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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • NeverNudeNo13@lemmings.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzflouride
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    27 days ago

    It’s so funny I was just having a similar conversation about neurotoxic venomous animals in another thread. Lethality is an obviously concerning threshold, but there are substances out there that can easily destroy your quality of life and livelihood that never reach the concern of being lethal.

    I think for mostly rational people concerned about fluoride in their water is that it was a public health decision made with little to no actual science proving it’s safety or efficacy when it was first decided that they were going to add it to the public water supply. The proposed benefits of it weren’t even supported by scientific evidence, it was just supposed that exposure to sodium fluoride could potentially reduce tooth decay for some.

    Personally, I’ve suffered from the cosmetic damage of dental fluorosis, and I’m not necessarily thrilled about fluoride. But I have way more issues with public mandates founded on pseudoscience than I am with sodium fluoride. Especially now that we can see evidence that for some people fluoride can be especially beneficial.

    So what was wrong with giving people the option of using fluoride toothpaste or mouthwashes… Why did it have to go into the public water supply?


  • Yeah that’s mostly true… But it’s not like a hangover… I had a friend bitten by a snake out in the Mojave once and I’m sure she would have strong opinions about how strenuous the recovery was from it. Neurotoxins, especially potent ones, can be disruptive enough to create long term disabilities. If you are someone who performs a lot of skilled fine motor movements as part of your job or as part of a hobby or something it could be a significant amount of time for you to fully recover from a neurotoxin.

    Cytotoxins are interesting as well, though generally not considered deadly they can really mess up your quality of life and be extremely debilitating, even disfiguring.

    Generally just a good idea to stay away from anything venomous.









  • The Latin alphabet is not the original alphabet system used for English. There are modern alternatives that have been suggested to help eliminate some of the confusion created by using a non native alphabet, the Shavian alphabet for instance would theoretically solve much of the issue.

    It’s kind of what happens in other languages as well… English speakers like to quip that there are x number of dozens of ways to spell Mohammed. And for sure, in English, it probably feels that way. But there is actually only one proper way to spell it you just have to use the Arabic alphabet to do so.




  • I as well use a Anker powerconf camera and it’s fantastic… But you will need a windows machine if you want to modify firmware settings on it as their control app runs in windows. It does seem that once you modify those settings they are persistent within the hardware itself though and once you move it back to the Linux machine it should all be preserved.

    Of course it’s possible someone has already closed that gap out already or maybe the app runs in wine.


  • Beautiful! Yeap that’s a very clean parallel and also extremely important in that field as well.

    Since this has turned into a lovely exchange I want to offer one more point for your consideration.

    Where the outcome of marketing data typically intends to position a product or service in to it’s most profitable position, and the quality of the data produced can be somewhat validated by future sales/market share/market depth/etc.

    Polls like the one we are discussing aren’t constrained in the same manner and may be maliciously and purposefully designed to generate biased data. Humans are inherently vulnerable to hostile psychological manipulations. If this poll specifically isn’t just an outright scam intended to get its recipient to click on some link that load a payload of malware, it is certainly designed to purposefully create skewed empirical data.

    Not everyone, but certainly a small minority of people who may have not necessarily felt certain about where they stood either direction could look at the results of a poll like this and might find a tinge of doubt in the back of their heads. This sort of tactic hopes that a person will feel a paranoia that everyone else seems to know something significant that they don’t and drive social anxieties up. Again, not always, but also not uncommonly, we can find ourself doubting even deeply felt personal resolve on a topic or position if it feels like the vast majority of people disagree with us. This sort of cognitive bias warfare isn’t intended to immediately flip a persons perspective, but rather it’s designed to soften a persons resolve and introduce enough doubt that they may become susceptible to being flipped later. It’s why we need to embrace healthy skepticism and be willing to be more stoic with how we consume numbers others prepped for us.

    Much love friend, have a great day/evening!


  • Happy to help, sorry rushed a little bit to finish the last reply. Effectively the point the original replier was trying to make is that the data set is polluted with bad data because the collection method is just terrible. So back to the analogy I started setting up earlier. If the goal is to get everyone food, you technically win… Job done… Good job. Food will arrive, some people will get the chicken they specifically requested, and maybe a few people who actually wanted hamburgers will be happy too…

    But if the goal is to know what your coworkers actually wanted to eat and get it for them, then the only orders you will certainly get right would be for the people who actually wanted chicken, had the opportunity to reply, and took time out of their day to confirm there order. But you will also have people who maybe aren’t that keen on chicken but ordered it because they really didn’t want a hamburger.

    Everyone else will now get a hamburger… That includes people who actually wanted hamburgers, people who didn’t have a preference, people with a preference but it’s something other than chicken or hamburgers, people who actually wanted chicken but didn’t get their order in on time, people who brought there lunch and planned on eating it instead, people who thought the message you sent was a scam and didn’t reply but would have said chicken if they had known it was actually legit, people who told you in person they wanted chicken and didn’t realise they still needed to email you, people you sent the email to but were actually on vacation or working from remote that day, etc. All of them, hamburgers… How exciting… LOOK HOW POPULAR HAMBURGERS ARE EVERYONE! I can’t believe hamburgers beat chicken! Can you believe that 67.3% of our office is such fans of hamburgers?!

    Basically the results of a poll constructed like in the original post would be utterly trash, because the method being used is horseshit and not how any serious poller would/should ever conduct a poll.


  • It pollutes the senders data set because its entirely fallacious to assume that the only reason why some one would choose not to assert their opinion is only because they hold a specific opinion. The resulting data would be inherently skewed towards a particular result.

    Imagine you are taking orders for lunch for an office of coworkers and you were just told people that you are going l to order a hamburger for anyone who doesn’t explicitly say they wanted chicken and gave them a limited time to respond. You are very likely going to find some angry coworkers who wanted chicken but were stuck in a meeting. You will likely have a small population of people who realized it was Tuesday and had been really looking forward to tacos. And certainly, the vegetarians in the office are going to try to sabotage you professionally for awhile.



  • NeverNudeNo13@lemmings.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzbugs
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    7 months ago

    All good my dude… It didn’t make sense to me on my first past either so I figured that it might have gotten you in the same spot too. Just glad to see the community is not throwing down votes at ya anymore, because your comment just felt like an honest misread. Cheers.