Rabdomante's recent activity

  1. Comment on Reddit is adding native video ads starting next week in ~tech

    Rabdomante
    Link Parent
    You can also use a browser extension that automatically loads images, gifs and videos on hover; I currently use Imagus on Firefox.

    If you don't use the fold-out then you have to open everything in a new window.

    You can also use a browser extension that automatically loads images, gifs and videos on hover; I currently use Imagus on Firefox.

  2. Comment on Reddit is adding native video ads starting next week in ~tech

    Rabdomante
    Link Parent
    As it turns out, the reasoning was "so we can put our own ads in front of it"

    I don't trust their reasoning behind wanting to do it

    As it turns out, the reasoning was "so we can put our own ads in front of it"

    3 votes

  3. Comment on On making a fresh start in ~tildes

    Rabdomante
    Link Parent
    No and no. Once again, I'm describing the mechanism behind suspicion. Someone can describe how something happens without endorsing it. You've spent a good portion of this thread insisting that...

    That does sort of imply that my behavior is in line with alt-righters, and that I am not acting in good faith. So, you might not be saying that "Hey, this guy is alt-right" you are certainly hinting at it without saying it out right.

    No and no. Once again, I'm describing the mechanism behind suspicion. Someone can describe how something happens without endorsing it. You've spent a good portion of this thread insisting that people should interpret what you say without reading malice into it, don't fall into the same behavior.

    I'm not sure how crime stats are made

    Then don't make precise claims about how they're made?

    because I was actually saying it WAS socioeconomic status that influenced criminal behavior

    Then what's the point of using a racial statistic?

    I know a lot of people from all ethnicities are criminals, I just haven't pulled up the statistics to check. So I don't really know what you're getting at here...

    That it's not true that "statistics show a lot of black people are criminals".

  4. Comment on Spain now has the most female cabinet in Europe in ~news

    Rabdomante
    Link Parent
    Wrong. Gender equality would be a state in which the odds of having a 74% female cabinet are the same as the odds of having a 74% male cabinet. Since the overwhelming majority of world cabinets...

    This post is tagged with "gender equality", but the numbers aren't 50/50, so they're not equal.

    Wrong. Gender equality would be a state in which the odds of having a 74% female cabinet are the same as the odds of having a 74% male cabinet.

    Since the overwhelming majority of world cabinets (or even Western cabinets) are male-dominated, this female-dominated cabinet is actually moving us closer to gender equality. The tag is entirely factually correct even in the most precise statistical sense.

    2 votes

  5. Comment on On making a fresh start in ~tildes

    Rabdomante
    Link Parent
    I didn't do that though. I explained the mechanism by which insistence that "statistics can be racist" makes people suspicious. For crime stats? not really. I'm not really sure how double-blind...

    Ah but the problem with attributing alt right to me

    I didn't do that though. I explained the mechanism by which insistence that "statistics can be racist" makes people suspicious.

    reputable sources who conducted their studies multiple times, with a high confidence interval, double blind if necessary, random sampling, etc.

    For crime stats? not really. I'm not really sure how double-blind studies would enter into crime statistics collection. These are usually compiled from internal documents redacted by law enforcement agencies, with a pretty wide set of issues in terms of definitions, collection and reporting methods etc.; it's actually a pretty fascinating and complicated subject.

    While it is not exact truths, it is enough to be representative of the population

    Nope. That's the facet I think you're missing: even when the statistic is accurate (ie it correctly represents the measure it seeks to represent), that doesn't at all imply that the measure in question represents the population you're studying.

    For a science example: a friend of mine is a biologist studying the reproductive cycles of two competing species of river weed. She had a very large set of accurately collected data about prevalence of each species, water chemical composition etc etc, and yet she couldn't make heads or tails of it. The data was all accurate, but it didn't explain the observed behavior. Why? because the actual difference was caused by differing sunlight exposure, which her dataset didn't consider.

    Looking at just the crime stats to discuss ethnic patterns in crime is similarly flawed. We know socioeconomic status is an immense influence on criminal behavior, for an easy example of a relevant factor that is not captured by crime stats.

    Well even with statistics showing that a lot of them are

    It shows that very few of them are, unless you mean that statistics show that a lot of white people and a lot of hispanic people etc are also criminals, in which case I'm not really sure how the qualifier "a lot" even serves to diversify a meaningful quantity.

