Last year, I called out a friend for excessively blaming the Greens for various local council decisions/inefficiencies. They had the impression that the Greens had far more seats than they actually did (iirc, they only had 2, out of a total of almost 40). When I pointed this out to them, they were surprised, and we later reflected that they had likely inadvertently bought into propaganda that scapegoats the Greens.

One of the projects that the Greens had most loudly been opposed to in the area was one that looked like some genuinely pretty dodgy developments as part of a failing scheme led by councillors who had approved a bunch of other half complete failures.

How did you find out about your award?

I picked up the phone after slogging through traffic and rain to a bloke from Cambridge in the UK. He told me about this prize and the first thing I thought of was the lady who collected snot off of whales and the levitating frog. I said, “absolutely I want to be in this club”.

I love this. Speaking as an early career scientist, I think I’d rather win an ig-Nobel prize than a real Nobel.

“The manager said Dollar Tree has been in contact with police and are trying to find who is urinating in the candles.”

What a sentence

This is excellent news. I really respect the guys over at datacolada.org

Edit: fixed link

I’m not DMing because I don’t want to the play the game, but thank you for being kind and helping out people who do; I enjoy knowing that I could play if, if I wished.

What do you have on it? I’ve considered setting one up, but I’m not sure what I’d put on it yet, and I don’t want to do the thing where I make something I never use.

And you just know that eugenics related thoughts are a part of it for him. Ick, what a creep.

Like >!Criston Cole!< in House of the Dragon. (Spoiler scope: very minor season 1)

It’s not the most robust analogy, but I actually really like your comparison to painting restoration; to do it well, one must understand the techniques and materials used in the original (even stuff below the visible surface).

Not a lawyer, but I think the original work is still copyrighted, and that restoration wouldn’t (or certainly shouldn’t) constitute a new artwork. Though now I’m wondering about that terrible Jesus painting restoration from a few years back — it’s certainly different from the original, and whilst it might not seem reasonable to call it a new piece of “art”, it’s certainly inspired a great many people(to make memes)

I think many people who are responsible for pushing the campaign forward would agree it’s a much bigger issue. It’s just that the bigger issue is big enough that there are multiple fronts one could fight on, and this is a politically useful opportunity to push forward. A victory from this campaign will be unlikely to lead to the larger developments without more of a fight, because achieving the general rule will take a few instances of arguing the specific case.

For now, I’m excited to see where this leads, even if the answer might be “nowhere”

That’s very wise; I’m proud of you for recognising this

I don’t think the kind of compromise that is necessary is able to be stated in the way you’re asking for, because of how values feed into beliefs.

Take abortion rights for example: someone who would describe themselves as “pro-life” may argue something that is effectively saying that murdering babies is never okay. I would be in complete agreement there. As someone who is “pro-choice”, the core of my argument is usually some form of “a clump of cells that could become a person does not trump the rights to bodily autonomy that an existing person has”. No progress will be made in this discussion unless we can address the fact that the vast majority of abortions are nowhere near “murdering babies”. That’s where compromise is most likely to happen, in the discussion that arises when trying to reconcile different word views, and coming to speak in mutually intelligible terms.

For example, one area where I and many other abortion advocates have compromised on this front is recognising that the line between “a clump of cells” and “a baby” is pretty blurry. Personally, I don’t know where I stand on where the law should stand on that line; in my country, abortions after 24 weeks can only be done in exceptional cases (mother’s health at risk, foetal anomalies etc.). I think a time limit like this seems reasonable, but I’m not sure whether at 24 weeks, a foetus is more like a clump of cells, or a baby. I have personally had a very early term abortion, and I’m grateful to have had that opportunity, because I have no idea how I’d feel if I was in that 20-24 weeks range. Acknowledging this uncertainty I feel is part of how compromise works. I would hope that someone on the “other side” of the argument would apply a similar approach to try to understand and entertain my argument wrt bodily autonomy. In a way, this is an easy example, because all the leeway in positions has been explored, and the core issue is something that can’t be compromised on (such as how I can’t have a productive discussion with people who are actively against women’s bodily autonomy, or people who believe that life starts at conception).

