It’s odd to me that anyone fantasizes about nature in general being peaceful. Especially when the plot of most nature documentaries can be summarized as “fall in love with this creature, then experience the stress of watching it struggle desperately to survive.”

Sorry but the problem right now is much simpler. Gullibility doesn’t require some logical premise. “It sounds right so it MUST be true” is where the thought process ends.

That covers some things, but the algorithm feeds people such nonsense at such a high rate that it’s hard to keep up with.

I think your idea is laudable. Normally I’m not one to dissuade someone from fighting a good fight in the age of disinformation, but I worry that you’re coming at this problem from the wrong direction, and you alone will never be able to fight misinformation at its source.

Have you ever been able to change someone’s mind on an insane belief, just because you knew exactly where it came from? Or because you were aware of the idea before they were?

We’re talking about a hydra’s infinite rectum here. No matter what you -ectomy, more stool samples are coming than you will ever be able to process and analyze.

More often than not, a person does not rationalize their way into believing misinformation. It is not a logical process of collecting and analyzing facts. It is an emotional process of consuming content that elicits a level of fear, pride, or hate.

They fear what they do not understand.

They are proud to be a part of a group that does “understand”.

They hate feeling like they’re being told what to do and what to think. They feel a vulnerability within themselves - a gap in their knowledge - and rather than address it as an internality, they externalize it. They don’t understand because you don’t want them to understand.

To their mind, the answer can’t be complex. They have arrived at the belief that knowledgeable, professional, and underpaid experts are all wrong or outright greedy and dishonest, and that comprehending truth doesn’t require significant education and research.

Really, they believe the answer should be simple. If it isn’t, that must mean the “true” answer - the easily digestible TIL TLDR of the entire field of healthcare that they could actually understand without much effort - well, that answer must be hidden from them.

Note that this is not intended to describe a particular group or flavor of ideology or conspiracy, but rather the experience of believing in ideas that contradict observable reality, verifiable fact, and leigitimate sources of information.

You can’t just come at them with logic, evidence, or rationality. These things are necessary but insufficient. You need to approach it with emotion and empathy. Bedside manner is crucial.

Don’t waste your time trying to master the lies - spend time mastering the truth. Present your knowledge as clearly and simply as possible. Address your patients holistically. Use their language. Teach them without condescending to them. Don’t try to tear apart individual pieces of information they regurgitate, but understand the underlying themes and emotions that you can actually help them with.

Lastly, please don’t burn yourself out. It’s brave to want to immerse yourself in the rabid chaos of digital misinformation for the sake of your patients, but it’s a soul-crushing exercise that should be undertaken with extreme caution.

There are plenty of patients who really just need a good doctor more than anything else. And some of them will be more likely to believe in scientific truth when they already believe in the knowledge and good faith of a scientific expert.

Typing this out made me realize a distinction I failed to bring up. People do like to learn, but people HATE to UN-learn ideas. The person in your example wanted to learn something new, but did not want to unlearn the iphone walled garden.

This is an excellent point. You’re right, we do agree, sorry my comment came off aggressive.

Flashbacks to hours writing macros, mods, and scripts so that you could spend less time doing the things you paid a company to let you do for “fun”

I’ve just described to you a person that really wanted to learn something, and did it. Put in hours of mental and physical effort. And your response is that nobody wants to learn, and that people only learn what they want to learn? Which is self-evident and vacuous. (Edit: leaving this comment unchanged for the sake of clarity, but apologies for the aggression)

Inertia and degradation of curiousity is a real issue but my point is that the creators of the walled gardens intentionally discourage that curiousity.

Most people naturally want to learn. Even into adulthood. But people - like water and electricity - naturally tend toward the path of least resistance. And everywhere they go, walled gardens offer them more and more paths with less and less resistance at every step.

There still lives a generation or two that ripped apart computers, crashed them with amateur code, bricked them with viruses, reformatted the drives and put it all back together again as kids and adults. They did that because it was something they wanted to learn. It wasn’t easy, or simple. It was hard, and confusing, and risky. Kids of the generations that followed don’t do that nearly as much, even though they could.

Are those kids inherently less curious than their parents were at the same age? No. At least, not by birth. They’ve just been offered a path of less resistance, and they took it. Does that mean they want that path? No. There’s just so many paths in front of them that the path of technological literacy is lost in the weeds.

