Harvard-behavioral-scientist-studies-dishonesty-accused-fabricating-data
4 to go!
She’s on track to shatter the record some said was unbeatable. 
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“Misinformation” is newspeak for truth the State doesn’t want shared.
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Misinformation is a genuine challenge, but I am afraid as well that the proposed solutions are fucking stupid.
Why the hell do we keep electing fucking morons to represent the population?
Maybe Joseph de Maistre was right “Every nation gets the government it deserves.”
We get stupid laws, because we elect stupid politicians, because the majority of the population is freaking stupid.
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She’s at the foot of the last mountain, with 18 hours in hand!
30 days of non-stop running, climbing, cycling, and kayaking,
Incredible.
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Klibreck was the first big hill I did with my Dad when I was about 15.
Lovely day and we got a swim in the loch on the way back down. Then we had a fish supper in Lairg 
Well done to your pal, many thought that record would never be beaten. Obv she got a very good weather window. I was never a Munro-bagger as such myself I doubt I ever did >30-40 summits myself but I always kept an interest in those who did. Its a major expedition and the planning and logistics is every bit as important as the fitness and general mountain skills. That and being able to take a full month off when the weather is good.
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A remarkably upside-down observation. The idea is that if people were more intelligent they’d elect better politicians who would then make better laws which would then solve problems like misinformation.
This point seems to rest on at least the following wild suppositions:
- There are “intelligent” politicians people could have voted for but didn’t
- People voting are influenced only by their “intelligence” and by no other outside forces
- Politicians, once elected, make laws in a kind of vacuum and no other party has any influence
- The way to solve problems is through writing laws.
What we actually have in reality are
- laws that are perfectly intelligently chosen to further reinforce the imbalance in favour of the already unimaginably powerful corporate entities who lobby for these laws, because
- those same corporate entites are free to pump money into buying political and media power, which they do so very succesfully, which leads inevitably to
- people being incredibly misinformed and actively interested in subjects which are no threat to any entrenched power - sports, reality tv, superhero movies, raunchy romance novels, porn, and the like.
Longer thought-experiment type spiel on point 2 from above:
Imagine a fictitious country where as soon as the children were able to walk and not poop themselves they were sent to a place called a “school” that functioned in an arbitrary and authoritarian manner. No talking, no laughing, no movement. The children have no say in anything there, why they have to study this or that, and are taught that to be liked and respected, they have to submit to authority, not kick up a fuss, and compete against their peers in endless bureaucratic nonsense-tests. Generally, both students and teachers despise this, with the odd exception.
This experience is obligatory, and goes on for a minimum of ~15 years, the most intellectually formative years of a human life. It mostly creates adults who are stunted, bitter, fearful, sad, and often even hateful towards a range of academic subjects.
At the same time as this (totally fictitious) country does this to all its citizens, the way its economics and politics work is based on a system of endless marketing and spin. The movies, the shows, the music, the news sites, the government messaging, the packaging on food, the search engines, the games, the algorithms - all engineered very explicitly to encourage everyone to focus on consuming more and more, to get outraged by the latest flavour of the week and then dutifully move on to the next thing, and so on.
That’s the state of affairs in this non-existing country - people are terrified of appearing “intellectual”, terrified of the responsibility of being “informed”, terrified of sticking out too much, constantly fed informational junk-food and prodded around by algorithms and snake-oil sellers, constantly feigning one moral stance or the other to fit into their in-group, and told endlessly that experts will handle the matter for them and that they couldn’t possibly understand complicated subjects like economics and finance and etc anyway.
Just vote for one or the other of the two clowns we put on stage for you every few years, and don’t cause any hassle.
Obviously, that’s the situation we’re in. The immense injustice and painful stupidity of the whole thing is not helped in any way by “tough-minded” commentators like yourself blaming the actual victims of this obscene and cruel system masquerading as “democracy”.
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I only wanted to post this in the first place. Obviously a biased perspective, but very clear and informative too. I especially enjoyed the bit on static and dynamic typing.
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Would this even be needed with SAFE?
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@JimCollinson – Rust GUI library.
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For Safe the lag between earth and Mars would be an issue since the current design is for completely decentralised network and really assumes the nodes are not too far away. Even geostationary lags could be a minor issue if too many nodes connect via geostationary satellites.
Of course some modification may help but as suggested once before the networks would be basically separate with bridging between the two to allow for transfers of chunks to build out each network. Maybe only when a chunk is requested then if not in planet’s network then a call to the adjacent networks is done just like in the planet’s network but response is not expected to be quick but could take however long and when it arrives then the planet’s network stores the chunk and sends it off to the requester.
Maybe even when a chunk is not available then the client could do a variant of the get chunk and that would be an external safe network request and when it uses that variant then it can expect a long, long wait. By only doing it when a request is made then the different planet’s network are not overloaded with every chunk in the solar system, only the ones someone requested or stored local to the planet.
Here planet could also be a artificial structure in space where people live.
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Let’s just get safe up and running on Earth for now ay 
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Surly you mean like the Death Star? 
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And she did it!
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The pool of available politicians is true to be limited as psychopath will tend to desire such positions of power. However it is also the responsibility of the rest of the population to come forward to become candidates in the first place. If honest people with integrity don’t come forward to propose new ideas and become new candidates, then we are responsible for our inaction.
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The capacity of recognizing psychological manipulation techniques, biases and logical fallacies used as rhetorical devices does come with intelligence and education. However here he we have a complex interaction between the corrupt politicians and the educational system. The most corrupted countries are getting their educational system getting dismantled as the corrupted politicians know that a smart populace is a threat to their desires to perpetually stay in power.
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Congressmen write laws of a variety of reasons, however lobbying “with donations” in the US is baffling one of them. In most other democratic countries it is coded as bribery and it would be considered illegal (and it still happens anyways, but at least it is recognized as illegal). It is incredible how the industry has the US government by the balls to normalize the concept of paying politicians to get favours.
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Writing laws that make sense, that are well researched, pragmatic and enforceable, yes, it is essential. Making changes to it influences the whole society, and in some causes it is the center of the nucleation of a whole new culture and mindset in that society which has an everlasting effect. For example, redlining. Shitty laws by bigoted politicians will fracture a country.
Laws to combat thievery and even public littering in Singapore turned a cesspool of a country to the cleanest and safest country in the world. Korea changed in just 10 years as well.
None of these points invalidates that original quote.
Btw,
I came to leave this news here:
France is seriously becoming freaking dystopian.
This is slippery slope happening in real time.
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Chrome already blocks websites it deems fishy.
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But it is different if a government by law orders every browser to keep a ban list, especially if it is some bullshit excuse like “piracy” equates as malware.
And the next step is terrifying if you think about it, those enforcing these laws are legitimate.
Any other browser that doesn’t comply would be illegal…
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