196
Community Rules
You must post before you leave
Be nice. Assume others have good intent (within reason).
Block or ignore posts, comments, and users that irritate you in some way rather than engaging. Report if they are actually breaking community rules.
Use content warnings and/or mark as NSFW when appropriate. Most posts with content warnings likely need to be marked NSFW.
Most 196 posts are memes, shitposts, cute images, or even just recent things that happened, etc. There is no real theme, but try to avoid posts that are very inflammatory, offensive, very low quality, or very "off topic".
Bigotry is not allowed, this includes (but is not limited to): Homophobia, Transphobia, Racism, Sexism, Abelism, Classism, or discrimination based on things like Ethnicity, Nationality, Language, or Religion.
Avoid shilling for corporations, posting advertisements, or promoting exploitation of workers.
Proselytization, support, or defense of authoritarianism is not welcome. This includes but is not limited to: imperialism, nationalism, genocide denial, ethnic or racial supremacy, fascism, Nazism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc.
Avoid AI generated content.
Avoid misinformation.
Avoid incomprehensible posts.
No threats or personal attacks.
No spam.
Moderator Guidelines
Moderator Guidelines
- Don’t be mean to users. Be gentle or neutral.
- Most moderator actions which have a modlog message should include your username.
- When in doubt about whether or not a user is problematic, send them a DM.
- Don’t waste time debating/arguing with problematic users.
- Assume the best, but don’t tolerate sealioning/just asking questions/concern trolling.
- Ask another mod to take over cases you struggle with, if you get tired, or when things get personal.
- Ask the other mods for advice when things get complicated.
- Share everything you do in the mod matrix, both so several mods aren't unknowingly handling the same issues, but also so you can receive feedback on what you intend to do.
- Don't rush mod actions. If a case doesn't need to be handled right away, consider taking a short break before getting to it. This is to say, cool down and make room for feedback.
- Don’t perform too much moderation in the comments, except if you want a verdict to be public or to ask people to dial a convo down/stop. Single comment warnings are okay.
- Send users concise DMs about verdicts about them, such as bans etc, except in cases where it is clear we don’t want them at all, such as obvious transphobes. No need to notify someone they haven’t been banned of course.
- Explain to a user why their behavior is problematic and how it is distressing others rather than engage with whatever they are saying. Ask them to avoid this in the future and send them packing if they do not comply.
- First warn users, then temp ban them, then finally perma ban them when they break the rules or act inappropriately. Skip steps if necessary.
- Use neutral statements like “this statement can be considered transphobic” rather than “you are being transphobic”.
- No large decisions or actions without community input (polls or meta posts f.ex.).
- Large internal decisions (such as ousting a mod) might require a vote, needing more than 50% of the votes to pass. Also consider asking the community for feedback.
- Remember you are a voluntary moderator. You don’t get paid. Take a break when you need one. Perhaps ask another moderator to step in if necessary.
view the rest of the comments
TLDR: cooperation, solidarity, and understanding diverse perspectives, which is a large part of what 'learning' is, if you've ever learned about complex intelligent systems. which you should, because we want to resolve dissonance between different model perspectives without losing the ability to communicate, or becoming hostile. also dealing with the non-communicative parasitic patterns, like cults, which are like organisms that get 'smarter' and more 'able' at large scale, at least in regard to growing goodhart's law style until the non-comprehended environment dies along with the host.
Expanded:
learning about learning is important. the scientific method, bayesian probabilistic weighting, how words work, history and diverse expert consensus, bias, etc.
all very important and should be the main class in school at this point. if you don't learn how to learn, you might just find a hole and build complexity within confabulations until nobody knows what you're talking about, and you can no longer confirm your beliefs with the diverse representations of others.
this will stack with how to build tools to resist social momentums, and tactics often used to stop progressive memes from gaining foothold. astroturfing/reframing/dividing.
a story for framing
a bunch of atheists want to stop your cult dogma from being pushed into schools? get a bunch of feminists mad at the ones protesting to end male genital mutilation, because 'female genital mutilation is worse' or some other terrible strawman that re-frames their actual position, and then get some 4channers or joe rogan chuds/rhetoric in there so you have more evidence of bad actors, would be funny if a bunch of media groups come into existence and then die, doing nothing but this kinda ragebait. nice. now both sides have legitimate grievances being dismissed by the other side while they attack each-other. now to push some more stuff for governments/schools to weaken people's ability to comprehend the world or communicate.
when they get mad at rich people, let them waste all their energy screaming at buildings, uh oh, anti-fascists and minority groups are rising up? better frame them like an apocalypse of a bunch of idiots on the news, rather than address the constant struggles and suffering people experience, because we want to be pandas and don't want to adapt to new environments..
