I'd like to propose an amendment to the list of basic human rights. I think we need to add internet access. Everyone on earth, every person, deserves to be able to get on the internet and talk to whomever they wish. Every person deserves access to the internet's public repositories of information. If someone chooses not to use the internet that's fine, but anyone who wants to talk, or listen, or argue, or make weird art, or ask for help, or offer help, deserves to.

I’m not sure about the troop readiness these days, but afaik, USA is currently very close to its military capacity.

For everything it’s doing by having a quarter of 1 million troop stationed around the world and having between 3 and 5 Aircraft carrier groups floating around the world if they fully commit to an armed conflict with Venezuela they are basically spent.

That’s the moment any army can decide to do whatever the fuck they want and the USA can really basically only bark and look on. (Technically they could of course fight, but that would mean they sacrifice actual defence of homeland). So that would mean that China could take Taiwan, Russia could really take Ukraine or even poke further into Europe. Not to mention the Middle East would basically be without a guard dog.

If this happens this most likely would be the final nail in the coffin of the US Empire and almost analogous with how the Roman empire crumbled. (And of course the ultimate payoff for Vladdy to have helped Donnie get in the White House).

I don’t think there’s a whole lot of risk that the USA will try to take Canada or Greenland because of this.

There are people who are saying that we are at the same point as we were in Germany In the 1930s. I would argue this is much closer to Hitler having just taken all of Europe and now deciding to also go and take on The Russians.

Also don’t forget that Trump is truly one of the dumbest strategists we’ve ever had. The only success he’s having is because he has a very well oiled machine but even a well oiled machine has absolute nonnegotiable thresholds which Donald and Drunk Pete will probably try to ignore by renaming a department from defence to war and by hoping that will work.

Curious what others think about this situation?

E: spelling

There is a book called “On Being Certain”, by Robert A Burton who’s a neurologist, discussing how we know what we know. He postulates that the sense of “conviction” has less to do with objective reality and far more to do with “a feeling of knowing.” He also suggests that we are far less self-aware than we think we are.

People see a different viewpoint and their body reactively brings up all the conditioning received from popular advice. Instinctively, they hit the downvote button, thinking that they are rightfully decreasing the noise of a dangerous idea and protecting the less aware.

Most people aren’t interested in debate nor challenging the reality they find themselves in, or even the framing and interpretation of that reality.

Is lemmy supposed to be better then other social media?

How do we make lemmy a more thoughtful place? Or how do we create meaningful spaces on lemmy for thoughtful discussion of opposing views?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

We’re back! Instead of putting a neutral topic in the introduction, I'm placing a bit of opinion on an issue to see if it helps spur discussion. We are also actively seeking moderators and people who enjoy discussion (and understand that being wrong is an important part of being a better person)! Send me a message if you’d like to help out.

This week, I'd like to discuss something that I've not seen discussed much elsewhere.

Many on Lemmy are the type to want to see their government go through a revolution of some kind and think that slow change is impossible, but what happens after? Say you get a group and topple the oligarchy or shitty government in power, what then?

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• How do you defend what you're building from those who have more resources than you?
• What does the government look like?
• Would you keep anything from the old systems?
• What kind of leaders would you need?
• How do you stop it from turning into the NEXT horrible thing?

Something I see a lot in the Fediverse and left wing spheres is people rejecting, or making enemies of imperfect allies. The video I shared paints a great picture of what it's like.

Here is some examples I've seen, and what reactions they've been met with.

"I ditched Gmail for Proton" is met with "That's terrible the CEO is a Trump boot licker"

"Posts on r/BuyCanadian" is met with "Why are you still using Reddit, it's American?"

"I'm pro trans but, there are some things I'm not 100% onboard with" is met with "Harsh criticism & Ban"

"I sold my diesel SUV for an electric KIA" is met with "You shouldn't support China or drive a SUV, buy European instead"

"I switched to Brave instead of Chrome" is met with "Brave sucks its American and still part of chromium"
etc.

I so often see people harshly criticize and alienate people that are mostly on their side, and might in the near future be fully on their side.

