First of all: you’re good! I think there are lots of centrist and right-leaning people in academia who are doing just fine; especially in the US lots of world-class unis are in deeply conservative areas too. Most of academia don’t discuss politics that much at all as long as one cares about science. I’d wager the political leaning bias is more from a population bias rather than systematic discrimination of any sort

I could imagine AI researchers being more right-leaning yeah. The stats I got were from personal anecdote and research being done about this a short while back… there might have been an update in the AI age

First of all, good for you lol

It’s € 1.715 with today’s exchange rate. The minimum salary where I live is roughly € 1,9k after tax. Not life-changing money, but it’s still an absolutely huge amount that is enough for survival & is quite significant

I mean this is a large amount of money even for Americans though. The absolute highest paying “normal” job I could think of is a stacked SF Bay tech guy who makes $200K/yr after tax… but that’s still like 12% of take-home pay

Current STEM researcher who also happened to have met a few academics on the right side of the political spectrum… I am very qualified to speak about this I hope. I’ll try to use as unbiased language as possible

First of all, you are correct. It is generally true that most academics are left-leaning (obligatory not all, but you get the point)

In general, higher education attainment is associated with being left-leaning: academia is known to have extreme levels of education attainment (many jobs require a PhD). On top of it, academic jobs reward intellectual curiosity, do not tend to pay super well, tend to heavily rely on governmental funding… all of these are traditionally more associated with the political left or left-leaning. Still, there very much are right-leaning academics, they just don’t tend to scream around a lot about it

There are notable exceptions however. Economics is quite famous for being politically balanced, although what economics treat as left/right-leaning might be a bit different from the general public. If I remember, business schools (yes there are business professors!) tend to be more right-leaning. This is a smaller field and a bit more anecdotal, but quite a few prominent meta-science researchers are right-wing nutjobs: the “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” guy and the NIH director Bhattacharya guy are both COVID deniers

There are also fringe scientists as some others have mentioned, but most people within their fields don’t consider fringe scientists as part of the academia so to speak

The Chinese side of the story is heavily censored and only has official reported numbers (likely tampered with, knowing China) and some propaganda pieces, but this is very much a Chinese national emergency as well. The Guardian’s latest reporting claimed that the Chinese officials reported 16 deaths and 546 missing, while Nepal’s numbers are 675 deaths and 2,498 missing

Maybe there are ulterior motives, but I think given the extent of the disaster, it is much more likely that China treated it as a top-priority national emergency, so might as well help out the neighbors with any extra manpower as well

My understanding is… Being popular (a.k.a. having lots of subscribers) requires someone to be entertaining and be good at self-promotion. Being entertaining is independent from being a good person. For the latter, I once saw a streamer say something along the lines that anyone who is willing to do that level of self-promotion likely self-selects for at least some level of narcissistic traits

… and a lot of their subscribers are relatively young and likely don’t care, probably

The idiom is “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order for a reason. Even if plastic recycling is difficult in the US, reducing and reusing are doable by just about anyone. This can be using less one-time plastics, eating less meat (make sure nutritionally balanced), drive less, reuse those shipping boxes for other stuff such as for paper waste, buying from local farmers (if you can afford it)… something along those lines

For home, living in an apartment is actually one of the best things one can do for the climate, since living in an apartment in a city is much, much more energy efficient than living in a suburb… not to mention cutting down on car-related costs. For ppl living in a home, methinks AC is more of a boogeyman… having good home insulation is a much better solution (as a well-insulated home uses less energy!), and the best part is that it is bipartisan so red states would happily do it too. If renovation is not possible, stuff like blackout curtains, window blinds, … are cheap insulation options

IMO these are still negligible effects on an individual level, but these are not nothing, and if everyone does these the world would be a much better place. For more meaningful actions, probably organizing

Slay the Spire 2. I do NOT want to be infinitely killed, memory-wiped, and resurrected

Currently? I am center-left in Western Europe. Political views where I live generally lean left but are quite diverse, so it’s hard to find people who are directly opposing… I do have a colleague who is a classic liberal (free market, deregulation and all that), but we are quite chill about it & that’s pretty much it

I did spend 3-4 years living in majority Hispanic/Vietnamese neighborhoods in Houston though, and I’d be considered much more left-leaning relative to the US population. So I was a left-leaning person, in fairly right-leaning neighborhoods, in a left-leaning city, in a right-leaning state… having any discussions about politics was certainly an experience, I just tried to not talk about it for the most part lol

Straight into the investment account. It’s not nothing but I’m not strapped for cash, and 50K USD alone can’t do much where I live…

I vaguely recall some old psychology/sociology research which suggest that violent video games actually decrease violent crime rates (I did find articles like this); one possible explanation is that ppl with violent tendencies might be distracting themselves with video games. So… maybe yes to a certain extent? I don’t know by how much compared to other media though, we also have the likes of TV drama, pop music, sports, celebrity worship, …

