1. This person didn't claim THEY were harassed. They claimed others were harassed. This was not THEIR lived experience. They were talking about harassment secondhand.
2. The secondhand claims of inappropriate language were made on the internet. The internet is different than the physical world. Much text typed on the internet is/can be recorded. It is a very common practice for someone who is being harassed on the internet to share with others the record of their harassment. The internet is perfect for this. It's certainly much messier out in the physical world to prove which is the analogy you seem to be trying to apply to internet communication.
3. I just asked WHERE it happened, not to provide a precise record of the claims. It wasn't a tall ask to respond with an internet location (i.e. channel).
4. Questioning claims is NOT harassment, especially when the cost to produce evidence supporting the claim approaches zero (as on the internet). This is a toxic mentality to employ, though I'm sure you think you are being noble with your #believeallclaims approach. If anything, people who employ a "DON'T QUESTION IT!" approach do themselves a huge disservice, as that is probably the least persuasive tactic to do and immediately signals a huge red flag to any neutral onlookers.
The topic here is asking for where secondhand claims of harassment on a part of the internet happened, with the context of it being contrary to MY lived experience in similar parts of the internet. I'm trying to square how this secondhand claim could be contradictory to MY lived experience, and to update my understanding if given new information.
As a last rhetorical example/hypothetical: Let's say I made a claim that someone replied to a tweet of mine this week calling me the n-word. Do you automatically believe me? If you sought to prove my claim by looking at my tweets, are you a racist that is harassing me? What if there is absolutely no record of the alleged tweet reply happening/existing (even accounting for a potential delete)? Would you ever waver in your belief of my claim?
That's great! For the sake of humanity, can you please start documenting your realizations/interpretations in some sort of readable/understandable format, with your reasoning? Especially those realizations/interpretations which are not super widely held, as it'll help move the ball forward with humanity understanding how things have evolved.
If you did this, then perhaps you'd be a bit less frustrated when others come to your interpretation years later. And if you are looking to status seek, you can gain some status points in the process!
On examining the negative thought patterns, I think there's at least a couple parts to it:
1. If you very much believe no amount of physical health interventions will have any cognitive effects, then it seems like the probability of you sticking with any sort of health/fitness routine is very low. If in fact, health/diet/fitness DOES have positive cognitive effects (it's been proven scientifically and there are tons of anecdotes), you may end up depriving yourself of a really great thing for improving quality of life and cognition. So examining the possibility that your cognition is not doomed and immune to physical health interventions could greatly increase the odds of improvement.
2. In 2 of your examples, they were social situations. In my experience, negative thought patterns can definitely impact that. I'm saying this somewhat loosely, as I'm not an expert, but have done research in the past on this: Thoughts can trigger bio/physiological responses in the body/brain that can definitely impact cognition.
This is not meant as a criticism, hopefully more of an inquiry if you so choose. Is it possible that your 'feeling' of your brain being irreparably damaged is actually factually incorrect? And that your assumptions/model of the plasticity of the brain may be wrong and skew a bit negative?
Is it possible that these negative thought patterns are holding you back? Awhile back, I became aware of some irrational negative thought patterns I had myself, and worked on reframing them, and it helped immensely w/ confidence.
You dismissed the article and author by labeling it a 'hit piece' by 'someone who hates wikipedia'. When other users asked if you had any substantive critiques of the claims in the article, you responded by saying you don't need to read or respond to the article's claims because of the 'bullshit asymmetry principle' that you adhere to.
The next natural question that I asked is how you arrived at the conclusion that the article/author is heavily biased (or filled with 'bullshit' as you have stated)? You respond by implying what I was asking is 'bullshit', and you don't need to answer any questions about it.
Overall, this thread/tangent has not been constructive. I was responding to your ad hominem on the author and shallow dismissal (which is against HN guidelines) of the article with no supporting arguments/remarks/evidence. Yes, my tone was more direct, as I'm not a fan of shallow dismissals based on ad hominem attacks. Probably my mistake for even engaging given the content of the comments that were posted to others.
Like you have stated a number of times here, you don't need to read/respond to anything you don't want to and you don't owe anybody anything. For future reference, this is just an implied rule in life, and doesn't need to be explicitly stated. Feel free to ignore this comment as you have stated you will, and I definitely don't expect/want anything else out of this conversation.
Would you actually be interested in reading about Wikimedia finances though? Wikimedia is a non-profit and posts all of their financial data publicly [1], why not go read it there?
What's interesting is that you somehow know that the author is someone who hates wikipedia, yet you refuse to read his article(s). How did you arrive at the conclusion that the author is someone who is heavily biased against Wikimedia and shouldn't be trusted? Are you just memetically repeating something others have said on the internet about the author, or did you read other articles/claims from this author and independently arrive at your conclusion?
If the latter, how could you have not researched Wikimedia finances even a little to validate claims the author makes? In which case, you would have something substantive to communicate to others on the internet to be aware of about the claims of the author, instead of the anti-intellectual ad hominem approach you took here.
How can you be sure any research won't result in violence? How do you establish whether a given piece of research/data will result in violence?
Is your basic operating model for this: "Never show any data that shows there are group differences, because it can be used by violent extremists"?
If that is your operating model, do you support getting rid of ANY data out there that shows differences between groups in ability/behavior, as it could result in violence? For instance, should we ban all public violent crime reporting, if that showed group differences, as it would be something used by those violent extremists you mention?
But making it known that the line of questioning will bring violence to others is implying that if the person continues the line of questioning, they are then knowingly and intentionally bringing violence to trans people. In a lot of legal systems and with informal norms, if you know your action will cause harm to others, and you do it anyway, you are considered a cause of the harm.
