Weiszklee

Gay, German, 37, would-be artist. I'm a liberal socialist, so naturally I spend a lot of time complaining about liberals and about socialists.

[weiszklee]

Been ages since I showed myself on here. Quite happy with how these turned out.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

so much of the "research" on "phones bad" is just statisticians congratulating themselves in a circle

[dragon-in-a-fez]

example: I am right now reading an article on "phubbing", which is apparently the term for ignoring people you're with in order to pay attention to your phone. we'll slide right past the claim that this is a normal word people use.

the authors have developed a "phubbing scale" and demonstrated that it has strong correlation with the existing "maladaptive technology use" scale. from this, they conclude the "phubbing scale" is a valid and useful metric.

the "maladaptive technology use" scale, if you go and read that paper, has shown strong correlation with the "problematic smartphone application use" construct.

have you caught the problem yet? nowhere has it been proven that scoring high on any of this is actually bad for you.

imagine someone told you "if the ground is wet it probably rained recently". then you talked to someone about rain and they said "if it rained recently there were probably clouds". yeah okay sounds reasonable. then all three of these people told you their research proves clouds, rain, and wet ground are all signs of demonic possession in giraffes. you'd be like hold up, I think you lost me somewhere

[ollievion]

I don’t need a study to know using my phone makes me feel like shit

[dragon-in-a-fez]

do different things on your phone then. I'm guessing you haven't written off paper as a technology just because tax forms make you want to cry

[weeknightbrutal-deactivated2026]

It's fair to be skeptical of research into problematic mobile phone usage on the basis that while some studies have shown it to be correlated with anxiety, insomnia, and depression, correlation is not causation and it is difficult to establish a causal relationship when studying this kind of problem. It's also fair to be skeptical of psych research in general due to the problems that are pervasive in the field.

But being not just skeptical but confident that you've debunked all the extant research on the basis that...the dumb statisticians never even bothered to check if this was actually bad for you LMFAO IDIOTS is just plain anti-intellectual though.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

> spend 5 years getting a PhD in youth and digital media

> express annoyance with a common failing of academic writing in your field

> get called anti-intellectual

[dragon-in-a-fez]

now reading a paper where the researcher:

asked students to volunteer to take a "screen-free challenge" where they didn't use electronic devices in class for a semester

recorded students' views on the challenge at the end of the course, and found that most of the students who participated had positive views while most of the students who didn't participate had negative views

completely ignored that this might just mean "people who thought something was a bad idea didn't do it", and instead concluded "the screen-free challenge leads to more positive views on the learning experience"

I'm getting whiplash from all the looking into the camera I am doing here

[allore]

Just to clarify, they only recorded the students’ views at the end of the study?? They didn’t ask the students what they expected at the beginning or ask why they participated??

That seems like such a basic step to mitigate your #3!

[dragon-in-a-fez]

the thing you have to understand is that "screens bad" research gets published so easily you can basically make every research mistake ever invented and be fine

[contemptible-scoundrel]

every so often I come across a kink post about like being kidnapped and tortured or held at gunpoint or begging for ones life for sexual purposes and I understand its going for a very haggard frail thing being taken advantage of vibe but in my mental image it really just comes off the same as that picture of wolverine strapped to a nuke

[contemptible-scoundrel]

ideal sexual encounter for people whose username is something like snuffpuppy

[specialmouse-deactivated2025060]

This is the funniest image I’ve seen in years like this is probably the very worst thing that could possibly happen to anyone ever and the artist somehow perfectly conveyed the correct level of emotion he’d be feeling like dude it’s over but what else are you supposed to do

[hoping-for-novelty]

I think it's bad to accuse people of being "anti-intellectual" when they criticize a specific academic field, especially when they have specific, constrained criticisms. Yes, even when the criticisms are wrong

Academic fields can be wrong, often in ways that are pretty obvious to outsiders. Do not become the kind of idiot who defends Freud

[charl0ttan]

protip if youre growing up with an authority figure who freaks out on you when you fuck up you can learn to get preemptively anxious and stressed and then just keep doing that your whole life 👍

[argumate]

people upgrade a tragedy to an outrage when they feel it transgresses the natural order, so the discourse over a tragedy will get bogged down in circular arguments when people have differing ideas of what the natural order should be: if you're mad about police brutality or foreign immigration then a cop shooting someone or an immigrant stabbing someone is reinforcing the emotional attachment you already have and retroactively justifying the outrage you already feel, which will often lead you to say things that make you sound like a deranged anarchist or deranged racist respectively.

realistically you're going to have cops of some kind or another and you're going to have foreigners of some kind or another and anyone who can't take a systemic view of problems (sadly most people?) is going to be stuck reacting to each event as it happens with streams of disconnected outrage and occasional riots.

[argumate]

really I'm just echoing Heath Ledger's Joker here but I think it's true, and it's not just a question of the natural order but also the way people seem socially hardwired to be more sensitive to human adversaries than other forms of trouble, to the extent of blaming accidents or disasters on conspiracies of hostile actors or even witchcraft.

if air pollution or contagious diseases kill a million people well that's unfortunate, but it only becomes an outrage if we believe it was deliberately orchestrated by Bill Gates or George Soros, and it can still attract less interest than one guy getting into a fight with someone considered an Enemy.

