ricecake

:) that's why I referred to available technology, not the word. "Computers" were available, both as people and as semi-algorithmic adding machines, but the speed, capabilities and operating principles were different to a degree that the only similarities are a name and an abstract mathematical model.

Although picturing the brigades of women with adding machines occasionally sending a telegram to create a 1900s Internet is amusing.

I actually don't believe you. Like I don't think your shirt fell apart like that, and I don't think you bought a plastic shirt.

Fabric lasting a long time isn't odd. I've got a synthetic fabric gym bag from 20 years ago that's fine. I've got a 10 year old synthetic blend shirt that's never had an issue. I've got cotton shirts in the same range.

Synthetic fibers tend to be more expensive, and are more durable for the fabric weight. It's why they use them for safety equipment.

You're acting like none of us are familiar with clothes. Where are you buying disintegrating shirts, and why ? I've never encountered that and I've been wearing clothing for quite a while. I've only had any type of clothing tear like that if it snags on something like a nail.

Then why don't you? There is literally nothing stopping you from doing that.

Your clothing probably isn't made of plastic. It's probably made of cotton. If you're buying unrepairable clothing that's a choice you made, since I think all of my clothing is repairable and it wasn't purchased with that intention.

I know why I don't spend my time patching holes in my hand made underwear: it would be uncomfortable, and it would take more of my time than a 5 pack of underwear costs.

We didn't invent all this stuff because we're stupid. We invented it because owning one pair of pants for your adult life is just absolutely miserable.

The other thing is that we're both using devices that the most powerful people in the world would have absolutely no possibility of using anything close to as recently as 100 years ago. So it's not just efficiency gains, but fundamental gains in what's even available.

There's a point in time where the amount of spices I have in my pantry would be enough to count me amongst the wealthy. Hell, dinner tonight would have made a king blush with how much pepper I used.

Too salty for my taste, the cheese ones make me feel awful and every other flavor tastes like gym bag smell.
Oh, and the dehydration mixed with salt blowing out your taste buds makes water taste off, so you're just dehydrated longer.

Are you actually thinking that a joke image where someone isn't overly impressed with doritos is viral advertising? On a platform with negligible traffic? With shills who call the product unhealthy?

That's so weird I might not even be able to finish my Crystal Pepsi ®.

I mean, they're definitely not providing the circus.

The phrase literally refers to giving people loaves of bread and a more frequent holding of games and public entertainment to keep people happy, not the notion of just distracted.

The current admin is making it harder for people to meet basic needs, and not doing anything to pump approval ratings.
A more modern sense would be to look for ways to make life easier that doesn't fix anything, and to make life better that doesn't improve anything, but has the perk of being explicitly because of the admin. A check for $500 and a set of movie tickets.

I don't think it's astroturfing to talk about what food engineers have figured out about human taste preferences.

A lot of people spent a lot of time and money figuring out what drives people to mindlessly eat. Then the ignored the health ramifications and started selling a lot of products that are just different textures of salted sugar fat with glutamate.

Same reason you'll absentmindedly eat a basket of bread if you have cinnamon butter, or cinnamon rolls.
We can use the food science to predict that there's probably a mild aged cheese that would be great on a cinnamon roll.

Less the long and narrow and more how it's used.

A fishing net is also long and narrow, but we usually wouldn't call it a spear because that's not how you use it. If you spear something with your net you've made a mistake.

Personally, I'd say a duck beak is "spoonish", and the fish hunters are "grabby". Some are tweezery, and some are tongy.

People normally feed ducks food like bread. The woman was used to this, so she was startled to see someone feeding ducks birdseed.
We're used to birdseed being used to feed songbirds or the various tree birds.
When the woman was directly informed that ducks are birds she was directly confronted with the knowledge that we put waterfowl in a different mental category than arboreal birds.
It's easy to imagine the feeling of realizing you've had a very basic, totally benign blindspot in how you conceptualize something as simple as ducks, and the woman's reaction captures that deep feeling of "now that you say it it's obvious" that a lot of people have felt. Knowing the feeling, it being slightly uncomfortable but harmless, and the general whimsy of ducks makes it funny.

It's funny because feeling empathy for silly mistakes makes us laugh.

You're immediately ascribing malice and poor character to these people

Where are you seeing me ascribe malice or poor character? You thinking that having a failure or making a mistake makes someone a failure is projection on your part. I don't view making a mistake as a character flaw.

You overestimate your own ability to resist propaganda along with how much knowledge and information the "average person" has.

I don't even know what to do with this statement. How are you getting to that from what I said? Is it the part where I said the opposite?

