MudMan

In that it’s mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.

So I guess it’s a good test for that sort of “just read the headline” response.

It’s been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can’t parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?

I may be done with this place at this point. It’s just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.

Yeah, but… this isn’t that.

You’re literally saying “well, anecdotal impressions say this, so I refute this study that says something else”.

We don’t like that. That’s not a thing we like to do.

And for the record, as these things go, the article linked here is pretty good. I’ve seen more than one worse example of a study being reported in the press today.

They provide a neutral headline that conveys the takeaway of the study, they provide context about companies mentioning AIs on layoffs, they provide a link to the full study and they provide a separate study that yields different, seemingly contradicting results.

I mean, this is as close to best case scenario for reporting on a study as you can get in mainstream press. If nothing else, kudos to The Register. The bar was low but they went for personal best anyway.

Man, the problem with giving up all the wonky fashy social media is that when you’re in an echo chamber all the weird misinformation and emotion-driven politics are coming from inside the house. It’s been a particularly rough day for politically-adjacent but epistemologically depressing posts today.

So the report itself argues there is a need for better data, and it seems fairly level headed, but…

…what’s with people being mad about it?

I say this a lot, but there seems to be a lot of weird anti-hype where people want this AI stuff to work better than it does so it can be worse than it is, and I’m often confused by it. The takeaway here is that most jobs don’t seem to be behaving that differently so far if you look at the labor market in aggregate. Which is… fine? It’s not that unexpected? The AI shills were selling that entire industries would be replaced by AI overnight, and most sensible people didn’t think so or argued that the jobs would get replaced with AI wrangler tasks because this thing wouldn’t completely automate most tasks in ways that weren’t already available.

Which seems to be most of what’s going on. AI art is 100% not production-ready out of the gate, AI text seems to be a bit of a wash in terms of saving time for programmers and even in more obvious industries like customer service we already had a bunch of bots and automation in place.

So what’s all the anger? Did people want this to be worse? Do they just want to vibe with the economy being bad in a way they can pin on something they already don’t like and maybe politics is too heavy now? What’s going on there?

Absolutely not the case. See, what’s happening is you went “will somebody think of the 25 year old children”, I said that’s a disingenuous argument and you went “will somebody think of the 25 year old children” again. My not engaging with the disingenuous argument isn’t “light on arguments and refutations”, it’s me refusing to argue the issue on the disingenuous terms you are presenting.

Which is an argument I find pointless in the first place because my point wasn’t about… 25 year old children being seduced by sweet, sweet sports gambling, it was that the Pew survey results were presented in a surprisingly skewed way that is representative of that exact “think of the children” falacy, regardless of the merits of the argument.

Yeah, well, I stand by that being disingenuous, intellectually dishonest crap. It’d feel weird giving the mostly technically correct Ipsos/Pew survey a hard time for a shaky headline but giving you a pass for outright manipulative demagoguery, so this is me not giving you a pass.

Cool.

So most of that post doesn’t apply to the point I’m making because, honestly, the issue is with sports in the first place, so the argument is about sports being trivial and that whole thing is irrelevant anyway.

But I am setting that aside because “young adults are children because it is convenient to the point I’m making and besides I bet they start before they’re 18 anyway and will somebody think of the 25 year old children, and also porn bad” is such an intellectually dishonest argument that suddenly I don’t care that somebody at Pew is annoyed at gambling ads during sports to the point of deploying subtle headline manipulation. I’m more concerned with what you’re on and trying to make you understand why you should make a genuine point instead of wrapping yourself in demagoguery, because maaaan.

Not really, no. I am upset at the type of binary framing you are deploying here being present even in well established research institutions to push specific viewpoints.

Like, say, having a study series that in 2022 reports a 57% neutral answer headline that result as “few people think sports betting is good” and following that up several years later with a 50% neutral answer as “Americans increasingly see sports betting as a bad thing”. That’s what you call framing, it’s not supposed to be there, and it may not annoy me much, because this subject is irrelevant, but it does annoy me.

I also take some issue with the wording of the question, if you must know, which is “Thinking about the fact that betting on sports is now legal in much of the country, do you think this is generally…”. I would question why they needed to remind people that this comes from a regulatory change if they weren’t going to report it that way, especially since it forces them to keep the same framing in 2025 when they follow up.

But hey, that’s nitpicking. So is the whole thing. But it’s still a bad headline and a bad way to frame the results. And arguing from authority isn’t going to change that. I’m not particularly impressed or reverent when it comes to Ipsos or Pew’s methodology for these, they aren’t that complicated.

It absolutely does not. I’m not American, so all of that is based on weird, unapplicable, culturally-specific fixations.

Sports betting here has been available under government sanction offline for the better part of a century, it has its own complicated history and the way it interplays with online betting is quite different and has different impacts.

Not that it would matter much, it’s still fundamentally irrelevant. “Will someone think of the children two steps removed from the thing I’m advocating against” is the oldest, dumbest political manipulation tool and this isn’t even a particularly good application of it. But even if that wasn’t a huge stretch… man, in the context of… you know, the current state of the planet, it ranks somewhere next to “do you think there’s more empy air in Cheeto bags specifically these days” in my personal scale of urgency.

…

…

THAT is what they increasingly see as a bad thing for society?

The hell?

Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but what Americans think is increasingly not a good guide to take any sort of action in the first place.

That said, I actually salute the real majority of people in the survey that were assaulted with this question and went “the hell are you talking about, get out of my face”. Because yes, the results say 43% responded “bad thing for society”, 7% said “good, actually”, and 50% said “get out of my face” and are the normal ones.

Let this be a lesson not about sports gambling, but about how bad surveys, misleading headlines and moral panics can be used to manipulate large groups of people.