    1 vote

  6. Comment on On making a fresh start in ~tildes

    Rabdomante
    Link Parent
    Nope, statistics are constructed measures that attempt to capture certain facts. They are not the same thing as the facts themselves. The way the measure is constructed is almost certainly limited...

    Statistics are merely facts.

    Nope, statistics are constructed measures that attempt to capture certain facts. They are not the same thing as the facts themselves. The way the measure is constructed is almost certainly limited and invariably imperfect; the way the measure represents the underlying facts is usually even more limited and imperfect.

    Crime statistics, for example, are constructed through specific collection methods, definitions and with the use of certain underlying statistical models (for example, the "per capita" statistic relies on demographic modeling).

    They try to offer a perspective on the phenomenon of crime, but this perspective is limited. The publishers of crime statistics themselves will tell you it's limited.

    So, when someone comes into a debate on race relations, drops racial crime statistics and then withdraws behind "buuut these are just facts!", they're doing a dishonest operation (and they know it). They're presenting a slice of reality that they know leaves the impression that they want to leave (ie minorities are worse people), and then refusing to engage with the very many criticisms of their presentation by raising up a wall of stubborn "you're just refusing to accept facts".

    And, given how absolutely prevalent this behavior is among internet alt-righters, it certainly does give rise to the suspicion that the person in question is not acting in good faith.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on Should we, in rich countries, open our borders to migrants, refugees and other immigrants? in ~talk

    Rabdomante
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    This isn't a binary choice. It's not open borders or closed borders. Most borders are controlled borders, where some people can come through at certain conditions and others can't. The asylum...

    This isn't a binary choice. It's not open borders or closed borders. Most borders are controlled borders, where some people can come through at certain conditions and others can't.

    The asylum system must be protected and respected. It is a lifesaving mechanism and a moral backbone of the contemporary international order.

    Economic migration, which today often happens together with and on the same routes of as refugee flight, should be controlled based primarily on what is sustainable. It does no one good, including the migrants themselves, when a country takes in more than it can integrate into its society.

    At the moment, it seems to me that specifically African and Middle Easter immigration to Europe has reached the point where integration is failing to happen. Even the most harcore progressive and committed countries, like Sweden, are simply failing to integrate large portions of their migrant populations. It would already be unrealistic to expect all of Europe to adopt Sweden's outlooks and priorities; it's even more unrealistic to imagine that we can in short order all start doing even better than that standard.

    11 votes

  8. Comment on Mod cultures - What do we want? in ~tildes

    Rabdomante
    Link
    On reddit, I've been first (of course) a simple user, then I was a mod for some pretty big subs (including a default, back when those existed), and then I left all my mod positions. So I think I'm...

    On reddit, I've been first (of course) a simple user, then I was a mod for some pretty big subs (including a default, back when those existed), and then I left all my mod positions. So I think I'm in a fairly decent positions to post my take:

    Often I see mods making things far far worse by being one of the most combative and hostile in-groups on the site.

    This has been true of almost every mod team I've been a part of or interacted with. Mod teams that weren't routinely hostile to the out-group were the exception far more than the rule, and were usually the product of very peculiar subreddit communities.

    When I was a mod, hostility seemed a 100% natural and sensible development.

    We the mods knew what the problems were, what the dynamics were, and what could be done and needed to be done.

    We dealt with a small but extremely bothersome minority of users who were perniciously hostile to us, and the defensive mechanisms that we developed to handle them easily extended, through exhaustion, paranoia, laziness and a fair bit of self-righteousness, into reasons to be hostile to anyone who questioned us at all; because being anything less than that seemed like both a waste of time and a potential opening for pernicious users to exploit.

    So, instead of explaining to the 1000th user who clearly hadn't bothered to read the rules why we removed his post, we just told them rudely to read the rules, and muted their near-inevitable subsequent message of protest.

    If someone publicly challenge a rule that we had established to deal with problematic users, and which seemed to be overtly stifling of less-than-problematic users, we had a very short tolerance for debate, because we felt like we had had it endlessly and always with the same arguments, and that oftentimes people were bringing them up again in bad faith.

    A key problem, which tildes already seems to want to tackle from the start, is simple exhaustion. I'd say all teams I was in were simply far too small for the workload. You can only volunteer to handle the same bullshit so many times before you feel like you are entitled to just shut bothersome people up or tell them to fuck off; before you start seeing each user not as an individual, but just as another undifferentiated instance of the same nuisance you've been dealing with for years.

