Hm.

Here are my thoughts:

I don’t really care about picking the better debater. That actually seems kind of antithetical: In a perfect world, the truth should win, and it doesn’t really matter if someone’s more “skillful” or forceful or just willing to type and berate more. Actually one of the things that bothers me about the propaganda on Lemmy is that it is often (not always) pretty skillful at changing minds, independent of the validity of the content.

I do like the idea of formalizing it a little bit. Having a limited number of “rounds” is an interesting idea. Right now, one of the issues I see that I’m trying to deal with with this thing is the strategy of kind of blathering endlessly or constantly changing the subject, not really being responsive but talking without end. The current iteration of the bot will call you out on it when that happens, but it might be kind of better if it’s your chance and once it’s done it is done. Kind of like court: If the opponent raises a point, and you just ignore it, than by default they “win” that point and you don’t even have a chance to go back and correct it.

I don’t even necessarily like the idea of picking a “winner.” To me, that’s up to each reader, and often the truth is kind of in the middle or they are both valid arguments. It’s more of kind of a pass/fail on both sides: Are you being reasonable? There are a lot of strategies that look really reasonable, or at worst just like aggressively asserting your side, but if you’re good at using them you can literally make almost anything sound plausible. So, if neither side is doing that, then it’s fine! They just had a conversation, responded reasonably to each other’s points, everything moved forward. I am more on the side of “what truth did we figure out” as opposed to needing to assign a winner and a loser mechanically to each debate.

Yeah, modern day political TV debate is nonsense. Actually, even this format of debate in the video you sent, I don’t completely like. The woman is clearly full of shit. They’re setting up this format structure, this respect, this kind of “objective” format, and then they are welcoming someone to take an honored position within it that doesn’t deserve the respect. I didn’t watch much beyond the beginning, but I can almost guarantee that she is lying and rationalizing, and her underlying position is “red man good blue man bad.” I don’t really know how you can expose that in a taking turns long form “debate” format, that’s just my reaction seeing her. I feel like having something like Jon Stewart interviewing her and challenging her, still being fair and letting her talk but not letting her get away with bullshit, would be better than implicitly pretending that she is upholding the social contract when she is not.

Maybe I am wrong, that’s just my snap judgement seeing the first little bit. Actually, setting up a framework where being unfriendly to that kind of dishonesty is allowed and sanctioned, but being dishonest or shifty in your debating is “not allowed” in the same way that overt incivility is “not allowed” currently on Lemmy, is part of my goal here.

Those are my thoughts about it, in no real coherent order, it just took me a little time to watch a piece of the video and get back to you.

Well, but you do though. Making comments and getting the respect and agreement of the people in the community is how you get influence.

I really don’t like this Lemmy thing where certain people are empowered by the software to control the communications of other people (beyond just removing spam or abuse or something). I feel like you don’t need that. I really don’t feel like you or me or anybody being put in a position where they can “influence” someone else’s communications unilaterally is really necessary to a good community. Often it is counterproductive. Maybe that’s the issue, you just activated one of my pet peeves in a way that has nothing to do with what you want to do.

Can you tell me more about what you want to do, how you would want to apply Oxford scoring and such? Maybe that could be a whole separate community / idea, I was envisioning this one as being a lot more basic, just can people talk with each other without blatantly mischaracterizing the other person’s points or ignoring questions or etc. But IDK, maybe I just don’t understand the basic concept even yet.

Do, or do not. There is no try.

Yeah, I’d be happy to post it up along with some of the other little tools I use here, that’s a good idea.

Nothing is stopping you from making that tool without mod powers…

I generally don’t even touch the mod buttons except in exceptional circumstances; I don’t expect that this place would be any different. Maybe events will change my mind but I would hope that a lot of this stuff can get worked out with talking and culture, as opposed to by removing comments.

Ooh… that’s a good point. Any discussion which gets fed into the debate bot will get fed into OpenAI’s API, which means it’ll be used for training. (I trust their “do not use this data” checkbox not at all.) And I think you’re right that having that happen will be a deal-breaker for most people and just a totally different thing than the purpose of the community as stated.

Let me think on that a little more. I won’t do anything with the tool until I can look into self-hosting it or something. I think consider it as purely a human community until further discussion, then.

I don’t think this is really true as long as they’re complying with the DMCA. OP can upload stuff, it’ll stay up until someone notices and cares enough to send a takedown notice, and then the server host will take it down. In theory OP might be liable if they really wanted to push it, which maybe makes it not the best idea, but I think the server operator is in the clear as long as they take stuff down if it does get requested to.

Ha! Thank you. I was just about to reply to you, crediting the original author.

