Yes, and RFK and the right love to exploit that, telling people to “stop trusting experts and do your own research”. If everyone he’s talking to is a scientist, great. But if everyone just falls back on their own heuristics, that’s exploitable.

I think the breakdown in communication is due to a difference in how people’s brains have been trained to accept something as “true”. Some people embrace the scientific method, while others are dogmatic.

To elaborate, I imagine you (aspire to) readily alter your personal beliefs to fit the data you’ve observed. But that is a foreign concept to some people. In order to utilize the scientific method, you need to be appropriately trained in it, and you need the intellect to apply it. But if you’re lacking in either department, you still need to be able to function day-to-day, to dress yourself, do your job, pay bills, and just stay alive. No one has time to think critically about every single challenge they’re presented, so our default behaviour is to create heuristics which can be reused multiple times without needing to think.

The difference between science enjoyers and dogma stans is that the latter group slowly learned over their lifetime that heuristics helped them function in life more than relying on their ability to reason; and now not only do they depend on the exchange of heuristics between others in their group (their “ingroup” as-it-were) in order to function, but they assume everyone operates that way (it’s all they know). The scientific method is a just a vocab term they forgot in middle school, and the idea of re-evaluating your beliefs is frowned upon, because that means you must have bad heuristics!

So back to your original question, I believe the confusion happens because you and they have different implied meanings when you each ask for a source of information: You ask because you want new evidence that might change your conclusions about a subject. But they ask because they seek to discredit your source of heuristics. In their experience, if someone told them X, but then later that person turned out to be wrong, then that’s enough reason to doubt X. That’s their heuristic for doubt, so that’s their goal, to make a map of your ingroup and try to foster doubt within it.

That is the only reason in their mind that they would ever have to know your sources, the concept of empiricism is mostly foreign to them.

All of that can be publicly audited. When we talk about “trust” we’re referring to what happens server side, which we have to assume can never be publicly audited. The importance of e2e encryption is that what ever happens server side doesn’t matter. There’s a massive gulch between trusting a binary you’re able to inspect and trusting one you can’t.

What you said is valid though, if you want/need privacy, you need to put in effort, but you also have to assume there’s someone smarter than you who will be able to outsmart your own audit. The absolute best you can hope for is that at least the binary is publicly reviewable and that they’re not smarter than every pair of eyes who reviews it. That’s basically the backbone of open source security.

I sincerely apologize for taking you seriously. You tried to warn me with your alternating caps, so it’s my fault. Cheers.

That’s fair, though that’s more of a flaw with the email protocol. There’s no way around leaking that to the receiver’s email provider as well.

Good point, I hadn’t considered that.

For the record, if your security is based on “trust”, you’re going to have a bad time. The whole point of a cryptographically secure line of communication is that you don’t need to trust anyone except the recipient. Protonmail users choose it specifically because they don’t trust anyone, including Protonmail.

The US economy is now completely detached from productivity and is now running on speculation

Yep, the market feels like it’s in max-greed mode. There was a taste of fear when the tariffs were first announced, but wallst was quick to token TACO to justify just ignoring everything. My question for the last 9+ months has been, “how long can a market willingly ignore reality?”

I assume it will take until a critical mass of those speculators start needing to liquidate. I don’t know what will trigger that, but at some point the profits come due.

I would consider this post itself a liability if I were living in china. Yeah, even if I thought it were safe initially, there’s no guarantees that living there is safe long term. Like right now, people still generally consider it safe to continue living in the US, but I don’t blame anyone for choosing to leave, because there’s really no group that’s entirely safe from Trump’s hate mongering (besides sycophants).

For the record, this clip from this movie is always posted out of context. Everyone posts it for its literal interpretation, but this rant happens early in the film, and the rest of the story shows how the network it aired on figured out how to capitalize on the ratings it generated. This results in a populist, sensationalist circle jerk that is very profitable for wealthy network owners. Much like how MAGA became what it is today.

“#2” is two words. But dropping either “I” or “pencil” would work.

My cat will eat plastic wrapping left sitting out. So yeah, he would definitely try to eat a frog given the chance.

I’m like the twin towers the way your bush got me collapsin’.

Hah, is that the main character from Disco Elysium?

C&C Red Alert 2

I played it as a kid 25 years ago, but Day9 was replaying it recently and I had to go back and try it. It’s so good, especially the campy live action cutscenes 🤌. There was definitely a lot of humor that went over my head as a kid 😂.

People who are interested in geography, geometry, cartography, political science, geopolitics, culture, cognitive biases, ethnocentrism

I maintain that none of those people are the ones interested in this movement, and if you believe they are, you haven’t spent any time thinking about it. Again, I’m looking for any actual legitimate argument in support of it. A condescending argument from hypothetical authority isn’t going to cut it.

Yeah, I’m open to any valid arguments for why it would matter, but I haven’t seen any. People who think land size should correspond to representation are…to be more diplomatic: not making any effort to think things through.

CMV: this movement only matters to stupid people, and does not qualify as something “I should know”.

Ugh, can’t wait to post about how sick this is to my insta story…and tomorrow I’ll vlog my trip to the beach!

The CEOs you’re talking about are the CEOs in the analogy.