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The Luddite

I might've found the dumbest paper ever written.

sciencedirect.com/science/arti

"if Canadians all used land acknowledgements in their emails roughly 30 people would be sacrificed annually to reputation signaling."

An honest paper by a well adjusted person who just cares about the environment.

Mar 17, 2025, 01:24 Ā· Ā· 10 Ā· 18

I never thought I'd live to see the day when "pronouns/year" is a unit.

This must be satire.

Josh, buddy, what the fuck are you talking about?

Also lol @ "virtue signally." Dude is so mad about pronouns and trans people that he can't even spell virtual signaling right.

@platypus That's different because AI is progress whereas pronouns and land acknowledgements are libtard virtue signaling.

@theluddite That sounds like it comes from The Onion...

@theluddite pronouns are literally destroying the planet!

@theluddite Think of all the emissions that could be saved by shoving Josh into a locker

@theluddite
A trans-man would save 33% of characters off his former pronoun, 25% off his possessive pronoun - thus saving the world. Quite a percentage! šŸ¤“

@theluddite How many people were sacrificed in the process of writing and publishing this paper? (Seriously, surely this is one of those elaborate academic publication jokes?!?)

@theluddite@assemblag.es @ElenLeFoll@fediscience.org I can't wait to read his article about the harms of generative ML usage!

any moment now

any... any second... just uh... give it a minute now...

@theluddite I wonder what the carbon cost of that paper was.

@theluddite
The production and circulation of that research has appr. generated 300 tons of CO2 I guess 😔 šŸ˜‚ 😜

And us spreading it here has also an effect lol

I have said it before: there is always more research needed, even though we know what's the matter. If research is stopped all those people can't pay their mortgage.

@theluddite this is very very normal that he decided to focus on these "relatively new additions to email signatures" and not on the historial and often image-based "don't print this e-mail" signature. He could at least have found some irony in their environmental motivation :p

@theluddite he should do the pointless paragraph-long confidentiality notices at the bottom of emails next. šŸ™„

@theluddite Dude must have gone to the Jordan Peterson school of bullshit

@theluddite
I once had a long, long conversation with a person like the author of this paper.

Eventually I said, "OK, do you think there's ever a case where efforts to improve things don't end up making things worse overall".

He thought about it for a minute, then said "no, not really".

At a certain point, the boundaries between good faith and bad faith argument stop mattering 😄

@theluddite I’d submit an letter to the editor and do a computation on how much CO2 was wasted by the author breathing