And to be clear, my stance on US sports betting is: get out of my face. I’m more than happy to talk about how the modern online betting industry uses inadequate regulation to bypass pre-existing rules and how this is another vector of the concerns about online regulation of server-side services and their interactions with privacy and censorship.

But “is it a good thing for society” is going in the “get out of my face” column.

Most of that is entirely absurd and not worth getting into. I’m sure a pedantic historian can nitpick it if that’s the way everybody wants to go.

However, let me revisit your accusation of “contradicting my point”. At no stage here have I conflated unarmed protest with peaceful protest. All along I’ve been frustrated by the US mindrot tendency of accepting no nuance between some My Little Pony version of political action and outright armed confrontation. The worldwide protests that show how bonkers the US perception of the issue is were not peaceful, but neither were they an armed confrontation where protestors attempted to use their armed might to deter police forces. They were… you know, political action. Civil unrest. “Civil” being the key word.

The way you and US leftists in general tend to parse stuff like this is nonsense. The fact that mass protests can escalate to the point they went in Nepal, Madagascar or any of the countries in the general “Gen Z spring” movement and prior protest waves disproves the US perspective because a) it has nothing to do with the level of access to weapons, and b) it shows sufficiently commited public action doesn’t have to be either fully nonviolent or an armed insurrection.

Americans look at this as some form ot guarantee their success by either intimidating the other into submission or hoping that the other side will fold immediately. That’s not how this goes. “The cops may charge at us, we should bring guns” is some weird overlap of thinking protestors are entitled to painless victory and that there is no possible pressure beyond violent pressure. It makes no sense to me. And yet, here we are, a bunch of posts down the line.

See, and there it is. Zero to a hundred. It’s either popcorn or civil war, no gradient.

I mean, for one thing Nazi Germany also wasn’t defeated by military cosplayers flashing their gun collection at them, and clearly neither was MAGA America. The first one was defeated by a borderline apocalyptic global war, so… in the grand scheme both the military cosplay and the sternly worded letters are pretty much about just as effective there. We’re still waiting and seeing on the MAGA America part.

But for another, plenty of nonviolent and/or unarmed protest has achieved its goals, historically. From Europe to India to South Africa to the actual United States. The “sternly worded letter” derision is pure action movie fantasy. This month alone the governments of Madagascar and Nepal came down after mass protests. Not a single set of camo pants in sight, just… you know, students organizing on social media and One Piece flags for some reason because this is a weird timeline.

They weren’t even fully nonviolent, either. There were clashes, there was enforcement violence and dozens of people, mostly protestors, were killed in both countries. And still two governments came down and the situations continue to evolve and push for full regime change.

Meanwhile the example I’m being given is some American fascists standing on a street while cops that agree with them wait for them to get sleepy at their military cosplay convention and go home.

I don’t get Americans. I don’t think the way they see the world as a culture makes sense, and I am terrified at how much they export it successfully through places like this. Nepal just held a full-on election over Discord and I still understand how that went down better than middle class America’s political views.

Yeah, no, that’s the point. You look at a barbaric demonstration of a completely broken down society and see something that works. That’s horrifying.

You effectively saw some guy walk into a subway holding his erect, exposed penis in one hand and a machete in the other and went “hey, that guy found an empty seat right away, I think we can all learn a lesson here”.

That’s nuts. It’s weird that you don’t see how nuts that is.

Somehow still accurate.

Yeah, no shit, that happens everywhere.

Some people go back the next day, some societies react to this by protesting harder and longer. Other times this devolves into outright conflict or seismic political shifts. Sometimes it settles down over time.

The reaction isn’t typically some combination of “Oh, well, what can you do” and “maybe if we bring actual firearms the natural conflict with authority baked into all civilian political action will dissipate fully and permanently”.

That’s some US-specific delusion and intrinsic tendency to violence right there.

I didn’t say it looks like a flash game, I said it looks like the logo for a flash game portal.

That is fucking terrifying and so is anybody who doesn’t think so.

Twitter has an aggressive character limit, a focus on a streaming feed and historically it’s been built on fast, trending content updated in real time via reposts and this sort of atomized discussion using unthreaded quotes.

Tumblr has changed a bunch trying to stay relevant in a MySpacey kinda way, but it’s ultimately more of a blog platform where the main post is expected to be bulkier and more readable while the threaded responses are framed as more of a comments section you don’t even get to see in full by default, so it more or less splits the difference between Twitter and Reddit, or between Masto and here.

“A different CSS” can impact how you interact with things a bunch, along with how you present trends and follows. Which I guess was my original point.

It’s less the design itself and more that it makes the entire proposition seem like a flash game portal circa 2006, so it just screams “stay away” at unsafe volumes. It’s not even a bad drawing, it’s just branding the wrong thing at the wrong time.

It’s all just little text packets, this place included.

But hey, that’s all social media. The slight differences in threading, text limits, media embeds and share mechanics do matter.

Why else would you shoot at them?

Is that not what weapons are for? Who the hell goes to a peaceful protest expecting to be shot at with lethal weapons? What the hell? You are not protesting at that stage, you are at war, that’s some Tiananmen shit. Listen to me carefully: if you think law enforcement at a protest is going to open fire with live ammunition on unarmed protesters do NOT go to that protest. Start organizing a guerrilla, see if you can get the legal system to act on the people responsible, get in touch with press and try to get international awareness on the serious breach of human rights happening on your country, but do not just show up in a protest you can reasonably expect will lead to a massacre of unarmed civilians. I can’t believe I have to put this in actual words.

I’m always so baffled by American unwillingness to take any action followed by the immediate assumption that the very next step is going to be full-on murder. Just zero escalation, in their minds it’s either eat popcorn at home or be shooting at people indiscriminately.

I genuinely don’t get it. There’s a mental model at play here but it may as well not be carbon-based.