Brain_Thief

I understand your frustration but I still cannot get past the point that, generally speaking, an individual must make a specific, conscious, and unforced series of decisions in order to repeatedly end up in front of movies that they dislike. Their decisions must also by necessity happen in a context where there are many other media options available.

I also enjoy the cinema but I only go when there are films that I find interesting and worthwhile. In my specific case this means that over the past few years I've seen Parasite, a showing of the original Alien, a few midnight B-tier horror movies, etc. I don't get to go to the movies as often as I would prefer but the alternative of wasting my time on films that I don't find attractive while simultaneously financially supporting an industry I disagree with seems obviously non-viable to me.

The entire premise here is a bit odd to me; are people forced to spend their time and money watching a sub-par movie? Couldn't they watch one of the innumerable television shows that are available, watch YouTube, older movies, etc., etc.? The comparison made above to having to eat McDonald's in a desert doesn't make any sense in this context since that is talking about needing life-supporting nutrients in a literal desert.

Interesting - your response makes sense. Thanks again for the information.

Thank you for the response, I find this very interesting.

So is it true to say that the production of a particular solution to a differential equation is a statement about how a system will behave based on its initial conditions, and that the statement captures within it the principle of action minimization by virtue of the fact that it is a derivation of information from natural laws?

But are the statements "reality minimizes action" and "reality solves differential equations" actually, literally equivalent to each other? It strikes me that this is not in fact the case. There are solutions to systems describing skyscraper sway that have the building stand at a terrifying lean angle; what is supposed to be selecting the particular solutions that we observe? A purely random walk through the solution space seems unsatisfying as an answer.

I understand your frustration and share it, but I personally believe that we are at the point where this behavior (i.e., failure to act) should be expected of tech companies. The economic incentives of the companies who run the most popular social networks seem to be negatively aligned against robust responses to the propagation of bots and disinformation, and that doesn't appear likely to change.

I also wonder whether the mitigation strategy for this type of societal threat is not to be found via strictly technological means anyway since the line between bot and human actor appears to be blurring more and more as time passes and technology improves (artificial face generation, improved NLP, statistically-informed posting and behavioral modeling, etc.). Imagine how complicated the process of discriminating between automated and human-controlled accounts might become in ten or twenty years from now; it seems as though there will have to be some sort of public education component to reduce the credulity of human users in online environments - an adjustment of weights in the network of information sources among the general population, if you will, in a direction that de-emphasizes online content.

The idea that the number of employers who might pressure their employees into not using legally-enshrined sick leave could be comparable to the number of employers who, through the goodness of their hearts, currently offer sick leave to their low-wage employees in the absence of a requirement to do so doesn't hold water. Furthermore, the (quite real) threat that employers will attempt to violate the spirit of a worker protection law should not be justification for society to not implement such laws. History clearly shows us that the goal of improving the lives of American citizens cannot rely upon charitable behavior from corporations.

I agree that neither case may be black or white; however, one is dark, dark gray and the other is eggshell.

At the risk of being confrontational, I have to question whether you have ever had a low-paying job in the USA or if you have even taken the time to look at the typical "benefits" and work requirements attached to such jobs. The absolute and unquestionable reality for millions of workers in the USA (food industry, customer service, transportation, and many others) is that they have zero paid sick leave and are also subject to work requirements that allow for their termination with little to no warning for any form of work absence. It follows logically that there is a great deal of people who work while sick and are afraid of missing work for any reason - they have minimal rights, live paycheck to paycheck, can barely afford healthcare, and have almost zero job security.

This is the environment that rabidly pro-business regulation and the erosion of worker protections has created; assertions that the hideously benighted situation of low-paid workers in the USA will magically "self-resolve" without strong legislation go against the entire history of the labor rights movement and basic common sense.

Not OP, but I share his / her perspective. My reasoning is that the act of killing is a serious and irreversible decision that should not in any way be trivialized. Furthermore, a full evaluation of the consequences of killing should not be deflected, distorted, or colored by something like amusement. Since killing is a necessary part of life (others mentioned vaccines, food production, and gardening below) it seems important to foster a sober and cautious attitude toward the act so as to prevent unnecessary loss of life; the "gamification" of death, even in trivial cases such as with the salt gun, does not appear to promote a sober attitude toward killing.

Essentially, my stance is that there is a difference between accepting an action as necessary and engaging with it as needed and making said action fun / associating it with enjoyment. I don't count video games as part of the issue for the moment since, at least currently, it does not seem like the characters and units that populate video games are in any sense alive. This may change, however, and if it does then I expect radical consequences will unfold.

You didn't state a theory; to the extent that you implied a theory similar to the one I described the available data does not support it at all...

I agree with those points but I have not seen evidence for the idea that the availability of social safety nets is not also a significant factor in fertility rate trend, which I took to be the thrust of your original post.