I wouldn’t call it empty accomplishments though. In my belief system anything that leads to a healthier state-of-mind is inherently healthy

For the question itself, I mean people (at least in Europe) are very much rioting in the streets for the reasons you mentioned

I use a straight razor! I think I spent ~100 USD on it… forgot the brand/make, but with a decent water stone + leather strop most half-decent straight razors can be honed to be quite good

I only use it for face shaving. Because I wanted something that is both 1) highly effective (want to go for a 100% clean look) and 2) environmentally friendly… I started off with a safety razor too, later upgraded to the straight razor since it is as eco-friendly as it gets, no need for shaving cream/cartilages/etc. The razor was pretty cheap all things considered and the plastic handle has already fallen off, but the blade itself still works like new

Downside is 1) a bit more annoying to use as it has to be honed every time, and 2) much higher risks of accidental injury especially for beginners

I am considering getting an electric something for shaving other parts of the body though

I think it goes this way

• Least: Probably a tie between most liberal arts majors. I can’t rank them, but methinks none of these directly lead to employable skills 😂 (which sucks because I think they are wonderful for a well-rounded education)
• Really bad: “Pre-X” (pre-med, pre-law, …). The majors themselves are honestly quite adaptable to most white-collar jobs. But their fields carry the stereotype of requiring a super-advanced (often doctorate) degree, so probably high chances of underemployment
• Bad: whatever major that was previously the part of a boom/bubble, so currently probably stuff like IT/data science. Great all-around majors that probably suffer from extremely lopsided demand-supply after the bubble pops

My personal dislike for Tesla/SpaceX aside, they do employ 6-digit numbers of workers and make impactful real-life products, so Musk’s companies themselves would be worth a metric fuckton of money (maybe comparable to Honda/Toyota?) no matter what. But they are also somewhat overvalued on top of their already high inherent worth

And on top of this, Musk has really large stakes in his companies… I don’t know the exact details, but I don’t think it’s common for a CEO to own 20% of their company outright. So these together made Musk the richest person

If I am being pedantic, technically the richest entities in the world are countries and their governments… Basically like your examples suggested. No private company in the world can spend as much as the world’s largest countries. So by extension, leaders of dictatorships are arguably “richer” because they essentially own their country. Case in point, the House of Saud has a total net worth of ~1.4T USD

Serious: a Google data scientist has legitimately written a book on this topic lol. Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (see his Wikipedia page)

The book didn’t age super well because they got the causation direction wrong; in terms of real-world implementation Google Trends turned out to be pretty bad at actually predicting flu

I guess so, if it is true that would mean current AI companies did some serious ethics fuck-ups…

I’m giving current-generation AI the benefit of the doubt though. I personally don’t think the current transformer-based LLM designs can achieve consciousness (although I think machines in general can, just not the current model architectures)

This is a really good question but far above Lemmy’s pay-grade man. Neuroscientists are very actively researching and doing debates on this topic (consciousness in AI)

The main problem is that we don’t even have a consensus, fool-proof theory of consciousness… We can barely tell whether a lot of living creatures are conscious or not (think octopus with their distributed intelligence, plants with their chemical signaling, …), and if so, when in their development stage does consciousness arise. Machines are one step removed from even that; even if we give AI models the benefit of the doubt and say they can develop consciousness, how in the world are we supposed to measure it

I found this highly-cited Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper (Seth, A.K., Bayne, T. Theories of consciousness. Nat Rev Neurosci 23, 439–452 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00587-4) (try Internet Archive if you can’t access it) that might be of interest… If you follow the citation trails, there are a ton of new articles on debating consciousness in AI. Like this arxiv article on consciousness in AI

I couldn’t imagine a single scenario where I wouldn’t choose to reborn as myself. IMO it is objectively the correct choice: more stable/safe world (compared to pre-industrial revolution with dangerous spells), and I’ll almost be guaranteed to do quite well in it given the status window and skill tree

My intrusive thoughts tell me to choose world of magic and go kaboom though

Technically Google Pixel, because of GrapheneOS. Realistically I don’t have a single mobile phone brand that I like

Not as expensive as some of the other comments here but

Around $70~80 for the cheapest steak at a medium- to high-end restaurant in Chicago. Worth the experience and I bet most ppl would have loved it, but that’s how I found out I don’t like steak…

The second most expensive restaurant I’ve been to (averaging $40~50 per entrée) was legit amazing though

My work account once got placed on a biotech mailing list so there’s that

Outside of work accounts, I don’t think the algorithms think I exist lol. I use adblockers everywhere, and the only site with real ad-targeting I routinely use is YouTube… which I exclusively use on private windows while logged out, and with adblockers as well. Mayyybe YouTube/Google thinks there’s a weirdo Japanese weaboo (which is only half-correct) living around the vicinity of my house based on my IP address, but that’s pretty much it