Worked through my obsessions a bit and let go of them. In the following weeks I asked three women out and got shot down each time instead of thinking about doing so for a month and being a creep.
Unironically, good on you. That’s character progress and it takes a lot of courage and self-confidence to accept rejection in a mature way and keep trying regardless. For what it’s worth I as an Internet stranger think we should help more people do the same sort of things.
Her name is [kept to myself because I’m a gentleman who doesn’t kiss and tell]. I hope I, in turn, am not someone’s most alarming thing but it’s possible :P
I’d say it’s sometimes ok, sometimes necessary for brevity, and sometimes accurate. Accurate = “All people need oxygen, water, and calories to survive.” Brevity = “Generally speaking, people enjoy good food and good company so those situations work well for forming relationships.”
Consequences of generalizations have a lot to do with how tolerable they are. If I say, “most people like pizza” there’s not much harm if several million people don’t. If I say, “all or most people of this gender/ethnicity/religion/whatever have X problem” that’s a lot more problematic because it can easily lead to a consequence of harmful prejudice. When it comes to matters of ethics, beliefs, accusations etc. it becomes very important to handle cases individually as much as humanly possible.
It isn’t too much to ask. According to Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG (Harvard Psychiatrist/Instructor), research shows that the release of non-consensual porn makes the unwilling subjects suicidal over half the time. Non-consensual porn = deepfakes, revenge porn, etc. It’s seriously harmful, and there are other effects like depression, shame, PTSD, anxiety, and so on. There is functionally unlimited porn out there that is made with consent, and if someone doesn’t want to be publicly sexually explicit then that’s their choice.
I’m not against AI porn in general (I consider it the modern version of dirty drawings/cartoons), but when it comes to specific likenesses as with deepfakes then there’s clear proof of harm and that’s enough for me to oppose it. I don’t believe there’s some inherent right to see specific people naked against their will.
Waking up when the weather changes:
That’s the face I made about a week into trading Reddit participation in for Lemmy participation or just break-from-social-media time. Conversations feel more genuine, there’s less overbearing moderation (at least in my experience), and if there’s nothing new on Lemmy I’ve probably spent enough time reading forums anyways. I’m only keeping my 13-year-old Reddit account to keep track of old favorited posts and specialist forums like specific video game tips.
But the post is explicitly about Tweets that challenge emotions and views and how that’s harmful. It’s one thing to want to see fewer suspicious offers from Nigerian princes and horny MILFS in my area. It’s another to tell an AI that you don’t want to see events or conversations that might be upsetting or make you think about ethics, politics, etc.
P.S. I’m replying to you a lot today, just want to say I’m not trying to be abusive or follow you around. You keep making points on this page that I want to engage with, and hopefully it’s not coming across as persecution.
There are enormous issues with who decides what makes it through the filter, how to handle things that are of unknown truth (say ongoing research), and the hazards of training people on the receiving end of the filter to assume everything they consume is completely factual (the whole point of said fake news filter). If you’d argue that people on the far side of the filter can still be skeptical, then just train that and avoid censorship via filter.
He’s talking about wanting some system to filter out Tweets that “elicit emotion” or “nudge views”, comparing them to malware. I looked him up and see he’s a computer scientist, which explains the comparison to malware. I assume when he’s designing AI he tries to filter what inputs the model gets so as to achieve the desired results. AI acts on algorithms and prompts regardless of value/ethics and bad input = bad output, but I think human minds have much more capability to cope and assess value than modern AI. As such I still don’t like the idea of sanitizing intake because I believe in resilience and processing unpleasantness as opposed to stringent filters. What am I missing?
I’m putting this in it’s own response because it’s a less important addendum to my main points above and I don’t want to put everyone off with a single huge brick of text.
If just knowing bad news exists makes life difficult for someone, even if they don’t click the link, then I’d (respectfully, not as an insult) recommend learning coping techniques like meditation, diaphragmatic breathing, or cognitive behavior therapy that can add resilience. I am NOT suggesting someone feeling like that is innately weak or flawed, but there are techniques to move the impact of knowing there’s bad things happening towards manageable. If it’s still immediately extremely distressing, there may be related past trauma that needs sorting out.
