lvxferre

I was wondering about what steps should be taken to quarantine (and possibly block/ban some of them) on the lemmy.ml instance?

I'll tag two admins of the instance, as I don't think that they'll want this content: @joebidet@lemmy.ml, @cypherpunks@lemmy.ml

A lot of those users are already doing shady shit. HinduSher for example is clearly squatting on multiple comms, among them three (!bakchodi, !bharatvarsh, !bharatvarsha) that, while not intrinsically associated with fascism, do provide enough context for his username.

[some are] convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home.

I think that it's pretty safe to say that at least some people around you are stone-cold fundamentalists. This sort of discourse doesn't come from non-fundamentalists.

That said as stupid as "rock is [from the d]evil" claim is, I don't think that it's rooted in racism. Instead I think that it's because some values often followed by rock bands, singers and fans clash directly with some values of Christianity.

Note that some sort of percussion pops up in almost every musical style, across the eras.

Slaves. They created the guitar

This was already addressed, but... come on, acoustic guitars are from Middle Ages Iberia, and they backtrack all the way into the lutes of the Ancient Egypt and Anatolia. (Probably. It's so old that the origins are hard to determine.)

I like how this meme deconstructs the claim that religion is good because it gives moral structure to a person. Sure, it does... until the person starts imposing the morals of their religion, and then use them to justify their own actions.

"You're on a path in the woods. And at the end of the path is a cabin. And in the basement of the cabin is a princess."

Great game even for people who don't like visual novels. And the music is part of that - I'm a big fan of this one.

I won't address everything because it's a lot of text, OK? (I did read it though.)

I think that it's more accurate to say that reasoning is a "tool" that you use to handle knowledge. And sure, without knowledge you aren't able to use reasoning, but sometimes even with knowledge you aren't able to do it either - we brainfart, fall for fallacies, etc.

Another detail is that ignorance is far more specific - a person isn't just "ignorant", but "ignorant on a certain matter". For example it's perfectly possible to be ignorant on quantum mechanics while being informed on knitting, or vice versa. In the meantime intelligence - and thus stupidity - is split into only a handful of categories (verbal, abstract, social, etc.).

To someone who knows more than us, they’d consider us stupid.

They'd consider us ignorant. At least if following the distinction that I'm emphasising.

When we talk about people being stupid or smart, we’re just reducing that complexity so we can make simplistic insults that make us feel better about ourselves, but ultimately aren’t saying anything meaningful about the human condition.

Not necessarily reducing it but I get your point, given that I think that it's simply easier to talk about ignorance and stupidity as behaviour than as something inside our "minds" (whatever "mind" means). And in both cases it's behaviour that we all engage; some more than others, but we all do.

It depends on the context. In some cases the person might be taunting you to defend your position, or simply trying to avoid some subject.

But let's say that the person says this out of the blue, and is proselytising this view that human rights should be opposed. In this situation I believe that the person thinks that they benefit from denying human rights to other people; it's mostly selfish. (And worse, stupid - the person will be likely in the short end of the stick.)

Yeah, I think that this is part of the deal.

When someone says "people are stupid", they usually are not conveying "the average person has a lower-than-average intelligence". And I don't think that they're even comparing people with some point of reference (the average, or themself, or someone else); in the context they're usually criticising some behaviour that they see as stupid. For you this behaviour would be "living below their potential", for me it's "showing blatant lack of reasoning", for @_danny@lemmy.world's (from another comment) "lack of curiosity, drive to learn and critical thinking".

Frankly, that is just a big pile of babble.

but “people” is defined [SIC] around the average person

There's no "definition" here. The closest to what you said that would make some sense would be "but "people" implies a generalisation around the average person", but it doesn't work in your argument because it does not contradict what BananaTrifleViolin said. Nor it justifies your assumption that

by saying “stupid” is not defined around average intelligence, you’re really criticizing the phrase “people are stupid”…

I genuinely think that you did not understand what the other poster said, so I'll repeat it under different words.

The comic has an implicit definition of stupidity as "lower than average intelligence" (see panel 2).

BananaTrifleViolin is highlighting that this is not the definition that people use for "stupid" when they say "people are stupid". And that leads to a fallacy called "straw man", where you misrepresent a position to beat it. Munroe (the cartoonist) is doing this, either by accident or on purpose. (It is not the first time he does this; his comic about free speech also shows the same irrationality.)

know

Wine is wine, bread is bread. Let us not conflate lack of reasoning (stupidity) with lack of knowledge (ignorance).

More like 90% of human actions are stupid, as I'm not sure if there's an even split of "the stupid" and "the smart", and plenty people mix both. (E.g. being oddly competent at something specific, only to vomit assumptions on something else.)

In special I feel like four types of stupidity became a bit too common, too harmful, too egregious. They're the failure to handle:

• uncertainty - or, "how your belief might be wrong, and you'll need to handle the case that it is wrong"
• complexity - or, "how small details have a profound impact on everything"
• undesirable possibilities - or, "how nature gives no fucks about your fee fees, and things don't become true because you roll in wishful belief"
• context - or, "how things are never isolated, and you need to look outside the thing to understand the thing"

They're intertwined, I think. And perhaps there's something more important than those, but those four are the ones that I notice the most.

What you're really saying is "other people aren't as smart as me."

I like xkcd but I feel like Munroe is being assumptive here, assuming "your expectations are based on you". Are they?

I published an Op-Ed [...] Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable.”

The author was idealistic and gullible. Capitalism rewards rarity and value as much as feudalism rewards honour and faith - they don't, those discourses are just there to "sell" you the economic system.

Those knowledge workers do all this social media greasing because better exposure affords them better deals than using the same time to refine their skills.

Postman’s masterwork is his 1992 book

Caveat: I didn't read the book.

Those three phases sound like bollocks for me. Tech doesn't fight ethical and moral values; it shapes them. Because tech is rather close to the material conditions, while moral and ethical values are part of the superstructure. And it has been like this since we learned to make fire.

Still, I'll play along and pretend that I take the concept of technopoly. The concept is silly but the author is still talking about a distinct chunk of human history, associated with the globalisation of information.

A major source of this destabilization was the Trump-Clinton election cycle, which, among other things, created a subtle but consequential shift in our relationship with the products coming out of Silicon Valley.

Tell me "I focus too much on USA, too lirrle elsewhurr" without saying so.

The same process is happening everywhere, even in places with no Trumpet or Klingon or Bidet. It's the thesis ("stay connected 24/7") generating its own antithesis ("nope").

During this period, Postman writes, “tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.”

They always did it.

“Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World,”

Where are the anthrax bombs and the Nine Years' War?

I'm being serious; unlike Postman's book, I did read Huxley's. And the major factor that allowed the World State to seize power was war ravaging society and causing economic collapse. That is nothing like the technopoly through this text, that is the natural development of information as yet another capitalistic product.

Consider our current struggles to make sense of generative A.I. tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The problem with those gen model tools is not that they enable automation, and Luddites would go against it. It's simply that they suck.

As such, it's less about a struggle against those tools and more with how they were marketed. And without them, you'd get something else being shilled in their place.

This is already a big wall of text so I'll stop here. The text is fun food for thought, so my criticism should not be considered as "it suuucks".