@grumpybozo i love "the Fowl Place".

@fdr wait, have bee dances been discredited?

@fdr i mean, at some level entymologists have interests related to what they study, but the magnitude is attenuated enough that as a community their work seems pretty credible. why can't we just be insects?

apparently, signal qualifies as "our technology overlords", but facebook is meek and neutral and espouses no dangerous ideology. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/opinion/jack-dorseys-twitter-signal-privacy.html ht @dangillmor

Discovering a civilization on a very distant planet, along with some means of instant communication, could be great for social science. We'd make a deal: we do the social science for you, you do the social science for us. Since neither of us have an interest, beyond academic curiosity, in the other civilization's arrangements, the work might actually be credible.

@ParaGauchial @enmodo @stephenjudkins how can we constitute ourselves as a democratic public, where both empowered to act and able to make choices wisely?

offense should be neither given nor taken.

@enmodo i have grown whiggish about the remarkable advances in sophistry.

@guan we will have a baby boom among travel bugs.

@enmodo @stephenjudkins most of what my elaborate statistics / econometrics education taught me is how many degrees of freedom there are in “empirical, quantitative” analysis, how many ways you can be (often unintentionally) deceived by the way you are explicitly or implicitly modeling the problem.

@stephenjudkins the basic “conspiratorial” impulse — that pharma companies are willing to trade off our illness and death, in quite large numbers, against their bottom line — is i think right.

rather than challenge that, the smart play (if you were a conspiracist) would be to make sure the stupidest accusations got the most play, in order loudly to discredit what on quieter settings might damningly withstand scrutiny.

hmm.

hmm. Toot! previews full tweets when you embed a Twitter links, so they basically look like cross-platform quote tweets?toots?twats?

the “official” Mastodon iOS client does not.

@akhilrao who knows, maybe not so bleak! what if it’s a lab developed very contagious supermild virus crossimmune with COVID and after the leak we’ll all be perfectly immune from now on with no ill effects? #HappyHypothesis

@stephenjudkins it was a story for a day or two in 2020 on twitter, the cat antiviral that might fight COVID but that might undermine more lucrative remdesivir. then there was a dress or a clown or something. look over there!

While we were loudly arguing about Ivermectin, we forgot to hold Gilead accountable for sitting on GS-441524. Flood the zone with shit, they say. https://twitter.com/victoriacyanide/status/1607925652858220545 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GS-441524

OK. It is so deeply suppressed I don't know what it would mean, but it must mean something. #JabLeakHypothesis

when they tell you as a child to dream big, there’s a danger you may mistake all the other people in the inspiring tales you imagine for mere extras.

when you are the object of love at first sight, the perpetrator is the love that spied you.

@jpgoldberg @nadim @gsuberland why isn't it going to happen? why not just eliminate the web client in favor of the more secure native apps?

expressions of enthusiastic agreement on this platform are called darn tootin'.