    Another key problem, which tildes also wants to tackle, is hierarchy. The mod pecking order, as much as the all teams seemed to want to pretend didn't exist, was absolutely a thing, and effectively created an aristocracy of old timers whose influence was automatically disproportionate to their actual amount of contribution to mod work, simply because they could if they wanted to demod us all, and thus had very real weight to any claim to seniority.

    Finally, and again I'm happy tildes wants to tackles this, was the issue of disconnect between mods and communities. With the small subs, being a mod meant being a user 90% of the time, and then volunteering to do some cleanup and some maintenance once in a while.

    With the larger sub, you were a mod all the time. You were always needed to do work, and the work took a lot of time, and the anti-mod elements in the sub would not let you live in peace as a user, always bringing up your status as a mod even in irrelevant discussions just to pick fights. Eventually you grew disconnected from the community, spending most of your time in the mod slack/discord, chatting with people who got what your experience was about. That alienation bred a sense of superiority that was toxic to mod work.

    24 votes

  9. Comment on Thoughts on putting the comment box at the beginning of Tildes threads? in ~tildes

    Rabdomante
    Link
    tl;dr it gets brought up all the time, it's a conscious design choice to incentivize users to partecipate in discussions already happening rather than immediately post their own top-level comment

    tl;dr it gets brought up all the time, it's a conscious design choice to incentivize users to partecipate in discussions already happening rather than immediately post their own top-level comment

    14 votes

  10. Comment on What is your favorite tea? in ~food

    Rabdomante
    Link Parent
    Absolutely masala chai, made directly in watered milk as the Indians do it, with their mix of spices. Stuff of the gods. Everyone who can should head to their local indian market, get the mix, and...

    Absolutely masala chai, made directly in watered milk as the Indians do it, with their mix of spices. Stuff of the gods. Everyone who can should head to their local indian market, get the mix, and ask the vendor how to brew it.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on New US ambassador to Germany under fire for rightwing support. Politicians accuse Richard Grenell of breaching protocol over interview with Breitbart in ~news

    Rabdomante
    Link Parent
    Look at the more granular data. The city centers, which are the wealthies parts of cities, tend to vote mainstream. But the dilapidated suburbs? they go populist right more often than not. Uh...

    The growth in the right has predominantly been outside of densely populated areas, outside of cities.

    Look at the more granular data. The city centers, which are the wealthies parts of cities, tend to vote mainstream. But the dilapidated suburbs? they go populist right more often than not.

    And the issue all of those places cite is immigration, not urban poverty. They cite immigration and jobs.

    Uh yeah, what do you think is the main cause of urban poverty? unemployment and shitty, unstable, low-paid jobs with no prospects.

    You mention five-star and once again that's not a poverty movement, it's an immigration movement. They simply would not have the support they have if not for immigration being a vote motivator.

    This is completely wrong, and as an Italian I think I'm fairly qualified to speak on it. M5S' main electoral promise focused on universal basic income. Immigration is the province of Lega.

    The real cause of this in my opinion goes back to the recession. It devastated commercial and industrial small to medium businesses outside of cities. There are towns that had nearly all shops close up. The standard of the towns dropped drastically as a result of all the loss of businesses. Things are a mess to this day, there are still rows and rows of closed and unused businesses. It all started with the recession. It lowered standards of living and lifestyles for people. This created the unhappiness that permeates throughout these movements, but this is not what they are voting for. They're voting for immigration.

    Your analysis of urban poverty is exactly right, but then how do you turn it around and say "but that's not what they're angry about"? on what basis?

    They are angry about being neglected. They're angry about someone like Renzi promising an 80€ bonus to middle-class workers while doing nothing for the unemployed. They're angry at a political class they perceive as detached elitist and self-referential, and they're voting for the "new" alternative that promises to be different. Renzi was initially balooned into power by the same anti-establishment sentiment, he presented himself as the "rottamatore", the scrapman who'd demolish "old politics". Immigration is just an issue of circumstance.

    2 votes

  12. Comment on New US ambassador to Germany under fire for rightwing support. Politicians accuse Richard Grenell of breaching protocol over interview with Breitbart in ~news

    Rabdomante
    Link Parent
    Immigration is a flashpoint, but the working class hasn't turned en masse to populist right parties over immigration alone. There has been not just a failure but a refusal by mainstream politics...

    The only "groundswell" that exists is an immigration-based one.

    Immigration is a flashpoint, but the working class hasn't turned en masse to populist right parties over immigration alone. There has been not just a failure but a refusal by mainstream politics to address working class grievances, and especially the great historical left wing parties in Europe have been paying the price.

