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
@drmike I mean this is how we should always have been treating verified accounts, with lots of skepticism, not believing them.
So really I see this as an improvement.
Verified accounts always have spread misinformation and they always will. Maybe it's worth listening to them or not, but it's never worth trusting them.
Verified accounts just means it looks like it's coming from a human. But humans lie, or humans get the story wrong. So the verification was never a reason to trust what was being posted.
So great! We are figuring out not to trust these people that we never should have been trusting in the first place!
@lauren meh, I figure most of the time such positions are symbolic only with little actual impact.
So either the occupant of the position realizes that and sets their expectations accordingly, or they get really really frustrated.
Neither does any good.
@pglpm@emacs.ch no, I'm talking about Fediverse, or more specifically, I'm thinking about the ActivityPub protocol that runs it.
AP is all about delivering streams of content left and right from content producers to the applications and websites that want it. But the streams themselves are a little ephemeral so it's up to the end use to decide what to do with them.
So Fediverse might deliver an answer to a question, and while a platform like Mastodon might just throw it up on the screen for an hour, it takes a more specialized website to actually display the answer that was provided and keep it around for future users to find.
@Nonilex it's not just culture wars, though.
The administration was caught promoting politicized messages particularly related to health care that have nothing to do with culture, messages that sought to sink scientific information that ran up against officials' public messaging.
That's such an important part of this story.
@SteveThompson Well, it's not so much backing Biden as it is pushing back against the lower court.
I know that's being pedantic, but the details matter in legal procedings.
@marqle I'd say that so many mastodon users are requesting this feature that it's reasonable to say it needs to implement the feature.
Admittedly this is not objective, but it is a long-standing feature request. And I think I remember that the developers have agreed to it finally.
As if the pros don't want clicks? :)
FWIW, over the past year, particularly with regard to the Ukraine war, I've been struck by amateurs doing a much better job at assembling and presenting news than the professionals.
Professional journalism has simply really seemed to go downhill over the last decade or so.
@freemo@mastodon.acm.org
@lola no?
I don't know what you're referring to.
@Miro_Collas that sort of talk is dramatic conspiracy theory that lets our elected officials off the hook for their votes.
No, the people behind the Supreme Court's composition are Supreme Court justices themselves and presidents and senators that we elect.
We need to hold them accountable and not let them pass the buck to figures supposedly lurking in the shadows.
Don't like the current makeup of the Court? Push for the ouster of senators who consented to their appointment.
But that's not really how the #House rules work: any representative doesn't have to make a deal to either vote or withhold their vote.
If Democrats really wanted the House to reopen they could simply stop voting to stand in the way. That doesn't require any dealmaking.
When you start talking about deals, though, that gets REALLY complicated since this is more than just the Speaker. There are committee assignments and House Rules on the table at that point, which is a giant Gordian Knot to address.
@DemocracyMattersALot
@lauren it's an ax I've been grinding for years that we needed to normalize something like cryptographic signing to authenticate both text and visual media.
And so I'm particularly annoyed to see us get to the point I've been fearing for a decade, where such image manipulation is snowballing, but we didn't put in place norms to detect it already.
Siiiigh.
Nerds in academia have been sounding this alarm, but ah well.
@skry the thing is, sometimes a criticism is called out because it's actually not valid.
@witchescauldron well, I'd view Fediverse as a tool or as infrastructure, like the telephone network.
It's the communication framework that's available to solve whatever problem one might use it to solve.
Whether that problem is forming a community or transmitting weather reports is a separate question.
Maybe the tool will prove useful, maybe not.
@TheConversationUS because they provide fodder for dramatic storytelling that doesn't actually matter all that much.
They provide clickbait.
@pglpm@emacs.ch IMO it would be a way of interfacing with the site but not the site on its own.
Stackexchange sort of provides an archive of answers while Fediverse is about transient exchanges.
I could see Fediverse feeds to help people contribute to the site, but the site itself needs to be more than a scrolling feed to provide answers to future searchers, if that makes sense.
@fj I mean, with the FAA delaying the moving fast part, yes, we can blame them.
We are watching an FAA delay, that the FAA confirms, so why not blame the FAA?
The regulator says it needs more resources to keep up with their workload. Why not take their word for it?
@marcusgreen maybe to build on something @dameoutlaw@mstdn.social was touching on:
An ax I grind is that the ActivityPub protocol and Fediverse were consciously designed to put instances, not users, at the center of the system.
Everything is controlled by instances, and the refrain of "Well a user can just set up their own instance!" only reinforces this.
The instance focus has all sorts of implications ranging from moderation through system performance, so it's no small deal.
I would much rather have had a focus on users, but that ship has sailed, and there's not much to do about it at this point.
Does this mean we can finally agree that Krugman is an overrated moron?
These days the guy seems to do nothing but sell slanted opinions that are often so easily debunkable.
Yes, he was better in the past. Now he's off on a limb.
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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