I average about 10mph or 16kph on my e-bike, and gets passed by routinely by 'normal' cyclists going faster than my pace. E-bike users do not necessarily ride faster; I use one to help with the many hills in my area, not to go fast. I don't think it'd be fair to force me to use roads and mingle with cars just because I use an e-bike.
I think our perspectives are in complete agreement, and your comment proves that allowing e-bikes to go faster than 25kph, or operate without use of the pedals isn’t necessary.
I’m certainly not advocating that e-bike should mix with cars. I’m saying the than an e-bike that assists beyond 25kph, or doesn’t require peddling, isn’t an e-bike. It’s just an unlicensed motorbike pretending to be an e-bike.
My wife and I got electric bikes about 8 weeks ago and they have been great for running errands in lieu of single-occupancy car trips. We live near the Interurban Trail/Aurora and the e-bikes enable much easier access to a variety of stores, restaurants, and parks, which are not easily walkable. We now appreciate the nearby bike lanes and quiet streets for making longer trips to bigger parks or neighboring downtowns like Edmonds. We recently had wanted to return to Capitol Hill to enjoy a more walkable neighborhood, but so far bikeabilty has been an excellent substitute. Plus, in four years there will be a light rail station near us to offer yet another alternative to car trips. We feel lucky to have these options in our "suburban" location.
I think people should be more comfortable with non-binary truth, based on the likelihood that something is a lie or not based on historical record. I would put more trust in a statement from someone with a record of telling unbiased truth versus someone with a record of frequently spewing lies or having ingrained bias.
Otherwise, if you don't make these types of initial simplifications, it becomes too complicated to start evaluating the truth of any statement, including scientific ones. And it's okay to be make a mistaken evaluation, just reevaluate and adjust the simplified "truth" assessment model based on more recent data.
There is a danger in deferring a "truth" assessment: a community loses a sense of shared truth leading to polarization, doubt, confusion. And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative, which may be a lie after all.
Careful, getting a bit too postmodernists in here. If you look at it too hard all "truths" become false eventually, and that can pave the way to apathy.
>And it's okay to be make a mistaken evaluation, just reevaluate and adjust the simplified "truth" assessment model based on more recent data.
And how many politicians on both sides of the aisle double-down on an issue just to remain consistent to their base?
Or worse, change their position thanks to millions of dollars worth of lobbying or the promise of a high-up position once they're out of office?
>And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative, which may be a lie after all.
Maybe the Stoics were on to something. If the masses believe the lie, doesn't it become the truth?
> If you look at it too hard all "truths" become false eventually, and that can pave the way to apathy.
Isn't the point of seeing the truth as non-binary that they cannot become false? Just less likely to be true?
This seems intrinsically more amenable to changing one's mind on the truth of something, though I agree that not having an opinion on the truth of something is apathetic. Just because you strongly believe that you're about 60% sure that something is true doesn't make it less strongly held.
I do this all the time in scientific analysis... estimating how likely I am to be correct is part of the job.
I think what they mean by truths becoming false is rather that all certainties become uncertainties. Delving too deep in postmodernism is like taking all of your legos and melting them.
If I want to have a conversation about free speech, and a postmodernist begins questioning if we even actually have free will, or if it's even valid to discuss morality if it's entirely possible we exist in a simulation...you haven't actually advanced anything. You've just made soup. Postmodernism is a tool for turning building blocks into soup, and that is more often than not extremely counterproductive. Though it is, to some degree, necessary.
I think the fundamental problem is that aggressive postmodernism will often disregard presuppositions with absolutely no interest in understanding the utility/value of the presupposition.
"If you look at it too hard all "truths" become false eventually"
My opinion is that many apathetic people become that way because of being treated unfairly (in their view) or feeling helpless, and way less people become that way because of thinking too hard.
"Or worse, change their position thanks to millions of dollars ..."
