I came across this comment today, and it really makes me wonder how people just dismiss intellectual curiosity outright.

yes!!! they’re everywhere and anytime I see someone bring it up someone comments some shit about having an open mind… uhhh no???

Unlike the side many of them seem to blindly and militantly defend, the side they rage against is not asking for blind adherence to beliefs. You have to open yourself up to questioning your beliefs; there is no value in a closed mind.

This is colonialism all over again.

Yeah, I see a lot of bragging about “pushing tankies out of the space”, the space that they founded, mind you. Not even content with just creating echo chambers to exist blindly and unquestioningly in (beehaw), they don’t want other groups to have anything for themselves; they aren’t satisfied getting a space for themselves until they can be sure their ‘enemy’ also has no space for themselves.

So why should the Library of Congress exist? Why should the Internet Archive exist?

“They’re books, who gives a shit. Most things are lost over time.” “They’re web pages, who gives a shit. Most things are lost over time.”

There’s value in record-keeping. People can analyze it on a technical perspective (like a literary analysis). People can enjoy old games (like reading a book from the 1500s). People can analyze trends in the industry. There are endless reasons why record-keeping could be useful, and you can never plan for all of them ahead of time.

What a horrible source. This is really shit reporting.

They’ve hyperlinked the word “hot dogs” to another article on their site titled “Hot dogs sold as ‘vegan’ dogs at Tel Aviv Hanukkah event”.

They’ve also spent part of the article estimating the average hot dog size, converting it between units, and converting the reported asteroid size into hot dog units.

All of the section headers are lame hotdog based puns.

This whole shitty presentation adds nothing to the article. It’s distracting. In fact, if you take out this bullshit, the article is really only a couple of meaningful paragraphs. And while there is absolutely value in comparing an asteroid size to a daily object (say, “the size of a car”), there is absolutely zero value, perhaps negative value, in comparing an asteroid size to a collection of sequential hot dogs, or two superbowl trophies.

I could somewhat understand if NASA themselves where putting out press releases with these weird comparisons: that would be a somewhat playful and innocent way to increase public interest. But when it is coming from third-party sources, who push it way past the point of playfulness into absurdity, it loses any value.

Also, unless I’m missing it: they don’t even link to a NASA statement. So it’s pure editorializing without linking to their primary source.

Well I’m sorry you can’t fathom that there is potential future value in old games. I even said that we can’t know the future value of something like this, so the safest thing to do is to just preserve them as well as we can.

Do you disagree with all of the explicit examples of ways it can be valuable that I laid out? Or do you simply want to assert the games are “meaningless” and ignore every way in which value can still be derived, or could be derived in the future, from them?

I suspect you haven’t actually thought this through and are just being antagonistic for fun; that’s how it comes off, anyway.

It seems like a “joke” (a sick one, but one not meant to be taken 100% literally) image. There is absolutely no way anyone would truly think that is useful. Even if it was super thick and effective, it doesn’t even cover a whole child. It can also just be kicked aside. There’s no way this isn’t meant as an exaggerated image just meant to bring attention to a real situation.

And China has just about as many of those capitalism problems as we do.

Do you really think China has all of the same capitalism problems?

China doesn’t have:

• a rampant and actively ignored homeless problem
• widespread food insecurity, including among children
• a disgustingly large and widening wealth gap, with the government bribery that comes with it
• inaccessible or unaffordable healthcare for a large portion of its population, especially those most needing of it
• reversal of child labor laws and increasing promotion of its use
• destruction of the education system and villifying those seeking to escape generational poverty
• a massive and increasing renting population (compared to those with outright ownership), spending an increasingly large fraction of their constantly decreasing wages on housing
• an incarceration rate nearly five times average developed nations driven largely by for-profit prisons and slave labor performed by the imprisoned

Does China have problems related to capitalism’s influence? Of course. Does it have as many, or do they permeate it so deeply and thoroughly? Of course not.

ArXiv doesn’t filter anything afaik (or maybe they have policy against really egregious stuff). If you take a peek at their mathematics section, any nutjob who think he’s solved the collatz conjecture can export their microsoft word ramblings to PDF and publish it on ArXiv.

ArXiv does have value because journals overcharge authors for publishing, overcharge other researches for access to journals, hold strict opinions on what they will or will not publish or censor, among other complains. ArXiv levels the playing field a bit by being basically fancy PDF file hosting. Not every valuable piece of thought comes from a “prestigous university”, and restricting access to knowledge is overall a bad thing.

For $500k USD, you can get the low quality ArXiv article; for free, you can have this high quality teardown of said article.

Thank you for the amount of effort this took to put together. I’ve done only a quick skim but I’m going to give it a full read. Some stuff that definitely stood out to me is: the horseshoe theory nonsense; and the “rude words mean evil person” nonsense. Use of charged words or negative sentiment don’t make you bad or wrong; arguably, negative sentiment is the only rational response to a lot of the topics at hand.

I suspect that the way they came to that conclusion was: any post mentioning one of those groups, that also had a negative sentiment rating, meant that sentiment was directed at that group. Which is horribly dishonest. What’s more likely is someone to be angry (which registers as negative sentiment) about those groups being mistreated or what have you. By the naive approach they seem to have taken, that’s indistinguishable from being mad at that group.

Also, the methodology they describe, and the conclusions they come to don’t align. They don’t describe any methodology by which they could determine that the identities are being attacked. It would be like if they concluded some cause-and-effect relationship but their methodology had absolutely no way of establishing a causal relationship in the data.