Yes, people only really learn what they want to learn. But the reason people in general are getting less curious over time is because they are being convinced that they want to learn something else, or worse, more often than not they’re being deceived into thinking they’re learning at all.

Eh, like almost everything else in human experience it initially started because of daylight and agriculture. Hunters and gatherers had fluid schedules, but farms had strict requirements. Without electricity and with a life built around plants and animals, everyone just has to work when the suns up. With most of the population involved in agriculture and not much else, you’re right - you either woke up or you died.

Then candles, gas lamps, and eventually electric lights opened up the darkness for meaningful work, while agricultural technology slowly pushed workers out to other fields (heh).

But out of necessity the hours for schools and markets were originally built around the hours of the fields, and it just stuck.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I think morning people are playing a hand in perpetuating this issue. They probably get to keep deciding the rules because they keep showing up before us, all energized and efficient and judging us for showing up late or tired. Or something.

But I would be curious to see if any studies have checked if there’s a correlation between sociopathy/narcissism and sleep phases, I’ll take a look. Or maybe they’re just signalling that they’re early risers as a way of feeling superior to the rest of us.

Just interesting because even non tech people want this when you sell it to them properly. They don’t actually want a walled garden ecosystem that is “simple”.

Nobody actually wants a walled garden, they just get entrapped in them (“it’s just where my friends/music/content creators are”)

They then become convinced that they want it, and its reinforced by the walled gardeners (looking at you, iMessage videos and bubbles)

I know a person who built their own PC (Windows, but still) from scratch for the first time as an adult. Had the money and the opportunity to buy a prebuilt rig in two clicks, but instead researched the market, ordered parts and tools, exchanged a part that didn’t fit the case, learned how to assemble it all by hand, and exclaimed that it was a great experience and would do it all over again.

And yet at every opportunity still buys an iphone despite the cost because it’s “simple” and they “don’t want to learn” something new. That’s not the actual reason - that’s just stockholm syndrome.

They also intentionally frame a really bad thing as a “good” thing. The situation here is not that the “rich” run the economy - it’s that everyone else is being priced out of the economy by wage stagnation and rising costs of living.

The alternate headline here is “wealth inequality surges, 90% of Americans now account for only 50% of consumer spending”

Or

“1 in 10 Americans spending as much as the other 9 combined, while 3 of them live paycheck to paycheck”

People earning 6 digits a year are still one bad accident or diagnosis away from losing their jobs and living in poverty. They’re not the root problem or the solution to the economy, and this article is trying to paint them as both.

Instead we need to acknowledge that the people “earning” 8-10 digits per year are extracting and hoarding that money away from the 90% of Americans who would otherwise be spending it in ways that would actually improve the economy.

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It’s not clear to me who or what is directly responsible for this, but do you really think the American Agency for Making Sure Planes Don’t Crash isn’t involved when an American Plane Crashes… just because it happened somewhere else?

Has it all been futile? Have I wasted ten years fighting the same fascists my grandfather fought in WW2?

You didn’t waste your time any more than he wasted his. Plenty of people died fighting without seeing victory on the horizon. If WW2 had ended differently, it still wouldn’t have been a waste of time fighting Nazis. You can’t always win, but you can always fight.

Martial law would be devastating but no matter how well-funded they are, the American defense industry is bloated, mismanaged, and full of flawed humans. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, even Ukraine - all prove that defeat is far from guaranteed against what appears to be an unstoppable force.

But to tell the truth, I am struggling to figure out how to fight at this stage. Messaging, communication, organization - these appear sparse and unreliable right now, drowned out in the sea of disinformation. What will bring us together? Do we need heros to rally around? Martyrs to avenge? Slogans to shout? Organizations to unite? Platforms to coordinate? All of the above?

Three things are true:

1. People seek attention, and often lie to get it.
2. Seeking attention is not unique to GenZ. People screamed for attention in Pompeii and Ancient Greece, leaving graffiti on the walls and yelling arguments at strangers
3. Many symptoms of neurodivergence appear at first glance to be typical to the human condition. This is not a coincidence - neurodivergents are human, and therefore face many of the same problems that neurotypical humans do.

_

The reason autism and other disorders are evaluated as a spectrum is because the human condition itself is a spectrum of experience. We are not simple creatures.

