Knowing the distribution of what entire households watch is very useful. It’s not about spying on you personally.

[citation needed]

I mean, from the abstract it looks like what the study did was localise the specific network of right hemisphere neuronal clusters that, when damaged, predict religious fundamentalism. Since they only studied patients with TBIs, they weren’t testing the claim that brain damage increases the likelihood of fundamentalism. The rate of fundamentalism in the general population could, hypothetically, be higher than among TBI patients (i.e., if brain injuries actually reduce fundamentalism) and this study’s insights would still hold.

Thanks! Appreciate learning something new!

Sounds like a great way to evolve vaccine-resistant rabies

Your and his age are gonna be major variables here. Conversations and relationships work very differently at different life stages.

You sound like you’re maybe a teenager? Try asking interesting questions that require some thought to answer, but still leave room for your friend to give an easy thoughtless answer if they want to. Where do you think we’ll be in X years? What’s something you thought you wanted but as you’ve gotten okay have realised you actually don’t? What do you think we do now thar future generations will think is crazy? Listen to his answers and ask followup questions.

Personally, I’ve always been most impressed by directness, honesty, intelligence and courage.

I very much agree with your take. I wish mature-thinkers had more influence on contemporary politics, instead of the populism and black-and-white moralising that seems to be dominating our world.

Also, the quality of discussion on lemmy is surprisingly good!

Yeah, the point that the musicians seem to be making, from the very brief quotes he shares (I haven’t been following this independently), is about the efficacy of music boycotts as a tool for political change. You can object to a nation’s political actions and still think that performing music for your fans in that country will make things better.

The author just insists that Israeli government genocide is bad and that the ordinary citizens are complicit. I think the implicit logic must be: bad people should be punished, depriving them of music punishes them. While it might satisfy a craving to hurt the bad guys, I think it’s much harder to claim that this would help stop the genocide.

I think the musicians have a stronger case that actually performing would be more likely to change people’s minds and improve the situation. Plus the broader benefits of keeping music and art apolitical, rather than trying to make everything in life a tool for political manipulation. I’d have actually been really interested to hear some substantive arguments about those points, but was disappointed to discover that, as you say, it was just a hit piece.

Wow, what a terrible article. The author doesn’t engage with any of the substantive points Radiohead and Nick Cave are making, he just disparages them and insists on his obvious moral superiority. It’s dressed up in some, admittedly, very nice writing, but this is just childish name calling.

Still, interesting read. Thanks for sharing.

Sounds amazing. Could you provide a link or at least enough names that I can google it?

Nah, that’s great because you can so easily escalate to heavy talk. Disagree with the political opinion. Insist car culture is just pointless fashion fads. Dive into the morality of reality TV.

Either they disengage and you’re free, or you get to have an actual meaningful debate instead of echoing hollow platitudes.

The actual results are in the text. 56% personifiers among autists vs 33% among not autists, p<0.05. Self report is p=0.06.

Scientific papers are often titled “What it’s actually about: something witty.” This one is about object personification and so after the colon they personify the paper itself by giving it an emotion.

1. the whole point of statistics is to extract subtle signals from noise, if you’re getting wildly different results, the problem is you’re under-powered.

Thanks for taking the time to post these links, just letting you know you’re efforts have benefited at least one person who’s gonna enjoy reading this.

The perfect colinearity of most of the lines is very suspicious too.

A friend of mine just used it to write a script for an Amazing Race application video. It was quite good.

How the heck did it access enough source material to be able to imitate something that specific and do it well? Are we humans that predictable?

Putting the recovery center on top of the perfect hill for rolling down…

Fair enough, but that still doesn’t address the problem for people who do want to be on a large server—full of many people who share their cat meme interests—and see mostly high quality content.

Wanting to be in a forum with thousands or millions of other enthusiasts is a legitimate use case for this kind of social media platform. In that use case, I don’t know of any other way but voting to efficiently filter low quality content. “Just leave” avoids the problem rather than solving it, by denying people the opportunity to do the thing that most people go to Reddit for: to be part of huge communities and just see the good threads and comments.

Interesting perspective. Thanks for genuinely engaging, by the way.

I worry that the mechanisms you describe might not work as the number of users gets large. Check out “Eternal September” if you don’t know about it already. Niche forums might be able to run like that just because they will never have too many members. For forums which many people are interested in (e.g., cat memes), this might not be possible. They may need a mechanism for high-grading content.

Are you willing to accept the assumption that bad content (e.g., spam, advertising, trolling, low effort posts) is far more common than good content (I.e…, high effort posts)?

If you are, then it seems to me that your system would involve a lot more people interacting with a lot more bad content than they do good content. Down votes are a mechanism that let’s one person’s time wasted interacting with bad content reduce the probability that everyone else will have to waste their time on that content.