Matt Bennett 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (2814)

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 31 Mar, 2023 @ 01:06pm

  see my previous reply to one of your earlier post

  Oh, I replied. You're just babbling. You're a hateful liberal who worships "The Science" without understanding what that means or what it works. And now someone has told you in detail how "The Science" is made up and not scientific at all and you're Big Mad about it and I just don't fucking care.

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 31 Mar, 2023 @ 01:02pm

  you asked ‘how large a sample size’

  I just read the summary to start., it really wasn't necessary to read the whole thing, you morons dragged me into it.

  You fail to address any of their actual methodology, the stats used and how they’re used,

  I did, in great detail, actually. Try reading again.

  you don’t mention any of the usual critiques of such studies.

  Not sure what you think that is or why it's important. I had my own criticisms. Maybe the "usual critiques" are wrong, I have no idea what you're referring to.

  The way you attack any studies of the sort

  The vast majority of studies of this sort are concocted to justify a political position and have no scientific basis. They are essentially just culture war salvos. This is actually a particularly egregious example. (again, as I detailed)

  Or are you like a majority of rightwingers who just automatically distrust science?

  Again, I have a physics degree, I respect hard science a great deal. I do not respect bad science, nor an opinion disguised with scientific ornamentation, which is unfortunately an awful lot of sociology.

  I mean, Science usually does give results that lean fairly heavily to the left,

  Ahaha, yes, I'm sure you would like to think that. "The Science" or "Science" with a capital "S", maybe. Actual science not so much. My general experience with people who say "The Science", and you are fitting this mold perfectly, is that they do not actually understand science very well at all and in fact treat it much like a religion. "Science Guy said something I already agree with and their was a Methodology so if you disagree with You Are Wrong". It doesn't matter if someone has pointed out the methodology is wrong or the underlying data is trash (as I have, with this "paper"), "The Science" is on your side and everyone else is a heretic. Really quite explicitly, it has nothing to do with actual science nor reason. Example: Actual science does not support and in fact refutes quite a lot of what I'm sure you believe about covid, covid vaccines, lockdowns and masks. You haven't mentioned any such beliefs but I know you hold them, because you believe The Science, not what actual scientific research has said about it.

  Let me put it another way....[random babbling about how much you hate conservatives, republicans, and Trump particular]

  Yeah, OK, you hold a bunch of super awful opinions about republicans and are kinda hateful, I knew that already, but what does that have to do with how science works? Nothing, is the answer.

  So regardless of your objections to this paper, how could you not see it as likely being correct? I would be far more skeptical if it found the opposite.

  Yes, of course you would. The entire reason you are defending this paper is it feeds into your preconceived opinion. It's just a piece of opinion, with opinion as datasets, opinion treated as objective metrics, recycled through an equation, because you think if there's math involved it must be science, and it is designed to generate a predetermined finding. But you LIKE that finding, and you like "The Science" so you're going to defend that tooth and nail even tho you don't understand it. You can think whatever you want, but it's an opinion, not science.

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 31 Mar, 2023 @ 10:53am

  Ultimately true, yes. Still almost nothing but math.

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 10:22pm

  Wut? Are you just babbling now? Most sociology is nonsense, for similar and sadly predicable reasons, but this "study" is awful *in particular. None of criticisms were general, they were actually specific to why this article is made up nonsense.

  you should have objected earlier instead of going along with the turn to the general

  Oh my, there was no "turn to the general". Quite the opposite. I turned out being generally dismissive, and then once your whining led me to actually read it I realized it was so much worse than I initially assumed. Sociology is, in general, quite bad, but this "study" is much worse.

  “Oh, sure, there are NO examples of a sociology study (which overall have incredibly low reproducibility rates and therefore are not science) producing a biased result, right”

  Yes.....I had read the general summary and was dismissing it on general grounds of being sociology (fair) and having an obvious political goal. It just didn't warrant further investigation. When you continued to defend the article, like an idiot, I was taunted into reading it and found it was **so much worse than I had assumed and transparently so*. My general disdain was warranted, but I actually got a lot more precise with them over time, how do you not see that?!?

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 10:10pm

  Dude, this was only at the 3rd level of responses (so reply to reply to reply), and he specifically and explicitly said in that comment that he was talking about “the Dominion Lawsuit do[cs]” and “Faux News polls”.

  He was using that to attack the claim that the paper applied faux "credibility" ratings to various sources. He was basically voicing support for bad methodology through an unrelated third thing. Do YOU read?