An area in which I’m working on trying to compromise on is trying to reshape how I think about farmers and other similar social groups. Farmers are a good example because I am a very left wing, queer, university-educated city-living scientist who has Opinions on the climate, and I’m very socially progressive. To some people, I am the big bad Other, an inherent problem with the world. I don’t like this, because certainly I don’t see myself as “the problem”. I’d actually rather like to be part of the solution, but I won’t do that well if I take the easy route of dismissing people like this as just racist, idiotic bigots whose opinions I shouldn’t care about. Many of them are bigoted, but if I don’t want to mass exterminate people whose views are unacceptable to me, nor be exterminated myself, I need to try to imagine a world where I could break bread with these people. That’s a pretty difficult challenge.

PhilosophyTube’s video on Judith Butler helped a lot on this actually. I have been realising more and more that the common ground that exists between me and many of my “political enemies” is that we are humans who are scared and struggling, like me. When I feel hopeless, solidarity pulls me through, and thinking in this way makes it easier to feel compassion for people whose anger and bigotry isolates them from this kind of community support: a person can simultaneously be a product of their environment, and responsible for their actions; they can both be a victim of fascist ideology (through becoming isolated, disempowered and stewing in hate), and also an active perpetrator of said hate.

This reframing isn’t itself compromise, but hopefully if I continue to work to see what I share with the people I most disagree with, I’ll be able to have the kinds of conversations that build compromise. Successful compromise takes a small amount of shared ground and extends that, bit by bit, person by person. That’s why I think your question didn’t get the answers you were hoping for: by the time things become solidified into political parties and manifesto stances, there isn’t much fluidity and ambiguity left to act as space for new, shared understanding.

If you made it to the end of this comment, thanks for bearing with my meandering. If you’d like to read an essay about compromise that’s a much better story than my rambles, you might enjoy this article about a beautifully mundane yet improbable compromise helped build the internet. . The whole article is great, but I especially love this part:

"In the beginning, the disagreements seemed insurmountable, and Miller felt disheartened: ‘The first night we thought: This is gonna fail miserably. At first nobody saw eye to eye or trusted each other enough yet to let each other in and try to figure out the art of the possible.’ But as concessions and then agreements were made, people began to feel energised by the creation of a new system, even if imperfect; one piece at a time, their system could bring the content of the web within reach for everyone. As Caplan remembers: ‘By the second day, there was a lot of drinking and all-night working groups. We were running on adrenaline and energy. By the last day, we realised we were making history.’ "

I take heart in the understanding that compromise is messy, and hard to evaluate when you’re in the thick of it.

I think I saw a paper on this kind of thing over a year ago. Iirc, it said that engagement is lower on Mastodon, but higher quality.

I think one of my favourite parts was this footnote in part 4:

"Though the idea that politics is ingrained into material design choices is a growing consensus within recent Science and Technology studies work. I once wrote a piece on the role of software design in shaping people’s interpretation of texts - because that’s how I get wild on Friday nights.

(N.b. link preserved from original)

This is obviously a joke, but the truth in the joke is that you’re a huge nerd, and it makes me happy to see people like you on the internet. There was a while where I perceived the tech-people you critique as “my people”, but ultimately the euphoria of finding community dissolved into isolation and dread, as I grew to understand the impact of the cultish culture of tech.

TBF, that’s sort of my experience of pronouns due to finding queer community at university.

I agree. Whenever I get into an argument online, it’s usually with the understanding that it exists for the benefit of the people who may spectate the argument — I’m rarely aiming to change the mind of the person I’m conversing with. Especially when it’s not even a discussion, but a more straightforward calling someone out for something, that’s for the benefit of other people in the comments, because some sentiments cannot go unchanged.

That’s fun, I’m stealing that

To be fair, the way the Krebs cycle is taught is usually pretty grim (speaking as a biochemistry major)

I don’t understand this, but it sounds cool.

Perhaps another way to think of it is that we’re a patch of localised order in an overall disordered universe