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2 yr. ago

  • I always understand "free will" to mean "figure out who you really are". I.e., every person has a certain character from birth, and that just unfolds throughout life. "Free will" is about figuring that out.

  • What i don't get here is what the existence of a "creator" would have to do with abortion. Just as an example, what if there is a god. What does that tell us about everyday life, or about abortion?

    It would be very well conceivable to me that there is a god, but they have no opinion about whether we do abortions or not. How are these things connected?

  • What you just uttered is a totally valid belief in my eyes :)

    Beliefs don't always have to be based on mere intuition alone. It's totally fine to be able to back up what one believes with arguments.

  • do you believe that randomness exists?

    The universe and everything in it was made for a reason.

    I wonder how randomness would fit into this. I believe that randomness does exist and that order/causality has its limits.

  • The world is made of magic, it just differentiated into so many forms, that one of them is science and that's what many people believe is all there is.

    I feel in the mood to explain more about this:

    Similar to european school's history classes tend to be focused on european history (we call that "eurocentrism"), our worldview is focused on humans, i think that's called "anthropocentrism". While humans are important, it's not everything there is. There's also plants and other living beings, and in fact there's many more of them than of us. I try to consider that.

    I'm calling the unity of all life "magic", i came up with that and it's supposed to be a play-on-words on the german word "Magen" (stomach) (representing that plants and animals are connected through an important relationship that is food). Also the stomach is the organ most physiologically/spatially central in the human body, in my opinion. So i imagine that everything's in the human is built around that "central" organ that is the stomach. That makes sense as the intake of food is the root of all animal existence, that enables animal's existence in the first place. Thus "everything is created from the stomach outwards", as supportive organs to help the stomach collect and digest food.

  • I think Turing's Test was only about the quality of AI. But there's still outside-of-the-digital-world characteristics that distinguish humans from AI. For example, you'd be able to walk up to a server administrator and speak to them in person so they give you an account on their server. AI could never do that.

  • I have the idea that public libraries could host fediverse instance. Just register an account on their server, then go there physically and they will approve the account. You don't need to show them your ID or even tell them your name. They just see that you're a fleshy human. Now, other people who federate with this server can know that any account registered on it is at least associated to a human. That human can still use AI to post on that account, but at least there's not millions of bot accounts in circulation.

  • i agree, and if assumptions that others made about you ever gets you in trouble, just say "i never said that" and that's it.

  • Interact with these people the same way as you would interact with the police. Stay superficially polite, but also be as unhelpful to them as you can get away with.

    Also, the sentiment that they are bastards applies. (sorry, you triggered my emotions somehow and now i'm angry)

  • I always suspected my mother didn't like me. She always assured me she loves me, but it only causes me to question the significance of spoken words. She subconsciously blames me for the shitty situation she got herself into.

  • I also often notice that i won't even bother to try to put my thoughts into words because i just expect other people wouldn't understand anyways.

  • I think the point is more to filter out people quickly who you couldn't be in a sustainable relationship with anyways.

    I don't mind it as much as i used to anymore. But ten years ago, i consistently associated "small-talk" people with people who were superficial and wouldn't comprehend important issues should they ever come up anyways.

    Also i'm not sure how right i was about that.

  • Uh i didn't know you could grow servers. I assumed they were assembled in factories, being machines and all.

    Does anybody have experience with this process? Where do you get the seeds from? What soil do they grow in? Should you water them, or not (considering them being machines and all)? Do they need sunlight exposure? And if yes, how much of it?

  • Thanks for your comment :)

    I feel that you're trying to be honest about this discussion, though realistically, many of your points have flaws in them.

    One of the issues i see is that you're acting as if society was one, coherent blob. In reality, you have a bunch of people more-or-less (often less) willing to cooperate with one another.

    That’s because value is created by labor, if your labor isn’t needed and you don’t have a job, then you’d still produce value if you had one. And when you can’t afford something, that disadvantaged labor might produce it. OK, I’m a shitty explainer, what I mean is that, if there are no regulations directly preventing it, there’s a feedback of creating another bucket of demand and thus jobs to fulfill it. Not an economist.

    I think somehow, herein lies the fallacy, though it's completely non-obvious. In the last 200 years, we've lived in times where "bigger population" always implied more workers and thus more work getting done.

    But that is not, in general, the natural way. Consider, as an example, the medieval ages. Most people were farmers, and basically all farmable land at that time was distributed among farmers. If you had more people back then, that did not mean that more work got done. You can only plow and harvest so-many hectares. Once that is done, you're running out of work, and the additional people are mouths-to-feed, but they don't really produce any extra. I'm worried that as automation advances, we're nearing similar terms. More people would not mean more productive output, but rather, people sitting around with not much to do, aka. unemployment. And that creates a psychological toll where people get dissatisfied with their living conditions, as they're looked down on as "useless eaters", and that creates a negative situation. I think that the number of people should not hugely exceed the number of jobs that actually should get done, i.e. jobs that actually pay at least a living wage.

  • The irony. I bet most MAGA have sub-median IQ. But apart from that:

    That stance of mass-sterilization is quite a hefty turnaround from "people should have more children", which we heard just a few months ago.

    I don't want to be a doomer, but the economic prospects are bad. Lots of people already struggle to make end's meet, and if the mass layoffs of white collar workers due to AI are real, it will be even worse. Notice that it doesn't matter whether you think that AI can replace people, it only matters whether companies think that AI can replace people. Now, having children costs a lot of money, at least $100K, depending on where you live, and i understand people being reluctant about having children.

    I also think that it's politician's job to improve the living conditions of the people, and GOP might actually for once be doing its job if it starts educating people about the socio-economic implications of having kids.

    I also advocate for UBI (universal basic income), but the way i see it today, there's a high likelyhood that it will come, but will be too little to actually cover cost-of-living costs. I.e., it might be a "support", providing $400/month no-strings-attached and it would definitely improve the living conditions of many people, especially in low-income households. But it would still not solve all problems.

  • wasn't there something about children born from a C-section having a notably lower amount of gut biome, which kinda proofs that a significant amount of gut biome gets transported through the vaginal channel, or am i misremembering things?

  • The question is not what you do, but when.

    If you did the same job you do today 50 years ago, you'd get massively better pay for it. Real (inflation-adjusted) wages have declined in the last decades, especially if you compare with cost-of-living inflation.

    It just means that the demand for human labor is diminishing.

  • I think the reason why it's a common belief that one should never "talk to nazis" because a lot of people would easily be convinced by them.

    I.e., if a common person talks to a nazi and hear about their beliefs, they might at some point say "oh, these guys are right after all", and then you have more nazis.

    however, i'm an intelligent person and can actually discern what is true and what is not based on my own abilities, and wouldn't be convinced into being a nazi just by talking to one. In fact, it would have the opposite effect and make the nazi a non-nazi, thus improving society.