Instead I'd like to see responses like

"Hey fantastic that you switched to Proton away from Gmail, consider moving to Migadu as they're an even better solution"

"Awesome that you're buying Canadian, while you're at it consider checking out Lemmy or PieFed"

"Great job switching to Electric, next time consider buying a smaller European car there are many great reasons why they are better"

"Great that you're pro-trance, what's stopping your from being onboard with XYZ? Maybe I can change your mind?"

"Nice Brave is already a lot better than Chrome, even better would be LibreWolf, also make sure to try out Kagi or Qwant instead of google"

You don't change someone's mind by criticizing them, you need to have a discussion and bring them over, tone matters. How do we stop these criticisms and alienating imperfect allies?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

We’re back! Instead of putting a neutral topic in the introduction, I'm placing a bit of opinion on an issue to see if it helps spur discussion. We are also actively seeking moderators and people who enjoy discussion (and understand that being wrong is an important part of being a better person)! Send me a message if you’d like to help out.

This week, I'd like to discuss something that's been a bit of an issue for me personally.

Lemmy (and Reddit before it) appears to have a problem with overly-aggressive bannings for perceived slights. In the topic linked above there were people permanently banning users from multiple communities (any they moderate - dozens in some cases) for single downvotes, 4 downvotes across a ten-month period, and bannings because a moderator thought they maybe sorta kinda read that a user may have had a negative thought about their pet issue.

I've personally been banned from Communities (and been sent some pretty vile PMs) for posting in our weekly threads here playing devil's advocate where I state hard questions that I do not necessarily feel are correct. They think they've discovered some secret agenda by finding posts I've made here and use them as "receipts" in order to dismiss anything they think they're reading that may be contrary to their opinion. Any context provided for the post falls on deaf ears.

I'm someone who operates on the idea of "If you can not defend an opinion from scrutiny, you should probably not hold that opinion."

To quote myself:

It’s pretty tragic that people can't handle opposing opinions. I think the activist nature of Lemmy is kind of a self-destructive spiral and people need to learn how to live with each other again. But I guess that’s the issue with modern social media as a whole… Nobody has any idea how to convince anyone else, only to yell at them louder.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• Are niche Communities correct for banning anyone who downvotes?
• Do downvotes represent a "disagree" button for you (this Community notwithstanding)?
• Most importantly, what would it take to change this?
• Does it help build the Community? What about the platform as a whole?
• Is there a way to build a "safe space" without building an echo chamber online? Is that even a valuable thing to build?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

We're back! We're testing the waters with the new influx of people to see if this is valuable or not. We are also actively seeking moderators and people who enjoy discussion (and understand that being wrong is an important part of being a better person)! Send me a message if you'd like to help out.

This weekly thread will focus on The Future Of The USA. You may not be American (I'm sure not), but what happens with America can impact the world.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• How do you feel things are going there?
• How are they impacting relations with your country if you aren't from America?
• Do you think things will get better or worse?
• How do you think things could be made better?
• What should other countries do to mitigate the damage that may be occurring?
• What are your thoughts on tariffs?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

I think one of the issues with online arguing, from most takes on it, is that the main reason people have to argue is to spread an idea. Whether it's by convincing the opposing part of the argument and making them change their mind, or by changing or reinforcing the mind of anonymous readers of the argument.

Most of the time this leads to one of two conclusions: If someone tries to change the other person's mind they will, most likely, find themselves hitting a wall, which will lead to frustration, disinterest, or personal attacks once it's seen that the other person will not change their mind. If they do not care about changing the other person's mind and just want to make clear that their own position is the right one to have, then the argument becomes a game of winning and losing. This could be achieved by many ways, depending on the context, it could lead to insulting and trying to put group pressure (via downvotes for instance) to make the other person's opinion seem as the "bad" one. Or via creating a game of rules, and play that game better to become a winner. Please excuse the small attack I'm about to make on this very space, but part of this second approach is the rules of debate, as in consider arguments without sources, emotional responses, or fallacies as losing points in the game of arguing. And often when the other part falls into one of this issues the goal quickly becomes to point out all this "faults" the other person made, so they are clearly shown as the loser. Don't get me wrong, it is important to argue without fallacies, and to be able to prove any statements that one's make. But I don't think anyone gains anything when the argument becomes a match on who is able to ask for more sources, link more articles and identify more fallacies.

