epic pwned

sound is vibration

You are so close. bzzz is not any closer to the buzzing sound than the japanese buu

Lag

Do you still have native-level pronunciation and grammar skills in Cantonese? Forgetting words is one thing, that happens, and words can be relearned. I’ve lived abroad for 5 years now in my 20s, and even I’ve lost some vocabulary in my native language.

If you no longer know the grammar or the pronunciation well, then it’s a more legitimate question if it is your native language anymore.

Either way, you are some sort of bilingual. In fact, some people grow up like that where I come from: with two native languages, one of which is oftentimes stronger / more eloquent due to education, social life, etc.

This made me look up “whole word reading”, and it just made me irrationally angry. To be fair, English isn’t my native language and I don’t have a recollection of learning how to read, but “whole word learning” sounds insane. But like… Why would you do that if you are using an alphabet?

There was this one study that found that people have significantly fewer close friends than 30 years ago, and for men, the change was larger. I would call that a loneliness epidemic.

What the hell

A proper all-encompassing conscription would be kinda insane. Drafting a percentage of people like they do in sweden might be reasonable. AFAIK they don’t actually have to force anybody to go to the army in sweden though, they have enough volunteers, but the system is set up so that in theory they can.

I don’t really care, both are pretty fucking bad

I think the masses, by and large, are still taking vaccines. The ones who don’t are stuck in epistemic systems that amplify noise (social media, conspiracy theory groups, right wing cults etc.).

I seem to be doing a poor job at making my point here. Hope you appreciated the conversation regardless.

what are you really achieving?

Having knowledgeable researchers that can help produce vaccines, and having at least a part of the population be knowledgeable enough to make sane decisions about their healthcare…

It’s a prerequisite to solving ”the antivaxxer issue”, though not sufficient.

I was trying to illustrate that filtering out (mis/dis)information it is not only important for your mental health, but also from an epistemological standpoint. All good epistemological systems (science, fair and accurate journalism, etc.) filter out/exclude a lot of point of views. I agree, there is no central arbitor of truth, that’s why good epistemological systems are doubly important.

If your process of finding knowledge isn’t based on good epistemological systems, you will drown in the pool of noise that you get from just listening to people around you. But if your epistemological approach is sound, then yes, interacting with a lot of people will make you understand the world better.

It’s not about mental health per se. For example, if I as a researcher want to search for scientific information, it’s good that I can exclude anything but scientific articles. Similarly, excluding flat earthers and antivaxxers from a social media site will probably improve the general public’s understanding of the world.

It’s just pragmatism. The alternative is to have everybody listen to all information - at that point it becomes impossible to find the signal in the noise.

Filtering out certain information flows is an integral part of freedom from speech, not an indication that you are in an “echo chamber”.

Humans in general are very hesitant to admit that they were wrong. Cult members doubly so.

I mean a lot of things are. Russia definitely wants to destabilize the west as much as possible. But like, not literally everything that Russia could do and would benefit them is actually done by them. We gotta focus on the big picture and not get lost in the weeds of, for example, whether Russia is to blame for the Smolensk air disaster, or every single Baltic underwater cable break in the past 2 years.

The ”everything is a russian conspiracy” theory seems more plausible every day…

It’s kind of a fashion trend, and internet porn made such a fashion trend possible by making it visible to more people. At least if you look at it that way, stark differences in behavior and opinion between generations seem completely normal.