The reason people are diagnosed with a disorder is often because they have landed somewhere on the spectrum of human experience that involves an abnormal level of difficulty when faced with “normal” challenges.

Simple or routine tasks, time management, emotional regulation, conversation - humans universally face normal challenges in these areas at times, but neurodivergent individuals face greater challenges at higher frequencies, to the point where it can be classified as a “symptom” because it directly interferes with their life in a way that is not statistically normal - it produces unhealthy levels of stress or emotional instability, impairs social and professional engagements, interferes with their ability to reason or achieve their own desires, etc. etc.

These symptoms can often be managed or treated. Just as often, they can only be coped with.

In short, “invisible” symptoms, masking, misdiagnosis, and societal misunderstandings all contribute to this very common idea that the average neurodivergent is just an attention seeker.

Is it likely that you have come across someone who has incorrectly self-diagnosed? Absolutely. People will lie on the internet. People will lie to your face. People will lie to themselves.

But it is also incredibly likely that you have come across people with severe symptoms that you had absolutely no understanding of. People who have been driven to the brink of suicide because they couldn’t manage their own mind, people who can convince you they are okay but can’t convince themselves.

It’s a goddamn spectrum, and people who can’t function at all belong on it just as much as people who can mask, treat, or cope with their symptoms enough to blend in. You don’t get to write off their existence just because their struggles aren’t obvious to you.

You don’t get to use your identity as a defense against being called an asshole. Anyone can be a bigot. You talk about people who you claim to identify with like they’re deviant, lesser, and worthy of oppression. It’s not about fucking pronouns and you know it. You openly admit you want these people to suffer.

You’re a bigoted asshole and don’t belong in any community that relies on inclusion. Goodbye.

I used to live in a city. Doesn’t matter where I live, the queer community is only accepting of a certain kind of queer. Which I’m not.

You do not get to paint the whole community like this. The community is only accepting of a certain kind of person: the kind of person that accepts and supports the community.

You’re not doing that. You’re stirring shit up, acting like some members of the community haven’t earned their place, and throwing around some extremely inappropriate stereotypes like your alleged experience is indicative of the community as a whole.

You want to be homophobic and stereotype people like this, and you want to be transphobic and dismiss their struggles up to now as “having it too easy”?

And you fucking come around saying they deserve to be oppressed? They “have it coming” because they “wouldn’t listen to their elders”? You want them to be oppressed?

Then you’re absolutely right. You’re not the kind of person the community accepts. Get the fuck out.

It seems more to me like the TQ wants to rid themselves of the LGB with their pronoun tirades and temper tantrums.

Woah, hey, what the fuck? Here I thought you were having a sincere overreaction but no, this is all just transphobia, and possibly homophobia. You’re basically ranting about the whole community being non-monogamous? Sexually deviant?

“Terminally online whiny piss babies”? You want to reject the community? You think they’ve all just had it easy? You live a “lonely rural life” and think you can talk about how people have had it easy? Paint the whole community red like that but it’s okay if you say “(at least by me)”?

Transgender people have had it easy?

Absolutely not with this shit, I do not give you any more benefits of the doubt or good faith. You are hitting all the bigot talking points regardless of what you identify as.

You do not get to divide the community at a time like this. Trying to stir shit up and turn LGB on TQ and vice versa, yeah, you need to GTFO.

Blaming any victim for their oppression is wrong.

I’m sorry but that is the end of this conversation. You want to blame people for their own oppression. You are not speaking as their ally, you are speaking as their enemy.

Great. So, you think your fellow community members have a behavioral problem, and you’re blaming them for their impending oppression. Again, not the words of an ally. To them, or to anyone in the community.

Blaming any victim for their oppression is wrong. Especially if you know what it’s like to be oppressed. It’s not their fault, and how dare you suggest that it is.

You think they’re disrespecting their elders and they don’t know how good they have it? Do you genuinely not see a problem here? Have you ever heard someone say anything like that and thought “hmm, actually they have a point”? Especially when you don’t actually know how good they’ve had it?

I’m saying that since they want to fake being oppressed so hard they should get a taste of what real oppression feels like.

This is your problem. You need to face it. Those are not the words of an ally. Saying that a member of your community deserves to feel the same oppression you did? Absolutely not. You are not speaking as their ally, you are speaking as their enemy.