Well, I see new data: lobbying $$$ that could make a previously trusted politician biased. Time to update my simplistic model on his related political ads to being less likely to true. There might be another politician who changed positions based on new or emerging body of evidence - maybe this person is more trustworthy this time. New data -> updated evaluation.
"the masses believe the lie, doesn't it become the truth"
I'm not familiar with post-modernism or Stoicism. But I sure hope that the proportion of people who believe one thing does not ultimately determine its truthfulness. The way I would initially simplify this is to rely on the likely proportion of unbiased people who hold one position versus the opposite. And by unbiased, I simplify that by not trusting greedy people, or people who have not studied the policy or history of it or other places who've tried different approaches. I think these initial simplifications will already cut down many viewpoints and voices that I do not need hear, in order to make an informed voting decision.
I think postmodernism leads straight to linguistics, not apathy. Much of politics is based around words like “democracy”, “freedom”, “the middle class”, “big government”. There is no truth around these things because they mean whatever is politically convenient in the moment. I mean sure you can define a pretty good general purpose term for your own use, but that’s not going to be how politicians use it. These should be seen as rhetorical terms, not inherently meaningful outside of the context of, say, a speech or and ongoing public discussion. It is far easier and cheaper to redefine yourself out of commitments than it is to actually stand for concrete values. The fix is to stand for concrete values that everyone can easily identify and discuss in concrete terms. It should be easy, then, to determine the difference between “waffling” and adjusting to a new situation because everyone can adjust together around a value consensus.
Note, PR takes literally the exact opposite tact to communication. We’re barreling deep into a post-truth world with an incredible amount of money fueling this. See also: non linear warfare, hypernormalization, Edward Bernays, why to buy a newspaper when it never makes money.
> And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative
Strongly disagree, this would imply that an individual's support of a narrative can change simply by the environment around them changing while the individual stays static.
Three Christians, two athiests, and an agnostic are sitting at a bar. Does the agnostic support Christianity? Two of the Christians leave. Does the agnostic now support atheism?
If the Christians are bullying the athiests, and the agnostic does nothing, then yes, they are implicitly supporting the actions taking place in their vicinity. If they're just all sitting around doing nothing, the implicit support is of them sitting around doing nothing.
Yes, people are fine with all sorts of murders and other atrocities taking place, as long as its not happening to them. As long as the right kind of people suffer. Your phrasing is wrong, of course, because you're conflating support for something with committing the act yourself, but you're not too far off the mark.
- one: you are bringing religion into a discussion where it isn't necessary
- two: it hangs in a frame where a causual passer-by might think this is usual. I mean: if I write "if the rabbits chases the cats and the dogs do nothing" an hypothetical reader who knows nothing about cats and rabbits might easily get the idea that this is a common occurrence, while in fact it is fact a very unusual one.
- one: not my example; it was introduced by someone as a rhetorical jab by trying to introduce an emotionally-charged subject. The point doesn't depend on religion in any particular way, and I'm happy to rephrase it.
- two: I think this is fine. In an example where a bunch of people are sitting in a bar and a big group starts bullying a smaller group, someone who does nothing is allowing this to happen, and we can attribute moral responsibility for them allowing this to happen. Just because everyone knows that it's normal for someone to always get bullied by the larger group doesn't make it okay. If someone doesn't know or understand that bullying is wrong, assigning moral responsibility is more complicated, but neither of those things depend on their knowledge of the frequency of bullying. There is a way in which available information is important, but not this one.
Writing - especially in an Internet forum context - about Christians bullying Atheists
is about as fitting as
- in a historic context - writing an example about Jews killing Nazis. Yes, it has happened, more than once. And no, for some reason that doesn't make it a good example except when we are discussing that particular topic.
Besides, as was mentioned above you are both pulling an unrelated group of people into this and you are pulling religion into an argument about something else.
Snide remarks like that is equally annoying regardless of if they come from you or from the old relative who always wants to frame everything good that happens as a miracle from $DEITY
Both you and the old relative might mean it well and get som points from people who agree with you but on the larger scale it only increases tension.