That being said I'm going to just link some literature that support the basis of this statements. Can Arguments Change Minds? . This article goes into great lengths to show something that's easily seen when arguing online: People don't change their minds from an argument. The process of changing someone's mind is very complex. The article explains some study cases where people from extremist backgrounds changed their minds over time, in a context of discussion, but it's stated that this change had a lot more going out that just a proper intellectual discussion.

Why bother then? In my opinion, the best thing we can get when arguing with someone whose opinion differs to our own is to understand them. To find out their way of seeing things, their motives, their reasoning. That's a great value. And to get this often we need to let them talk the way they want to talk, this tend to lead to some undesirable things, like mentioned fallacies, unsupported claims or straight up bigotry and name-calling. But I think that it is still valuable knowing if that's their only reasoning, or trying to push past those to see if there's something more in depth about why they don't agree with us. But, ultimately, focusing the discussion in getting a win, will often make us miss a lot of valuable information that we could have gotten if we just saw the argument as a way to understand the other person, and of course, to understand ourselves. And not only for us to understand them, but to them to understand us. Explaining our point of view in the clearer way possible, and focussing not on winning when we talk about our opinions, but on showing why we have those opinions. To be able to reach a point of "I don't agree with you but I understand you".

Of course the big elephant in the room here is that taking this approach to it's logical conclusion would mean letting some people express ideas that we don't want to be expressed. The obvious example here is hate speech. Should hate speech, or extremist arguments be allowed, and discussed? If allowed, what's our goal when engaging into an argument with them, to convince, or to understand and make the other part to also understand us? This is where I'm more torn apart, as the logic of this reasoning leads me to believe that the best is the later, but it confronts with everything I've learn about how to deal with hate speech and dangerous ideologies until now. Thus why the (OPEN-ENDED) tag, and why I hope for anyone to jump and give their opinion on this.

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

We're back! We're testing the waters with the new influx of people to see if this is valuable or not. We are also actively seeking moderators and people who enjoy discussion (and understand that being wrong is an important part of being a better person)! Send me a message if you'd like to help out.

This weekly thread will focus on Political Purity Testing. The definition we will use for this discussion is here along with some real-world examples.

The attitude can essentially be summed up with "If you're not 100% with us, then you're against us."

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• Do you feel it is helpful or harmful to a side of an issue to purity test?
• Do you feel these tests are encountered more as you enter extreme areas of thought?
• Are there alternatives to purity testing that you'd rather see implemented?
• Do you feel this happens more on the left or right wing, or is it roughly equal?
• Here's a goofy quiz about which Canadian Political Party you most agree with. Take it and let us know the results if you feel like it! https://canada.isidewith.com/political-quiz

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This weekly thread will focus on Helping Us Fix Weekly Topics. This Community seems to have a problem. I generally do my best to create open-ended topics that don't lead the reader to respond in any specific way, all while providing what I think are interesting starters. I've purposely picked other moderators that do not think the same as I do on many topics, but have the skill to explain why they feel the way they do. Results of all of this seem to be extremely limited.

If I try and introduce some opinion in a topic for people to pick at (even if I don't believe it), they tend to get very aggressive and seem to insult moreso than discuss. They focus on moral arguments instead of logical ones and abandon discussions when challenged which sort of defeats the purpose (and goes against the rules) of the entire Community to begin with.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• Can we do anything with moderation or rules to help encourage you to respond more?
• Are there any format changes you'd like to see that may help?
• Do you ever feel that Lemmy is a more aggressive form of social media and therefore limit your discussion?
• Does the activist nature of Lemmy help or hurt further adoption?
• What topics would you like to see covered?
• Is Lemmy even a good platform for discussion to begin with?
• Would you like to be a mod and help out?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This weekly thread will focus on Climate Change. We're not going to discuss if it exists (it very obviously does), but what we can do. I've seen a lot of blame thrown around, but not much on what can actually be done so I'd like to get some ideas on that front.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• Should the focus be on individual actions or holding corporations accountable for their environmental impact?
• Should governments prioritize investment in renewable energy over fossil fuels, even if it means higher short-term costs?
• Is it more effective to implement strict climate change laws or to rely on voluntary measures and market-driven solutions?
• Should countries be obligated to accept climate refugees displaced by environmental changes?
• Is geoengineering a viable solution to combat climate change, or does it pose too many risks?
• Should climate change education be mandatory in schools worldwide?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This weekly thread will focus on the sometimes painful art of being wrong.

