There's multiple kinds of value. As an individual, learning new understandable models can help with developing a useful view of the world and others. Even if that benefit is simply feeling good about "understanding" something - that might still "scratch the itch" of concerns. This understanding might be detached from the material reality of the processes involved, but who cares? With this perspective, they're hardly incompetent if they're getting value from it.
This isn't very far from religion after all. You could consider it a kind of rational spirituality.
The scientific community has its own values, and might rightly reject simplified thinking like this. And that's fine for scientists, but an individual is going to have an easier time accepting stories of pleasure and drives than stories of gene expression and neurotransmitters.
If it is a blacklist, it's not a very good one. "pedobear." and "pedophile." work fine. I don't understand why they would want to block these anyway. One's just a meme, and the other is a bunch of mugshots of strange looking men.
It's unfortunately not uncommon for such images to appear on the Russian internet. The Youtube thumbnails are possibly things that were linked to from VK communities. Or maybe there are links in the content somewhere.
If I go on Yandex and search "img " and then a bunch of random numbers, I get almost all pictures of young women, and many pictures of underage girls in provocative poses.
This sort of thing does happen. A few months ago, people discovered similar results on Google Images(!) by searching "TV television and film". The results were being pulled from a 4chan archive of the board with that name.
I don't think it's related to the "VK" web results problem though. If you search "VK," or "VK!" or VK with any punctuation, all the web results come up as expected.
On Twitter there seem to be a lot of people on who expect to live in other worlds soon, and not just to explore and study them. He's likely rhetorically responding to that idea. And I think it's worthwhile to confront those ideas critically. IMO as well, living off of Earth sounds hellish, given what we know now.
The person the Twitter poster is talking with is now suggesting that many people will abandon their physical bodies, and those that won't will live in cylindrical space colonies. He's speaking fantasies.
It may make no sense to you (or me, much of the time), but should they be allowed to say it? I think so.
To me, I think it’s valid for a group of people to organize and write a letter criticizing someone, and then to send that letter to the person’s peer group. They can also criticize the employer of that person. That’s part of what of what being in a free speech society entails.
I don’t agree with the positions, but I think the complainers should have a space too, even if it’s outside of the relevant institution.
I also don’t like that universities threaten people’s jobs over this such complaints. I agree with mc32 in that such places should tolerate unpopular or contrarian opinions. And that’s where I view the problem appearing: it’s not the angry internet mob, it’s the university giving in to them. It’s up to the university to show thought leadership in their own spaces, and to ignore such ridiculous controversies. If signatories on my imagined letter threatened to stop working with the institution if not have their requests met, it might be best to cut ties with them, not the allegedly problematic peer. The university has to show that leadership.
>you don’t denounce meat eating therefore you are evil and your peers and employers should ostracize you (...)
This seems like a valid position to me. It’s extreme, I don’t agree with it, and I think people with such positions should be encouraged to be more tolerant, but it’s a valid position to hold in the public space nonetheless.
I don’t think the problem is people holding these positions - outrage will always exist if you allow crowds to converse freely, which is easy on the internet - but that institutions like universities instead see the outrage as an excuse to fire people. The institutions ultimately make the choices that alter people’s careers, not the crowd. Universities and companies should do more to stand up for tolerance of opinions. If the crowds themselves are viewed as the problem, then I fear for the future of free communication on the internet.
Those guys get a ton of criticism. Universities have been deciding to oust people for public outrage. Zuckerberg owns most of his company. Elected officials are removed by voting, and their critics are trying to reduce those votes.
Edit: My point is that all these people receive criticism. Universities seem to act on it more often, but they don’t have to. They choose to.
This isn't very far from religion after all. You could consider it a kind of rational spirituality.
The scientific community has its own values, and might rightly reject simplified thinking like this. And that's fine for scientists, but an individual is going to have an easier time accepting stories of pleasure and drives than stories of gene expression and neurotransmitters.