I rephrased in terms of unnamed groups, what are you still going on about? You should direct these comments at the person who chose to make it about religion.
(Hey philipov, I'm kinda using this comment to reply to both of you -- not everything here is directed at you.)
Guy Who Chose To Make It About Religion, over here! FWIW I was just looking for a concrete example that would illustrate the preposterous nature of the statement I was replying to, and when I searched my brain for people who don't have a position on something "agnostic" was the one that immediately came to mind. Having the hindsight of seeing this little back and forth between you two, maybe "undecided voter" would have been more apropos... but I feel like that could have potentially spiraled out, too. In any event, I wasn't trying to start a holy flame war and I didn't imagine that anybody would go on a tangent about the religious aspect of it.
That said, why not stoke these flames unnecessarily? As for whether athiests gang up on Christians more than the other way around, I don't think the "internet" context is relevant; the internet is the context we're discussing this in, but the hypothetical bar was IRL (or at least, that was the interpretation of the author and the author has never heard of a bar that isn't IRL). Where I live (Midwest US) Christians ganging up on athiests seems more common than the other way around IRL, so if we need to unpack the realism of philipov's modification to my example and willfully ignore the fact that their choice of which group would be cast as the aggressor was just based on which group was initially larger in my example (which was in turn based on which group is larger IRL, but I don't feel the example would be substantially different if labels were reversed) I'll vote for "marginally more realistic than the other way around and nowhere near the same ballpark as a roles-reversed holocaust."
Good explanation. My original point was that the attempt to reduce to absurdity fails because it's not simply being something or holding some opinion that causes others to be in implicit support of it. Implicit support consists in being present when an immoral or unethical action takes place, and not stopping it when you have the opportunity to do so. Indeed, it doesn't even require one group to be in the majority, although fear of going against a larger group is often what causes people to stay silent.
I get your point, but I don't think it's entirely relevant to my original post because the comment I was replying to was making statements about the truth of descriptive claims rather than, say, standing by while group X oppresses group Y. Of course these are intertwined and hard to separate in some cases; you can find plenty of examples where descriptive claims have been used to justify horrible atrocities, and being agnostic towards the claims Nazis made about Jews would not garner my sympathies, but I hope you can understand the distinction I'm drawing. I don't even feel comfortable saying that the scared or indifferent onlooker would be supporting group X (though if they pay taxes to group X I'd say they are supporting the oppression whether or not they speak up, in a financial sense), but I do understand your reasoning in that context and don't particularly care to split hairs over the definition of "support" (it doesn't affect my opinions of standing by and doing nothing in the face of oppression, I'm just a pedantic motherfucker).
Did the Christians try to convince the agnostic about something? If not, nothing changes before or after they leave.
Anyway, the OP was about political ads that can affect how people vote, a decision to vote or not affects the community. Being agnostic about something (aliens) does not necessarily have the same gravity of effect as believing in a political ad.
The problem with degrees of truth is that they aren't composable into an argument. I can chain together a handful of things that are 99% true and arrive at an absurd conclusion because the 1% is the interesting bit.
In this context, the question is whether something is political speech or something else. What is included and excluded from that category will get pretty interesting.
We saw the same thing with compelled union dues in the public sector. Were those for political speech or just routine union activity? SCOTUS said it couldn't tell the difference, so a public institution couldn't compel employees to pay dues.
I guess twitter thinks they can tell the difference, but I suspect there will be a lot of controversy.
> The problem with degrees of truth is that they aren't composable into an argument. I can chain together a handful of things that are 99% true and arrive at an absurd conclusion because the 1% is the interesting bit.
No, there are formal systems for handling uncertainty, Bayesian inference, fuzzy logic etc. Even informally we do apply similar rules all the time (though we are not free of biases)
Degrees of truth aren't some option you can choose, it's just an observation about how the world already works, where information is universally not perfect. The point is by acknowledging it, you will be more willing to update bad information and bad conclusions as you get updated information.
