for - climate crisis propaganda - human psychology used to exploit irrational tendencies of people to delay climate action

This reminds me of, during the height of the iPod era, when someone I know was gifted* an non-Apple music player and some iTunes gift cards—their first device for their first music purchases not delivered on physical media. They created an iTunes account, bought a bunch of music on the Music Store, and then set about trying to get it onto their non-Apple device, coming to me when it wasn't going well trying to get it to work themselves. I explained how Apple had (at the time) made iTunes Music Store purchases incompatible with non-Apple devices. Their response was baffling to me:

Rather than rightly getting pissed at Apple for this state of affairs, they did the opposite—they expressed their disdain about the non-Apple MP3 player they were given** and resolved to get it exchanged for credit so they could buy a (pricier, of course) Apple device that would "work". That is, they felt the direct, non-hypothetical effects of Apple's incompatibility ploy, and then still took exactly the wrong approach by caving despite how transparently nefarious it all was.

Returning to this piece: imagine if all that stuff hadn't been locked up in the social media silo. Imagine if all those "comments, posts, and photos from the past 14 years" hadn't been unwisely handed over for someone else to keep out of reach unless you assimilated. Imagine just having it delivered directly to your own inbox.

* NB: not by me

* NB: not as a consequence for mimetic desire for the trendiest device; they were perfectly happy with the generic player before they understood the playback problem

With this comment, the anti-JS position is becoming increasingly untenable. The author earlier suggested C as an alternative. So their contention is that it's easier to write bug-free code in C than it is in JS. This is silly.

C hackers like Fabrice Bellard don't choose C for the things they do because it's easier to write bug-free code in C.

ReconfigBehSci [@SciBeh]. (2022, January 8). RT @thehowie: Deaths by Grizzly bears each year: ~1.6 Deaths from COVID each year: ~400K. Adjust for age, all you want, his fear of Grizz… [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1479832293489397767

Zeynep Tufekci en Twitter: “What the person just chosen to lead the "Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health" for WHO wrote on February 28 ("if you're worried about COVID, it's irrational panic") and what I wrote one day before ("We have to get ready so we can lessen risk").” / Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved August 09, 2020, from https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1289217618172243971

Teovanovic, P., Lukic, P., Zupan, Z., Lazić, A., Ninković, M., & Zezelj, I. (2020, May 20). Irrational beliefs differentially predict adherence to guidelines and pseudoscientific practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gefhn

This reminds me of Plato's "Chariot Allegory:" the notion that the charioteer (logic, reason) attempts to drive and control the two horses (rational and irrational) toward the truth.