I decided to find out if any progress had been made on the science behind why some ants are attracted to electrical fields. After filtering out exterminators (it's so demoralizing to search for information on creatures you love and find nothing but people who know nothing about them boasting about how they will kill them all) I found what looked like a blog. But, who the heck is "James Brown"? Never heard of the dude. Maybe he could be my new friend if he likes ants enough to blog about them!
As far as I can tell these people are phantoms. That's cruel on multiple levels. If I was not familiar with this SEO trick I'd spend time looking for them both (to politely tell them about the errors in their blog... which I would assume they would care about since they love insects.)
But I know what this is now. It's probably the exterminators. To get their page ranks up they need "legitimate" pages... like personal blogs by enthusiasts to link to them.
@albertcardona@futurebird it's awful but also useful. If you do know the language "here's what you need to know" is an enormous flashing signpost saying what follows is bullshit and can be ignored.
It's a phrase targeting the information overwhelmed. A mind vulnerable to being told something that sounds true and feels true ... but maybe isn't true... but even if it is true it's selectively sending you along.
We all get tired and just want someone to tell us "what we need to know"
But don't let it be a stranger or a bot! The only person who can say "here's what you need to know" to me is my husband when explaining what flavor of ice-cream he wants me to buy.
@futurebird@lostwax@albertcardona if someone wants their spouse to pick up a specific sort of ice cream i'd normally expect them to just say brand and type, an utterance that's comparable to or shorter than "here's what you need to know"
the latter implies there are so many permutations of acceptable ice cream types, each of which may or may not be available at that particular trip, that you're being given flow charts and formulas to work with
That is exactly what is happening. And he knows how easily overwhelmed I get with shopping so he tries to make it simple... but like me he's really picky.
We are expected to take this kind of BS as "harmless gaming of the system." but I find it incredibly distrustful and hurtful. It's making it harder for people to find each other by putting all these fake people in the way. It's LIES the pages are full of half-true nonsense. It's making people know less and filling their heads with false facts.
And this kind of page is what you find FIRST. You won't find @alexwild or the formiculture forum.
@futurebird@alexwild SEO and the marketing as a whole are toxic as fuck. They want to push themselves in your space, without your consent only to gain more power/money. There is not a single acceptable thing about it ...
These fake pages ought to be blacklisted to oblivion. But I don't see any search engines taking this seriously at all.
Not really in their interest to do that. We need to make more noise about just how terrible these pages are. Fake experts? Fake people? Fake images? Fake facts?
Information pollution & fragmentation of natural networks of human learning. A rot on the body of human knowledge: any search engine that puts such pages at the top should be ashamed.
I live in fear of the day that things that look like academic papers, formatted and written like academic papers start popping up all over the place but they will just be generated nonsense.
So I will need to go to the journal's webpage (if they have one) and look up the paper to see if they really published it before I read anything (if the journal lets you do that without subscribing)
And then I'll need to also check if the journal is a real one too.
I already do this if I'm doing any serious research, but part of learning is exploratory. Needing to suspect that EVERY sentence could be a lie kills the momentum.
I'm not a professional scientist. I'm just an enthusiastic amateur. I have a full time job and don't have the time to do all that all of the time.
I should be able to read a damn blog about ants without being worried a machine is feeding me lies from a ghost.
@futurebird@medley56@wmd This is the core of the problem IMHO... Summing up this thread in my own words: There is an erosion of Trust, an undermining of Human connection and an en-garbage-ification of information. I fear the permutations on today's known "attack vectors" and the results that will be manufactured...
@futurebird@medley56@wmd Are you aware of the (now retracted, fortunately) scientific paper with AI generated illustrations of absurdly large rat genitalia? It was making rounds on the Fediverse a few months ago. Scientific publishing was already severely flawed before AI slop generation became a thing, and it's going further down the spiral. It really boils down to personal reputation, which also has it's flaws.
I don't have institutional access to most journals so many of these systems are of limited value for me. I tend to find pdfs of journal articles I want to read when they aren't behind a paywall or if I can get the author to send it to me.
Will these extensions help with that?
Amateurs doing self study like me don't have access to many of the tools that those working in the system might have.
So far there have been some fake papers submitted to journals and I think a few even got "published" but at time of posting if you find something that looks like a paper that says it's from Journal X it's probably really just that.