Claims that an action can cause violence are ultimately claims that the action causes violence.
As an extreme example: Times Square in NYC is considered a "Walker's Paradise" with a walkability score of 100 on Walk Score. But it seems like the worst possible place to walk, and most NYC locals I know avoid that area like the plague.
I think with the popular conception/definition of walkability and the assigned importance of that conception is a little over-rated.
I personally feel like it overvalues commercial activity (restaurants, retail, grocery, entertainment). Obviously, it depends on how often you want to partake in said commercial activities as far as how you would value it.
I would love if the conception of walkability could also take into account:
'How far can I walk without having to worry about cars/crossing streets/waiting for lights?'
'How safe/comfortable is the walk? Will I be walking by people who will harass me/be high on drugs/try to sell me something?'
'How easy is it to string together a run without having to stop?'
'How busy are the sidewalks? Will I have to be dodging people on their phones all the time?'
'Is it easy to take a dog for a walk? Or are there limited green spaces?'
'Are there social/interest groups nearby that meet up?'
I find some of these types of factors much more important than closeness to X number of commercial venues. So a busy downtown street may get a high walkability score (i.e. Walk Score) because of the restuarants/retail/theaters, but it might be atrocious to my conception of walkability.
There was no accusation of making up anything, as I cannot possibly know your personal experience.
What I was doing was pushing back on using comically outlier events as something representative of rural living, that the GP would have to reckon with if they were to live in a rural setting. Nobody I know who has lived in a rural environment has ever experienced what you highlighted. If you did experience that, it sounds like you just had shitty neighbors or you lived next to a recreational area where that is more likely to happen, and I would caution against extrapolating that experience to being the norm among rural residents.
The irony is I never have been woken up by ATV's and shotguns in decades growing up in a rural environment, but have certainly been woken up by those things a number of times in urban environments.
I grew up in a rural area, and I experienced zero instances of loud ATVs and shotguns where I lived, at any time of day. This view sounds like a TV trope, which one might lean on if they don't have much in-person experience of living in a rural area themselves.
The advice to try it before you buy it is sound though.
> You're not exploring anything, you're not celebrating life, not producing any meaning. You just sit there, like a robot, pissing it all away.
I would suggest that meaning can be found, even if you are unable to transcend our human limitations in this insanely large universe. But I can tell that you are on a path of reflection of what a meaningful human life means for you, and that's exciting! I wish you the best!
(Don't read this as if I have it all figured out, because I most certainly do not)
Not to be too much of a cynic, but this article definitely has me losing a bit of respect for this writer.
It reads like the social acceptance of his writing/illustration is of the utmost importance to him, and that social acceptance should trump other considerations. This type of yearning is a trust buster for me. I don't want writers/publications towing whatever the politically correct line is for that given moment, I want them to be intellectually honest and open for whatever topic they are writing about.
Perhaps I would interpret it differently if he was honestly wrestling with the impact and considerations of technology, instead of just reacting to a Twitter rainstorm that came and went like they all do. I don't feel like he's really grappling with it, just giving into the simplistic "AI art can take our jobs away, so therefore it's bad" take, but then ignoring how he uses other technologies that people aren't complaining to him about on Twitter. (this of course is not to say anything about the ethics of said technology, my comment is about intellectual honesty and not groveling)
If this writer was really sincere about not wanting to leverage technology that could have the downstream consequence of job displacement, why on earth is he writing on the internet and interacting with so many people on the internet? There are so many jobs that could be involved in physically distributing the information that he wants to distribute, but he knowingly plays a part in using a distribution system that is essentially zero-cost and doesn't need labor to distribute information. Why is he using Getty instead of working with independent photographers/illustrators and paying them MORE? (I know he said he will pay the complaining illustrator on a future one, but that was done because he was called out)
It's going to be the same story with AI art and AI other things. I would predict that at some point in the next 5 years this writer will be using AI art again, because it'll be more socially acceptable then.
I obviously say this all from the position of not being in the eye of a Twitter outrage cycle, but man, I would love to see more people not kowtow to the mob and just let it pass...
I think there a few aspects to whether something can be 'interesting' to me with regards to creation (i'm probably missing some):
1. Is the broader topic/activity interesting to me? (interesting in of itself, not for the other reasons listed below)
2. The act of doing is interesting to me in of itself (as opposed to consuming)
3. The act of growth/learning/getting better is interesting to me
4. How good the output of my creation can/will be
5. How will the output be socially valued in a way beneficial to me (whether status/wealth/whatever)
I will say as I've gotten older, I've started to really decrease focus on #5, as I've found it to be the most empty for me (not to say I haven't achieved success there, but it's just a never-ending treadmill when you compare with others).
I try to really focus on #'s 1-3, as they give me the most joy.
It seems like you are hyper-focused on ends/outcomes. And if an end/outcome of a pursuit isn't completely novel, unpredictable, or result in you being the best at the pursuit, then what's the point? Is that an accurate summary?
I wonder whether there's a higher level view that really prioritizes status seeking, and that a life should be valued based on outcomes/production. And if you can't produce things at the level of the best, what's the point?
If that is the case, I've certainly had those thoughts when I was younger, and I would offer to consider giving yourself a break. Release yourself of expectations of being the best/most novel/etc. Give yourself permission to be a flawed human. Focus on enjoying the little things, focus on the present. Focus on the journey, not the end. We're the self-aware universe, we're so lucky we get to experience things as we do, let's enjoy the ride while we can. And contrary to what you're hinting at, there are an infinite number of possibilities/knowledge to gain. To think us humans have answered all of the questions of conscious experience and the universe (and what may lay beyond) is incredibly naive.