, level of education, financial resources, access to healthy food, sedentary lifestyle, disordered eating habits, trauma, medications, hormonal imbalances, physical and mental health, etc.

It’s common sense that people trying to lose weight are more likely to reach for non-caloric products, and with other studies showing that most people who lose weight will gain it back within 5-10 years, it’s makes this study’s results obvious and proves nothing new unfortunately. Sweeteners very well could be an independent cause of weight gain, but until they account for all of the confounding factors that influence why people gain and lose weight, they won’t be able to determine its true role in the matter.

They’re asking a valid question everyone should have in the back of their minds when reading study results, no need to eye roll. It’s not some crazy conspiracy theory that corporations will happily fund studies in the hopes of cherry picking results in their favor. It’s bad science and it happens all the time unfortunately. Sometimes bad science makes it into good journals, and it can take years to figure out that the study was flawed due to bias.

I was just reading this morning about the immunologist Jacques Benveniste who got his study published in Nature, he claimed that water had memory and that antibodies imprinted on diluted water. It was such a bold claim that it made international news and quacks everywhere ran with it. It took some investigation to determine the scientists Benveniste was working with were paid off by a company that sold homeopathic products. There’s also the douche who got the MMR vaccine linked to autism. Despite the study being debunked, it’s an idea that pervades mom groups across the globe and has resulted in a resurgence of measles that never had to happen.

J&J should have taken action years ago, they could have prevented so much suffering and death. This is a great article on the issue from back in 2020, explaining how J&J could still profit even if they only charged 25 cents per pill. Instead they charged several tens of thousands of dollars for a course of the medication, leaving 80% of people in the world who need treatment unable to access what might save their lives. It’s unconscionable.

Thanks for speaking out and sharing. I’ll do what little I can on my end and boycott this company until they do better. At this point I trust the no name brand over J&J anyways so it’s an easy option.

I was going to ask where’s Facebook’s CEO, but we all know Data can walk the ocean floor and take no damage.

The Offspring. They always seemed to latch onto whatever sound was most popular at the time and regurgitated more of the same. Somehow they built an extremely successful career doing this.

It was the rubber band of believing in yourself. It came down to bestow you with +2 confidence, +1 ingenuity and +3 mending for completing his quest.

People who have good reasoning skills can see it for what it is, so we need to collectively get into the habit of calling out disingenuous manipulation and put a stop to it. Rather than focusing on refuting each specific point, draw attention to the most ridiculous points, refute one or two, then stop engaging entirely because it is self-defeating.

The fact that this man is still given televised platforms after everything is unreal. All that does is give the illusion that there is substance to his manipulation. He needs to be shunned to his echo chamber and the world needs to move on.