Physical analogy for social media breaks - I work out regularly. Even though it’s a healthy habit, I don’t work out every day because it’s tiring and that would make it unhealthy. When I do work out though I want it to be difficult because that’s how gains are made. So I’m not saying you or I need to batter ourselves with torturous news every day - breaks aren’t just ok they’re how you stay healthy. When I read the news though, I want the whole truth even if that truth has parts that are uncomfortable or challenge my worldview, and I also want to be experienced/trained enough to handle those emotions and thoughts.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking a break from social media or news. There are days I don’t visit sites like Lemmy or when I do I only click non-news links because I’m not in the mood or already having a bad day. That’s different than filtering (as per Karpathy’s example) Tweets so that when you do engage it’s consistently a very curated, inoffensive, “safe” experience. Again, I only have the one post to go off of, but he specifically talks about wishing to avoid Tweets that “elicit emotions” or “nudge views” and compares those provocative messages to malware. As far as your point regarding blatantly sensationalist news, when I recognize it’s that kind of story I just stop reading/watching and that’s that.
I WANT to have my emotions elicited because I seek to be educated and don’t want to be complacent about things that should make me react. “Don’t know, don’t care” is how people go unrepresented or abused - e.g. almost no one reads about what Boko Haram is doing in Nigeria (thus it’s already “filtered out” by media), and so very little has been done in the 22 years they’ve been affecting millions of lives. I WANT to have my “views nudged” because I’m regularly checking my worldview to make sure it stays centered around my core ethics, and being challenged has prompted me to change bad stances before. Being exposed to objectionable content before and reassessing is also how I’ve learned to spot BS attempts to manipulate. It doesn’t matter how many times MAGA Tweets tell me that God is upset at drag queens and only Donald Trump can save the world because now I recognize ragebait when I see it. Having dealt with it before, no amount of exposure is going to make me believe their trash and knowing what is being said is useful for exposing and opposing harmful governmental policies/bad candidates (sometimes even helping deprogram others).
Without wanting to be too aggressive, with only that quote to go on it sounds like that person wants to live in a safe zone where they’re never challenged, angered, made afraid, or have to reconsider their world view. That’s the very definition of an echo chamber. I don’t think you’re meant to live life experiencing only “approved” moments, even if you’re the one in charge of approving them. Frankly I don’t know how that would be possible without an insane amount of external control. You’d have to have someone/something else as a “wall” of sorts controlling your every experience or else how would things get reliably filtered?
I’d much prefer to teach people how to be resilient so they don’t have to be afraid of being exposed to the “wrong” ideas. I’d recommend things like learning what emotions mean and how to deal with them, coping/processing bad moments, introspection, how to get help, and how to check new ideas against your own ethics. E.g. if you read something and it makes you angry, what idea/experience is the anger telling you to protect yourself from and how does it match your morality? How do you express that anger in a reasonable and productive way? If it’s serious who do you call? And so on.
In the spirit of the thread, here’s a meme I’ve stolen from someone else’s recent post (want to give credit where due) in case you get criticized for your plundering ways:
How about we just avoid the long arguments and jump to the end:
There. After so many of these threads I can near guarantee 90%+ will fall roughly into those categories.
I’m going to show my age with this list, and metal is such a large genre I don’t always know what counts. Hopefully there’s new ones for some folks that you’ll enjoy as much as I do.
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Closets have no need to worry about being phased out so long as there are Republican politicians who secretly love LGBTQ+ sex. “It’s happened so many times that it’s almost become predictable at this point. The louder someone is about the righteous conservative Christian lifestyle they’re leading, the more likely they are to be stepping out on their wives or having secret gay affairs because if there is one thing you can count on in life, it’s for Republicans not to practice what they preach.”
I’m 43 and rarely have aches (certainly nothing that would qualify as chronic), but I also regularly walk to and from the gym to weightlift. There’s a saying “Movement is Medicine” and so far it seems to be proving true for me. Maybe if you don’t use it you lose it.
I almost never buy multiplayer-focused games anymore. Of course not all gamers are shitty, but enough are to matter. Having left those games behind I can see how they were taking more joy from my life than they added. If friends want to do private co-op that’s cool, but it’s also rarer now that we’re all older.
As far as sales go, I love playing a year or two behind new releases. Patched games at a discount ftw and timing doesn’t matter in single-player games.