Opinionhaver @ Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

A contrarian isn’t one who always objects - that’s a confirmist of a differ

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6 mo. ago

you might as well join them.

I don’t see how that furthers your cause. Quite a few have already joined them, as you might’ve noticed - and this kind of rhetoric isn’t exactly helping with that.

Insulting the person you're talking to isn't very effective way to clear up that confusion. You have a nice day.

I'm not defending Republican policies, and I’m not denying that there are real issues worth being angry about. What I’m calling out is the way you’re choosing to express that anger - by making exaggerated, tribalistic jabs that shut down conversation and treat an entire group as cartoon villains.

Muslims are people, Islam is the religion. People are not the problem.

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Feeling wronged doesn’t give you a free pass to distort reality or attack people dishonestly. You can criticize Republicans all you want - but do it with integrity. You’d rightly call them out for misrepresenting your views, so maybe hold yourself to that same standard.

And let’s not throw around accusations of “both sides” when your own response jumped straight to whataboutism. If you care about the truth, it should apply consistently.

Burqa bans come from separation of religion and state.

Not always. In some countries, it’s simply illegal to cover your face in public - that applies to balaclavas just as much as burqas.

Further widening the canyon between the two parties with this kind of cynical and dishonest takes isn’t just unproductive - it’s counterproductive. Fake internet points aren’t that valuable.

You only ignore AI slop when you recognize it as such.

In the case of being anti-abortion, we’re talking about people who believe in the biblical God - and they often point to chapters in the Bible to justify their stance. In most cases, it boils down to the belief that life begins at the moment of conception and that all life is sacred. There are also passages in the Bible that speak about God having plans for unborn children.

Whether they should or shouldn’t hold those beliefs is not an objective fact but a value judgment on your part - and either way, it’s entirely unrelated to what I was saying.

Isn’t human intelligence exactly what most people mean by "general intelligence"? It becomes ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) once its capabilities surpass those of humans - which I’d argue would happen almost immediately.

By "those things," you're referring to God or the entity running the simulation? Whether it's a reasonable belief isn’t really relevant from the perspective of the theory itself. You’re still going to encounter people who hold such beliefs - and if you want to change their minds, the better approach is to identify and challenge their underlying beliefs, rather than the ones built on top of them.

Belief in a God or a creator is a foundational belief - being against abortion isn’t. That view only logically follows from the prior belief.

I don't see how this is relevant to my theory but yeah, sure.

Well, that’s not a direct quote from me, but yes - some people assume the universe was created by something. For some, that’s the person running the simulation; for others, it’s the biblical God as described in the Bible, or atleast their interpretation of it.

Personally, I consider it synonymous with “creator,” but even if someone believes in a biblical God, that’s beside the point. While the idea of a biblical God is an entirely unconvincing concept to me, I still give it - or something like it - a greater-than-zero chance of actually existing. I can’t prove otherwise.

Another example of a belief like that would be belief in the physical world around you. You could be dreaming - or in a simulation.

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a valid question - and the idea that something created it isn’t entirely unthinkable. The point is that you can’t prove or disprove it. Not believing in God is just as much a foundational belief as believing in one. Much of what you think about the world is built on these core beliefs - the kind that, if proven wrong, would effectively collapse your entire worldview.

I 100% agree with the first point, but I’d make a slight correction to the second: it’s debatable whether an LLM can truly use what we call “logic,” but it’s undeniable that its output is far more logical than that of not only the average Lemmy user, but the vast majority of social media users in general.

A theory I’ve been working on lately is that our worldview rests on certain foundational beliefs - beliefs that can’t be objectively proven or disproven. We don’t arrive at them through reason alone but end up adopting the one that feels intuitively true to us, almost as if it chooses us rather than the other way around. One example is the belief in whether or not a god exists. That question sits at the root of a person’s worldview, and everything else tends to flow logically from it. You can’t meaningfully claim to believe in God and then live as if He doesn’t exist - the structure has to be internally consistent.

That’s why I find it mostly futile to argue about downstream issues like abortion with someone whose core belief system is fundamentally different. It’s like chipping away at the chimney when the foundation is what really holds everything up. If the foundation shifts, the rest tends to collapse on its own.

So in other words: even if we agree on the facts, we may still arrive at different conclusions because of our beliefs. When it comes to knowledge, there’s only one thing I see as undeniably true - and you probably agree with me on this: my consciousness, the fact of subjective experience. Everything else is up for debate - and I truly mean everything.

Modern Wisdom, Making Sense, The Joe Rogan Experience and The Jordan Harbinger Show.

That’s exactly what a Boltzmann’s brain would say.