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Speed limits are set below actual safe speeds for roads to drive local government revenue through speeding tickets.
Reincarnation
I just can’t get over the idea of:
Nothing --> Existing --> Nothing
So I figured, an unscientific philosophical guess, that existence is more like:
Noting --> Existing --> Nothing --> Existing (again) --> Nothing --> Existing (again) --> [forever]
Maybe “souls” is just an energy.
Einstein said energy canot be created or destroyed. So maybe, when we die, we become an energy that, by some ways we can’t yet understand, just randomly becomes a part of another living being… maybe a human, maybe non-human, maybe this energy stays nearby here on Earth, maybe it somehow goes to a random alien planet and you become an alien the “next life”… who knows?
Or maybe this is just another coping mechanism my brain cane up with in face of the knowledge of certain death, influenced by the Eastern philosophy that I grew up with? Whatever…
Insecticides (which are based on disrupting insect sex hormones) are making men more feminine. The industry says it’s impossible, that they are only parts per billion of what you eat. Still.
Müller forcefem world champ lfg
Sunscreen causes skin cancer.
I know it’s probably not true, and I wear sunscreen when I need to, but it just feels wrong slathering all those chemicals on my skin.
I fully believe it causes blood and bone cancer. The aerosol kind, due to benzene. My husband has polycythemia Vera secondary we think could have been caused by sunscreen. We live in a tropical area so we need it year round. Multiple doctors have mentioned it as well as a lawsuit we heard about locally.
I am sorry to hear that :(
Benzene is certainly a scary chemical and I hope things improve for you both.
My moral values, such as valuing reducing suffering as far as possible, qualify I suppose.
Dogs are boys and cats are girls
They asked for unscientific things.
There are people who are always lucky, and those who are unlucky. The lucky ones tend to win more coin flips, have less accidents, and if they fail it will be upwards.
“Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.”
That has really stuck with me. It isn’t so much that some people "always get lucky’ it’s more true to say they are more prepared to catch the opportunities that happen.
I’d use myself as a counter example. I’m pretty lucky in life. I’ve got a decent job, I can pay the bills, I’ve got a wonderful wife and supportive, friendly family. I’m doing better than the vast majority of humanity.
Games of chance? Unbelievably bad. Statistical anomaly. It once took me 25+ tries to win on a 30% odds lottery ticket.
I’m pretty much the same, but for the games of chance; As long as the prize isn’t monetary, I tend to do really good. Coin flip because two people asked the day off and only one can take it? Sorry for the other guy.
Another thing that I’m really good at is pushing a button. If for some reason something doesn’t work after pushing a button (either computers or machinery), just complain to me it isn’t working. I’ll ask if I can try, and somehow it always works. Actually a very usefull skill when I worked as an operator in various chemical plants. Coworkers had mixed feelings about it tough.
People were happier in the stone age than they are in first world countries today.
Our brains did not evolve for the lifestyle we’re living today.
I sure as fuck would be happier out hunting, gathering and making handcrafted tools during the day, then telling stories by the campfire wrapped in a fur at night.
Even if there’s no toilet paper, I could get mauled by a bear every day, and if not, the tribe will leave me behind on the next migration when I’m too old and weak to keep up.I’d rather live 30-60 years like that than edit another Excel sheet. Sadly, our “civilization” made that way of life completely impossible.
the tribe will leave me behind on the next migration when I’m too old and weak to keep up.
FWIW, this part is almost certainly not true.
https://news.usask.ca/articles/research/2017/ancient-spinal-injury-a-story-of-survival.php
These are just a handful of these types of stories, there’s loads more if you want to search for them. But the upshot is: your family or tribe would have taken care of you to the best of their ability, for as long as they could, and you would have been given a decent burial when you died.
it’s the ‘noble savage’ myth.
which is really a play on the ‘ignorance is bliss’. as if babies are ‘happier’ than adults or something.
Yeah, I kinda agree with this. The usual argument against this is usually something along the lines of “but you’d probably die of dysentery by the age of 40”. But I think I’d be okay with that. Better to have lived a short life outside an office than to live to be a 100 spending 45 years in an office.
To be fair, stone age life has some drawbacks too. Few would want to potentially die to a failing tooth, die to any kind of disease or starve to death if winter is harsher than expected.
I agree that few would choose that life.
I still believe those who were forced to live that life led happier (if shorter) lives.
I’ve been playing around with this idea I have called “n-link civic literacy” it’s an unscientific measure of civic literacy (how good are you at extracting and understanding information from the news) that works by measuring the number of links it takes to successfully obscure bullshit from the reader.
Did you read a headline, form an opinion and react to it without reading the article? Then you are -1 link literate. Do you open the article but believe it’s claims without checking the source material? Then you are 0 link literate. Click through to the study cited by the article? 1 link literate.
Probably would not work for edge cases, but I think could work to get a rough measure of the civic literacy of a community.
I only read your first sentence and I agree with you.
I only read your first sentence and I disagree with you.
I like this metric.
I personally don’t bother fact checking a lot of articles I read because I don’t really form opinions about them. If it’s important I’ll dig but I really just look at as biased noise. I’ll always try and phrase out what the agenda of the writer is, but most of the time the only hard opinion I form is “this may or may not be true”
Even the stuff I read that aligns with my own beliefs. Maybe especially. You should always be re-evaluating and changing the way you see the world based on new evidence.
“Space Lord” by Monster Magnet is a classic banger for all time and it’s a tragedy that it’s been all but lost to time.
They still play it on their concerts, thought. Really cool to see it live.
