Thanks :)

😳

So like… Psych meds and hormones don’t count right…?

Is the bottom right the royal British army?

Who wants to fight!? 😡

(👉👈)

I would rather we meaningfully enforce standards on all social media platforms, but it’s a start.

The algorithms designed to harm people and the scaling well beyond the possibility of meaningful content moderation has got to be addressed. At this point I’m honestly not totally sure how, but man does it need fixing. We’ve allowed online spaces to become incredibly exploitative, and breeding grounds for hate and extremism.

That makes complete sense to me, that’s a widespread systemic exposure; I’d kinda expect usage of leaded gasoline that to have that sort of impact

And yep, it sure is frustrating 🙃

A sample size of 1000 people isnt exactly huge to be fair.

I’d like to clarify- I wasn’t intending to be hostile, though I can see how it came across that way, and I apologize, I did a kind of shitty job of conveying my idea in a way that would connect with you. I think in online spaces it can be really hard to break the habit of making your point in a way that will register with bystanders rather than the person you’re ostensibly actually talking to. I did a great job at expressing my perspective in a way that would validate the confusion I think amercians are likely to experience reading this post (as reflected by the votes), but I did a kinda crap job of actually addressing you, sorry about that. I’ll do my best to be a little effective in communicating what I meant and why I felt that way.

As an American, this feels like a cartoonishly out of touch representation of the issues my country faces (which to be fair, would be entirely understandable if you don’t live here and don’t have any first-hand experience with the US). We have plenty of them (issues, that is), and there’s lots of discussion to be had on the impact of guns on society, and also from where I’m standing it seems like are far more probable explanations for people lacking critical thinking skills than that we all just shoot our rootin’ tootin’ guns all the time over here in yeehaw land, and so we all have lead poisoning from all the bullets we’re shooting’. (Not trying to build a straw man of things you didn’t say, my point is that it feels like an caricature, and not one that aligns with the experience I have actually living here)

To reach past “crappy educational system”, “weaponized anti-authoritarianism and individualism”, and even “lead from drinking water or gasoline”, or any number of other likely causes, to instead land on a caricature of American life feels a bit silly to me. Thats an acute risk associated with an activity most people don’t participate in, and that even the people who do participate in, don’t very often.

The book you linked appears to be about how the American educational system is conceptually flawed and approaches education in a way unlikely to yield meaningful critical thinking skills- a point I think I’d likely agree with it on. But to be fair, a book also isn’t actually a quantitative reflection of poor critical thinking skills. It wouldn’t totally suprise me if America did struggle with critical thinking, there are lots of possible reasons we might- and at the same time, it’s a little frustrating for someone foreign to my country to look from the outside and say “man, I wonder if they’re all dumb cause they have lead poisoning from shooting guns all the time” while providing evidence for the link between shooting and lead exposure (makes complete sense) but no evidence for the premise that we’re dumb; that part is just taken for granted.

It kinda feels like you’re asking if the caricature of us all shooting guns all the time is the reason for the caricaturization of us all being dumb. And in doing so, overlook much more systemic far-reaching explanations for how a nation might end up in a state where critical thinking skills are lacking.

I’m not wading into looking for evidence because the nature of these things is that it takes a looooot of evidence to dispute an idea that can be thrown out with only a little. My mental health is horrible and I don’t really have the energy for that at present 😅 I think lots of other folks have made valuable contributions to the discussion, but I didn’t see anyone speaking to the fact that this feels like it’s borne out of an outsiders perspective based mostly on an imaginary idea of what it’s like to live here.

I don’t expect my expressing that idea to change your mind, but I still think it has value for providing perspective and context to the things you’re considering. If you don’t actually know much about the US first-hand, it might not be apparent that folks in the US are unlikely to see that a realistic source of the problem you’re describing given the actual experience of living here.

All I really hope to add to the conversation is that perspective. Its fine if you don’t see it the same way that I do, to be totally honest sometimes there are instances where being immersed in or “too close” to something impairs your ability to see it clearly. Though I don’t think this is one of those times.

Sorry this is all over the place, I’m pretty spent and didn’t have it in me to edit further for clarity (or try to be succinct, as you can probably tell by the like 30 paragraphs where a couple of more carefully thought out ones might have sufficed.)

This seems like reaching for the most esoteric and niche explanation to a fairly simple phenomenon.

America’s school system sucks, and the anti-authoritarian nature of a culture formed by rejecting monarchy has been coopted to convince people that science and reason are authority figures you ought to fight back against.

The vast majority of Americans aren’t gun owners, and the vast majority of gun owners don’t shoot very often. You haven’t provided evidence for Americans being incapable of critical thinking, but you want evidence for why guns aren’t the source of american stupidity.

This is a very silly post. 😅

Thank you very much for sharing

That was a horrific read, and really gives you a lot more appreciation for how real the enforced perpetuation of the status quo is…

It looks like a peeled garlic clove

Thanks for the additional context!

I’d heard the story was kind of a letdown (I don’t have hardware I can play 3 on, so I haven’t gotten to it yet) so I’m really just hoping the story gets the focus and effort it needs; 1 & 2 had really excellent writing and story design and it feels like a huge loss for the series if they can’t find that again

That looks fucking incredible, you really nailed the dramatic feeling

To me I think if I set aside the square slices, it looks like tasty pizza; I think I’ve just only ever had square pizza that kinda sucked

(I know there are kinds of square pizza that are delicious, I just associate it with shitty school lunch pizza from when I was a kid)

I tried when I set up my new laptop and definitely learned a ton, but eventually stalled at getting network manager setup so I could use GNOME settings to configure networks, and getting sound set up

I completely forgot about trying it in a VM, I may have to go give that a try!

If it had package kit implementation so I could use a graphical package manager/app store it’d basically be my perfect distro if I could get it set up the way I want. An independent distro, super elegant, if I understand right the packages are all vanilla, “stable rolling release”. I really like it, a minimal distro is just a bit beyond me skill-wise, and I’d miss having a way to browse native (non-flatpak) applications graphically

Frankly I’d much rather have void. Super cool distro, a lot of things about it seem like an ideal fit for me, I just don’t really have the technical skill to get a minimal distro all set up the way I want it

Plus their logo is pretty. Which shouldn’t matter but like, look at it- it’s a cool logo!

I don’t have anything useful to contribute, but I’m wishing you luck and I hope you’re able to get the things you’re looking for out of it :)

It will never fail to be funny to me that the technical term for seasonal depression is S.A.D.

“I went to the doctor today and they diagnosed me with SAD 😞”

Thank you :)

What does that mean?