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Author Topic: AmeriPol thread  (Read 3533352 times)

Naturegirl1999

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31185 on: July 14, 2019, 11:31:17 am »

So it’s not possible to teach someone who doesn’t want to learn, could one possibly teach the importance of learning, rather than the facts themselves, and then they can learn things? It frustrates me that some people cling to false information after the information has been proven false. Maybe I should become a science teacher to help people learn what science is, thank you for correcting me. You’re right it’s not about proving things true, it’s eliminating falsehoods until you are left with true things.
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Folly

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31186 on: July 14, 2019, 11:40:33 am »

it’s not about proving things true, it’s eliminating falsehoods until you are left with true things.

I prefer 'It's not about proving that you are right, it's about proving that everyone else is wrong'.
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Naturegirl1999

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31187 on: July 14, 2019, 12:03:12 pm »

Yes. I tend to be bad at wording things. Thank you
Back to Trump
getting rid of a nuclear deal to spite another president is stupid
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hector13

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31188 on: July 14, 2019, 12:06:38 pm »

That’s pretty much Trump’s presidency so far. Everything is bad unless it’s the same thing but has his name on it.
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the way your fingertips plant meaningless soliloquies makes me think you are the true evil among us.

sluissa

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31189 on: July 14, 2019, 12:13:34 pm »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHckZCxdRkA

It all started right there.

Up until that point he'd been more or less on whoever's side it was that benefited him. He made donations to Republicans and Democrats. He supported politicians on both sides.

After that, all connections with the Democrats dried up.

All because the man can't take a joke. All because he decided to back a dumb conspiracy theory and refused to back down from it.
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Naturegirl1999

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31190 on: July 14, 2019, 07:51:56 pm »

So basically they're forcing the top 20% of earners to use the standard deduction, except for the top 1% and corporations who will still use itemized deductions and pay even less.

So... I'm sure this is dumb but I can't see why.  If we just made everyone use the standard deduction on income tax, would that destroy society?  Because it seems like that would fix a good chunk of our tax code.  I get it would hurt people with a lot of business expenses, but why should some rich asshole not pay taxes on his first class plane ticket he can afford if I'm paying taxes on my train ticket that actually hurts me a lot?

I guess it would hurt small businesses in particular, but I don't know that small businesses should even be paying income tax.  Or businesses in general.  If we tax money businesses hold year to year (as investments or cash, or unused assets like gold), tax money that leaves the country*, and tax money that gets paid out to domestic employees via those employees own income tax... all the money is being taxed.  There's no reason to have income tax on corporations.  And it would solve the small business issue.  If you don't pay yourself with company money** for the first year or two, and you put the money you make back into the business, you just don't pay taxes on your business.

Like seriously what are itemized deductions adding?  From what I understand a little under half of corporations just don't pay income tax, because they can pay money out to charities and get 2-4x the money spent as deductions.  Then they can double dip if the charity is owned by one of their CEO's private sector buddies because the CEO has effectively paid himself that money tax free and then used it as a bribe.  Most people in the country are using the standardized deduction meaning their work expenses are still taxed, while meanwhile everyone seems to agree that we'd prefer that rich people pay their actual tax bracket without deductions.  And its not like personal working expenses mean shit to the Bill Gates of the world, as any major expense is just going to come out of the company.  Under my proposed system that money wouldn't bet taxed in the first place, instead if its say an airline ticket or fine dining at a meeting then the money would only be taxed once the airline/restaurant spent it on something other than business expenses.

*mostly blindly.  Something like there's two rates; if you're paying money out to foreign corporation or freelancer, 5%, if you're moving it to a bank account or corporation you control, 33% or something disheartening like that.  There would be no tariffs, no brackets, just two questions: is the money leaving the country?  And will the person moving the money keep control of it?  Very simple flow chart.  And if you get the 5% rate you have to give the government an itemized list of everything you spent the money on, which congress could subpeona and individuals could make a freedom of information request about it after 5 years (to prevent industrial espionage).  Because I'm sure rich people would think of some scam to get the 5% rate and at least that way journalists and auditors could try and sniff out those games

**as in you're either a person with existing income e.g. from real estate, or you hold on to some of your startup funds for living expenses.  Or if we're talking really small, your parents/SO cover your expenses
Found this post kind of far back, from what I’ve read, you would probably make a good congressman, o pass this law
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Naturegirl1999

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31191 on: July 15, 2019, 05:37:34 am »

IMO, both sides are right here in different ways.