and i like to constantly point out that mainstream journals will even note that the black american community was generally russian propaganda target #1. get your enemy to attack themselves, and you can pay some idiot to idiot his way into office through a bunch of social manipulation tactics, which are being actively described here.
and nobody is educated enough to interpret the complexity when sometimes there's a little uncomfortable truth everywhere. easier to pretend none of us see the uncomfortable mistakes of the flawed models currently being used to represent our reality.
imagine being rich and doing whatever you want, and then spending a little of your hoard to ensure others can't do what you don't want them to do. that's largely what's going on. you can, through changing what people are able to interact with, hack a lot of minds if you got the money and power. this hackability comes from a lot of social energy minimization vie creating more simplified shared heuristic representations, so you can more easily predict each-other. (for a deep dive, see friston's free energy principle/active inference, and epistemically focused followup by mahault albarracin.)
that being said, it's not just cristo-fascist think tanks like prager-u and the heritage foundation, but a diverse set of differently-able groups working together to support the sustenance of their non-progressive models. kinda a "we don't fuck with each-other, as long as we target the tribe that wants to force us to think" deal between a bunch of idiotic patterns that continue existing like parasitic cultural organisms.
so... we gotta fight it like one. like cells and organs of a body working together to fight a new parasite, using the intelligence and tools we have. understanding that the whole of humanity is our 'body,' and we're fighting a cancer that uses noise/stress to disable cells and take them over.
need to build structure's that won't just get noticed and hijacked before they can become effective. understanding how to de-escalate and reframe the thought process of someone who is currently stuck in cult style non-communication traps where they can't update their model anymore. also need to follow it up so that the inevitability of growing diversity can lead to better forms of understanding the world and communicating, building a robust self-healing body, rather than trying to self-segregate and isolate until a parasite decides to rampage.
hope that makes sense!
This does make sense. And I do agree with you. I hope this happens. I guess I'm just a little jaded with people in general.
Thanks for your effort! I like the cancer analogy. I wonder though, if our society might already be in metastasis. I try to keep my hope...
Can you recommend literature?
a lot of this is novel, and only now being properly understood from confidence of multiple expertise perspectives being compared, that allow more confidence in certain weightings on old ideas. some old ideas are hard to quickly correct for, because people don't like digging out parts of their current model for making sense of the world.
to be fair, that is mechanically connected to the same drives that run fear and everything else based on how we contextualize the 'surprise' we feel when the world doesn't match our model.
most of the stuff on surprisal is mostly in the karl friston direction, or predictive processing. active inference is a very good thing to study, because it teaches how we make sense of the world as a bunch of cells working together, in varied and often novel contexts.
for more technical reading
https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5299/Active-InferenceThe-Free-Energy-Principle-in-Mind
free textbook on MIT, although it's a couple years old now.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38667857/
this is one of my favourite current takes, basically anything around mahault, friston, or michael levin right now is great for a technical framing of things.
levin is a good source if you like the cancer analogy
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33961843/
although this writeup was a few years back. he is constantly interacting with different experts of different fields on youtube, and there's a lot to be learned just hearing their conversations and sense making. some of the most amazing empirical results in recent experiments are coming out around michael levin's work. he keeps a summary up to date for his broader message if anyone wants to know tufts university for something other than the government bagging students.
more lighthearted and mainstream,
algospeak by adam aleksic,
Godel Escher Bach/i am a strange loop by douglas hofstadter,
for understanding language and complexity.
extra shortform,
https://www.youtube.com/@theforestjar/videos
the forest jar is often dismissed because of the art and dry delivery, but the topics are fantastic, comparing the represented perspectives of different 'thought tools' or representational perspectives, to convey a greater and more nuanced picture.
a lot of knowledge is just understanding how cults work to sustain their current model of the world in-front of critique.
some things are just general concepts that need to be better collected and talked about together, like the motte and bailey, and how cults, or people like jordon peterson will confabulate pockets of faux expertise complexity (kind of the same way AI will confabulate in a way that sounds like it makes sense) but he is actually just diverting and distracting so that he doesn't need to deal with the dissonance in question. someone actually framed it well in his jubilee thing and it's hard to call it out if the surrounding people aren't familiar.
that being said, any pocket can take all of your time if you let it, so we need to do better at creating cultures of cooperatively and intentionally interacting with this material. people with more social talent would be valuable here. etc.
also artists should already be working with scientists to help with communicating the truth of current understanding, better than clickbait dishonest journal headlines.
hopefully some good resources here, unless you're looking for something else more specific.