[relelvance]

[this-is-trans-joy]

everyone loves to hate terfs until they realise that it actually entails rejecting bioessentialism entirely and then suddenly you’re “taking things too seriously” and you “don’t have a sense of humour” like i’m sorry but saying protect the dolls doesn’t make you immune to terfism it has seeped into every corner of mainstream feminism and unless you’re actively searching it out and checking your own biases you will always be at risk of sharing a space with terfs

[this-is-trans-joy]

“Only women can—” nope. “But all men—” nah. “The divine femininity of—” gonna stop you right there. “Everyone born ama—” if you finish that sentence I’ll kill you. “Men don’t experience—” you’re wrong. “Gender isn’t real but sex is imm—” *loud incorrect buzzer*

It also goes without saying that bioessentialism inherently can’t be trans inclusive no matter how hard you try. “All men including trans men—” probably not. “This is only a woman’s issue—” is it really? “Afabs only—” why? “All trans men are like—” what? what are they like? finish the sentence i dare you.

[argumate]

so much crime discourse is implicitly predicated on there being an ontological distinction between Criminals and Ordinary People that the justice system should be able to immediately intuit by mystical introspection, like why would you let Criminals out on bail? why would you put Ordinary People on trial? if police already knew who was guilty in advance then their actions really would look even more perverse than they already are!

[rampagingpoet]

"Bail Reform" is one of the big Conservative tough-on-crime talking points in Canada right now, and it's something I'd love to see more statistics on.

Right-wing newspapers report every day that someone, somewhere committed° a new crime while out on bail. And yeah that's bad - but what are the actual numbers? Canada's population isn't that high, but there are still 40 million of us. P(is on bail & committed a crime) could be literally one in a million and there'd still be forty people to pick from to find the most sensational anecdote.

It only makes sense if we throw "innocent until proven guilty" right out and just kind of blithely assume that if the police arrested someone they must have done it. Then again the people pushing this don't seem to believe in trials or even "having served one's time" - they're up in arms every time a violent offender's sentence is up and they're back in the community. Because people can never be given the benefit of the doubt and prison can't fix Ontological Criminality Syndrome.

° No innocent until proven guilty in these articles, can't stand by the bedrock cornerstone of our legal system and make it sound useless at the same time.

[argumate]

yeah I feel that being mad about bail is closely related to being mad about immigration because it stems from a similar mindset, where you can obviously sort people into Good and Bad and so letting the Bad people roam free on the streets is something you would only do for perverse reasons because you want to destroy society.

but of course if you are detained without bail or your family member is deported then obviously that's government overreach, the bureaucratic nanny state punishing Good people as if they were Bad for its own nefarious reasons.

now ideally we would have a perfect oracle that would guide all decisions towards the most optimal outcome, but failing that we have a messy mix of institutions and cultural norms and political arguments and the result will always be a tradeoff that we hope functions well enough to keep making progress towards a society that sucks less.

[st-just]

'your You is stored in your body but mostly the brain. Ergo changes imposed on it can and will change the sort of person you are,' is something people will accept in principle and then just recoil from in basically every particular case.

I blame the widespread belief in an immortal soul.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I feel like advertising is probably the funniest place anyone can choose to predicate their moral arguments against AI on the basis of environmental impact because like. The advertising industry is already probably the most wasteful i dustry in terms of environmental costs vs. actual value it provides, to the point that adding AI to it amounts to a very small drop in the world's biggest bucket. Like.

"Using AI to design flyers looks cheap and tacky" 👍 I completely agree.

"Using AI to design flyers is bad for the environment" I can tell you with 100% absolute certainty that the environmental impact of printing hundreds of paper flyers which will be looked at exactly once and then thrown in the garbage is like. Several orders of magnitude bigger than the environmental impact of generating the picture that will go on said flyers.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Like I find it hard to think of a position that more succinctly communicates "I never think about where anything comes from or how it's produced or how it's disposed of or the environmental costs of any steps in that process unless there's some sort of moral panic telling me to be concerned about it" than thinking that the "AI" part of "ads made with AI" is the part that's bad for the environment.

[argumate]

Screwworm Is Back In Texas Cattle—Is DOGE To Blame?

The government cut funding for the New World screwworm monitoring program and then reportedly ignored ranchers warning the parasite was work

dang

[pissvortex]

Christians when they die and go to science instead of heaven

[this-is-a-love-story-isnt-it]

This insane update from Neocities

[tsarina-anadyomene]

it really is quite bad for your military to have an image of itself as a warrior class. what you really want is for your soldiers to think of themselves as boring professionals who will fill out a report form if someone gets a little too warrior ethos out there

[floofshy]

In my dream last night, I was proselytized to join "tantric buddism" which believes that you will be reincarnated as a god no matter what, but by listening to proto-metal songs you can have seizure-like experiences to commune with your future divine self, and thus improve morally.

The evangelist dodged my questions about "what if I am reincarnated as an evil god who encourages me to be evil?"

As an side story, a loser socially awkward kid kept praying for a miracle to make him cool, but his future self was a socially awkward divine auntie who made things worse.

[northstareclipse]

There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.