I understand your resentment but the restaurant manager is a different user

fuck it, go full mathematician. Serve an empty bowl on the grounds that it’s a vacuous fruit salad, every ingredient in it is a fruit

The “you will all submit to RTO and like it” machine has finally found a way to package this message in a way that wide eyed internet activists will support. Congratulations to them, I guess.

Obviously, yes, but at that level of knowledge as a user, you either don’t know about that or don’t feel comfortable enough to deal with it.

Debian – I just wasn’t ready for it. Got told “oh you’re using Mint? That’s nice but you should try out Debian it’s the Real Deal™” but the reason I was using Mint back then in the first place was that it was my first step out of the Windows ecosystem, I was scared shitless and didn’t understand anything. What do you mean I don’t get a huge pretty start menu?! How am I supposed to find stuff then?!

Excellently.

I got invited to an interview at an absurdist variety show with these weird ethnic undertones (this would be a hassle to explain, just imagine that part of the show is that everyone there is putting on an exaggerated redneck act). They apparently got wind of some scientific publication I was involved with and for some reason decided it would be a great piece of entertainment to have me on. My colleagues were thrilled about this ‘now or never’ opportunity but I had a strong gut feeling that these people weren’t about to laugh with me. Thought about it for a minute and then responded nope, hard pass. Still probably one of the best decisions of my life.

The prime problem is that every social space eventually becomes a circlejerk. Bots and astroturfing exacerbate the problem but it exists perfectly fine on its own – in the early 2000s I had the misfortune of running across plenty of gigantic, years-long circlejerks where definitely no bots or nefarious foreign manipulators were involved (I’m talking console wars, Harry Potter ship wars, stupid shit like that). People form circle jerks in the same way that salts form crystals. It’s just in their nature.

The thing with circlejerks isn’t that there’s overwhelming agreement on some subject. You’ll get dunked on in most any social media space for claiming that the earth is flat or that Putin is a swell guy, that in itself is obviously not a problem. What makes a circlejerk is that takes get cheered for and upvoted not in proportion to how much they are anchored in reality, but in proportion to how useful they are in galvanizing allies and disrupting enemies. Whoever shouts “glory to the cause” in the most compelling way gets all the oxygen. At that point the amount of brain rot is only going to increase. No matter how righteous the cause, inevitably there comes the point where you can go on the Righteous Cause Forum and post “2+2=5, therefore all glory to the cause” and get 400 upvotes.

Everyone talks a big game about how much they like truth, reason and moral consistency, but in the end when it’s just them and the upvote button and “do I stop and honestly examine this argument that gives me warm fuzzy feelings”, “is it really fair to dunk on Hated Group X by applying a standard I would never apply to anyone else” – the true colors show. It’s depressing and it makes most of social media into information silos where totalizing ideologies go to get validated, and if you feel alienated by this then clearly that space isn’t for you.

The write up Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments explains the underlying dynamics pretty well: by saying “I just like this one thing Peterson said”, you assign him karma points and now everything else about him will be viewed more positively. That’s just how people work, and people will assume you know that and are exploiting it.

For example: by linking that post, I just effectively supported the effective altruism movement – even though I’m really not a big fan of it – whether I like it or not, because the author is heavily associated with them. That’s just how it works.

I encourage anyone to read the Wikipedia page on this issue, it provides a lot of sources and goes over whatever evidence the Israelis did claim to have, and how several pieces of it were dismissed as insufficient. I am not arguing with your conclusion here, it’s just that “HA! THIS HEADLINE SETTLES IT” makes for a lousy mental habit.

The only outcome I can imagine is the brigade closing this write-up as a duplicate and dragging off the author kicking and screaming, never to be seen again, like what happens to the vtuber protagonist in The Waldo Moment. The idea has grown too powerful for even him to contain it anymore.

Israel says it has two goals: destroy Hamas and rescue the 129 hostages still held by militants […] but some families of hostages worry that the bombing endangers their loved ones. Hostages released during a weeklong cease-fire last month recounted that their captors moved them from place to place to avoid Israeli bombardment. Hamas has claimed that several hostages died from Israeli bombs, though the claims could not be verified.

