volkris @volkris@qoto.org
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
Who is going to set up that function? Who is going to dole out those rewards?
It's always crucial to consider the motivations behind the motivations, the incentives that bring the individuals on board with the plan.
Otherwise it comes down to magical thinking, that if we get this abstraction working everything will be grand.
No, in the real world you have to think about how individual humans are going to implement the real plan.
But when you say make, you run into the same issue.
Make? How do you make the group work together? How do you enforce it? How do you get enforcers to enforce?
Even in the making you have to have buy-in. You have to convince the makers to make.
An update on and description of #BlueSky distributed capabilities, including a long segment on distributed labeling and moderation, and how the way #Mastodon / #Fediverse handles it promotes contention on this platform.
I always say, there's a lack of focus on technology serving users here, with instances being the primary focus, and that's a shame.
@Free_Press she doesn't, though.
@ianRobinson Occam's razor would have us at least consider that maybe she is simply being honest with her opinions as expressed in orders, without any sort of conspiracy involved
@tntneedham she wasn't put there. That's not how that process worked.
@ianRobinson
@janettespeyer I think it's under appreciated that there are a TON of practical issues when it comes to how to be on fediverse, issues ranging from internal editorial processes through marketing matters through legal matters.
The hosting of one's own instance falls into those issues.
It's not as simple as a lot of people think.
@roknrol I don't actually understand your poll :)
What sort of labels are you talking about? Can you give an example?
I don't know if you are talking about anything from food labeling through pronouns through political labeling.
@ShingoMouse wow, It sounds like this outfit doesn't really even know how the Supreme Court works if it's asking questions like these.
Or, more likely, it probably knows how the Supreme Court works but it's trying to influence people towards its interests by promoting these nonsensical perspectives.
This outfit is taking advantage of you. You need to know that.
@antares The key is that if your state has given you a vote, well then that's your vote to use however you wish for whatever goal you wish to pursue, and one voter's goal can be entirely different from another voter's goal.
So the idea about throwing your vote away relies on the premise of what the goal is and whether the voting choice does or does not contribute to that goal.
Maybe one of your neighbors has a goal of using his vote to affirmatively promote the candidate of one of the major parties, while your other neighbor has a goal of using his vote to support one of the parties themselves regardless of the specific candidate, and another neighbor has a longer term goal of wanting to influence what future candidates may be on the ballot.
Those, and many others, are entirely reasonable goals, and they would advise completely different voting strategies, none of which would be throwing the vote away.
@wjmaggos I 100% agree that this issue is exactly where philosophy meets reality. The problem is that I think you're on the wrong side of it 🙂
You're doing an awful lot of speculating about what's in the jailer's head. In reality people have a ton of different motivations, that vary from person to person, but we don't have to make any assumptions about it, as we can simply say he's acting in his best interests to do it, using his personal power to do it based on whatever might be in his head, and we don't have to assume any more than that. We don't have to philosophize any farther than that reality.
The politician has asked him to use his power to jail a person, and for whatever reason he has agreed to use his power that way, with the end result being exactly what I'm trying to stress, that the politician himself isn't exerting any particularly significant political power in the jailing.
And so it is that politics has no power in itself, but rather, it invites us to use our own power in ways that we agree to use it.
The threat of being jailed is not an expression of political power but of the power of the jailer, even if the jailer decides to cooperate with a political decision.
The problem is that I think you guys are talking about philosophy when we are talking about application.
You can philosophize all you want about what might be or what could be or what should be, but at the end of the day, you might also be more concerned with what is as you may or may not be led into a jail cell.
And that is emphatically my point here. It doesn't matter what politicians might say, the power rests with the jailer leading the person into the cell.
The abstract is not so important when it comes to that sort of thing.
@selea The problem is that it's so leaky.
And again let me say that this is just part of the way this system was designed. It's not about bad administration or anything else, I think it is absolutely a flaw in the design of this system.
If you have a single instance that you haven't blocked that misbehaves, that's it. The content is liable to be out there.
Unless you're willing to lock down your instance so that you only allow other instances that you personally trust and can vouch for not running any sort of compromising software, even by accident, well then your users need to know what they are getting into here.
Yes, take steps to reduce it, but even if you reduce it, a lot of users are just not aware that the option exists here.
@wjmaggos No I would reverse that.
It's not that the society we take for granted requires that most people agree to go along, but the opposite: the society we see before us is required by what the people have agreed to go along WITH.
The society is what the people have come up with. It doesn't require the people, but the people created it. It doesn't exist separate from the people.
In the same vein, it's not true that otherwise we need totalitarianism to make it function at all, because it doesn't exist separate from us. We wouldn't need totalitarianism to enact society, rather we would require a different society based on what we agreed to create in a distributed way.
Because politics is not power. We each contribute power as we see fit, with politics being just one expression of how we are ourselves organize our own use of our own power.
We don't need this, we don't need totalitarianism, we don't need super bowl tickets, we don't need Yoko Ono albums 🙂
We decide what we want from society collectively and what society ends up being is the reflection of what we all decide to do with our power.
It's not the other way around.
This is a great illustration of what I'm talking about.
You go to jail? How does that happen exactly? Think about it literally.
If a politician declares that you go to jail, what happens? Nothing. He writes it on a scrap of paper or he says it into a microphone, but pfft, those are just words.
Now you might decide to voluntarily go to jail, I guess, but that's your own power that you're executing, not the politician's.
Or maybe an officer of some sort comes around and picks you up and puts you in jail, but again, that wasn't the politician, that wasn't the politician's power, that was the power of the individual officer who decided to use that power to put you in jail.
So it all comes back to, politics really doesn't have power. It isn't power. It can help organize power, it can help to get you to submit a tax payment that is then offered to the officer in return for his agreeing to use HIS OWN POWER to round you up and put you behind bars.
But that's his power, that's your power, that's not politics, that's our agreeing to accept the political invitation to use our power in such a way.
Politics is not power. It's only an invitation for us all to contribute our power in ways that represent the political consensus, if we want to.
@sammi you keep making assumptions about me that are just wrong.
I have a problem with that? No. I really don't care.
You might, though, if you don't want to sound like a nut who's just spouting propaganda in the course of arguing for something pretty extreme.
But that's not my problem. I have no problem with that.
@shellheim I mean, you probably are!
Like I said, the way this platform works, your instance is broadcasting your posts to a lot of people who are perfectly able to take those posts and sell them to data miners.
With all of the posts being out there for the taking like this, I would be amazed if companies aren't out there collecting and reselling already, and haven't been doing it for a while.
The way this platform is set up, it makes it really easy for them to do that, so why wouldn't they? They get the benefits of data mining without having to bother marketing their platform building it themselves or anything like that.
We have set up a system that is ripe for exploitation, so it would be amazing if it wasn't being exploited that way.
@olives It's crucial to keep in mind that elected officials play a role in this. All too often they escape accountability as people get upset with courts.
@olives I mean... I'd say there are very key lessons in political science, not tech, to learn from that.
Yeah, they pioneered regulations. And showed why some paths shouldn't be uncritically followed.
@hesgen Yeah, but I think that second part really captures the problem with the first part as well.
Humanity eventually will always prevail? No, it will only prevail right until it doesn't.
But that kind of flowery language seems to be what the guy is selling, going right back to this seams is a war against humanity itself.
No, that's also wrong.
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
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