I study environmental science and I can believe it, every model I've used all the sources I've used that predict have been conservative in numbers compared to what's going on.
The problem is we are never going to do what needs to be done because capitalism is the literal cause and the world is addicted to capitalism because none of the companies are going to do what they need to do unless it's profitable.
It's greed or commercialism. Capitalism is synonymous to them in popular discussions, but even if you picked a non-capitalist stance like communism, they'd produce greenhouse gas anyway.
With drastic action now needed to limit global warming to the Paris Agreement target of 1.5°C, the scientists warn that recent extremes in Antarctica may be the tip of the iceberg.
The study reviews evidence of extreme events in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, including weather, sea ice, ocean temperatures, glacier and ice shelf systems, and biodiversity on land and sea.
It concludes that Antarctica's fragile environments "may well be subject to considerable stress and damage in future years and decades"—and calls for urgent policy action to protect it.
"Antarctic change has global implications," said lead author Professor Martin Siegert, from the University of Exeter. "Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero is our best hope of preserving Antarctica, and this must matter to every country—and individual—on the planet." ...
The researchers considered the vulnerability of Antarctica to a range of extreme events, to understand the causes and likely future changes—following a series of recent extremes.
For example, the world's largest recorded heat wave (38.5°C above the mean) occurred in East Antarctica in 2022 and, at present, winter sea ice formation is the lowest on record.
Extreme events can also affect biodiversity. For example, high temperatures have been linked to years with lower krill numbers, leading to breeding failures of krill-reliant predators—evidenced by many dead fur seal pups on beaches.
Co-author Professor Anna Hogg, from the University of Leeds, said, "Our results show that while extreme events are known to impact the globe through heavy rainfall and flooding, heat waves and wildfires, such as those seen in Europe this summer, they also impact the remote polar regions."
"Antarctic glaciers, sea ice and natural ecosystems are all impacted by extreme events. Therefore, it is essential that international treaties and policy are implemented in order to protect these beautiful but delicate regions."
I'm not sure this is a good study. I mean I scored 85% so woohoo but you just get headlines to go off. The art of noticing disinformation is in reading articles and making inferences on them. Questions like "vaccines contain harmful chemicals" are obvious red flags but there are some that are a reasonable-sounding headline but I'd imagine the article itself would fall apart on first reading. I know half the problem is people don't read articles but this is a very simplistic survey.
Not only is it not good, I'd dare to say it's awful. Never mind that the headlines themselves are terribly crafted: the entire point is that one has to be critical of sources, and not take everything at face value just because it sounds somewhat convincing. It's not about blatantly discrediting things at face value because they don't fit what you believed to be true.
By the standards of this test, headlines such as "The CIA Subjected African-Amercians to LSD for 77 Consecutive Days in Experiment" would clearly belong in the fake news category. And if it's supposed to test whether the (presumably American) respondent has decent insight into the realities of contemporary politics, why in the world would it include something as obscure as "Morocco’s King Appoints Committee Chief to Fight Poverty and Inequality". There's literally no way of knowing without context whether the associated article would be propaganda or just an obscure piece of foreign correspondence. Many of the "true" headlines are still things one shouldn't take for granted without checking sources, and many of the "fake" ones are cartoonish.
It's just bad research.
Edit: Rather than bad research, it seems it might be badly misrepresented. The paper itself appears completely different from what is reported in the linked article. I'm still, however, not entirely convinced by the approach using AI generated headlines.
It is, and I feel the questions are quite obvious.
That being said... I'm related to conspiracy theorists. I got a first-row seat to their dumbassery on facebook before I deleted my account. And... a significant issue was paywalled articles with clickbait titles, during Covid especially. The title was a doubt-inducing questions, such as "Do vaccines make you magnetic?" and the reasoning disproving that was locked behind the paywall. And my relatives used those as confirmation that their views were true. Because the headlines introduced doubt and the content wasn't readable. That and satire articles.
