I don’t disagree, but don’t pretend you haven’t effectively set up the equal and opposite thing here. No mods will ban anyone but other than that every comment section is an implicit competition for best pro-Palestinian talking point, even when decency demands otherwise. We don’t talk about Oct 7, and if we do it was friendly fire, and if it wasn’t it was a natural consequence of Israeli policy in Gaza and that is the real issue. Yeah fine we admit the attack was not a hundred percent morally sound if you insist so much, but we don’t assign a moral weight to it or linger on it because hey when you make innocents suffer, you sow the wind and eventually reap the whirlwind, oh sure Hamas’ response was ugly but what can you do, you know, be a bastard and it comes around. Now it is our moral duty to call loud and clear for a ceasefire – the cycle of violence must stop.

I know what you’re thinking: that’s not fair! That’s not my opinion! Yeah, the circlejerk doesn’t care about your private opinion. You know better than to contradict any of the above around here in writing, and that’s enough. I’m sure a lot of people privately think “oh… tbh that last IDF strike was unconscionable” before posting on /r/worldnews the part of their opinion they know the crowd will like better.

The “you will all submit to RTO and like it” machine has finally found a way to package this message in a way that wide eyed internet activists will support. Congratulations to them, I guess.

Obviously, yes, but at that level of knowledge as a user, you either don’t know about that or don’t feel comfortable enough to deal with it.

Think of this like one of those steam reviews: 4,000 hours played, do not recommend

Debian – I just wasn’t ready for it. Got told “oh you’re using Mint? That’s nice but you should try out Debian it’s the Real Deal™” but the reason I was using Mint back then in the first place was that it was my first step out of the Windows ecosystem, I was scared shitless and didn’t understand anything. What do you mean I don’t get a huge pretty start menu?! How am I supposed to find stuff then?!

Excellently.

I got invited to an interview at an absurdist variety show with these weird ethnic undertones (this would be a hassle to explain, just imagine that part of the show is that everyone there is putting on an exaggerated redneck act). They apparently got wind of some scientific publication I was involved with and for some reason decided it would be a great piece of entertainment to have me on. My colleagues were thrilled about this ‘now or never’ opportunity but I had a strong gut feeling that these people weren’t about to laugh with me. Thought about it for a minute and then responded nope, hard pass. Still probably one of the best decisions of my life.

The prime problem is that every social space eventually becomes a circlejerk. Bots and astroturfing exacerbate the problem but it exists perfectly fine on its own – in the early 2000s I had the misfortune of running across plenty of gigantic, years-long circlejerks where definitely no bots or nefarious foreign manipulators were involved (I’m talking console wars, Harry Potter ship wars, stupid shit like that). People form circle jerks in the same way that salts form crystals. It’s just in their nature.

The thing with circlejerks isn’t that there’s overwhelming agreement on some subject. You’ll get dunked on in most any social media space for claiming that the Earth is flat or that Putin is a swell guy, that in itself is obviously not a problem. What makes a circlejerk is that takes get cheered for and upvoted not in proportion to how much they are anchored in reality, but in proportion to how useful they are in galvanizing allies and disrupting enemies. Whoever shouts “glory to the cause” in the most compelling way gets all the oxygen. At that point the amount of brain rot is only going to increase. No matter how righteous the cause, inevitably there comes the point where you can go on the Righteous Cause Forum and post “2+2=5, therefore all glory to the cause” and get 400 upvotes.

Everyone talks a big game about how much they like truth, reason and moral consistency, but in the end when it’s just them and the upvote button and “do I stop and honestly examine this argument that gives me warm fuzzy feelings”, “is it really fair to dunk on Hated Group X by applying a standard I would never apply to anyone else” – the true colors show. It’s depressing and it makes most of social media into information silos where totalizing ideologies go to get validated, and if you feel alienated by this then clearly that space isn’t for you.

The write up Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments explains the underlying dynamics pretty well: by saying “I like this one thing Peterson said”, you assign him karma points and now everything else about him will be viewed more positively. That’s just how people work, and people will assume you know that and are exploiting it.

For example: by linking that post, I effectively supported the effective altruism movement – even though I’m really not a big fan of it – whether I like it or not, because the author is heavily associated with them. That’s how it works, sadly.

I do exactly this kind of thing for my day job. In short: reading a syntactic description of an algorithm written in assembly language is not the equivalent of understanding what you’ve just read, which in turn is not the equivalent of having a concise and comprehensible logical representation of what you’ve just read, which in turn is not the equivalent of understanding the principles according to which the logical system thus described will behave when given various kinds of input.

