Walking into a meeting at Kohler and keeping a straight face after saying the words “toilet camera”–and then maintaining that straight face throughout the product’s discussion, greenlighting, development, manufacture, and sale–deserves an Oscar.

I think part of what you’re saying is why the Kowloon build can’t deliver that, though.

It’s a very good summary of the article. The things the author reconsidered were pretty nuanced, and trying to describe them in a headline without making the headline even longer than it is.

Would you have liked this better?

“This Minecraft map that recreates Kowloon Walled City, one of history’s most notorious slums, made me realize that 3D level design isn’t just about the complexity or the environmental challenge, but about the internal lives of the people who live there and the way that the game implies a greater reality that exists beyond the confines of the camera’s field of view”

Because that’s too long to fit in a tweet.

I read the article. It appears to deliver on the promise of the headline pretty completely. What is promised is a little bit too nuanced and complex to be neatly encapsulated in the headline any other way. The headline also isn’t sensationalized or misrepresentative of the content. And, honestly, the reason I think most people are clicking is for the Kowloon part, not the level design part. Are you just upset because it sounds a little bit like a LinkedIn status in its construction?

I already talked you through it in the linked comment, and honestly if you don’t get it I don’t think I can make it any simpler.

In any case, I’m not taking homework from you. I know how I arrived at this conclusion, and you’re free to believe me or not. Have a good night.

But how does including sources make that world? How does it move from point A to point B?

I addressed that very objection at the beginning of the conversation.

You haven’t thought of that at all. You’re applying reasoning to positions you hold, not reasoning to reach positions.

That’s particularly hilarious since the comment I’m talking about was from fifteen hours ago.

I’ve been thinking about media literacy for decades at this point. I’m not naive enough to be certain that this is some foolproof magic bullet, but I think it’ll help, and it’s definitely not going to hurt public discourse.

Mastodon has definitely improved, but more to the point, there’s really nothing else. Particularly not anything that anyone is using. Unless you widen your definition to include Bluesky.

Honestly, I’d say that Mastodon’s perceived complexity in the past was kind of an illusion anyway. The problem of choosing a server was really made out to be this huge hurdle, when in fact it was no big deal at all; I was a member of several different servers over time, and I didn’t feel like my experience was substantially different on any of them. Just join one that seems interesting or is near you or whatever, and you’ll be fine. After that, it operates pretty much the same as Twitter did. Following people on other servers can be a little bit trickier on web, but in the app it’s pretty seamless.

You’re contending that sharing sources online won’t accomplish anything because people are resistant to changing their opinions. Yes, that’s currently true; and while I see a benefit in the current world to sharing sources, why not also imagine a world in which it actually does change opinions? There’s no physiological or psychological law that makes opinion change impossible. People can change because people do change, so why don’t we do what we can to make that more common?

People behave like this now for a lot of complicated reasons. For one, changing opinions hurts us (physiologically), so our brain tries to prevent it; that’s something that can be eased with exposure. Also, rich people and foreign interests have a vested interest in keeping people susceptible to misinformation, and greater media literacy is really the only tactic that can combat it.

But more importantly, the world we live in now isn’t the only world we ever have to live in. It’s going to change one way or another; why not take steps to make it change into something more like what we want to live in?

No, I’m absolutely not saying that. I’m saying we should normalize having sources and not just blindly repeating a thing we heard.

But how would one wash the dish? Surely not with a dishwasher pod?

The point: “stop wine-ing”?

By French law, bread can only contain flour, yeast, salt, and water. Sadly, he must be cake.

Whoa, the Eat The Rich people are serious.

You’re talking about a current reality. I’m talking about normalizing a different future.

No. I’m not running on a fantasy. I’m trying to bring into existence a world that doesn’t yet exist. I know that people aren’t rational, but if my mind can be changed by facts, they have to have some value.

Yeah, definitely. But:

1. It’s a lot easier to answer the disinformation if you know where it’s coming from. Part of the thing that makes my head spin about the GOP news cycle is how even I (a chronically-online, fairly well-informed person) will have absolutely no idea where some people come up with the nonsense they come up with. Is it from their own mind? Is there some fringe community on Facebook doling out steaming dog piles of AI-generated anti-vax nonsense? Is it a legitimate outlet, and they’re just massively misunderstanding it? Knowing where it comes from can really help in combating it; even if you can’t stop the current fake news, you might be able to head the next one off before it takes root.

2. Sometimes just the process of needing to find a source can make people look twice. It works for me, even: if I want to write something I’m pretty sure about, and then go looking for a source, sometimes I’ll find out that that source isn’t reliable, or that it was retracted. Sometimes I’ll even find out that what I remembered was true, but it’s way better or worse. I become more media literate sourcing my facts.

And he represents just one of hundreds of deadly misinformation campaigns in the last thirty years alone.

Anything even slightly better than the idiocy we have seems amazing to me, apparently

This. As soon as we treat them as “only monsters,” we start to think that “regular humans” aren’t capable of monstrous things.