If you are looking at papers on a controversial topic eg. COVID there is already a lot of fake stuff out there. But on "boring" science topics, things like a description of a new species of ant? One can trust a paper most of the time.
But, my trust has been deeply shaken and I check now and then, and look for the signs of the rot spreading regularly.
@futurebird@medley56@wmd@alexwild Yeah, that is a fear I share. Especially if the real research remains behind paywalls, and the fake ones will obviously be open access. Guess which ones will be shared more. Try fighting fake news then.. I guess, as bad as it is, it is one more argument to make all research Open Access.
I wonder if a non-profit search engine is possible. I can’t believe Google is willing to burn down their brand like this. Also, an opening for curated information services like Wikipedia and Encylopedia Brittanica.
I was initially skeptical of Wikipedia and I feel a little bad about the article I contributed about hummingbirds hitching rides on the backs of geese (it didn’t last long) but Wikipedia has proven very reliable for what I need.
I make a monthly contribution to wikipedia. I used to have many problems with them (and still do) but I realized how lost I'd be if they ever became like the rest of the web. I need them to be the way that they are.
@futurebird@wa7iut@wmd
Me too!
I use their website almost daily.
Every time I use my phone to ID a plant, I am directed to Wikipedia to confirm the information. I adore Wikipedia and I feel that I can help protect it with my small contribution. I use iNaturalist to triple confirm or when Wikipedia and my phone ID function aren’t helpful, but they usually help.
I’ve been contributing too, though annually and recommend everyone who uses it also contribute what you can. They are generally the first place I look for information. The techical articles in the areas I know about have been very good quality. Certainly should be supported. Anything free means you’re the product.
I don't have a good feeling about this. "Planting trees" is almost a red flag for me at this point since very few people seem to understand how complex and the real investment needed to plant a tree.
You can't just spam saplings and expect a forest. A forest is a living complex system easier to preserve than it is to build.
"planting trees?" Really? What kind? Are they native species? Who will care for them in the critical first years? Who owns the land?
Tree planting schemes have been used as green-washing more often than they have been sincere or effective means to care for the earth. Some "tree planting" operations are just logging companies who sell the rights of their monoculture fields to companies who want to claim they planted trees. The trees are harvested years later.
In NYC we planted millions of trees. But they just sent saplings and let amateurs spam them wherever. Years later they have all died.
@aral@futurebird@mistergibson@wa7iut@wmd I do believe there was literally a big criminal bust in Brazil regarding a carbon offsets company that was using the money dedicated to carbon offsets to log the rainforest.
@futurebird@mistergibson@wa7iut@wmd yeah, my family has tried to raise about 2 hectar of mixed forest for about 30 years - it's insane how many of the trees planted didn't make it
even if they mean well, one planted sapling isn't one tree in the end, it's 90% deer breakfast
However, my understanding of what Ecosia's doing--unless they're outright lying--is that they partner with different local ecological organizations that specifically aim to rebuild biodiversity in damaged environments. One of their efforts in Brazil is even more about "fighting illegally set fires by ranchers that want to turn forests into grazing land" than it is "plant a bunch of trees".
@futurebird@mistergibson@wa7iut@wmd
I’ve used Ecosia for many years and had the same fears, but they’re a good company. They have different projects. It’s not random.
The very goal of advertising is to make us consume more and pollute more than what we really need.
Advertising money is a very small fraction of the benefits big corpos would not have made if there was no advertising.
By definition, everything related to advertising is destroying our ecosystem. That’s even the goal itself ( because "consuming" == "transforming ressources into trash")
I still think the NYC tree planting events were good for the community. People got together and dug around in the soils of their local parks and medians. We noticed the little wild places tucked between the buildings and met other people who cared. I think a better event could feature:
@futurebird@mistergibson@wa7iut@wmd I will say this activities frees more seats at restaurants, plays and movie house, making me reservations easier. Kudos! Please continue!
@futurebird@mistergibson@wa7iut@wmd This is honestly giving me the idea of "natural city tours" that don't just take you to parks or nature preserves, but wander around a city/suburb and point out all the wildlife there -- native and imported. Dole out factoids about each. Add in some kind of identification guide/treasure hunt aspect to get people more engaged. Donate portions of ticket sales to rewilding or other local initiatives to increase native rewilding.