The unstated conclusion of your response seems to be that the absence of basic social service rights has no impact on rate of demographic change in developed countries; however, your comment appears to be focused on current measurements, and not rate of change. Keep in mind that the average American's economic position has been degrading for decades now, while the same cannot be said (to the same extent) for the citizens of the European countries you mentioned. Your source only has data through the year 2015, so I have supplemented it with projection data for the year 2020 from the CIA World Factbook [1] to more clearly illustrate the trend; the earlier date for each example I cite below is sourced from your link [2]. I've also included data for several other major countries (and the EU as a whole) that offer basic social safety rights to their citizens.

The USA fertility rate in 1990 was 1.98; in 2020 it is projected to be 1.84 (a delta of -.14).

The fertility rate in Denmark in 1990 was 1.65; in 2020 it is projected to be 1.78 (a delta of +.13).

The fertility rate in Portugal in 1990 was 1.52; in 2020 it is projected to be 1.41 (a delta of -.11).

The fertility rate in Germany in 1990 was 1.36; in 2020 it is projected to be 1.47 (a delta of +.11).

The fertility rate in Canada in 1990 was 1.66; in 2020 it is projected to be 1.57 (a delta of -.09).

The fertility rate in France in 1990 was 1.75; in 2020 it is projected to be 2.06 (a delta of +.31).

The fertility rate in Norway in 1990 was 1.85; in 2020 it is projected to be 1.84 (a delta of -.01).

The fertility rate for Europe in total in 1990 was 1.70; in 2020 it is projected to be 1.62 (a delta of -.08).

This is obviously not a thorough (or even statistical) analysis of the situation, but a cursory look at the data from the perspective of multi-decade trends does not lend credence to the notion that the availability of social safety nets has no impact on demographic rate of change in a developed country.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#the-global-decline...

Since when are sources required for basic observations on reality? Thanks to Republican opposition to providing first-world amenities to U.S. citizens (universal health care access, education access, childcare access, etc.) new generations of Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to start families. The evidence for this is multitudinous and moments away via any search engine...

I'm trying to interpret your comment in a charitable manner, but no matter what angle I come at it from it seems disingenuous ("whataboutism" comes to mind, for starters). No one in this thread has pretended that disinformation is mono-directional in the political arena; what has been stated is that there is a disproportionate amount of disinformation emanating from the conservative end of the media spectrum and that said misinformation has been coupled to the process of micro-targeting.

With the premise that advertisements are information streams that are designed to modify a person's behavior, I have few questions for you:

1. Do you believe that advertising is effective?

2. Do you believe that targeted advertising is more effective than non-targeting advertising?

3. Do you believe that misrepresenting information in an advertisement is acceptable?

At no point did I argue that we understand everything about nature. My point is just that every single thing in nature has turned out to be eventually accessible to rational modeling and understanding.

I'm having a hard time following this explanation / statement - it seems to contradict itself and yet is used to justify your subsequent point:

To carve out a niche for certain areas and argue that these will eventually turn out to not follow that pattern has been a losing strategy throughout the history of science.

However, we have the obvious examples of pre-big bang ontology, as well as the origins of life and the evolutionary process, as "things in nature" that arose and yet do not appear accessible to our methods of understanding.

The observation "if you don't know how to do it, then you don't know how to do it with a computer" comes to mind here. I've yet to see any research indicating that we have or are on the verge of having a theory that describes a consciousness-generating mechanized process; assertions to the contrary seem to rely upon enlarging the definition of the word "machine" to a scale of abstraction that renders it unintelligible.

The problem is that the American public elected a reality television show host who can barely string a coherent sentence together as president. Since expertise, honesty, and competence represent direct threats to the administration (e.g., decorated military whistleblowers, career foreign service workers, etc.), the administration has steadily removed such people from critical positions in an attempt to stifle internal resistance to its behavior. A side effect of this type of purging is that we now have a reduced capacity to respond to complex geopolitical and natural threats. Hopefully the hard reality of a pandemic shakes some folks out of the propaganda bubble before too much damage is done.

https://thenib.imgix.net/usq/8688038d-f99b-4224-872b-b8dd626...

I see this sentiment expressed a lot and, frankly, I just don't buy it. I dropped my FaceBook account years ago and have never had any trouble staying in touch with people or being invited to things. Are your friends / family so insistent on using FaceBook for all communications that they would cease including you in events or talking to you if you needed to be contacted via, e.g., text message or email? If that's the case then I suggest you seriously consider the kind of relationships you have with these people and whether or not they are worth maintaining.

It was a parameter stipulated in a hypothetical example.

These are good points you raise. I suppose what I'm really thinking is that there needs to be some sort of "interpersonal digital communications normalization process" for young people that functions similarly to how being at school around teachers / outside at recess around peers functions to normalize children's behavior toward others (or at least serves to mitigate the most blatantly anti-social behaviors in many cases). As it stands, many children are introduced to the web and online communications without much (or any) guidance whatsoever as far as I can tell; it seems like the impact of this hands-off approach is quite negative in many cases, with young people lacking the tools to healthily manage their interactions with the web.