  Oh, and the paper you’re referring to isn’t even about studying sociology. You just asserted that it was and dismissed it

  DAFUQ? What the fuck are you talking about?!? I've said a great deal about sociology, I've said a great deal about this "study", I've said nothing about "studying sociology."

  you have decided to dismiss all sociology as not scientific.

  Well, yes, that much is true. Sociology isn't scientific, and I've shown you why. I suppose there could be an exception, but I haven't seen one for a while I have no idea what that has to do with the other random nonsense you're spewing.

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 09:58pm

  Yeah, it’s a joke. As in it is not meant to be taken seriously. Y

  It's a funny joke cuz it's more than a little true. Like not literally true, but close.

  Why are you using a joke as evidence for the truth of your claim?

  For one, cuz physics peeps will recognize the gang sign. But mostly cuz explaining in detail would take a lot of time and basically none of the audience would understand it anyway.

  Does physics involve a lot of math? Yes. However, it is not solely math as you claim

  Yeah, now you're just angling for a definitional argument, but seriously, theoretical physics is literally just math. It's anchored in real measurements, sure, but that's just the starting point, and you can get decades of "work" done without the introduction of a new datapoint. No one knows if what the string theorist are working on is even related to the real universe anyone. (which is a real problem, bad example, but it's funny) Experimentalists do a little bit of verifying a theorist prediction, but the vast majority of it just adding a few decimals to a measurement. (which you have to eliminate the possibility of observation error, with math). It's a teeny tiny bit of discovering new phenomena but no basically none of that. And of course you have to verify that new phenomena with math. All science involves math but seriously even experimental physics is all math with a teeny tiny bit of engineering on top. Oh, an engineering is almost all math, too. Yeah, seriously, it's all math. I can tell you've never done any this work, cuz yeah, it's a depressing amount of math.

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 09:32pm

  Now, how old did you think I was again? Early 20s or younger? And didn’t I say you were wrong about that each time?

  I'll take your word for otherwise, but you seem like a sophomoric idiot. Still do. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

  I’m not an expert,

  I mean, I'm not actually a practicing theorist (that is one of the few things I will say I'm not smart enough for and I only have a BS) but technically I am an expert compared to the average layman.

  nothing else you said would support your claims of familiarity with it

  It would if you were smarter. No, seriously, Mr. Bari Weiss, it's really not significant to me that you didn't understand it, you haven't understood many things that you really should have been expected to. I was describing the process of experimentally confirming predictions or finding gaps in the Standard Model in as simple of terms as possible. If it didn't make sense to you or you didn't find it convincing I really give no fucks.

  The same source you have used to attack sociology for not being reproducible (even though the studies often are reproducible) mentioned that this is an issue present in just about every field to some extent, and it didn’t single out sociology

  So this is double wrong because I don't think I've shared a "source" on the reproducibility crisis for weeks, and while I don't remember what the link was the Crisis is absolutely without question HEAVILY weighted towards the soft sciences, psychology and sociology by far being the worst offenders (biology is surprisingly bad, even at the molecular end). That really is common knowledge and no, I won't be providing a link, actually, you can go look it up on your own, it's really not hard. Your assertion just means you know jack-all about the subject and need to do some reading anyway. Every field has errors but the thing about physics is that an attempt at fraud (which absolutely happens a lot in the soft sciences) is apparent nearly immediately and observational errors actually get discovered pretty quickly, too.

  CERN is no more reproducible than most sociology or psychology studies,

  Yeah, so that's not true, at all, and just shows how little you know about it. You realize different groups get to run experiments there, right?

  The fact is that this is a crisis for science, particularly public perception of science, not just sociology and psychology

  So that's not true at all...it's mostly a sociology, biomedical, and climatology problem.....all fields where the variables are numerous, sometimes unknown, and squishy, and also where there's huge motivation to lie (mostly cuz things are squishy enough it's harder to get caught). Maybe psychology is worse than sociology, I dunno, but it matters a lot less cuz it's mostly the sociologists trying to tell you what your politics should be based on "The Science".

  Your defense of CERN against claims that it is not reproducible is rather weak in this context and essentially dismisses CERN as being unnecessary

  I actually have no idea what you're trying to say here and suspect you don't either. I dunno why I bothered breaking it down, that whoooooolllllleeee thing was basically nonsense.

