abben @abbenm@anticapitalist.party

I mean I get that crows are clever and that's inspiring and great and all. But this is actual crazy talk.

In a thread about crow intelligence, some commenters are apparently, non-ironically, not as a joke, literally insisting that crows could probably build a jumbo jet if they wanted.

And another commenter that I've screenshotted claims that humans are no more advanced in medical knowledge than crows because humans help other humans, and being helped means there is no intelligence involved.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24583314

There should be a word for the state of mind you are in when your brain is fried and you can only post incredibly vague comments.

People people who go to /r/academia and post "what are some well written papers" or who go to /r/programming and say "what's the fastest program?"

The /r/survival subreddit has people posting from the strangest headspaces. Some of their posts are in a 7th grade choose your own adventure style and its like its own genre of internet comment

Who in their right mind has ever seriously said out loud, as a serious expression of their core personal interests and needs, "I need better tailored ads!"

The things that the world "needs" are generic drugs, housing, health care, money, love.

You're not bending the arc of justice by offering me discounted printer ink.

I am not even sure I understand what "let twitter use information from our partners" means

What a mindfuck of a popup

One of those recaptcha things asked me to identify parking meters. So I did. But it said I was wrong.

But then I clicked on the mailbox and it approved it as 'correct'.

Tons of peaceful protestors at the #Maine state capital today.

Another rude comic where SMBC comics endorses nihilism.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/metaphysics

Sometimes it's values nihilism. Here, it's a lazy kind that says our indirect sensory access of reality means nothing is real.

And as always, it's always half-jokey. Flirting with a position but not really going all the way to approving it.

ughghghgh why

It's kind of like that thing about Schrodinger's Douchebag: an incredibly offensive statement was either sincerely intended or 'obviously' a joke, depending on how people react to it.

And that's the value of a joke that entertains a version of reality favored by the person who tells the joke. They get to put forward an image of a world they want to bring into existence, make the impression more familiar. But it's just a joke, so criticism misses the point

(2/2) AND that Lakers fans clearly WILL be there and boos should be expected, because the parade will be marching right through the center of Lakers fan territory.

I'd be interested in some of the theory of misinformation/online communication that makes sense of this idea that comments that rise to the top are ones that are capable of sustaining incompatible meetings. They are full of hedged bets, and multiple meanings.

The two ways this thread could be interpreted are (1) Lakers fans are obviously going to be out and booing a Clippers championship parade and (2) they obviously aren't.

And amazingly, there are comments in reply that justify both perceptions, by pointing out that the site of the parade would be Lakers ground zero, which could both imply that Lakers fans would not be going out of their way to be present at the parade, AND (1/2)

And adjacent to this is the fact that people are intensely aware of the phenomenon of mass shared agreement, and any individual would confidently explain what the thread was 'really' about if you asked.

But if you aggregated all those individual explanations together they would all be incompatible with each other, save for the quality of being expressed in a super confident way.

I think the role that ambiguity plays in Reddit comment sections has been underexamined.

I think huge masses of people upvote vague comments because they strike a venn diagram of a different possible meanings, all of which are incompatible with each other, but which collectively, are salient to a large group of people.

I've attached this Reddit thread as an example. It's either super obvious or not obvious that Lakers fans would come out to boo Clippers

And after decades of interminable debates, these rationalizations and many others are baked into internet culture as settled inviolable truths.

And now, in a completely different context, of regulating the spread of AI, people are using the same rationalization: "it's gonna get out inevitabley" to give up and do nothing.

It's much easier to do than to map out & think about the tediously vast logistical landscape.

Similarly there was the self serving argument that the spread of information was inevitable anyway.

Which may or may not be true depending on a billion practical considerations, some of which favored that view decades ago but don't now & could easily change at any given moment.

(Not that I've *ever* watched porn video ever, but I have heard from those who do that information definitely doesn't stay on the net forever)