The crux of it is it's genuinely scary how much power modern infotech giants have over what information the majority of the public is exposed to, and that gives them historically unprecedented ability to bend the world in whatever direction they want. 

None of the analogies brought up so far do justice to the scope of the issue, and pointing out that current legal definitions don't have a problem with it isn't any comfort.

We're already seeing these platforms leveraged to devastating effect against the political landscape, mainly due to the reckless disregard their developers had for any responsibility to the power their algorithms wielded in deciding what content users were exposed to for the purpose of keeping them around so there would be more opportunity to throw ads up on their screens.  Stuff like the blacklisting of Alex Jones is a public facing maneuver to make it appear that they now understand that they wield this power and are going to try to exercise more responsibility.

But... uhh... if they didn't understand before the type of power they had in their hands, they do now after they've been raked over the coals for it.  And from here they're going to begin developing sophistication in intentionally leveraging it in a way that doesn't set off any alarms in the public consciousness.  If we don't make some noise about it now while it's topical, it will go the way of mass surveillance.  It will become a ubiquitous feature of society that has deep effects on the nature of our culture and freedoms and makes everyone kinda uncomfortable, but has been so normalized for so long that most don't bother to think about it very much, except as an easy source of black humor.  By the time we've reached that point, and it won't take long, it will already have become 100x more difficult to do anything about it.

It is a sticky problem.  Because it's true that we don't want to establish a legal obligation for an organization to act as any individual's loudspeaker just because they have the technical capability.  We want to defend notions of free association and so on.  But all good ethical foundations can be broken and abused by context, which is why absolutism is bad.  I'm not saying I have any answers.  I just think that we do need to acknowledge the current state of information on the internet is in a dangerous place, and it's a new sort of situation that likely requires a completely innovative approach.

Maybe there is no answer, and our society is progressing in a way that requires us to just grow the fuck up in a general sense as a civilization and a species.  Everything is so interconnected, complex, and powerful now, in ways that couldn't have been imagined 200 years ago.  An individual's ability to abuse their freedoms to harm others continues to accelerate dramatically, but there's no point in restricting freedom to protect a life without freedom.  If we want to continue pushing the scope and capabilities of our civilization to greater heights, we need to be sincerely dedicated to becoming better human beings in the process, or it simply will not work out in the end.
I found this earlier in the thread. We cannot forget about this
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Bumber

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31192 on: July 15, 2019, 09:50:18 am »

Yes. I tend to be bad at wording things. Thank you
Back to Trump
getting rid of a nuclear deal to spite another president is stupid
AFAIK, the leaked memo contains Kim Darroch's interpretation, not Trump's statements.

The article states that Trump's claim is that it didn't do enough. (And also the false money thing.)
« Last Edit: July 15, 2019, 09:57:17 am by Bumber »
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Reading his name would trigger it. Thinking of him would trigger it. No other circumstances would trigger it- it was strictly related to the concept of Bill Clinton entering the conscious mind.

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Naturegirl1999

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31193 on: July 15, 2019, 12:06:42 pm »

Oh, sorry,I should have read the article more closely
There is a North Carolina case that involves gerrymandering
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Trekkin

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31194 on: July 15, 2019, 02:57:38 pm »

=snip=
I am confused why people discount reality. It makes no sense. When I tell people facts they don’t like, they say that it’s just my opinion.  This mostly happens in church, though. Some people prefer to believe the Bible over actual reality. It’s ok to believe a religion so long as you don’t discount reality, they say, the problem is, that people who believe in religion tend to shut out reality. Fortunately this isn’t everyone, but it is what seems like a large amount.

Sorry for the delay, but while we're reviewing recent history in the thread: they aren't actually discounting reality as much as, like JoshuaFH said, refusing to believe experts. It's an emotional response, not a logical one, and it's also one in which we are, in a weird way, complicit.