Fishing?

If it’s a tech interview, practice solving coding problems in a tech interview format.

Find simple “coding challenge” problems, write the answers on paper, get satisfied with them, then run them and see what happens. Definitely at least cover the basics (reverse a linked list, quicksort). Do it until you’re comfortable with it, which takes a while. You will start to ace programming tests because the calibrated response is for someone who does programming in a totally different format, and you’re comfortable and experienced with the unusual format.

Graham crackers with whipped cream on top. This one was very much the bottom of the barrel. 🥲

Ghirardelli brownie mix from Costco, filled up to about 1/3 of a mug mixed with milk and microwaved for 45 seconds to make a little brownie. Serve with ice cream on top, or with a glass of milk. I actually still do this one, it is delicious and costs basically $0 per serving.

Rice + milk + sugar and then mixed up in a bowl into a kind of puree. This goes great as a dessert after rice + frozen vegetables sauteed up from those massive Costco bags lol. If you’re feeling bougie you can shred some cheese on top.

The level of public education in American schools, about anything that isn’t a STEM precursor, is basically nonexistent. The STEM precursors are sometimes covered okay and sometimes covered poorly, depending on your school system, but outside of that it might as well be nothing.

I went to some good schools and I literally can’t think of a single thing I learned about World War 2 from school, let alone about Germany before the war. It all comes either from family talking to me about it or from my own reading. I like to think of myself that at this point I have some fairly in-depth understanding but that’s not because of school.

I know one person who uses “whom” correctly in spoken English, a former co-worker of mine, and when I heard him do it my respect for him instantly went quite a bit higher. I don’t even know why but it seemed like it showed a good window on something good within him.

What? Why? That’s exactly how it works.

One thing I would add to all the good answers here: It stems from a lack of contact with real-world, messy, difficult environments.

Usually people who come into contact with harsh reality a lot in their daily life are pretty humble. They don’t get stuck on one way of looking at things, they don’t refuse to admit obvious good sense arguments. Even if they get to the point that they’re super-qualified, they just kind of have common sense and are approachable. Mostly, not always. I think this is why people kind of fall in love with certain types of environments with a lot of challenge or “win or lose” aspect to them: Business, sports, law, war, esports, mountain climbing, whatever. It’s like you get to prove yourself and all your bullshit against the harsh light of day, and a lot of times what you learn is that some genius theory wasn’t really all that solid once it got exposed to the real world.

But then, a whole lot of first-world modern life isn’t like that. You can just go around your entire life talking about economics or politics and just be wrong as hell and you never get to find out. So it’s easy to be super-confident, and it’s obviously a lot more comfortable to be always right about everything than it is to admit when someone’s maybe successfully poking a hole in your genius.

Wait: My memory of the story was that Clinton loved to escort women around and constantly signed up for the duty, and everyone else on all sides of the equation had no particular strong feelings about it. Except for John Mulaney’s mom.

Jesus Christ dude. They took a wildly popular platform, replaced the social aspects that made it popular with incredibly obnoxious ad-spam and didn’t bother to absorb any of the new features or paradigms that other apps were inventing and making popular. So people moved on. It’s not complex. And then, trying to diagnose why everyone might have abandoned it as a result, they say things like:

Second, it feels heavyweight to request someone new as a friend, which makes it hard to rectify the first issue.

Yeah that’s a huge issue. You nailed it, you fucking donkey.

I feel like this is the kind of question that needs a whole lot of details before it is answerable.

Tax fraud? Absolutely fuck not.

Drunk driving? Probably I would give them a single “Hey next time I find out you’re doing that I am calling the cops on you” warning shot.

Stealing from their company? Depends, what does the company do and who owns it? Again almost certainly not.

And so on.

I feel like you actually probably can drive air into the empty spaces (that’s exactly how your lungs work), if you can somehow make a tight enough seal on the person’s nipple, but it would be incredibly dangerous because of embolism. Don’t do it.

Lemmy’s core development team are communists, of a very bizarre and inconsistent type that is openly or semi-openly in favor of massive command-economy-capitalist countries like China and Russia even when they are engaged in imperialist conduct. They’re weird. Idk what’s up with it. A lot of the core historical instances still have that mindset and are sometimes so obnoxious about demanding that everyone else needs to also that they are banned from the more recent more mainstream-thinking instances.

Generalizations are tough but I think it’s safe to say that 90% of everyone else on Lemmy is some variety of vague-leftist roughly in the mold of Bernie Sanders, which depending on your personal Overton window you may define anywhere from “disgusting liberal who betrayed the movement by voting for Kamala Harris” to “Communist.”

Hope this helps