dzamie

@anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz Okay, yeah. I do believe your intentions are good and true and all that. But I also still think that most social media is not designed in a way that promotes, or possibly even allows for, nuanced discussion. At best, the way to do that is, as you've made an example of here, to start with an eye-catching statement, and then expand upon it in followup posts below the initial one (the bsky/fedi version of adding a clickbait title and thumbnail to an insightful and well-researched youtube video). I strongly suspect that the perceived lack of nuance is not cultural, but structural. Once you can get someone talking, get into a conversation, working out the details is fairly doable. But the way bsky/fedi is designed, with quick bites of easily-digestible posts (owo), it passively hinders people's willingness to start those in the first place.

@veralycaon.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy Does that include the passengers inside? A vital part of a hungry dragon's diet.

@anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz You have arrived at the point of the original bsky post. If we assume that the bsky poster isn't so mind-numbingly stupid that they think large-scale farming no longer exists, then it's clear that they're talking about the circumstances surrounding the industry. Most likely market and industry regulations, because it's not like sustainable farming hadn't existed back then or "make money" suddenly stopped being the goal of people who sold crops. In that case, the post isn't saying data centers shouldn't exist in any capacity, it's a call for heavy and widespread federal investment in environmental protection, as well as in measures to discourage "long-term harm, short-term gain" practices. The Dust Bowl didn't stop because farmers independently decided to switch to sustainable practices and planted trees in strategic locations across the nation, it stopped because FDR's govt encouraged them to switch, and planted the trees themselves. Hopefully, this time, we'll prevent the massive ecological disaster, rather than merely reacting to it.

@anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz That is true; it does require assuming without evidence that they do not believe that large-scale farming has disappeared from the US. You would not be the first person I've met who thinks that would be an unreasonable assumption to make of other people's intelligence. I think you're looking in the wrong place, then. Bsky posts have a character limit of somewhere around 300, which is great space for memes and rhetoric, but wholly insufficient for basically any appreciable level of precise language regarding the details of an issue. Hell, my reply to you glazed over basically all the specifics of both the govt response to the Dust Bowl and the inferred suggestion regarding datacenters, and it still rocketed past that character count.

@anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz wall of text incoming, I finally got back to my PC I think that's an unproductive assumption to make, at least if you're earnestly looking for detailed/in-depth discussions of any topic (but especially a contentious one). It's susceptible to type II errors, especially when combined with the aforementioned character limits. To that end, let's look at what you've said in a 500 char cap. If I come across this and read it with a charitable eye to your capability for nuance, I would assume that this is, essentially, a thesis paragraph: a broad outline of your position that you will go more in-depth on in follow-up posts. It's not the entirety of your argument, merely an attention-grabbing opener (hence the strong rhetorical language and attaching an image rather than a link). It would be utter folly for me to pass judgement on just the opening statement. However, if I read it with an uncharitable view, you are bemoaning a general lack of nuance off of one given example, and the post I've screenshot here offers no substantive solutions or even solid description of the problem. The example you've chosen even has a strong indicator of sampling bias: the bsky post has been screenshot at least once by a broad-appeal account, suggesting that has an above-average rhetoric-to-nuance ratio. This is a similar behavior to a conservative bringing up a crime that makes national news to claim that the perpetrator's entire demographic is a similar risk. When you say you've "said all this so far," you're considering the several posts you've made, some of them in response to mine (discussion breeding nuance), in aggregate. But that's not what an individual 500-character limit looks like, and neither of us know if the bsky poster added more 300-char posts after the one in the screenshot; it's a level of charitability we not only are not, but can not, offer the original poster.

@anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz whoops, didn't see this notification pop before I finished my reply to the last. gimme a moment.