We can go into how crank magnetism and self-reinforcing misconceptions happen as a result of the fear of being socially censured for having been wrong, but those are how people go deeper into the rabbit hole. If we look at how people start discounting reality, a lot of it is down to armchair experts getting things wrong. Actual scientists with the time and the inclination for this kind of outreach are vastly outnumbered by people like, well, wierd: amateurs who are passionate about science but lack the time and training to get fully into the weeds about everything they read to the Nth degree. There's nothing wrong with that, but when you put together a long enough chain of amateurs summarizing and quoting each other, errors and spurious references can creep in unnoticed in the details. Sometimes it's little things like misused buzzwords. Sometimes it's bigger things like people claiming carbon dating proves the Earth is billions of years old (right process, wrong radionuclide). Then, once it gets mangled enough, it gets screamed at people by the loudest, smuggest assholes in any given group, along with the strong implication if not explicit statement that only an idiot could believe otherwise, because people tend to assume that anyone disagreeing with them is as dumb as they have to be to be corrected by the facts they understand.

So when you start with a detailed, nuanced scientific consensus and feed it through endless cycles of summary and tech journalism and retweeting until it ends up in the hands of some obnoxious twerp whose point is that everyone else is an idiot, it's not surprising that people would like to prove them wrong, and enough errors creep in along the way to make that relatively easy. Then, once they've proven the consensus-as-shouted-by-twerp wrong, they want to keep going, because we love doing things to extremes. Not only are they wrong that you can look down a canal to prove the Earth is round, they must be wrong about the Earth being round in the first place, and that means a whole lot of experts are wrong too and our poor budding conspiracy theorist is off to prove themselves smart by the most pugilistic methods they've learned from the aforementioned angry shouting, riding their underdog narrative off into the (apparently diffraction-induced) sunset.

It's like the militia asshats who think they can overthrow the American goverment with their bunker full of guns and Krugerrands. They aren't imagining holding off the whole Army, they're imagining them holding off their buddy Hank who's in the reserve and a whole lot of their buddies holding off Hank-equivalent soldiers, which seems like a feasible proposition to them. Similarly, Flat Earthers and similar aren't thinking they're actually going to disprove the scientific consensus by publishing peer-reviewed papers. They're imagining cowing that twerp on the forums, but in a lab coat and on a debate stage, and that seems pretty doable to them.

They aren't discounting reality. They're contesting the idea that the twerps are right about them being stupid, and unfortunately this is the only alternative they can see. Why else would they be so enamored of zeteticism?
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Lord Shonus

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31195 on: July 15, 2019, 03:10:08 pm »

There is also the factor I call "Chicken Little Syndrome". All too often, scientific consensus is simplified for popular consumption, and (for situations like climate change) given an alarmist spin in an attempt to motivate people to care. Between the simplification and the worst-case syndrome, these tend to portray situations that are readily checked ("California will be underwater by 2014! You won't be able to go outside with any bare skin in 2000 because there's not going to be any ozone to protect you! By 1990 we'll be eating each other just to stay alive!") and often don't come to pass because they were absolute worst case scenarios (and, often, because some intervening development forestalled the crisis, such as the global effort to save the ozone layer). This causes a lot of people to look at the current predictions, say "Well, they've been wrong every other time, they must be wrong now." and toss the problem in the circular file.


This isn't stupidity. This is making a reasonable decision based on distorted data - either not realizing how oversimplified the claims were, or else not realizing that the crisis was averted because of a herculean effort to do so.
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Doomblade187

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31196 on: July 15, 2019, 03:27:05 pm »

A person attacked a private ICE detention center parking lot with flares and was carrying a rifle, though it's unclear if they used it. We're shot, killed by local PD. Avoiding gender pronouns bc they may have been trans, even though news has been reporting them as male.

(I specify parking lot BC they targeted cars and outdoor propane tanks)

Edit: https://heavy.com/news/2019/07/willem-van-spronsen-emma-durutti/

Kinda unclear though still?
« Last Edit: July 15, 2019, 04:36:59 pm by Doomblade187 »
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In any case it would be a battle of critical thinking and I refuse to fight an unarmed individual.
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wierd

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31197 on: July 15, 2019, 03:32:52 pm »

=snip=
I am confused why people discount reality. It makes no sense. When I tell people facts they don’t like, they say that it’s just my opinion.  This mostly happens in church, though. Some people prefer to believe the Bible over actual reality. It’s ok to believe a religion so long as you don’t discount reality, they say, the problem is, that people who believe in religion tend to shut out reality. Fortunately this isn’t everyone, but it is what seems like a large amount.

