darq

Anki might be worth your while if you are trying to learn something.

Load it up with a flashcard deck of something you want to remember, and it’ll show you those flashcards. Lots of people use it to learn languages, but it’s also good for anything that requires memorisation.

Ah no, that sucks. I’ve been using a lot of those apps.

A massacre, or a genocide, is more than just “one’s” life ending. It is one’s own life, the lives of one’s loved ones, and the lives of one’s people.

I’d urge you to try and read my comments again.

But how can I hear “diverse opinion” if X opinions are banned/blocked/moderated in the first place?

There is no space where all opinions are welcome. It simply does not exist. Some opinions are going to force out others.

If you run a space where Nazi opinions are okay to speak, you can’t really expect to hear Jewish opinions. Or opinions of PoC or queer people or disabled people and so on and so on.

So most places do the calculations. You can ban this one view. And in return an entire spectrum of views becomes more welcome.

Bigotry is a painfully simple, painfully shallow, and painfully boring viewpoint. It is almost completely one-dimensional, simplifiable to the idea that the “other” is inferior or dangerous and is to be shunned or feared. It is a viewpoint that we all already know, one we have all already heard. Banning it loses us almost nothing, and in return we gain so, so many more valuable insights.

Is it the fault of the principle of free speech, or the legion of stupid people being allowed to talk freely?

I’m not talking about “the principal of free speech”. I’m pushing back on the foolish assertion that moderation leads to echo chambers for lazy and dull minds. When exactly the opposite is true.

I’m saying that if you want to hear diverse opinions, a free-for-all is a bad idea. Because that free-for-all leads to echo chambers.

You probably want restrictions because it would never apply to you. Denying you talking about stuff that doesn’t phase you, is easy.

No no, don’t make stupid assumptions about me so that you don’t have to confront my point.

What if that platform bans opinions that you happen to have?

Most of them do. Your assumptions are wrong.

Sure, if you point at 4chan or similar…free speech attracts shitnuggets and end up being an echo chamber. But that’s the fault of us humans being crap, and not free speech being inherently bad.

I never said free speech was inherently bad. Try responding to what I wrote, not what you imagined that I wrote.

I personally prefer spaces where everyone can voice any shit. Censorship is for lazy minds and a dull audience. IMHO.

I always find this take to be remarkably short-sighted.

Because if you actually want to hear diverse opinions, you have to cultivate a space where diverse people, with diverse experiences, feel free to speak.

Pretty much every space that tolerates open bigotry becomes deeply unpleasant for the targets of that bigotry. Which means those people tend to leave.

Which in turn means that those spaces soon turn into the dullest echo chamber, populated only by people unaffected the bigotry. Sure no views were censored. You just harass everybody different off the platform. The net effect is the same.

You can’t just block someone doxxing you. And it’s a lot different when it’s not one person, or even a handful of people, but thousands of people who are sincerely furious with you because of things they’ve convinced themselves that you have done.

Evasion reduces dex save effects to half damage on a failure, and no damage on a success. The rogue and the monk can dodge the comet completely.

No topic has ever gotten me into more D&D arguments than saying that a 10th level fighter should be able to fall off an airship, hit the ground and not immediately splat, but rather limp away from it after tanking the 20d6 damage.

I want a squad of Dwarven Fighters to be able to leap off of the same airship and do a three-point landing, because what the hell would Dwarves need parachutes for?!

Eh. If the wizard can conjure it, the rogue should be able to dodge it.

I know it makes my GM twitch whenever my rogue or monk would dodge an explosion. But we have to disillusion ourselves of the ridiculous notion that martial characters have to obey the laws of physics.

I have Evasion, so uhhh… Yup, zero damage.

A bare keyboard attached to a screen, that I could plug my phone (possibly running Phosh) and use it as a hardware for a laptop experience

Those exist!

They’re called “lapdocks”.

Who cares? Like genuinely who cares? It’s a chunky laptop. Big whoop.

This comment raised my blood pressure.

Bloody hell yes. I have to select text on my phone all the time and that little hovering Android context menu is utterly atrocious. How that passed any UX process is completely beyond me.

1. It hovers over text, rather than appearing in a predictable location like every other context menu in the OS does.
2. The menu just doesn’t appear sometimes. Usually when the selected text is large or near the edge of the screen or the screen is zoomed in.
3. It’s unstable. Every time you bring it up, the context sensitivity might add additional options. That context sensitivity is good, but it also means that one has to scan the menu for the desired option every single time, no matter how proficient one gets.
4. It’s uncustomisable. One of my most-used options requires me to select the text and wait for the menu, tap the three-dots to open the second layer of the tiny little context menu, scroll that tiny sub-list past a bunch of less-commonly used options to the option I use all the time, then tap on that. The menu is sorted arbitrarily, not even alphabetically, and is completely unmodifiable.
5. And what is given sort-priority over my actually used context menu items? “Share”. I can share text with two taps, which I will never do, but the action I use dozens of times a day requires three taps and a scroll to find it.

Nobody decrees who is stupid or not. That’s a judgement everyone makes for themselves.

If you want to “Give people the resources to educate themselves”, you have to have a definition of stupid and not stupid that guides your choice of what is and isn’t good education; in order to “Give them the benefit of the doubt, once”, you have to have a criteria for when they’ve stopped being stupid.

No. I don’t.

When I hear people talking about climate change like it doesn’t exist, or has “concerns” about transgender people existence, or something like that, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they are just ignorant. I’ll be willing to talk to them, and maybe explain some of the misconceptions they might have.

But if they aren’t willing to listen, then they… Are either stupid or malicious. But the difference isn’t meaningful. They act exactly the same, either way.

They don’t have to agree me thinking they are either stupid or malicious. It literally changes nothing if they disagree.

What? Quite obviously not what I said.

Alright I don’t know who you are talking to, but it’s very clearly not me.

Yeah I still think you are talking about something else?

Okay, sure, what about vaccines then? Hypothetically, I think the idea that we shoot ourselves full of mercury and viruses is extremely stupid. Malicious too, by your model. And also, I don’t think climate change is real, so now I think you’re stupid and you think I’m stupid and it’s he said she said and if we both think the other is being malicious we have a brawl.

In reality though some people are right and some people are wrong. The person who talks about vaccines as just “shooting ourselves full of mercury and viruses” is either stupid or malicious. What they think of me doesn’t matter, because this conversation is about how I should treat this hypothetical person.

And that was the point I made. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if they are stupid or malicious, I should treat them the same way. Because their intent doesn’t really matter, their actions do.

The thing that fixes this is a definition of “stupid” that we both agree on that is clear, useful, and objective. What is that definition?

That is not how language or communication works…

People who are thought of as stupid, rarely agree that they are stupid. Same goes for malicious, to be honest.