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Posts
2
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731
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • I think people's behavior is determined much more by social conventions and the expectations of their community (in addition to pragmatic self-interest) than it is by logical reasoning. I'll risk being the preachy vegetarian by discussing people's attitudes towards eating meat. Most people sincerely believe that cruelty to animals is wrong, and also that factory farming (if not all killing) is cruel. Yet they eat meat. I even know some people who started eating meat again after being ethical vegetarians. Did they change their minds about whether or not harming animals is bad? No. If pressed, they feel guilty but they don't like to talk about it. The reason they're eating meat is because it's convenient and almost everyone expects them to, not because they reasoned from first principles. Likewise with religion - if no one else is giving everything away to the poor and everyone will think you're crazy if you do rather than praising you, you're not going to give everything away to the poor even if it would make sense to do so given what you believe.

    Edit: Kidney donation is another example. I met a woman once who donated a kidney to a friend of her mother's. This person wasn't someone particularly dear to her, but she found out that he needed a kidney to live and she gave him hers. I think that what she did is commendable, but I still have both my kidneys. This is despite the fact that I sincerely believe that if, for example, I saw a drowning child then I would risk my life to save him. People would think I was a hero if I saved the child, or that I was a coward if I didn't try. Meanwhile almost everyone I know would think I went crazy if I donated a kidney to a stranger. My relatives would be extremely worried, and they would try to talk me out of it. I'm not going to do something difficult, painful, and (to an extent) dangerous when everyone I know would disapprove, even if in principle I think risking my life to save another's is a good thing to do.

  • I'm upset by many things going on in the world but I'm not overwhelmed because there are no relevant decisions for me to make. Look at it this way: what's the difference between reading a book that says Genghis Khan killed a hundred more people than you thought he did centuries ago and reading a newspaper that says a hundred people died in some catastrophe yesterday? In both cases, you've learned that total strangers died in the past, there was nothing you could have done, and there will be no direct effect on your own life. It's natural to be more upset by the more recent deaths (and I admit that I would be) but I think it isn't logical.

    The exception to that is AI. I think I do need to change my own life in order to increase my chance of thriving in an AI-dominated future, at least because if some jobs will still exist then I'll need to be able to do one of them.

    (I suppose "Do I flee the country?" is another decision I technically need to consider, but the answer is "No unless things get dramatically worse." Thus there isn't much to think about on a daily basis.)

  • I know that there are religious scientists and I think humans often compartmentalize beliefs in such a way that their belief about the supernatural doesn't affect their assessment of real-world situations. I'll even go further and say that often it seems like their belief affects their behavior much less than it logically ought to, with some (but not all) people who apparently sincerely believe in an all-seeing God and an afterlife still acting just like atheists in relevant situations. In this context, the fanatics are sometimes technically the more rational ones - I disagree with their premises, but their actions make sense if those premises are considered true.

  • I'm an atheist. I dated a woman once who believed in spirits. I think she experienced night terrors among other things and interpreted them as supernatural phenomena. It didn't cause problems then but I was a lot younger and I think now I'm less tolerant of that sort of thing. But who knows - I was crazy about her so maybe if I meet a woman I'm crazy about like that again then I'll tolerate anything.

    More recently I've dated people who believe in a vague sort of life after death but never someone who practiced any religion. I think I would immediately rule out practicing religious people if I were going through a list (as when dating online) but if I met someone in person, really liked her, and then found out she was religious then I'm not sure what I would do. It would definitely be off-putting.

    The problem for me isn't the lifestyle differences but rather my impression that religious people are missing the point about the basic nature of existence, when it really should be obvious. It makes me feel like I'm patronizing them, because to be frank I don't tend to think of them as my intellectual equals. (And I know that makes me sound like a pompous jerk.)

  • I completely quit reddit in protest after using it for over ten years when it threatened to replace the moderators of a small subreddit I participated in after that subreddit shut down during the API protests. I don't actually care about the API myself (I never used anything other than old reddit) but I thought that reddit had no moral (as opposed to merely legal) right to take over something the mods had built and it merely hosted.

    Lemmy is worse, but at least I'm following my principles.

  • As if human legs aren't the weird ones - they evolved from feet into hands and then into weird hands that we walk around on and call feet.

  • I see a dimetrodon.

  • You could jump to conclusions, or you could ask whether or not there is evidence that scientists' work in their own field is affected by irrelevant unscientific beliefs that they hold. In my experience, people are very good at compartmentalizing their beliefs.

  • The EU only demanded consent.

    As in the meme...

    Me: I consent (to load the website using the cookie settings already in my browser).

    Website: I consent.

    Privacy busybodies and EU regulators: I don't.

  • Blame the EU. There, cookies used to bother a tiny number of "privacy advocates" who were already perfectly capable of blocking the cookies in their own browsers but they weren't happy because no one else cared about cookies so they got the GDPR passed to bother everyone in the world.

  • I think that generally to make something like this work, you have to be much more tied to a specific location than middle class Americans tend to be. You won't be able to find a new commune (and certainly not a new extended family) if you move for work every few years.

  • That's really clever. (And the people pissed off aren't potential customers anyway.)

  • TIL that

    Affinity graduations are optional events typically led by students to celebrate different student identities and ethnicities. Commonly held ceremonies often honor Black, Hispanic, Asian, first-generation and LGBTQ+ students.

    That doesn't sound any more controversial than campus clubs for specific minority ethnic groups. Are colleges worried that they fall into the "racist if white people did it" category? (I would argue that they don't.)

  • But AI is actually way ahead of where I thought it would be in 2025.

  • Well, it is kind of stupid to complain publicly the way that this guy is doing. He's wasting the little good-will from Trump that he did buy.

  • Loving regardless of physical appearance doesn't follow from loving for more than just physical appearance.

    (I suspect that "don't be shallow" is the sort of advice that people often feel good giving but don't sincerely believe, but even the most sincerely non-shallow person generally can't simply ignore sexual orientation. Once you allow for sexual orientation, then you're already at the point where certain details of a person's physical appearance are absolutely critical for romantic love.)

  • Grande

    Jump
  • I wouldn't be able to do that - I had to stop drinking caffeine a few years ago but still get cranky if I don't have the experience of drinking a big mug of tea in the morning, despite the fact that the decaf tea has no direct pharmacological effect on me. Then whenever I'm bored or anxious or tired I make another big mug of decaf tea and feel better. It has to be tea; other beverages don't help. Purely psychosomatic but still definitely a real effect.

  • You know those jokes about how people already in hell don't know that they're in hell? Relevant.

  • Y'all get lemongrass?

  • You think I'm just persnickety? I'm downright cantankerous!