Flames on the side makes things go faster
Red is the fastest color.
Are you a Space Ork?
Wagh?
Purple orks are invisble
The Costanza Rule is real, but any attempt to utilize it is a paradox.
Rule: any decision I make is the wrong decision because I made it therefore I should always do the opposite.
But to do the opposite is also a choice I am making and therefore it too will be the wrong choice.
Also, it’s not a lie if you believe it.
Reminds me of a trolley problem variant I saw once. It went roughly like this:
A trolley is headed for Track A, where a single person is tied to the tracks. You can pull a lever and cause the trolley to switch to Track B, which enters a tunnel that you cannot see inside. Track B might have 3 people tied to the tracks, or it might be free of people. You can’t see which.
Two hours ago, a perfect prediction machine inside the tunnel predicted whether you would pull the lever.
- If it predicted that you would pull the lever (sending the trolley into the tunnel), then it tied 3 people to Track B, thus setting it up so pulling the lever would kill 3 people.
- If it predicted that you would not pull the lever, then it ensured Track B is free of obstacles.
The perfect prediction machine is guaranteed to have made the correct prediction. Do you pull the lever?
Assuming that I am aware of the perfect predictability machine and it’s affect on the situation: I move to the other side of the lever and push it. They predictability machine would be correct in its prediction that I would not pull the lever and nobody has to die.
That’s not a problem. It is just an exercise in reading. Two possibilities remain. In one, you kill 1 person. In the other, you kill 3 persons. (the empty track “exists” only if you do not use it).
Correct, IMO. But right now, before you make the decision… The machine has already made its prediction. The track either has people on it, or it doesn’t. Changing your mind now will not change that. If you are so sure of that decision, then the machine must have put no people on Track B. So now if you do pull the lever, no one gets killed! So why don’t you?
What is “now”? Seems you have more than one “nows” - or your variation makes no sense.
That machine decides before you in time, but after you in logic - otherwise it would not be a perfect prediction. So you can never decide for an empty track.
Yup, that’s the premise. It’s just an annoying thought experiment. Your actions physically can’t change the past, but somehow they still do, because the past was decided based on a perfect prediction of your actions. I was just playing devil’s advocate. I agree with your answer 100%.
“Now” is the moment where you decide whether to pull the lever. As is conventional in trolley problems, this moment can last anywhere from 2 seconds to hundreds of years :)
Is the perfect prediction machine AI? If so, I pull the lever each time.
Alas, it is a perfect simulation of our universe with perfect knowledge. Machine learning was not used in the construction of this machine. It can’t technically see the future, but it can predict anything perfectly except quantum phenomena. It has been demonstrated in countless trials that it can accurately predict human choices and decisions.
With no other information on how likely each is, and assuming the likelihood of each prediction stays the same, you should never pull the lever. The expected number of people in the tunnel is 1.5.
If the probability of there being zero people in the tunnel gets above 66%, you should pull the lever every time (the expected number of people in the tunnel drops below 1).
I have a pet theory on air humidity and flu or cold. Apparently the scientific consensus is that cold and flu are more prevalent in drier air. However, I see an uptick in both when the temperature is low, but the humidity is 90+%. It is purely anecdotal, but there you go.
In addition to what the other commenter said, when the outside is cold and 95% humid, the inside of a building would be warm and far drier. So the inside humidity % is much lower than 95%. Maybe this contributes to the issue?
You might actually both be saying the same thing here. Caveat being that I have no idea what the science says about cold/flu, but when talking about humidity when the air is colder it is drier. 90% humidity at 35F is not the same as 90% at 85F. As the air cools it is able to hold less moisture. So your observation that there’s an uptick during colder weather at a higher relative humidity could be the same as saying it’s more likely in drier air, because the air is drier when it’s cold, even when the relative humidity shows the same percentage.
The more you learn the more you realize how little you know.
that’s objectively true.
nobody is more of a genius that a teenager who knows almost nothing about the world.
being a shitty person is way more beneficial than being a good person.
and i mean by shitty/good basically morality. being a amoral selfish person is almost always better for the individual.
however, i think such people are always going to be unhappy due to the instability of their life.
I really liked that one Study? Experiment? Whatever it was that had people program different strategies to play a game for them. It was a “game theory”/“prisoner’s dilemma” type game. The kind where if you play nice you each win a little, but if you play mean you might both lose or you might win a lot.
Anyway, they made a whole bunch of AI type strategies that would compete and over time, the cutthroat or evil strategies would win in the short term, but over long term the cooperative play nice strategies always prevailed.
It may or may not be true, but I choose to believe that the best, most efficient, most beneficial strategy is always the one that favors cooperation, mutual aid, and forgiveness over cutthroat, deception, grudges.
Put another way, fighting and competition wastes more resources than it ever gains, cooperation and sharing is a better strategy.
I agree with you, but I’m afraid some people don’t care if everybody loses, including themselves, as long as no one has it better than them.
people’s lifespans are short. hence short term matters more than long term.
also fighting and competition bring meaning to life. long term cooperation, not so much.
I don’t think that’s true by itself. I think you also have to be good at pretending to be a “good” person (or at least only being “bad” to the out-group). We are social creatures. If someone is showing obvious antisocial behavior, they get shunned from the group.
IME it’s exactly the opposite. the most anti social people are the most socially rewarded. the sociopaths, psychopaths, and narcissists are far more socially popular than any other type.
the most altruistic people are shunned because tehir altruism makes other people feel bad.
but i live in the USA.