Sorry for the delay, but while we're reviewing recent history in the thread: they aren't actually discounting reality as much as, like JoshuaFH said, refusing to believe experts. It's an emotional response, not a logical one, and it's also one in which we are, in a weird way, complicit.

We can go into how crank magnetism and self-reinforcing misconceptions happen as a result of the fear of being socially censured for having been wrong, but those are how people go deeper into the rabbit hole. If we look at how people start discounting reality, a lot of it is down to armchair experts getting things wrong. Actual scientists with the time and the inclination for this kind of outreach are vastly outnumbered by people like, well, wierd: amateurs who are passionate about science but lack the time and training to get fully into the weeds about everything they read to the Nth degree. There's nothing wrong with that, but when you put together a long enough chain of amateurs summarizing and quoting each other, errors and spurious references can creep in unnoticed in the details. Sometimes it's little things like misused buzzwords. Sometimes it's bigger things like people claiming carbon dating proves the Earth is billions of years old (right process, wrong radionuclide). Then, once it gets mangled enough, it gets screamed at people by the loudest, smuggest assholes in any given group, along with the strong implication if not explicit statement that only an idiot could believe otherwise, because people tend to assume that anyone disagreeing with them is as dumb as they have to be to be corrected by the facts they understand.

So when you start with a detailed, nuanced scientific consensus and feed it through endless cycles of summary and tech journalism and retweeting until it ends up in the hands of some obnoxious twerp whose point is that everyone else is an idiot, it's not surprising that people would like to prove them wrong, and enough errors creep in along the way to make that relatively easy. Then, once they've proven the consensus-as-shouted-by-twerp wrong, they want to keep going, because we love doing things to extremes. Not only are they wrong that you can look down a canal to prove the Earth is round, they must be wrong about the Earth being round in the first place, and that means a whole lot of experts are wrong too and our poor budding conspiracy theorist is off to prove themselves smart by the most pugilistic methods they've learned from the aforementioned angry shouting, riding their underdog narrative off into the (apparently diffraction-induced) sunset.

It's like the militia asshats who think they can overthrow the American goverment with their bunker full of guns and Krugerrands. They aren't imagining holding off the whole Army, they're imagining them holding off their buddy Hank who's in the reserve and a whole lot of their buddies holding off Hank-equivalent soldiers, which seems like a feasible proposition to them. Similarly, Flat Earthers and similar aren't thinking they're actually going to disprove the scientific consensus by publishing peer-reviewed papers. They're imagining cowing that twerp on the forums, but in a lab coat and on a debate stage, and that seems pretty doable to them.

They aren't discounting reality. They're contesting the idea that the twerps are right about them being stupid, and unfortunately this is the only alternative they can see. Why else would they be so enamored of zeteticism?

Yes and no, and it is ironically (also) something you have also just fallen into;

They believe they are RIGHT.  In fact, they go so far as to "know" they are right. (like you just did.)


This is especially poignant, when the thing they claim to have knowledge of is a thing that is intractable to scrutiny, like a divine agency.  This is how "Dinosaur bones exist to test your faith!" and similar statements get lobbed around in true earnestness. (In such cases, you need to still be aware that they are not actually arguing against reality, they are making arguments that are grounded in a reality that exceeds the physical. Religion is based on knowledge of supernatural entities, such as gods, who inhabit a supernatural super-universe. Being beings outside the scope of the methods employed by science, they can blithely discount any evidence you provide them; The physical universe is not the TRUE universe-- at least as far as their set of axioms is concerned.) This is mostly the kind of mechanism involved in religious "true belief", but it also gets embroiled, along with the sunk-cost fallacy, when people end up mixed up with conspiracy theories.   (EG, the existence of drug induced hallucinations from chemtrails that you must ignore to find the real truth, et al.)

Suddenly, people trying their hardest to show you the history of how Eratosthenes determined that the earth could be generalized as a spheroid better than as a flat plane after observing shadows in wells, are *REALLY* either poor deluded people who have been duped, or are worse yet-- maliciously minded co-conspirators, out to perpetuate the fiction that the earth is not a flat disc, despite the obvious evidence of one's own vision. (ahem.)