Questions like "vaccines contain harmful chemicals" are obvious red flags but there are some that are a reasonable-sounding headline
It's exactly those "reasonable" sounding headlines (and in some cases the ideas and opinions that back them up in the body of the article, but that has to be provided for it to relevant, which as you point out isn't, which is a big problem) that serve as misinformation and/or dog whistles, so "vaccines contain harmful chemicals" could be aimed at antivaxxers (and those susceptible to being pushed there), but it's also technically correct, and apples and bananas for example contain these "harmful chemicals" too.
The article could be either fear mongering and disinformation - false, or science based and educational - true, but we can't know which just from the headline.
A headline like "small group of people control the global media and economy" could be a dog whistle for antisemitism - false, or be an observation of life on earth right now - truth.
My point is there are headlines that would seem like conspiracy theory to some, but irrefutable fact to others, and probably the opposite of each to each respective group, and without more than a headline (and often even with, of course), it's entirely down to the readers' existing opinions and biases.
It depends. But I am not forming my opinion on a loaded headline. If there's a headline like that, then yes, I rather check the article to see if it actually is like that or not. The majority of headlines nowadays are heavily sensationalized, especially the ones from news sites with a certain agenda.
Somehow I got 100%, but it was mainly luck. I really have no clue what % support marijuana is in the US, how young Americans feel about global warming, or how globally respected they feel. I'm not from there, so I don't follow it at all. I think it would've been better if they had an "I don't know / Irrelevant to me" option.
Just took a look here, and yeah. One of the headlines they ask you to rate is "Hyatt Will Remove Small Bottles from Hotel Bathrooms". It's the kind of thing that's basically a coin flip. Without having any context into the story, I have no opinion on whether it's fake or not. I don't think guessing incorrectly on this one would indicate somebody is any more or less susceptible to miscategorizing stories as real/fake.
I assume the idea is to include some pointless headlines (such as this) in order to provide some sort of baseline. The researcher probably extracts several dimensions from the variables, and I assume this headline would feed into a "general scepticism" variable that measures he likelihood that the respondent will lean towards things being fake rather than real.
Still, I'm not at all convinced about this research design.
I suspect that where you select on the extremely liberal to extremely conservative spectrum might have a correlation to which fake news titles you fall for. What sounds like obvious propaganda to you may sound like any news article that some may see from a more sensationalist less reliable news source, especially to those predisposed to conspiracy theories.
Of course, there are a few people out there who won't even identify headlines like "Ebola Virus 'Caused by US Nuclear Weapons Testing', New Study Says", "Government Officials Have Illegally Manipulated the Weather to Cause Devastating Storms", and "Left-Wing Extremism Causes 'More Damage' to World Than Terrorism, Says UN Report" as fabricated even when filling out a survey about fake news. But at that point they're not testing susceptibility to fake news, they're testing whether you've already fallen down the conspiracy rabbit hole and hit your head hard enough on the way down to render you incapable of even slight scepticism.
A better study would be, in my opinion, to present screen shots of actual content from social media (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, wherever), and have users rank it on a scale from 1 to 7 how much they trust it (not at al <----> completely). That way you can observe sources, content, how many "likes" a post has, and more dimensions that are more valid indicators of how people might (mis)judge content as being true or false.
I took the survey and it gives you two measures - one for correctly identifying true stories and one for correctly identifying fake. If you mark everything fake the results would say you're too skeptical because you discount real stories as fake. So anything that doesn't sound hyper partisan should be marked as real, even if you could imagine how it could be fake.
So they're just casually pretending misinformation isn't being spread about literally anything these days. To me at least, the AI-esque phrasing of the headlines made me distrust even information I rationally know to be true.
A common tactic I've seen in news headlines is referencing substances that can harm a human without indicating that in the quantities that they are present, they are not a concern. I'm not sure what the right answer would be to the vaccines question given that. If that is the case there, it may be true but misleading.
The title of this article is /r/Politics levels of editorialising. I half expected to read, "our conclusion is that conservatives are clearly dumber."
