Yeah this is the kind of thing where you really need statistics. This sticks out because it’s a prominent example of something new, an autonomous vehicle, doing something notable - killing an animal for the first time (or at least one of the very first well-publicized times on record).

For people’s reaction to this to be that this is because it’s an autonomous vehicle is the same sort of cognitive bias that causes things like, " The first person to get a math problem wrong in class was a girl so it seems like girls are bad at math". When of course it could be that the probability of boys and girls getting problems wrong is equal, and that the girl was simply the first one to get a unlucky roll on the dice of the universe. It could even be that boys are more likely to get problems wrong, and the girl was especially unlucky. It could in fact be that girls are more likely to get problems wrong, too, but this single instance doesn’t give us enough evidence for that. It could be that boys actually have gotten more problems wrong, but we only hear about the girl getting the problem wrong due to sociological biases, or vice versa. Etc.

I get that we shouldn’t trust corporations, and it’s not fun to defend a corporation, but it is important to defend rational thinking. And the rational way to approach this is to employ statistical methods to judge whether a vehicle being autonomous truly makes it a bigger risk to animals in the road or not. Any other line of reasoning is not right for this kind of problem.

I don’t have time to fully respond to this right now, but I just wanted to say that I do understand and sympathize with the things you’re bringing up here. I was hoping to engage with you politely, and my feelings are hurt by your insults, but I understand your anger. When I said I look forward to your counterargument, I meant that earnestly and respectfully. I’m sorry for upsetting you with my reply - I was hoping to lend an angle of positivity to you that you may not have considered, not discount your own view.

It allows individuals to distribute content to a network of hundreds of millions of people, with a very low barrier to entry, and in ways that are not centrally controlled. If my government is banning certain types of speech or information, websites in other countries may still be accessible with it. People in my own country may even make sites with that information, as it’s fairly easy to bypass those laws. The Internet holds all sorts of content that pisses off billionaires. Piracy, privacy tools, the Internet Archive, government document leaks. Think how I can read about the Epstein files so easily by searching or asking about it here on Lemmy - and then think about how much harder it is for me to find that information from a news company, if it’s even possible at all. Why do you think governments and billionaires around the world are so eager to monitor and centralize and rewrite the fundamental workings of the internet? They are coming after the internet because it is a threat to them.

I look forward to your counterargument.

Not the internet, but billionaire controlled platforms. The Internet is one of the best tools ever for fighting against centralized power!

Seriously. What candidate is it that this innocent perfect figure here represents? Which politician is it that is like this?

It kind of sounds like you’re talking about it purely as a thought experiment or as something to inspire other philosophical thinking. But I think the issue most people have with the simulation theory is when people think that it’s actually the way that the world is or think that it’s worth investigating the way that the world is just because it theoretically could be the way the world is. But theoretically the world could have been created by the god of the Bible or any of the other million explanations proposed by the million other religions that have existed. Almost every religion proposes a hypothesis that could indeed explain reality, but just because it could explain reality doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to investigate it.

I agree with you that all the questions you raised are interesting and worth thinking about, but none of that really relates to thinking that we actually live in a simulation. You’re just using the idea that we live in a simulation as inspiration to start thinking about these other ideas. But actually thinking that we live in a simulation is much less reasonable.

Yep, even on the side of the right ideas, half the people still got there via the same wrong methods that the people on the wrong side use. They just coincidentally happened to land on the right side instead. It is quite disheartening, exactly

Is it really being a pedant, or is it just being precise?

Depending on the social media in question, I’m not sure there’s much difference! I may be misinformed about the state of Tiktok and Instagram though, as I don’t use them myself. It’s just my observations from seeing others on them

This is definitely not true. Gooning usually means like multiple continuous hours of masturbation, usually with the purpose of entering some kind of zoned-out trance state. I think it is somewhat niche, as I’m pretty sure most people just masturbate for 5-15 minutes, just looking at porn but not by any means “entranced” by it. The term gooning has gotten so popular because the activity itself has gotten more popular. Personally I attribute it to people’s strong need to dissociate from the world in a way that isn’t expensive, and that isn’t so harmful that you can’t do it really frequently. It used to be that drugs would fill that void for the populace, but now people need more drugs to cope than they used to, and they can’t afford it anyways. Plus drugs fuck with your ability to stay employed, etc.

Another major contributor to it, imo, is the deluge of horny-bait content on Tiktok and Instagram. Even things that aren’t trying to market an onlyfans still are gonna feature people doing forced cleavage jiggles and whatnot. Sex sells, there’s nothing new there, but nowadays it’s almost like you NEED sex to sell. Basically anybody who is into vtubers or modern anime is an example of someone that just can’t really engage with something unless there’s constantly some ass or titties on screen, or some kind of horny undertone or subtext at the very least.

Ultimately I think gooning is a better form of “indulgence” and dissociation than the alternatives, but its popularity is a sad sign of the times. All humans like to turn their brain off once in awhile, but if a large subset of the population is basically crying out to have their brain off every day for hours at a time, and for it to be in every form of media and relaxation, I can only see that as a sad situation.

I’ve normally never shied away from dark humor or a fucked up joke but something about the innocence of that man just going about his day really makes me hate even joking about it. I’m not hating on you for posting this, but this just really hits a bad note for me. Downvoted, no hard feelings