Interesting Links for 15-03-2025

[andrewducker]

1. Tired and depressed people are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories

(tags:depression sleep conspiracy psychology )

2. Origami measuring spoon incites fury after 9 years of Kickstarter delay hell

(tags:manufacturing kickstarter design )

3. Why Do Transit Agencies Keep Falling for the Hydrogen Bus Myth?

(tags:hydrogen buses transport fraud )

4. I love Tumblr's enthusiastic celebration of the Ides of March

(tags:history funny murder Roml )

5. A trans refugee's court case against Hungary just improved Trans+ rights across all of Europe

(tags:transgender LGBT rights Europe GoodNews )

Comments

[aldabra]

1. Hello. Tired and depressed person here. I think they've got the causality backwards. If you believe in conspiracy theories you're going to sleep less well. Also, once you experience something actually being a conspiracy you're going to take the possibility more seriously subsequently.

Notice how liberal democracy has just succumbed to a forty-year right wing conspiracy in the US. And how many people seem to be sleeping less well as a result. Making it socially unacceptable to hypothesise about conspiracies works very much in favour of *actual conspiracists*, to the extent that they could publish Project 2025 before the election and still nobody took it seriously.

It turns out that reality makes people tired and depressed and in need of better sleep.

[andrewducker]

They described a conspiracy theory to people and "Researchers found that those with poorer sleep quality were more likely to believe the conspiratorial version of events."

[aldabra]

Yes, I read it. They have poorer sleep quality because they're *already* more likely to believe the conspiratorial version of events. They're less trusting of the situation they're in, so they sleep less well, and also they're less trusting of new situations. Independently of whether the new situation is actually trustworthy or not.

[andrewducker]

That reasoning for why they're sleeping badly seems like a huge leap. There are hundreds of reasons for people to sleep badly.

[amberite]

This is true. Also, sleep deprivation is robustly causally linked with a lot of mental health and cognitive problems, so you can assert pretty confidently that it'll have *some* effect toward increasing paranoia because it fucks things up on everyone already in a zillion ways.

That said, a devil's advocate point for your interlocutor: working jobs that impair your sleep because capitalism works that way does sort of provide observable data toward the hypothesis that other people are benefiting from harming you in an organized fashion. We do learn from our environments, and those environments aren't great.

[jducoeur]

Re: (2) -- the article's not wrong that this is a risk of Kickstarter, although I'm surprised by how high the cited failed-to-deliver percentage is. I use KS heavily, and in my experience that sort of failure is pretty unusual. Not sure whether my primary topics (comics and games) just do better than average, or what.

I didn't back Polygon (although the article tempts me to try and track down a set at retail), but had a somewhat similar experience with Sentien, a bone-conduction headphone set that shipped four years late. They had the same problem of poor communication that left the backers suspicious that it was a scam (especially because the deadlines just kept slipping, again and again). But the biggest problem was that, when it finally did ship, the results were just Okay. They're not terrible -- but they're not as good as the Shockz headphones that I eventually gave up and bought at retail while I was waiting, which were cheaper, more comfortable, and work more consistently.

So at least Polygon sounds like it's the real deal, just woefully mismanaged as a project...

[andrewducker]

Yeah, the problem is that most of the people running these Kickstarters are not good at project management, communication, dealing with suppliers, etc.

So if everything runs smoothly then they're all good. And if it doesn't then it all goes to hell.