I would advise you to remember your training, and recognize that you are falling victim to a confirmation bias here, Trekkin.

By that, I mean your hypothesis is not sufficient. There are other ways people get into the rabbit hole, such as "Profound epiphanies" (such as very vivid dreams, hallucinations, mental changes from traumatic injury, etc), and lack of sufficiently solid education in the face of charismatic believers seeking to actively recruit them. (Born into a cult setting, and suffering sunk cost fallacy issues.)

This does not mean you are wrong; a good deal of people probably do end up in the rabbit hole the way you suggest-- it just is not sufficient to be the single answer, so you should not treat it as such.


My attestation was more in the vein of "Regardless of how they got there, they exhibit this pathology"-- Namely, that no amount of evidence of the falsity of their claims will reverse their belief.  (In the case of the religious true believer, it is because the evidence you are providing is based on a subordinate subset of the metaphysical universe they ascribe to, and thus not compelling or meaningful. In the case of the sunken costs narrative, your evidence is indicative of the trickery and systematic malfeasance that seeks to make them conform. [why else would you be so passionate about shadows in wells?] They have invested too much thought into the workings of the conspiracy to be able to recognize the falsity of the conspiracy. The conspiracy has become "true" and unassailable.)
« Last Edit: July 15, 2019, 04:13:46 pm by wierd »
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Trekkin

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31198 on: July 15, 2019, 04:22:24 pm »

By that, I mean your hypothesis is not sufficient. There are other ways people get into the rabbit hole, such as "Profound epiphanies" (such as very vivid dreams, hallucinations, mental changes from traumatic injury, etc), and lack of sufficiently solid education in the face of charismatic believers seeking to actively recruit them. (Born into a cult setting, and suffering sunk cost fallacy issues.)

This does not mean you are wrong; a good deal of people probably do end up in the rabbit hole the way you suggest-- it just is not sufficient to be the single answer, so you should not treat it as such.


My attestation was more in the vein of "Regardless of how they got there, they exhibit this pathology"-- Namely, that no amount of evidence of the falsity of their claims will reverse their belief.

Oh, I'd agree with that; I didn't mean to imply this is the only way for people to get started, and I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I'm highlighting it because it's one we can do something about. We can't very well stop people hallucinating or being told incorrect things by their trusted friends and family, but we can endeavor to make sure that if they check their hallucinations against what they're told is true, they find information that's as accurate as possible. It's why I try to get my colleagues to do more unconventional outreach, for example.

Nor was I trying to contradict your claim, at least not directly; sure, if you just tell people that they're wrong and how they're wrong, they're going to try to poke holes in your argument all day instead of adjusting their beliefs. That said, if we acknowledge the emotional component -- and it is behind a significant portion of the crankery out there -- it does suggest that we can alleviate the problem by decoupling them being wrong from them being stupid, much like how some racists can be and have been brought round by just associating with the people they're racist against so they accumulate positive experiences on which to base their generalizations. (Not that this is a very good idea to try en masse, mind.) The less of their identity has to change to fix the error, the easier it is for them to fix it. So yes, there's no panacea here, but there are some things we can do to help stop the spread of crank beliefs before they're internalized and no longer amenable to rational disproof and much harder to deal with. Being meticulous is one of them.
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SalmonGod

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #31199 on: July 15, 2019, 04:35:28 pm »

I think the identity component is the most crucial, which is most often ignored.  I get frustrated all the time with the tired trope that arguing on the internet is pointless because nobody ever changes their mind.  But I think this perception is based on unfair expectations.  Changing one's mind on a strongly held belief isn't just about realizing "Oh this thing is false and this other thing is true.  Knowledge bank adjustment completed!"  It often involves completely reconfiguring one's concept of self and relation to the world.  That isn't something that just snaps into place upon witnessing evidence.  It takes time, and even active effort to work at.  And you're right.  Why would we expect a personal attack to motivate someone to go through the painful process of transformation?
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In the land of twilight, under the moon
We dance for the idiots
As the end will come so soon
In the land of twilight

Maybe people should love for the sake of loving, and not with all of these optimization conditions.
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