Idk you've got to meet people where they are to get them to care. Showing them the nature around them, around where they live, might just spark that for some.
I love this idea and I'm thinking it could be a great Senior Thesis project for some of our students to develop and give such a tour in our area. This would let me get some professional dev. hours to develop lesson plans for how to make such a tour (and design one myself, to really learn how to do it right)--
And then who knows maybe they will feel like doing it again when they move off to college!
@futurebird Yes!! :ablobcatheartsqueeze:
Maybe have them start with their own neighborhoods? There's a lot of life we often overlook in our own streets because we walk by it every day. But definitely consult with the other faculty to help build it out! Hopefully it catches some student's attention and awakens their inner biologist/ecologist!
@Byrdbrnz@futurebird@mistergibson@wa7iut in my city we have an event called Jane's Walk (after the urbanist Jane Jacobs) that is a weekend of community-led local walking tours: <https://janeswalk.org/> Topics include food, art, urban planning, history, systemic inequities, and yes, nature.
I've thought about doing a bug/spider-related walk for years but it's kind of hard to make sure they'll show up, you know?
@futurebird@mistergibson@wa7iut@wmd planting trees for the sake of trees, forests, and communities is great. Planting trees for the sake of capitalism, not so much.
@futurebird@wmd@wa7iut@mistergibson As someone who lived in New York City 50 years ago, there are a LOT more trees on the streets today. So a good many of them did survive.
@futurebird@mistergibson@wa7iut@wmd "Those trees you planted— do they happen to be on wood harvesting plantations? Are you literally planting them to cut them down in 30 years?"
I'll go one further. All those national drives from India and similar areas to plant billions of trees? It's just free labor for capitalism. They're planting lumber forests, and it's done by volunteers.
Renewable yeah, but that's just lining billionaire pockets, folks who own thousands of acres for those projects. New growth trees are carbon neutral at best.
I would much rather see $RANDOM_COMPANY pledging to keep an already alive tree protected and alive for an extra year, than this garbage around planting a tree. You can plant a million trees and bulldoze them all the next day. Or just leave them alone without proper water. It's meaningless.
Keeping something alive for a specific, defined amount of time... now that's real value, especially if it's part of an already old growth ecosystem.
@futurebird@wmd@alexwild my old blog, a real labor of love that i spent 4 years on but haven't touched in years, is now completely deindexed by google. I search for pages using their exact text and can't find them.
I like your phrase “information pollution”, it provides a framework or metaphor that can be applied more broadly than this specific example.
Like with other forms of pollution we can use regulation, education, social pressure, fines, punishment for different kinds of pollution: litter vs excessive waste vs toxic emissions.
@futurebird@wmd@alexwild Just a thought, but maybe if we remind them that "AI" trained on "AI generated" info actually gets much worse they might take it more seriously. All those fake generated sites feed back into their own LLMs and increases perplexity exponentially. They don't care about what it does to us, but it ultimately affects their bottom line on the product they're throwing every single thing they have behind.
@futurebird@alexwild
It's plain old lying, just like fake reviews.
Here in Europe afaik, it's now illegal to put up fake reviews of businesses and products.
It shouldn't be long until this cr@p is also illegal.
@futurebird@alexwild Agree this is a lousy situation. I'll offer a slightly optimistic and perhaps even polyanish reaction: what do we need to build which routes around this? I'm not sure what it is either, except that the Fediverse (most of what I've seen so far anyway) appears to be some flavor of step in the right direction.
Bullshit is an existential threat to civil society. "Free speech" is a giant security hole in the body politic. It has to be more nuanced. A sophisticated society would find a way to encourage sincere discourse, while filtering out noise that destroys it.
@futurebird it is a SEO trick as recently google has been ranking up articles with listed authors. You can basically trace back any thing that's ruining the internet back to Google these days 🙄
@futurebird
The profile images are quite "old fashioned" (in current technology terms) GAN generated images, probably from thispersondoesnotexist dot com.
Once you're familiar with the type and "have your eye in" they become easy to spot even in thumbnails. Any content using them is almost always suspect.
Note the coincidence of major facial features (eyes & mouth especially).
Newer tech versions are often much more difficult to spot.