I might've found the dumbest paper ever written.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666188825000863
"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.
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.
@theluddite in a world of ChatGPTā¦
@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
Oh hell yes! Followed :)
@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!
@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?!?)
Please please please let it be so! I thought that it might be but it looks like Joshua Pearce is a real professor and has also written a popular article based on this research: https://theconversation.com/email-signatures-are-harming-the-planet-and-could-cost-people-their-lives-its-time-to-stop-using-them-251215
@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
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 does it say "QED, atheists" at the end :P
@theluddite he should do the pointless paragraph-long confidentiality notices at the bottom of emails next.
@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 Iād submit an letter to the editor and do a computation on how much CO2 was wasted by the author breathing