• On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 08:30pm

  incorrect

• On the post: Senator Warner’s RESTRICT Act Is Designed To Create The Great Firewall Of America

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 08:29pm

  It doesn't. It just amazes me when people don't realize we are routinely prosecuting people for non-crimes based on who they pissed off, already.

• On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 04:14pm

  widely

  Incorrect

• On the post: Senator Warner’s RESTRICT Act Is Designed To Create The Great Firewall Of America

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 03:59pm

  to order US companies to secure their shit.

  Here's the fun bit: Neither government nor courts have any idea what "secure" is. So cool, you've just given whatever administration a tool to go after companies they don't like, whenever.

• On the post: Senator Warner’s RESTRICT Act Is Designed To Create The Great Firewall Of America

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 03:02pm

  It's almost like that sorta thing happens all the time, already.

• On the post: Senator Warner’s RESTRICT Act Is Designed To Create The Great Firewall Of America

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 03:02pm

  You should just parrot Reason more often

  1000x better than your usual posts. Even shitting on Mark Warner! I'll give you brownie points for that. Tiktok absolutely needs to be banned (Reason is also mostly wrong about this, but they state it much more sensibly than you do), but no, that doesn't mean the law doing so is going to be reasonable. And of course it isn't! Clean bills don't come out of congress anymore. Hey, remember yesterday, when you claimed Twitter following the exact same playbook Twitter had the LAST time the Modi government made them censor people, including continuing the suit to stop it, was somehow Musk "gladly" caving to their demands? As if something about either Twitter's options, or its actions had changed (it absolutely had not), and that meant Musk was a free speech hypocrite, for some reason? Definitely not that you hated him and were willing to say anything to badmouth him? Yeah, good times, that was fun. Anyway, you should copy Reason's homework more often.

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 02:33pm

  My post that you replied to was clearly not about this particular study.

  You were responding to a chain of comments about the study and seemed to be trying to defend sociology (foolish in and of itself), which was part of the same topic. So not only was your comment clearly about "the study", it would be expected to assume that, and if somehow you weren't talking about "the study", that's entirely on you.

  desperate attempt to change the subject or a sign of your really poor ability to parse sentences

  It literally was the subject, whether you realize it or not, but I suspect you do and now are just trying to shift the goalposts somehow after having been caught out. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 02:21pm

  I'm 45, with a physics degree. Now, instead of talking smack you have in NO WAY earned, why don't you explain why and how what I've said was wrong? Not "lol, no physicist would say that" (they would and do), actually explain yourself and show that YOU know what you're talking about, cuz you in no way have demonstrated even passing familiarity with the subject.

• On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 02:13pm

  Even “civilized” countries have rules like, you can’t be a holocaust denier.

  If the government can regulate speech, it's not a civilized country. Yeah, I'm aware the list that leaves. I said what I said.

• On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 02:10pm

  OK, and what do you think the other option is, exactly?

• On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 02:00pm

  to explain your logical progression from “it is possible” to “it’s a good idea”.

  Well I definitely didn't say that. Not sure if you're strawmanning or if your reading comp is that bad.

  – “Cost v Benefit”

  The cost of the car was negligible, basically zero compared to the overall cost of the launch. The benefits by comparison were very large (all marketing) equivalent to probably many thousands of times the cost of the car. (I have no idea how much, just that it is "a LOT") Cost can be other monetary, of course, which brings me to this curious statement:

  no concern for the obvious ramifications.

  I have no idea what you think is "obvious" or not, but there are no *ramifications" If you think there are, you have no idea how anything works and should sit down and be quiet. The car (what's left of it) is currently in orbit around the sun (not Earth) and is effectively another (small) asteroid. I say "what's left of it" because it is slowly disintegrating in strong UV radiation and after a few decades only the steel chassis and other metals (maybe the glass) will still be around. Certainly nothing organic (including plastic) nor volatiles. There's no "environment" to save out there. There are no consequences to this at all.

  – “There was basically no reason NOT to do it.”

  Yeah, so cost (anyway you want to define it) is very, very low, and the benefit is significant. No reason not to do it. Might even say stupid not to do it. Look, I seen a lot of that in this thread, just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it was dumb.

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 08:51am

  Just take the L and move on.

• On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

  

  Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 08:50am

  Trump has murdered satire.

  Oh, no, liberals killed satire. We used to joke that a failed male athlete could just claim to be a woman and win medals. Now that's literally true.

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