I don't mean not having an opinion and then forming one, I mean having an opinion, and then having that opinion changed with new or more accurate information.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• When was the last time you were wrong? What about something somewhat major?
• What was it regarding?
• How did it make you feel?
• What do you feel is the best way to correct someone with an ingrained opinion?
• Is it easier online or in person?
• When do you give up on talking to someone?
• Would you be open to a new thread type here where we create a Steelman post as a group? (eg. We start from questions and end up at THE post / article for finding information on a touchy subject)

This community has been around for a few months now. How do we feel about it? Are things working out? Any plans for further growing the community?

This is one of the topics I’ve been thinking a lot about quite a bit for the past few years (i.e. how to set up a community that values discussions with diverse viewpoints), so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts in relation to what I’m seeing here.

1. I think such a community necessarily needs to be a full self-contained instance, or else you’ll get very little activity. Think about how these discussions usually start. Someone posts an article/meme/question/etc, a few people show up and comment with similar thoughts about it worded in slightly different ways, then another shows up and goes against the grain, everyone dogpiles on them, and that’s when the real discussion starts. Very rarely do people go out of their way to ask “what do you think of X controversial topic?” And even if you do, that only leads to a very high level discussion that very quickly gets stale. If you get discussion in the context of specific events, then these discussions can be grounded in reality and lead to more unique context-dependent takes each time it comes up.

2. Regarding upvotes/downvotes: as stated in the rules, they should be used to measure whether a post/comment is a positive contribution to the discussion rather than the number of people who agree with your viewpoint. I don’t believe there’s a way to actually enforce this with the voting system we currently have, but I also think a relatively simple change can fix it. It will require a bit of coding.

   My proposal is a voting system with two votes: one to say that you agree/disagree, and another to say good/bad contribution. With this system, you can easily see if someone only thinks posts they agree with are good contributions, and you can use that information to calculate a total score that weighs their votes accordingly. It’s also small enough of a change that I think most people won’t have a problem figuring it out.

Thoughts?

Also, thank you Ace for taking the initiative in creating this place. It makes me happy to see that others want to see this change too.

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This weekly thread will focus on debate, discussion, and the lack thereof on social media (including Lemmy).

My apologies for "leading" a bit more than I try to normally in these weekly threads, however this is a topic that pisses me off in particular. Not only as a mod of a discussion-based community, but as someone who loves it when someone challenges me and proves me wrong / disproves my logic so I'd very much like to hear outside opinions on the topic. I can't even partially understand how people don't want to have a more cohesive / logically sound opinion.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• Do you feel that discussion is worse now? If so, what caused it? If not, where may others get this feeling from?
• Is it potentially a platform issue, or does it happen everywhere?
• Does discussion even matter any longer? Why or why not?
• Do you feel that more could be done to encourage discussion with outside views or are we better off just "bubble"-ing ourselves and blocking everyone we disagree with?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This weekly thread will focus on the word "Woke" and its meaning, use, and misuse.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• What does the word mean to you?
• Is it applied correctly or incorrectly?
• Is it even applicable any longer?
• Do you feel that Conservative media misapplies it, and is "everything I don't like is woke" an appropriate sentiment or simply uncharitable?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

PREFACE:

These dumb chat "A.I." programs are... not A.I. and even people selling it even recognize that.