This is an issue that has plagued the machine learning field since long before this latest generative AI craze. Decision trees you can understand, SVMs and Naive Bayes too, but the moment you get into automatic feature extraction and RBF kernels and stuff like that, it becomes difficult to understand how the verdicts issued by the model relate to the real world. Having said that, I’m pretty sure GPTs are even more inscrutable and made the problem worse.

no ethical people without explainable people

Calling “from the river to the sea” an “inversion of Likud’s manifesto” is a talking point. Take a time machine and go talk to hard line Likudniks of the past 50 years, you will hear plenty of colorful and distasteful slogans, but not that one. For decades pro-Palestinians have shouted it, rallied around it; they own it, no one else. Just like the Israelis own “we need to delete Gaza” - it is not “an inversion of Iran’s call to wipe Israel off the map”.

Add a “refuse” button that pops up a short text box detailing the consequences. The End, credits roll. Problem solved, now they can all go explain to everyone on the forums why this is the best ending

Now of course one could make some damning argument about the state of the tech industry in practice, resulting in one of those bell curve memes with “using SQLalchemy is a sin” on both far sides and “noooo it’s just a name it’s fine there’s no fraud involved” in the middle

Jules Verne wasn’t a technical expert either, but here we are somehow. Don’t underestimate a keen and observant imagination.

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Hey lurkers, the moment you see the phrase ‘everyone knows that’ stop reading and go look the thing up. Seriously, a single google search. Open a new tab and go google it. Click on a variety of sources. Be fair and also read the Al-Jazeera article, which last I heard still blames Israel. Don’t let some rando on a social media site tell you what ‘everyone knows’.

Now. Couples on the verge of divorce do this thing. ‘Who the fuck cares about the details or about who’s right in this particular instance. Let’s zoom out into the grand, very well argued, story of why I am in the right, and you are in the wrong and also an asshole. Fine, you didn’t snoop in my cell phone like I accused you when we started this argument, but you might as well have, and you’ve done worse before anyway’. This is very cathartic and gratifying, but it is not productive.

Why care about satire? Satire is a powerful force for exposing truth. All good satire has a grain of truth in it, and delivers that grain to the reader wrapped in a reductio ad absurdum: you believe X, but let’s take that to its logical conclusion. Not so reasonable now. In this case: You believe Israel’s denials, but let’s take that to its logical conclusion. Not so reasonable now. I suspect you know this. I suspect if a satire argument attempted to deliver a payload you disagreed with you would also suddenly concede that things like this are more than just a prank, bro.

I also sigh deeply at the attempt to make this about a psychoanalysis of me as a person. This is the year of our lord 2023. Everyone is angry. I am sure you are also angry about plenty of things. This is not meant as a general defense of Israel, of the Israeli government, of Israeli opinions about the conflict. Rest assured that I know plenty about the exact moral failings of the Israeli public and the current ruling coalition, and could write about my grievances with them at length and in great detail. But this “we’ve decided who the bad guys are, inconvenient facts not allowed” mode of thinking – no. I won’t stand for that. Fuck that noise.

When the story was that this was a lethal attack by the IDF with hundreds of casualties, there was nothing funny about this. Now that most credible sources in the first world agree that the IDF was probably not at fault for this particular atrocity (yeah yeah death to the first world and hail Xi & Putin etc, if you’re one of those people just kindly stop reading), now it’s suddenly time to turn this into a joke and short-circuit people’s critical thinking. “ha ha, ‘we didn’t do it’, sounds like a made up claim that the person who did it would say”. What a genius master stroke of insight.

You know what, I now have newfound respect for the people who at least put in the work to argue that the rocket geolocations were fabricated, the Hamas operative convo discussing the malfunctioning rocket was by paid actors, etc etc. At least they are making an argument, which a reader can evaluate and decide whether they believe. This headline is exactly as productive as if they’d written “Hamas reports deadly Israeli airstrike with 3000 victims at the house of You, The Reader”. What a disgrace.

The beautiful modern internet! Where one can in one breath complain about the post-truth era, then proceed to get 30 upvotes for making the absurd, maximalist claim that no one excused the Oct 7 terrorist acts – when Iran called those attacks Palestinian self-defence and Students for Justice in Palestine called it “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” (those are Reuters links, hopefully we can agree they don’t invent news wholecloth). So what now, are we going to move the goal posts and say that calling something “a win” and “self-defense” is not excusing it?

There are enough valid pro-Palestinian arguments: denying water to a civilian population of nearly two million is a war crime, that’s certainly a valid argument. These attacks didn’t happen in a vacuum, and need to be seen in the context of the impossible conditions in the Gaza strip: also certainly a valid argumnent. But this stuff, this blatant misrepresentation of reality, is what makes it to the top of the comment section instead.

Propaganda is not there to make you agree with it, it is there to tell you that you are powerless against it