jtrek

He should be in a locked, padded, room somewhere

A lot of Linux works out of the box now. If folks started selling preconfigured Linux machines like you can buy for windows, that's all most people need. Valve is following a good strategy

Many people don't want non-whites to get any of these things. They'd rather get nothing themselves than some of them get nice things. They're scumbags

Hah, I had written something specifically about "they took on risk!" and a retort of "are we a slot machine and lotto driven society then?" but didn't polish and post it.

For the latter, I might zero in on "they worked hard, maybe. Now they don't. Should a freeloader get more than someone who works?" to see what happens.

I've found "You work all day and get a small salary. The business owner sits around, and gets a huge payout. Does that seem fair?" is moderately effective.

The other core is "I'd rather die of preventable diseases so long as black people suffer more"

I'm not (intentionally) being rude while knowing that it's ineffective.

I'm saying the people that believe a flashy YouTube video instead of something uncomfortable are being stupid.

The solution will never be to get them to fall on their face and worship logic. Nor will it be to call them idiots to their face. (Even though some people are so fucking stupid and full of worm paste that I want to scream at them, that's not appropriate so it stays inside). The solution, unfortunately, needs to be wrapping facts up in ways that make them feel good. We have to cater to this behavior.

Here's a more concrete example. We do code reviews at work. I could leave a comment that says "Don't sort this list in place. That's going to cause a bug at XYZ". Straight. To the point. I could also leave a comment that says like "hey great work here. And a good call to sort the list! I think you might want to make a copy and sort that so it won't be weird at XYZ. Thanks so much."

The latter is a lot fluffier and a little dishonest (it's clearly not great work), but I have to write more like that. Otherwise people feel bad and whine about it.

I think this is a factor in why people love LLMs so much. They're always getting fluffed.

Right. But that's a stupid strategy that leads people to believing what the flashy YouTube video says about eating horse medicine to cure cancer instead of the grumpy scientist who makes you feel bad.

You're not wrong in describing how people behave. I'm saying that behavior is foolish.

Right. I think winning moves might have to play into people's emotions. Don't tell conservatives that greenhouse gases cause more heat to be trapped. Tell them like ONLY AMERICA CAN DEFEAT PHYSICS AND MOVE INTO THE FUTURE or whatever.

That doesn't change the square root of 9, and it's stupid to discard facts because the speaker is rude.

Another facet of what I said above: facts don't matter. Emotions matter. Which is a stupid way to live, but that's humans.

The average person, if you told them like "the square root of 9 is 3, you fucking idiot" isn't going to believe you. Which, amusingly, shows they are kind of a fucking idiot.

Facts don't change people's minds. The main thing that matters is "is the source in my in-group?"

This is kind of a stupid way to live, but that's the human baseline. So that's how all the conservatives live, and why they won't come around on things like climate change. They're not listening to facts. They're listening to their in-group.