I have to believe that everyone in Israel knows that “continue this balls to the wall military campaign to destroy Hamas AND free all the hostages! These go hand in hand” is cakeism lip service. Every minimally rational person should be able to understand that when facing a foe who is holding hostages, if you commit to destroying that foe by military means then you have effectively forfeited the lives of the hostages, barring an outstanding stroke of tactics or a lucky break (so far Israeli soldiers have been able to rescue one hostage by force). Conversely, if you decide to sit down with that foe and say “all right, score one for you, let us cut a deal and get all our hostages back”, then your foe will make sure to negotiate terms such that you will not be destroying anything or anyone (Hamas mistakenly thought they had this sorted out with the first ceasefire, which is why now they demand total cessation of all hostilities as a precondition for any further deal). But speaking this truth out loud in Israel these days is just not palatable; instead the public demands to hear these “do this and that” fairy tales.

I do exactly this kind of thing for my day job. In short: reading a syntactic description of an algorithm written in assembly language is not the equivalent of understanding what you’ve just read, which in turn is not the equivalent of having a concise and comprehensible logical representation of what you’ve just read, which in turn is not the equivalent of understanding the principles according to which the logical system thus described will behave when given various kinds of input.

Even the bluest and whitest Israeli apologist, convinced that the Israelis are the good guys in this conflict will – if they’re being honest – tell you: “Hamas started a war and is hiding behind these civilians as human shields, so this is what happens, do not expect us to stay our hand to prevent it, or to take responsibility for it, what if it was your country in this position, you would change your tune real quick”, etc etc etc. In essence, welcome to the real world, where this sort of thing can just happen and we do not have the ethical tools or framework to make it not happen. This is depressing as fuck.

A lot of Israelis imagine that in the aftermath of all of this Gaza will lose the capacity to launch another 7/10 and ‘learn its lesson’ which in itself will magically lead to a bright and peaceful future for the region. Somehow I am not so optimistic. Pragmatically speaking the Israelis themselves are in no position to say “now that we’ve bombed you, let us uplift you” but egads, someone should do something. The knowledge that even after Israel decides it has done enough and winds down its Gaza operation apparently no sane governing body wants to take responsibility for Gaza saddens me to no end. These people just deserved better, I don’t care how much they cheered for 7/10 or whatever. There can be no justice or peace without compassion

This is an issue that has plagued the machine learning field since long before this latest generative AI craze. Decision trees you can understand, SVMs and Naive Bayes too, but the moment you get into automatic feature extraction and RBF kernels and stuff like that, it becomes difficult to understand how the verdicts issued by the model relate to the real world. Having said that, I’m pretty sure GPTs are even more inscrutable and made the problem worse.

no ethical people without explainable people

white supremacist

Lol. Lmao, even.

None of the 54 people who upvoted this have the first idea about how Israeli internal politics relates to white supremacy. None of them know how Likud got elected in '77, on top what of ethnic tensions. None of them know the names “Dudi Amsalem”, “Miri Regev”, “Galit Distel”, who are high ranking ministers in the current Israeli govt (Distel quit recently), and how they built their political capital and support base on top of repeated scorn and derision for “the white tribe” which in Israel is traditionally identified with the secular liberal elites, who vote for left wing parties and try to promote left wing policies. Listen to some of the stuff that this wing of Likud says, ironically they don’t sound far off from the BLM movement who of course they will tell you that they oppose in their capacity as staunch conservatives. Don’t underestimate how much of Likud’s power comes from exactly that fault line in Israeli society.

Go ahead and call Israel bigoted, a settler state, a colonialist project, all of these start off an argument that often Israel is going to look not so great coming out of – but “white supremacist”? People make the surprised Pikachu face because this take is detached from physical reality. Out of what I want to believe is good intentions, you ended up shoving the square peg that is this conflict into the convenient round hole that is this narrative about colors vs. whites which has not applied since decades before the turn of the century.

FWIW I don’t personally have the taste for any of this. I wish I could stop hearing about the imaginary applications of colors to Israeli internal and foreign policy, and instead start hearing more about practical plans of how to ensure security in the region and how to aim for a future where millions of Gazans don’t starve. But clearly no one is asking me.

The advertisement is specifically about returning to the Gaza settlements that were abandoned during the disengagement of 2005; no one in Israel right now knows what’s going to happen to Gaza once the war winds down, there’s no consensus even for what the Israeli public would want to happen in theory. So, while this ad is jingoistic, tasteless and not a good look, it is not some deep chess move by the Israeli govt sending the real estate industry to Jewify Gaza; it’s one actor among a cacophony of competing voices, shouting “LET US UNDO THE 2005 DISENGAGEMENT THIS IS THE REAL SOLUTION”. If you want to correctly argue that historically these kinds of crazies do end up having govt backing then by all means argue that, but it’s better to understand the situation as it currently is.