The study used some simple tests to measure certain cognitive biases respondents might possess. Unsurprisingly, poor people are human, and subject to the same amount of bias as everyone else. This doesn't test the title of this submission - choices - at all. In fact the authors go to great lengths to explain this:
"Our research does not reject the notion that individual behavior and decision-making may directly relate to upward economic mobility. Instead, we narrowly conclude that biased decision-making does not alone explain a significant proportion of population-level economic inequality," says first author Kai Ruggeri, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia Public Health.
Sorry but how does the title not just slightly rephrase the paragraph you quoted? Seems like Kai Ruggeri is saying that their study concluded that poor people making poor choices is not a sole explanation for economic inequality.
The association between the cognitive biases of the tested psycho-metrics and poor decision making with regards to socio-economic outcomes aren’t tested or even cited in the study. To draw a causal conclusion you would need to investigate and confirm that. Put simply, A does not imply B.
It’s completely different. Everyone has cognitive biases, so measuring whether the poor have more cognitive biases or less doesn’t mean anything except that they have the same cognitive biases as anyone else.
That doesn’t speak to the quality of their decisions. The idea that you can’t make your life better or worse by the decisions that you make is self-evidently wrong. The only way that you could think that you can’t make your life better or worse by making better or worse decisions it’s if you’ve never made a decision that had any consequence.
You can share the same cognitive biases as everyone else and still make better or worse decisions. As a general rule, people who practice self control and defer gratification are going to do better than people who do not practice self-control and do not defer gratification. Of course it’s not always true, sometimes you roll a one. But in general, we know that certain types of decisions are going to have better outcomes and other types of decisions are going to have worse outcomes.
Sometimes the exact same cognitive biases can justify polar opposite ends. For example, optimism bias could play out in such a way that somebody makes incredibly poor decisions and justifies it thinking that everything will be okay anyway. On the other hand, the same optimism bias could play out in such a way that somebody makes better decisions and justifies it thinking that if they do everything they need to then everything’s going to be okay. Both ways could turn out to be wrong.
Yet another bias that we have is neglect of probability. Somebody who makes good decisions or somebody who makes bad decisions could use the exact same faulty logic that doing what they were going to do has a chance of helping them become a billionaire. In both cases, the chances of becoming a billionaire are infinitesimal, but the cognitive bias can justify both positions. Hang on to that piece of information for a minute it becomes important later.
One of the most studied cognitive biases is anchoring bias. In this cognitive bias, a recent piece of information ends up coloring the decisions that are made. Depending on what the last piece of news that you heard was, the cognitive biases that you have may end up supporting the idea of doing the right things, or they may end up supporting the ideas of doing the wrong things, and it’s almost random what the last thing that you heard was.
I could go on listing different cognitive biases and how they can potentially affect our judgments, and all of them would be true. But what would not be true is that the decision that you make doesn’t matter. The decisions that you make matter more than anything. That’s why if you want to have a good life, and you had a choice between being a couple standard deviations above average and intelligence or being a couple standard deviations above average in wealth, you would choose intelligence because it would help you make better decisions that would lead to better outcomes than just having a bunch of wealth available for you to blow.
It directly addresses what you said. The study investigates cognitive biases, and the title talks about “poor decisions”. The two are completely different things, as I explained in depth.
It seems like the study is more about identifying common dog whistles in headlines than actual misinformation. A shift in population demographics happens all the time so that one could be true, but the phrasing of non-white hints that is is probably an article loaded with misinformation about the cause and implications of the demographic shift. No idea how it was scored though.
The “you wouldn’t download a car” joke is one thing. What I don’t understand is how people genuinely use a satirical joke as a supporting argument for piracy, or a critique of anti-piracy.
The advertising never said downloading a car. It was stealing a car, which is very clearly a crime.
You are free to claim auto theft is not comparable to digital piracy. You are free to suggest that somehow in the future you’d be able to home manufacturer a vehicle (although a bit far fetched IMO). But criticizing an ad campaign for something they’ve never said is just silly.
If I stole someone’s car, and an exact copy of the car was left there for them, I’d probably be okay with stealing a car. Copying a file isn’t the same as stealing a physical album. That’s the criticism of that ad campaign, they aren’t equal comparisons. Besides, if buying isn’t owning, then copying isn’t stealing.
