fear

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.

Trump is a full blown cult of personality at this point, no one else will do. Maybe that’s a good thing since he doesn’t seem to have much time left.

Are you really pretending there’s no difference between assisting a country in defending itself from an aggressor, and starting your own war as the aggressor?

True, but with how secretive North Korea is, it’s difficult to get accurate cultural news directly from the source.

Send in the great musician!

欲蓋彌彰

I just can’t with this western bullshit!

I’m sure if someone remarked about “eastern bullshit” that you would cry racism, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Thanks for at least being amusing by calling me a racist and then immediately acting like one yourself. Don’t feel too bad about it, you’re one of countless to prove that wise saying which predates the CCP by 1400 years.

You pointed out how well China will be able to combat their declining birth rates and what they are doing to raise fertility rates. That’s great. You disliked the format of the article and didn’t feel it expressed their point adequately. Awesome. But you’re coming at the comments section with an intensity that seems disproportionate to how banal the article is. Birth rates are plummeting across the world, and every other country has their turn to have attention drawn to it, complete with their own set of uninvited suggestions regarding potential impact and what to do about it. It’s okay for people to disagree on the impact of stats like this. It’s normal and healthy when done in good faith.

Regarding your other post: “Anti-CCP is anti-China” is a tactic to try to deflect away criticism entirely. It is dangerous for a population to be stripped of the right to criticize their government. I criticize my own government all the time, and others as well when I think they’re making poor decisions. The CCP doesn’t get to be above this on an international scale because racism. The old stigmatizing the critic into silence approach is not conducive to open dialogue, and it’s ultimately a way of shooting yourself in the foot. 欲蓋彌彰

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.

A justice system criticised by Iran’s psychiatrists

Thank goodness. Hopefully they all fight against this blatant exploitation of psychiatry to persecute and control women.

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.

The remarks were made by Qiao Jie, deputy of Peking University Health Science Center and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, at a conference on Tuesday.

The population in the Chinese mainland fell for the first time in 61 years in 2022, decreasing by a total of 850,000, data released by the National Bureau of Statistics showed.

Doesn’t sound like clickbait at all to me. The viewpoint appears quite honest and genuine, and they go on to give sources for why they believe this matters. If you have contradicting stats, please share.

Stop closing in on me!

Not my fault it’s so forgettable.

Something becoming more than the sum of its parts to such a degree would indeed be magic. Are you claiming we’re AI computer programs and that real life is analogous to ChatGPT? Are information and consciousness synonymous? I would say that one of us indeed doesn’t understand the complexity of the situation.

we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon

This statement begins with the assumption that the brain produces consciousness, then says that because the thing that produces consciousness has components, that it can’t be fundamental. This is a really really good example of circular logic.

I find emergence to be the least reasonable of the 3 main hypotheses I consider, but I still accept that it’s possible since I can’t disprove it. However, it is illogical to conclude your hypothesis must be true at this stage.

Your comparison proves nothing. It is no different than insisting a radio must be creating the signal it’s picking up, because if you poured alcohol or liquid gabapentin all over it, it will no longer be able to play music. I’m sure you realize that if your radio breaks, that doesn’t mean the radio signal has disappeared. It is possible our brains are simply interfacing with consciousness rather than inexplicably fabricating it from more than the sum of its parts.

Based on everything science has taught me, it seems far more likely to me that consciousness is not magically created by my brain, but rather one of two things are happening:

1. My brain is able to interface with a conscious field

2. Consciousness is a force inherent within the universe, and our brains are able to make use of the force

Why would you assume it’s an emergent property and thus should be dismissed as not being a force of nature? I’m making fewer assumptions than you are by wanting to list it alongside the other forces until we can determine if it is emergent or not, and the implications of such emergence. It’s kind of a big deal that we can sit here and ponder the forces of nature with some degree of control over our little sack of atoms.

It’s safe to say that this list is going to change over time and represents a current snapshot of humanity’s limited understanding. Under the current snapshot of human understanding, leaving it off of the list seems to me to indicate an ironic bias on the behalf of researchers who must use the very force in question to do anything. By necessity, it is the overarching phenomenon surrounding all other forces since the only place we can definitively know these forces even exist is within our own mind. To say anything more is to make assumptions.

While I agree that a certain level of assumptions are necessary if we’re going to get anywhere, I’m also acutely aware that they’re still assumptions and that assumptions are not scientific. If we’re going to be scientific about this, we need to make as few assumptions as possible.

Not the one with the complaint, but I can see their point. Decapitations during birth happen around the world several times a year, with only some of those cases ever going to the news. When they do hit the news, they spread quickly because of the shock factor. Yet the general public may come away from this not realizing it’s is far from the first time and won’t be the last.

I’d say this would make a great world news article if some of the prior cases from across the world were also mentioned, and the bigger issue of women being dismissed by their doctors was prominently referenced with supporting studies.