I have a direct example of this:

I was at the UFO museum in Roswell, NM and the guy that was giving a talk was a self-described Ufologist and this was after the government released the UFO footage. He talked the whole time about government coverup of past UFO crashes, etc.

In the Q&A, someone asked if the recent footage gave him hope that we’ll begin to learn more about UFOs now that the government seems more forthright with the information… And he got pissed at them for even asking. It was as if his whole retirement activity of uncovering conspiracies was challenged and his brain couldn’t handle it except by getting angry at an honest question.

His conspiracy seemed to be more boring than he thought (and spent decades “researching”) so he wouldn’t allow the truth to shatter it. It was fascinating to see in real-time.

Depression for me.

No. I wish I could stay awake forever sometimes.

That we’re able to dodge the incoming wave of fascism and peacefully skim board into progressive politics.

There are others that don’t get the coverage, but yeah, pretty fuckin lame anyway. If only for the fact that they don’t get the coverage.

This is such a drunk, stupid tech bro idea.

Focus groups aren’t meant to be used for gaining an understanding of a broad swath of the population. Focus groups are used for exploratory research, concept testing, and understanding the “why” behind opinions and behaviors.

If you want to generalize trends towards large populations, you’re going to need a large sample size. It’s statistics that suggests that many respondents will leave you with extremely low confidence in the outcome.

For example, if you are trying to judge the voting preferences of a population of 100,000 people, you’ll need 383 randomly sampled people in a survey to reach a 95% confidence interval. 13 is nowhere near the amount of people required to cover those that considered themselves “independents” before the debate.

That’s not to say this tells us nothing, but it’s by no means a predictive study.

*edit: I actually would say it’s harmful because I think that it portrays the narrative as if it is predictive, when it’s not.

I’m definitely not for banning books, but couldn’t you say the same thing about news media? Or Facebook memes? Those “get you to think”.

People should have “the right to not be pregnant.”

Hahaha, as someone that works in AI research, good luck to them. The first is a very hard problem that won’t just be prompt engineering with your OpenAI account (why not just use 3D blueprints for weapons that already exist?) and the second is certifiably stupid. There are plenty of ways to make bombs already that don’t involve training a model that’s an expert in chemistry. A bunch of amateur 8chan half-brains probably couldn’t follow a Medium article, let alone do ground breaking research.

But like you said, if they want to test the viability of those bombs, I say go for it! Make it in the garage!

I just do not understand how anyone is on the fence about DJT… Like, they see this conviction and that’s what changes their mind? After everything else?

Join the club.