Situations like this make me think that public educational systems should experiment with some form of "digital literacy" courses / exercises for young children with the goal of humanizing the processes of online communication. Teaching standards for how to treat others (and how to respond to observed and experienced abuses) may provide some reduction in the number of individuals that seem to be finding their ways to toxic online communities. From a lay perspective it really does seem that people who participate in extremely toxic online communities are exhibiting signs of serious personality deformations; since the internet acts as a significant force multiplier on an individual's ability to spread their perspective, and since the problem of policing online speech without creating a locked-down surveillance nightmare seems unlikely to be solved any time soon, perhaps one of the better options would be to arm adolescents with a proper mentality for handling online harassment under the assumption that it is likely to occur.

"For any reason" is exactly the opposite of why the Trump campaign drew the scrutiny of intelligence agencies.

Could you illuminate those of us who are not in the know?

No matter how attractive it may be to pretend that business decisions exist in some sort of apolitical moral vacuum the simple fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of them do not. Making money is not an excuse for improving the surveillance efficiency of autocratic regimes, building gas chambers, or supporting an organization that engages in mass-scale detention of child refugees.

I fully support the rights of employees to peacefully encourage their organizations to weigh the moral components of business decisions. It is obvious that, left to their own devices, large businesses will support slavery, genocide, and any number of horrors in the pursuit of profit - something has to restrain their behavior and it certainly isn't going to come from the C-level without serious pressure being applied.

Ah, the ancient and exhausted "if you don't like it then leave" argument has finally made its appearance. How could none of us have realized that the obvious solution to disagreeing with a policy in our organization / community / government is to just silently give up and leave? Obviously a peaceful letter of dissent would be completely outside the bounds of rational behavior!

And besides, if a concerned group REALLY wanted to change things and not just whine they would simply raise billions of dollars to accrue a significant block of voting shares in one of the world's largest corporations to change policy via board action!

What, exactly, is hypocritical about these developers' actions? If a person wants their organization / community / country to change then they should encourage that change through non-violent means. It seems to me that by calling for their employer to discontinue business with an entity that they find unacceptable the Github employees in question are doing just that. In fact, their actions come across as quite sincere, and certainly appear to be far more productive and well-reasoned than your insult-laden criticism of them would imply.

I find it interesting that your condemnation of unproductive ideological advocacy is couched within a hyperbolic rant wherein you seem to assume the privilege of having your words taken metaphorically and not literally ("every piece" of NYC infrastructure is broken, implicitly due to "Socialism"; people are "screaming" about the ills of capitalism) while simultaneously refusing to extend that same privilege to the people you decry. Whatever your intentions, your use of bad-faith argumentation practices reflects poorly on your stance and mirrors the condescending messaging employed by advocates of the obviously untenable status quo. I claim that your comment was written in bad faith because it feels both divisive and derisive and makes no attempt at offering a bridge of understanding for balanced discussion to occur.

I wish I could say that it caused me humor every time I come across this type of justification for the ever-quickening erosion of the concept of personal privacy in the era of big tech. Here's why my gut reaction to interpreting Google's behaviors starts from the core assumption that they are pursing ever-greater levels of privacy-eroding ad tech in nearly everything they do:

0) Google's only purpose is to make money.

1) Google's strongest strategy (by orders of magnitude) for making money is targeted advertising.

2) Google has surpassed the critical size threshold beyond which morality plays no role in business decisions (see surveillance state-supporting tech in China among other issues).

Due to these facts it appears inevitable that Google will seek in all of its large-scale actions to involve ad tech in whatever it produces or engages in. It's how they fulfill their purpose (selling the most sophisticated targeted advertising possible).

I'm sorry that reaching what many believe should be a minimum level of income took such a prolonged period for you and I hope that moving forward you experience an easier time growing your income.

Based on the tone of your response, I take it that you are not supportive of my criticism of Amazon et al. A question for you: do you wish for other people (including yourself in the future, your possible children, or your friends and family) to have to struggle to make an amount of money that can support their basic needs? The fact of the matter is that the current federal minimum wage is completely insufficient to meet the needs of a person attempting to make it in the modern world - even 2X the federal minimum is incredibly low given the uncertainties around health care and higher education / job training.

When a series of corporations are vacuuming up an overwhelming majority of all productivity gains and the top 0.01% are becoming wealthier than historical princes, it is very valid and important to level a critical eye at the fairness of the situation so that we can all improve together and not have our societal progress retarded by sociopathy and greed.

I agree with the sentiment of your post and similarly find it shocking that anyone could defend a gargantuan corporation like Amazon refusing to provide their workers with reasonable wages to support quality lives.

It's worth noting that anyone who cares about this should refrain from purchasing things from the Amazons and the Walmarts of the world. The only thing these trans-human entities care about is money - that's IT. The only language they speak is money, and they will destroy the world, their human employees, and anything else that comes between them and their goal of capturing 100% of all economic power. The only thing to do is to stop feeding the beast. Don't buy shit from mega corps - no matter how convenient it is. It's unnecessary and directly helps propagate a system where sociopathic political-economic agents repress living standards for the vast majority of people so that a shockingly small number can be wealthier than kings.