I'm honestly taken aback that you're doubling down on "people are uneducated". You have a skewed view of the state of the average person. 5% of people work multiple jobs. You're condescending to view the average person as poorer, less educated and less able to become educated than they are.

People don't like being talked down to. Yes, I think if you become an antivaxer you've made a mistake. That's not a judgement on them, but on their beliefs. It has nothing to do with listening to them or how I might address their concerns. You're the one whose not really understanding people, because the people you're "understanding" are a caricature of what you believe antivax people to be like.
No, I don't think someone with two jobs working paycheck to paycheck and still underwater has time to research them. I don't think the level of knowledge I shared above (vaccines teach your immune system) requires that. I also don't think that most antivaxxers are in that position, and certainly the average person isn't.

How do you expect to reach anyone if you won't make even the slightest bit of effort to understand them?

What makes you think I think that? Do you think empathy precludes acknowledging a mistake? Or the other way around? I honestly don't understand the mindset you've expressed. Addressing mistakes is the heart of teaching someone. It's not an attack, or a value judgement, and it's not incompatible with understanding why the mistake was made. That understanding actually helps quite a bit.

You need to step back and think about why you perceive someone being described as making an error or having a failure of reasoning as a value judgement.

The entire premise of that article is how to effectively guide people towards getting vaccinated. The only reason you would do that would be if you thought it was a mistake to not get vaccinated.

Also...

It’s wrong to assume that people are ignorant, irrational or have naively swallowed online misinformation.

I agree with the article, and also that point. You don't need to talk down to the person expressing the concern. They have just as much agency and information access as we do. Everyone makes mistakes or gets something wrong.

It's not your job to teach them.They're the ones that failed, so they need to "do better" and that's it. You're a good person. You didn't fail in critical thinking and tumble down the alt-right rabbit hole. You want to hold everyone else to a higher standard because it absolves you of responsibility. Bad things happen because other people failed. It's not your fault.

That's a lot to unpack. What responsibilities do you think I'm trying to be absolved of? You seem to be implying that it's my job or responsibility to teach people about vaccines. I try when it comes up to advocate for them, but I'm not actually a public health professional, like I said before. My knowledge on the subject is superficially better at best. It's no more my job to teach them than it is theirs to teach me.
I'm not even sure what you're getting at with the "bad things", and "it's not my fault" part. That's a lot more mysterious backstory than I actually have.

First, I'm really struggling to see how saying that we're regular people like everyone else is virtue signaling.
Second, did you miss the part where I said "we're all closer to falling into these pipelines than we like to think"? How are you reading that much value judgement and dismissal in what I wrote?

You're quite openly condescending to view the world through the eyes of the "regular person", who you imagine to be a simpleton with a much more limited worldview than yours.
You are a regular person. So am I. So is my wife, and so are my relatives.
Acknowledging that you're a regular person like most other people is important for recognizing that it's not "people" who are susceptible to those traps, but you and everyone you know.

You're lowering your standards for other people. I'm recognizing that if I fell into that rabbit hole, it would be because of at least one failure of critical thinking.

I expect people to be generally informed and aware of the world, just like I am. It's not shaming to recognize that someone made a mistake or failed to live up to expectations. People make mistakes.

Do you think it's okay for people with access to every piece of information you have, who are just as intelligent and capable as you to fall into the antivax hole? If you made a critical error in judgement, would you want someone to tell you you made a mistake, or would you want them to argue that "it's okay, they didn't know any better, so it only makes sense that someone like that would do that? Poor things probably scared and confused"?

It's a good thing to have more data about, because the research is never just about one question, but we already have an overwhelming amount of data that says it's not only safe, but more safe than not getting them. Getting the vaccine is the cautious tactic.

We want to believe differently because ego, but we're regular people (unless you're a doctor. Playing the odds that you're not). It's really difficult to hold people who are functionally identical to me in a particular sphere of knowledge to a lower standard, which means the people who get sucked in aren't regular people. Regular people know that vaccines work by teaching your body how to recognize and fight a virus. They know that doctors all recommend them. They know there's a difference between the vaccines every doctor and grocery store offers you and the weird goiter/ED treatment they keep trying to sell you on TV.

Falling down that pipeline is a sign of at least one, but probably more, failures of critical thinking.
We're all closer than we like to acknowledge to falling into those mental traps by having those failures, but it's not regular people having normal regular people thoughts that do. Regular people are "believed they talked the car dealership into breaking even" stupid, not "disregarded all evidence and gambled their children's lives" stupid.