    The French Parti Socialiste has been almost wiped out at the last elections. The German SPD had its worst result of the post-war era. The Italian center-left coalition finished third in March, behind both the center-right and the populist right Five Star Movement.

    Only British Labour went against this trend, under the Corbyn leadership, ie with a leader who's been decidedly more hardline regarding working class issues than his milquetoast predecessors.

    All the parties which, instead, lost out were involved in governments that pushed anti-worker legislation, sidelined issues with poverty (especially urban poverty), and generally embraced a classic right-wing mentality that "the market will fix all in due time".

    This is what provided the upswell of support for the populist right, much more than immigration alone.

    4 votes

  13. Comment on What are thoughts on image-only groups similar to subreddits like quityourbullshit, me_irl, inceltears etc in ~tildes

    Rabdomante
    Link
    With the intent behind ~, the one place I see for image-only groups are when they're dedicated to photography, painting and other static image art. Screenshot groups tend to breed toxicity and...

    With the intent behind ~, the one place I see for image-only groups are when they're dedicated to photography, painting and other static image art. Screenshot groups tend to breed toxicity and low-effort outrage content.

    1 vote

  14. Comment on So was anyone else eager to join Tildes if only to pick a unique name? in ~talk

    Rabdomante
    Link
    That didn't even occur to me until this thread, and by then I had already re-used my reddit username anyway. I really don't care about usernames either way, I'm much more interested in content...

    That didn't even occur to me until this thread, and by then I had already re-used my reddit username anyway. I really don't care about usernames either way, I'm much more interested in content whoever it is that publishes it.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on What do you guys use to listen to your music? in ~music

    Rabdomante
    Link
    SoundScience QSB for the desktop, a pair of out-of-production speakers that by some dark magic (certainly involving virgin sacrifices to demons of the wastes) sound great ZeroAudio Carbo Tenore as...

    SoundScience QSB for the desktop, a pair of out-of-production speakers that by some dark magic (certainly involving virgin sacrifices to demons of the wastes) sound great

    ZeroAudio Carbo Tenore as earphones on the go and in bed. Pretty notorious for being excellent in their price range.

    Samson SR850 as headphones at home. Simple entry level semiopen headphones, widely recommended by audiophile groups (at least when I was choosing what to buy years ago).

  16. Comment on US President Donald Trump has second highest “own party” approval rating of any president at the 500 day mark in ~news

    Rabdomante
    Link
    The article links to this very nice Gallup datalet, which lets you visualize their presidential job approval via various demographic and political filters:...

    The article links to this very nice Gallup datalet, which lets you visualize their presidential job approval via various demographic and political filters:

    http://news.gallup.com/interactives/185273/presidential-job-approval-center.aspx

    It's a pity you can only pick one designator at a time. You can see, for example, that Trump's overall approval rate is 52% among whites, whereas it is 40% overall; and that there's just as wide a gender gap, with approval among men being 13 points higher than among women. Only the 50-64 years old cohort approves of him at a greater than 50% rate. It would be interesting to see the data for intersections of those demographics, ie his approval among, say, 50 to 64 years old white men. I don't think the results are likely to shock anyone, but I'd rather see the stats than trust my prejudices.

    8 votes

  17. Comment on The case for quarantining extremist ideas in ~misc

    Rabdomante
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    I think the article strikes a chord, but comes at the problem from an ineffective angle. Casting the reporting choice as between covering or not covering extremists means leaving the extremists...

    I think the article strikes a chord, but comes at the problem from an ineffective angle.

    Casting the reporting choice as between covering or not covering extremists means leaving the extremists with the choice of what content is in the story: the journalist only decides whether to show it or not.

    The Western press seems less and less capable of finding its own angle and voice in reporting. Most often, articles report on political controversy by simply lending the microphone to the various factions; an approach that is "impartial" only in the most superficial sense, and which is naturally exploited by populists, who know how to sound louder and more interesting than anyone else.

    Instead, the press needs to find its own authoritative voice, self-critical and aware of its limitation and potential for bias, but not simply surrendering to third-party opinions for fear of having its own.

    When the far-right holds some kind of event and presents their own narrative of it, simply not reporting on it leaves them in charge of the messaging, and it will get out through sympathetic outlets and social media. Instead, the press should report on it, but clearly expose the lies and crimes in their behavior.

    3 votes