What an unusual way to present the "progressive" ratio of taxes being paid, basing it on the total taxes paid by percentile groups. Of course a disproportionately wealthy percentile would be expected to pay most of the taxes in absolute amount or as ratios of absolute amounts between groups, if all the percentiles paid the same amount, but also EVEN IF the tax rates slide lower (i.e. are regressive) for the wealthy.
Progressive versus regressive tax rate discussions are more typically based on the ratio of one household's tax to that household's earnings. In other words, how much of what I make goes to taxes? I think this make comparisons more fair and straightforward, instead of comparing the ratios of combined absolute taxes by group.
I agree both or all sides engage in self-serving agenda and bad policies. Nobody is perfect.
But it is hard not to see that extreme ideology drives the agenda of one or a few sides, while most sides are willing to compromise with reasonable, evidence-based solutions that the ideologists reject outright. It is irresponsible to say in that case that both sides are being unreasonable - that false equivalence promotes an unhealthy stalemate and gives cover to those who blindly delay progress.
Thanks for working on the technical side of this social-equity project. Was the possibility of parent offering car pools or "walking groups" for kids included in the algorithm? I'm assuming that if volunteer parents are compensated to give carpool rides or lead walking buddies, then the negative impact would be lessened to parents who has to handle drastically different school start/end times. At the same time, it may be cheaper to compensate volunteer parents than for the district to procure or maintain more buses.
Another way to ask this question is: were there volunteer transit, ride share, or pre/post-school care incentives included in your algorithm, to balance the potential negative impacts to parents?
Yes and no. The algorithm runs with historical student data and therefore only considers students using the bus system in order to compute the effects of school start times on transportation.
On the other hand I think the district had planned to used the saved transportation money (~18 million/year) in order to help the most impacted parents (pre/post school care...)
I guess volunteer transit is always a positive thing for the parents and the districts. The algorithm was just trying to fulfil the objectives given by the district (costs, later students, fairness...). The compensations are what should happen after the algorithm: what do you do with the saved money, how do you help the most impacted parents? These negative effects were expected to disappear with the years as new parents start to choose the schools after the start times have changed (and therefore choose schools that can accomodate their schedules).
To me, it's definitely not the "most credit-giving way" or the "most childish thing". The Russia angle is a really big deal, it goes to the core of the legitimacy of Trump's presidency. Not only that, it demonstrates the direction his authoritarian tendencies is likely to lead the country into, with his open admiration of strongmen and inexplicable questioning of the historic goodwill within the NATO alliance.
His guilt over Russia involvement can be inferred by his constant obsession and attempts to discredit typical law enforcement investigation practices. It is a big deal to have a sitting president acting similar to how a guilty defendant would with (1) a video inviting computer hacking, (2) documented lies or rewrites of "official" statements about a Trump tower meeting of senior Trump campaign officials with the representatives of the invitees, (3) an announcement of an upcoming press briefing about contents (emails) of the hacking target made at the time of the meeting, (4) news reports of surveilled increase in hacker activities at the time of the hacking invite.
All of the above are not credit-giving or childish. At the same time, an alternative of explaining government policies and trade numbers would likely not get through the electorate, and in my opinion unlikely to change hardened or media-saturated minds.
Why do you think Trump spent so much time attacking Hillary for being "crooked"? It was to muddy the waters so that when Trump's own crooked actions came to light, the average person would just throw up their hands and say "they're all bad".
I am one of your fellow human being. What you describe is not a prioritization of my interests, so you are not necessarily speaking for your fellow humans. My interests, and those of countless others, are best served by an ecologically diverse and sustainable future.
My viewpoint is that those who are quick to trample on the weakest, including endangered animals, will likely find it easy to trample on the rights of the poor. It is not in my interest to support that potential future where might makes right. Both my interests and non-human interests can be served at the same time, with no conflicts if viewed in the long term.
