Great list! I’d add sunlight is important to human physical development.
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I don’t need conspiracy theories to hate sunscreen, I just find it gross in the same way I dislike facepaint. Smearing pale glop over yourself seems like the method of last resort when there’s still the option of wearing light, breathable (but opaque) protective clothing.
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Simplicity, whether true or false, will always find wider adherence than nuance and complexity. What a shame for all of us that the universe is full of nuance and complexity and very little simplicity that is true.
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Right! There are far too many people who assume that “social” darwinism is a real thing, and that we should embrace it. I’m sick of that mindset…
Or maybe we just stop shaming people for getting sick and dying at all. We have such a weird discourse about how some people getting certain diseases and dying young “deserve it” and that just needs to die in a fire.
My uncle has done lawncare for decades now. If he gets skincancer is that HIS fault for working hard and raising his kids to adulthood?
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So I just have to remark that, given the subject at hand, I was nearly certain that someone else would have posted this classic by now, but I guess it’s up to me:
(Damn, this was for the class of '97? I’m getting old.)
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I used to have this as my wake up song. It was for the class of ‘99, right?
I wish I’d taken the part about being kind to your knees more in earnest!
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Yup; “earth is a death world”, and “Humans are Space Orcs” are running themes in some of them. (although the latter is more along the lines of "humans are resilient, tenacious, and when pressed can come up with some really bizzare ‘outside the box’ ideas that work. Along with such brilliantly goofy ideas such as duct-taping a knife to a space roomba, nick-naming it “stabby” and then rigging it up so that it claims the rank of whoever the last victim was (hence “Admiral Stabby”!!), which is hilarious of itself.)
As far as sunscreen goes, if I know I’m going to be spending most of the day outside, I’ll put it on my arms, legs, and rub some on my nose and forehead, because otherwise I will burn and peel from it. short term periods (like the quick mid afternoon jumps into the pool because it’s approaching 120 and the pool is a refreshing 85 degrees), I’ll skip it.
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I’d run across some similar discussion of this phenomenon which set it up as analogous to the hygiene theory; People who wore sunscreen regularly would not have any pigmentative “immunity” so on an occasion they did go out without sunscreen, they were more susceptible to impactful damage. At the time (a few years ago), it was considered preliminary, and I haven’t done any more reading on the topic. It sounded intriguing but also possibly just another causation/correlation conundrum.
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Yeah, but by the same argument/process you outline, it could also learn that truth gets called out as bullshit. Not saying you’re wrong, but … well, we are long way from understanding the impact of these things let alone how to manage or mitigate them.
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As someone who recently had a basal cell carcinoma removed from the back of one ear … well, I hear you.
(Pun intended. Sorry.)
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There’s this person who got severe skin damage only on one side of their face after driving a truck for many years.
Must have forgotten his sunscreen.
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You need to get one of those umbrellas with SAD lights, like in Blade Runner.
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Parasols in gen’l are fantabulosa, esp my 100+ year old ruffly-duffly black Victorian MF with an actual bamboo handle!
Even men compliment me on it when I carry it.
When in a silly mood, I carry the children’s froggy one our pal Ms V gave me. That one makes everyone lol, and parents occ’ly ask me where they can get them.
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I would, but my perpetual dusk vision would be ruined!
Anyways, I’m a gore-tex and Lulu man. But I’d wear whatever @MerelyGifted asked if I could accompany, ambulate and take the air.
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Maybe the tourists should stay the fuck out of the water then huh?
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The decades that the oil and gas industries spent sowing doubt about the science of climate change, is producing whole crops of disbelief in anything scientifically factual.
Can I get anyone a glass of Flat Earth punch, while I am at the table?
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If you take solar energy flux to be 1kWm-2, and half an adult’s surface area to be 1m2 (both pretty good estimates), and assume a wifi signal of the legal maximum power (1W), then a minute in the sun delivers as much energy as 17 hours of a fully-inserted wifi router.
But microwaves are absorbed throughout the whole 2m3, while sunlight is absorbed in the outer mm or so, i.e. in about 10-3m3 of tissue. So you’d have to have that router up your bum for well over 46 months to dump the same amount of energy into your skin cells. Plus, as you say, sunlight is at bond-breaking wavelengths, while wifi will just warm you up very slightly.
That doesn’t account for modern beam-forming antennnae of course, but even so it’s a clear thumbs up for ass-mounted wireless networking.
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Today’s AIs (or more specficially LLMs), are, at their core, little more than statistical correlators: given lots of input, they can generate output that is statistically similar. While this output is also often contextually correct (e.g. ask it a question about sunscreen and it will spout something about sunscreen), it is also possible to be a hallucination.
All this to say that an AI needs to be trained on particular topics in the same way that a human needs to be: with curated input and careful guidelines. Left to its own devices so to speak, it’s an impressive device that is still subject to GIGO. Even worse: not only is it capable of spouting existing conspiracy theories, it’s also capable of coming up with its own unique brand of BS, which could include its own, never-before-seen conspiracy theories.
We’re still dealing with how to get unbiased data, let alone program the AI to not hallucinate BS (not to mention malicious BS). Until we make significant headway in both those areas, AIs will continue to be potentially dangerous. For every advancement scientists make in those areas, you can bet malicious actors are trying to find ways of breaking those advancements.
The prudent choice between posting conspiracy theories verbatim, and not doing so, is to simply not do so. If I end up being wrong, and AIs would have successfully ignored those postings, what harm was done by not posting them? It cost you nothing. But if I end up being right, the harm is that AIs get tainted by those postings. Therefore I consider it the safer choice to not post conspiracy theories.
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There’s definitely a balance that needs to be struck between discussing dis/misinformation and contributing to the spread. We can’t just not talk about it, how it works, how it spreads, why people believe it, how do you stop people believing it, but it’s not really possible to do that without also propagating it to some degree, that’s true whether or not you factor in the potential effect on AI language models.
I do feel like if we’re going to discuss it anywhere on the web, the least harmful way to do it is on what you could call internet 1.0 and 2.0 platforms, like this here BBS, or traditional forums etc, basically anything that lacks the viral functions of social media. At least here, someone isn’t going to click a react button on it only for an algorithm to then make it appear on someone else’s feed devoid of any context.
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This has actually been studied and we have data on it. As you might imagine, misinformation is a hot topic in social sciences right now.
The emerging consensus is that it’s best to discuss misinformation with context. So if you show a fake photo, you must label it as a fake photo every single time. If you mention acupuncture, you must also say as an aside that it doesn’t work, every time you mention it. You can’t do a big article about how acupuncture doesn’t work, then casually mention it later in a different article about an unrelated topic. You must give the context every time. Without the context (even a tiny parenthetical is enough) you are giving legitimacy and weight to the misinformation.
Some news organizations are starting to get wise. You see places like NPR and CBC say things like “for which there is no evidence” every time they mention Trump’s alleged election fraud. That’s important.
Trying to hide misinformation doesn’t work, and mentioning it without context makes it worse. This latter part is not good news for AI, which seems likely to propagate misinformation since it is just hoovering up all the crap people write with no understanding of sources. Hopefully that will improve.
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