Some states do use their own definitions of terrorism to explain why it’s bad when other people do it but OK when they do it, but that’s definitely not a uniform definition.

the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.

- Britannica

The use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals.

- American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

the use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants.

- Wiki

(Government, Politics & Diplomacy) systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve some goal

- Collins English Dictionary

the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes… government or resistance to government by means of terror.

- Webster’s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cegalOZqmEo

I don’t normally plan my reading much ahead of time but August is an exception on a few counts.

Firstly, Whalefall by Daniel Kraus comes out on August 8th. It’s such a goofy idea for a story (think Jonah and the Whale meets The Martian) and I have been so pumped, I’ve been talking people’s ear off about it for months. It’s like scientifically accurate Pinocchio.

Secondly, one of the bookclub picks for the Discord server affiliated with [email protected] is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin

And then it’s Tropeical Readathon (a semiannual reading challenge thing) again so I have a couple dozen books picked out to cover that, but the only other sci-fi one apart from the above is Under This Forgetful Sky by Lauren Yero.

I made a kind of “if you like PHM you might like these other books” rec chart thing when I first read PHM; if you’ve finished reading it you might enjoy some of these (although it does mention a few key elements of the book so if you’re going in completely blind and aren’t far in yet then don’t look at this yet).

It’s a machine learning chat bot, not a calculator, and especially not “AI.”

Its primary focus is trying to look like something a human might say. It isn’t trying to actually learn maths at all. This is like complaining that your satnav has no grasp of the cinematic impact of Alfred Hitchcock.

It doesn’t need to understand the question, or give an accurate answer, it just needs to say a sentence that sounds like a human might say it.

The impacts of the environmental damage are not necessarily worse than the environmental damage from not sinking superyachts in the long term, if it becomes a common enough threat that rich people no longer feel secure in owning them.

The concern with anything too destructive is with the property and safety of workers on board imo, not the ships themselves.

I’d recommend Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline if you want to hear more about the reasoning for this sort of thing.

Scientists can just make stuff up, but in this case Paul’s complaint appears to be more to do with the article than any underlying research as he is trying to draw information that the article doesn’t pretend to intend to provide.

A lot of the problems with publicly visible scientific research are to do with media communication and the way that journalists will interpret or spice up results in their coverage.

There are also problems with the incentive to publish surprising results more than confirmation of existing information, as well as with the incentives for research funding, and scientists can bring their own biases into research consciously or unconsciously.

For things like company sponsored research, it is not uncommon for multiple trials to be run and only the ones with positive results to be published. I’d recommend Ben Goldacre’s pop sci industry journalism books Bad Science or the even better sequel Bad Pharma for more discussion of this.

Then there are journals which function more like vanity press, with insufficient peer review processes and that just charge people to publish their papers.

But there are also scientists who just wholesale make things up, whether for obvious financial gain like Andrew Wakefield making up the autism from vaccines MMR scare because he had competing vaccines he wanted to sell, or just for easy prestige like Jonathan Pruitt just copy and pasting underlying data samples to boost trends.

It is not unthinkable for researchers to invent information, although my gut will always be to trust the researchers not the international megacorporation with an obvious financial incentive and the idea of suing researchers like this without substantial proof of fraud could have devastating effects on scientific research should J&J manage to push it through.

(YT video essay about Pruitt)

You cannot do that with other social media.

Facebook likes, Twitter likes, Discord reacts, LinkedIn reacts, etc. are all publicly visible. The only possible slight difference with this is that in some cases people might not be aware, in which case the issue would be that it is less obvious to a casual browser than Facebook’s “AncientMariner and 23 others liked this post” rather than that the likes are visible at all.