THE CRUX:

We don't have real A.I. - we have generative models trained on massive amounts of data which in effect attempts to compress it down into a trained model which it can run to try and regenerate answers based on the data it was trained from. It is a lossy compression, as the model itself is too small to contain the whole of the information it ingests. As such it makes things up along the way in order to fill in the blanks. You can see this in how chat models like ChatGPT will confidently give you incorrect information. Researchers call this "hallucinating".

The model doesn't actually have any core understanding of the material it ingests - it can't, since it isn't actually an artificial intelligence. It can infer what things should look like, and it can do so well enough now to start fooling humans into thinking it knows what it's doing. We're in the 'uncanny valley' of generative language and code models. So that's one problem. It makes things up without understanding it, and can't reliably reproduce correct answers, only things that kinda look correct.

It's absolutely infuriating to people who actually understand the technology that we've taken to calling it "AI" at all. It's a stupid techbro marketing stunt and unfortunately for all of us it has stuck, and as a result we now all have to call it A.I., and only those of us with the right tech background to know better will understand just how misleading that label is.

The output is still garbage, but it's dangerously believable garbage.

Remember all those shitty chat bots that circulated around for a while? This is just that, but way more complex and easier to mistake for real intelligence. Imagine now, if you will, an internet full of such chat bots all set up by techbros and lazy hacks trying to cash in on the sudden easy ability to generate 'content' that can get past regular spam filters at a rate so fast that no human team can keep up with checking it all, and they're pulling this stuff down from the internet en masse to train their buggy models, then submitting it back to places that are indexed online where the next set of buggy models can ingest it, like an infinite Ouroboros of shit, so next thing you know you can't trust a damn thing you read anywhere, because it's all garbage generated from other people's garbage, and companies like IBM and Microsoft are even getting in on it.

And because the models learn based on statistical trends and averages over a large set of data? Guess what? This huge flood of new "A.I." generated data is now the norm, and as such it takes precedence over human generated data that by natural limitations cannot keep up with the speed at which the A.I. generated data is flooding the internet.

That's basically what's happening now. Because the average person making decisions about how to leverage this new, lucrative technology for profit doesn't understand (or care to understand) how it works or why it's a bad idea. All they see is the short term dollar signs from getting leg up on the competition by churning huge quantities of shit out faster and cheaper than any human can, in a market where increasingly only quantity matters, not quality.

It's already replacing journalists and authors as newspapers and publishing houses are getting backed up with a flood of "AI" generated submissions from people trying to cash in on it. A huge amount of recent content on the internet is entirely made up, imagined by these models, and very difficult to tell apart from actual researched information by real knowledgeable experts. Throwing this into the mix with the already problematic ecosystem of disinformation from entities like Cambridge Analytica, and even writing children's books to help human children learn to read? The future is very bleak indeed.

THINGS I HAVEN'T SPOKEN ABOUT (or only alluded to):

• The massive power usage
• Putting it into software that absolutely does not need it
• "Necromancing" dead people for clicks
• Making search nigh-unusable
• Further reducing the value of actual writers
• Mass layoffs because the idiots in charge think the tech can replace people (Spoiler - no, it can't)
• You know those shitty auto-generated "Radiant AI" quests in Skyrim that everyone hated? You know how whenever there's a randomly generated room in a game how you can tell just by looking at it that it wasn't designed with any semblance of thought? Like that but they want to use it for everything in games now.

Some Sources:

A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine

How Bad Are Search Results?

#First and foremost, let me say that I appreciate you actually engaging in a real discussion on Lemmy!

Why did I make this community? Well, mostly in response to the rest of Lemmy and the way many otherwise interesting discussion threads fall apart into downvoting and groupthink.

I don’t like people making baseless accusations. I defend people on all sides when people are wrong about their opposition. I hate it when people think they know what others think and project incorrect (and often evil) bullshit on each other. It’s important to be correct with solid reasoning and conclusions, not just one or the other.

I hate people being wilfully wrong because their group fetishizes a certain angle of the truth instead of the boring reality of the situation.

Ideas are important and I don’t feel we can get out of the current shitty slump we’re in with political discourse unless we clearly speak about and discuss the world.

So let's talk like people. What do you want to talk about?