Became the only known cold blooded mammal and survived on a dank little island for five million years until humans showed up three thousand years ago and ate them to extinction.
they basically could only survive inside that closet of an ecosystem.. anywhere outside and they were easy meat for any medium sized predator.. apparently they were exceptionally slow, weak and stupid as a result of the adaptation..
The only time infinite growth would be possible is if we became a space faring species and colonized other planets. That would allow us to continue population growth.
Outside of that, infinite growth is impossible since there’s only so many people on this planet and even less who can afford their products.
Life on earth has recovered from several mass extinctions, life finds a way. Humans are cooked though. Best of luck to the next sapient species to evolve.
Capitalism and infinite growth is a microcosm of an organisms drive for infinite growth, which is usually curtailed by all sorts of biological and evolutionsry processes. Like space limitations and scarcity of resources, and I’m trying to figure out what is different between the individuals that form these mega corps and the average organism.
No. Because some companies would make no profit and others would be unaffected. Who’s going to pay more, Shell or novo nordisk? Shell would simply cease to exist
Yeah it really drives home just how fucking cooked the situation is.
Sorry kids the biosphere is fucked and human society is an echo of what it once was but there were some rich people who didn’t want to be slightly less rich than they already were.
• Sample size of 170, which even the researchers admitted was low
• First study done during the lockdowns, which they posited may have had a negative affect as people tried to cope with financial stress, sudden social isolation, and caring for a pet without ever leaving the house. It did, they found.
• Second study taken post-lockdown, unable to compare depression and anxiety as they did not bother measuring those the first time (why not?)
• Trained animals do provide a benefit, actually; friendly obedience and a relaxed personality found in support animals suggested to be a factor but they never measured that either I guess.
• 95% report greater life consistency and a sense of love, so maybe pets are helpful for someone in vital need of emotional support, we don't know.
Overall, I think if they tried really, really hard, and I mean really put their minds to it, they could write a worse headline for such an ambiguous and unhelpful article.
I’d consider a sample size of 170 to be pretty large, if the sample was drawn with perfect randomness from the population. But this one wasn’t, it was self-selected. Also wasn’t a clinical trial, and while they seem to know what they’re doing with setting up the questionnaire, I would assume it would result in larger measurement error, which would need more samples to be able to correct for.
Completely agree with you though - the conclusions that it seems reasonable to draw from this are ‘not much, really’. Seems to disagree with the results of a larger study by many of the same authors, too, which say that companion animals did result in a smaller decline in mental health during lockdown.
I fucking knew it. People have this idea that human roles are defined by biology. No, they are defined by competition. When we compete against the environment, being 20% weaker or smaller doesn't matter; you can throw a spear just as fine as the biggest person. When we compete against each other, being 1% stronger is a gigantic, monumental advantage.
This nonsense about gender roles is from lampooning nobility post-enlightenment. Us peasants have always just did what needed to be done.
Since we’re all here looking at yet another terrifying headline. I have a huge grudge for companies who force people into the office. It‘s unnecessary!! There should be a legislation in all countries ASAP to give workers a right to WFH they can enforce on the company!
We have seen with the pandemic it‘s possible and would free a lot of people from this pathologic need for a car and yet the companies owners and paid for politicians are dragging their feet to save their fucking "office real estate investments" or other bullshit reasons that all amount to control. Elon fucking Musk personally pisses me off the most, cause he pretended to care about the climate to sell cars and then is the absolute worst about this calling WFH "not real work", also to sell cars.
Don‘t even get me started on their private jets and pleasure yachts, all this unnecessary bullshit, there is already a first class the rich assholes can sit down in with extra space, they don‘t need their own plane!!
Assholes like that should be shamed everywhere they go for daring to do something so damaging while also forcing people to rely on cars cause of the hostile infrastructure and hostile work environments they created!
Governments are so good at making up crimes out of nowhere, see how effective they are at fucking over trans people for something as innocent as changing their own gender, maybe use that power for good for ONCE and criminalise environmental damage??
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