Depends on the setting. In a nurse-patient situation, you don’t ever bullshit them in the hopes of tricking them into some kind of benefit.
If your grandpa is raving on Facebook about how acupuncture is working better than opioids for post-knee-replacement pain management, then… “Hey that’s great you found something that works for you!”
YetAnotherUser makes a good point about not enabling a culture of scams or pseudoscience as well.
Yeah if someone’s benefitting from a placebo effect, the worst thing you can do is point out that it’s a placebo. If you convince them it won’t work, then you’ve just destroyed the therapeutic effect their brain was giving them. Just shut up and let the placebo do its thing.
With politics (especially the GOP), it’s the opposite of Hanlon’s razor – Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.
These fuckers are shooting for some combination of harming an outgroup, or profiting from corruption. They’re not idiots, they’re evil. They act like idiots because that’s what their base finds relatable.
Sounds like the problem there is more with shitty dictatorships. Leave it to a few evil assholes to ruin a good thing. But even in best case scenario of giving everyone the freedom to use the entirety of every day the way they want, it’s going to be a very, VERY mixed bag. There will be folks who literally spend the rest of their life watching TV or some other form of idle entertainment, but if that’s how they want to spend it, more power to em. I’d guess the majority of folks would engage in some form of arts just to have an outlet for creativity. Relatively few would turn to academics and pursue research for the sole sake of finding answers; but even that relative few would count for something… I think most important would be the kinds of things people study. Today we have a TON of talent wasted on finding clever new ways to blow each other up, or enshittifying the web, or perfecting the psychology of advertisements… if those people were all focused on, say, climate change… then we might not be in the whole planet-on-fire situation we’re in now.
Speaking of, we’ll probably be extinct before we figure out how to pull our political heads out of our asses anyway. Humanity actually living up to its potential is locked into the “wouldn’t it be nice if…” category.
Social good. If work stopped being such a demand, boredom would start to be an issue, and outside of just leisure entertainment part of the solution would be ushering folks to a field of study that interests them, which would lead to an explosion of research and breakthroughs. That shouldn’t come with a barrier to entry: folks who want to spend their time doing that should be enabled no questions asked.
We need to stop giving Trump (and the other neonazis that have surfaced in his wake) the village-idiot or bat-shit-crazy pass and treat him as though his actions are lucid and calculated. We can assess the state of his brain during autopsy. Until then, he’s a traitor and domestic threat to the United States, and we should treat that threat as seriously as its consequences merit.
Sorry, initial post was meant to be more cheeky than anything else: Basically saying AI folks like OpenAI have seriously damaged the quality of Google’s search results, and in doing so established demand for a new search option… and now they’re announcing a competitor to Google.
One foot (google) was shot to shift traffic over to the other (whatever this new shit is). Wasn’t meant to imply Google is in on it… the reddit analogy might just be muddying the waters, but the analogy was reddit as a company to search engines as a category.