very_poggers_gay [they/them]

Yes, but that does not mean AI has 0 influence. Rather, AI is a circle, a shape with no beginning or end, suggesting that AI has endless and infinite potential. Now, let’s say you want to remove AI from the equation - imagining a world without AI. What happens when you divide by zero? You can’t, because dividing by zero is undefined. Thusly, a world (future or past) without AI is now an impossibility. This is simply the laws of mathematics.

• Property Manager, AI Consultant

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Oh absolutely. It’s a huge issue, especially in humanities and social sciences, where the barrier of entry makes it so that almost all published research is conducted by certain populations on themselves. Some people call it “WEIRD” populations, meaning western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (though that “weird” terminology is a bit stinky… I’m looking at the “E” and “D”). Interestingly, China has now overtaken the US in publishing the most highly cited research of any country, though I think their advances are mostly in natural sciences and engineering.

There are also issues with how we qualify good quality or *academic * research. Again, this is especially the case in social sciences and humanities where the standards have been set by colonial researchers who had the means to run expensive studies on large samples. As a result, a lot of research methodologies and ways of knowing that don’t align with the western colonial standards (e.g., qualitative research, narrative analysis) get discounted or written off entirely

Yup, I’ve got a paper that’s just about ready for submission, and if the journal accepts it for publication, we pay ~3k USD, so about $4k CAD.

Researchers need to afford to live, and that money comes from research grants.

Not really and certainly not directly. Almost all research grants (at least in Canada and the EU) are for the costs of running research, not for the PI’s salary, which their institution pays. I know those two can’t be separated, but the point is still true that most of the grant money that individual researchers apply for can only be spent on conducting research. It is not for them to live, it is for them to do their job.

If this was even a problem, which it isn’t,

What do you mean by this part?

The neoliberal logic consuming academia is bad for academia as a whole, and anyone who can stand to benefit from higher education and/or quality research (i.e., practically everyone everywhere). Almost anyone working on research in academia is severely underpaid and they’re expected to work countless hours for free. Academia is a house of cards help together by the grindset of graduate students and early- or mid-career researchers.

The ways that grunts and funding are allocated are deeply flawed, and fields that aren’t tied to profitable industries (e.g., “life sciences” like biology and chemistry) are severely underfunded. See:

NIMH funding. NSF funding

The only winners in the current system are the profit-driven capitalists who fund research for good PR and ‘passive’ income, and the few others in academia who game funding systems to cash out on shitty dead-end or naively idealist research

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Hey what are you some kind of Russian bo-

…

Checks Constitution

(Yes this is cringe but I want it that way)

Thank you for your comments they are packed with good info btw

Yes

Uhhh the “National Socialist” Party was fascist, right? Entities posing as socialist CAN lie and actually be fascist, correct? Or is this western propaganda too?

Wait 'til you learn that urinal cakes aren’t yummy baked treats

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So many words to tell us you’ve read zero theory…

Also, how on earth is “Fuck cars” a successful “socialist experiment”? The biggest action anyone associated with that movement is flatten a few tires from SUV’s

Everyone I know that supports Ukraine does so because they feel for the victims of the missiles launched by Russia at schools and homes.

What does that support look like?

I, and many others in this thread, are very out of the loop.

Again, I have a hard time believing this is true. This is a war. People die by the hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, in wars. Providing uncritical support (as most liberals and “Slava Ukraine” types do) for any side in a war is still encouraging more deaths on all sides of the conflict. It is not a Marvel movie or gritty political sci-fi thriller that so many people seem to think it is.

The longer the war goes on, the more people will die or be displaced, and the more money from working class people will get funneled into the military industrial complex. Nobody outside of the MIC is benefitting from the death and despair of this war.

Most discussions about the conflict outside of leftist spaces is just liberals and conservatives fantasizing about Russia getting weaker (i.e., its people dying) and America/NATO/“freedom” getting stronger. The rare person will acknowledge that Ukrainian men must die for the latter to be true, but the reality of those deaths is often minimized or even celebrated. As well, anyone who dissents is typically accused of being pro-Russia, a bot, or a paid shill.

See this freak

This is a top comment on the top post of /r/UkrainianConflict fantasizing about making a Marvel movie montage of a war crime, and other users lapping it up

Or click on any new thread and see all the highly rated comments like this, lusting for further destruction

It took like two minutes to find these examples, and there’s countless more on lemmy, reddit, and the like. It’s almost undoubtably worse on Twitter or Facebook too

I have the feeling you know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m referring to comments like this (and god forbid you see a discussion about the war on reddit, where they make up the majority and get the most updoots and golds from kind strangers!!!) who thirst for bloodshed; who’ve been propagandized to think they will benefit from continued bloodshed; and revel in the comfort of knowing they will never experience the violence they wish upon the people of Ukraine and Russia

Could be because the dominant narrative is just people (mostly Americans) cheering for more men, women, and children to be forced into the meat grinder by the thousands, just so they (who are cheering from safety on the other side of the world) can feed their twisted sense of justice and pro-American/NATO and “freedom”/“democracy” delusions.

redditors picking fights in comment threads below a post they couldn’t spend 2 minutes reading

Hexbears deny the genocide against Uyghurs in China

Denial of the persecution of Uyghurs in China

human rights concerns in Xinjiang

China is treating its Uyghurs well.

Uyghurs in China are being oppressed.

It’s a weird thing to lead a discussion with the term “genocide”, and then use it interchangeably with all these others terms, getting noticeably less precise the deeper into your post.

Also:

They control what their citizens can see on the Internet, monitor every communication happening through their messaging apps, and often detains, without trial, dissidents who dare to call out the government for its wrongdoings.

This is America, lol.

Right, now Tankie is all but useless because liberals and so-called leftists that criticize communism use it the same way conservatives use “woke”

Richard Wolff, a prominent marxist academic, talks often about a socialist system where democracy is employed in the workplace. He focuses less on reforms or abolition at the state/government-level, and instead emphasizes the bottom-up changes that giving workers power and agency (i.e., making it so workers at all levels are involved in the decision-making process of the companies that require their labour) provides. He has a youtube channel and podcast called “Democracy at Work” that provides great introductions to how he views things, and he has worthwhile podcast appearances on other podcasts like Lex Fridman’s, for example.

Consider how impactful countries like Wal-Mart or Amazon are in our daily lives. Their economic throughputs are larger than all but a few countries in the world, and their workforce populations are also larger than many countries. Clearly they aren’t organized as representative democracies?

Another question I wonder related to this, is what exactly makes “representative democracy” the gold standard? Is it even the gold standard?