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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The problem with debunking is that it is inherently boring and an inefficient way to learn. To debunk something, first you have to explain the nonsense to the audience (which is ultimately pointless, especially if they haven’t heard the misinformation before), and then you go step by step providing accurate data.

    Itll always be more interesting to provide the correct accurate>!!< information in the first place, because then you can control the narrative that is used to provide the information instead of being forced to conform to the narrative of the misinformation.

    A clear, non sarcastic debunk is simply 50% explaining nonsense, then 50% a list of correct information. And a list is boring. That’s why all the debunkers inject personality into the debunks, because that’s the only way to make it interesting and entertaining.




  • Because it gives powerful people permission to do whatever they want, everyone else be damned.

    Both of the two major Longtermist philophers casually dismiss climate change in their books for example (I have Toby Ord’s book which is apparently basically the same as William Mckaskils book but first and better, supposedly). As if it’s something that can be just solved by technology in the near future. But what if it isn’t?

    What if we don’t come up with fusion power or something and solving climate change requires actual sacrifices that had to be made 50 years before we figured out fusion isn’t going to work out. What if the biosphere actually collapses and we can’t stop it. That’s a solid threat to humanity.



  • A major problem with longterminism is that it presumes to speak for future people who are entirely theoretical, who’s needs are entirely impossible to accurately predict. It also depriorites immediate problems.

    So Elon Musk is associated with Longterminism (self proclaimed). He might consider that interplanetary travel is in best interest of mankind in the future (Reasonable). As a longtermist he would then feel a moral responsibility to advance interplanetary travel technology. So far, so good.

    But the sitch is that he might feel that the moral responsibility to advance space travel via funding his rocket company is far more important that his moral responsibility to safeguard the well being of his employees by not overworking them.

    I mean after all yeah it might ruin the personal lives and of a hundred, two hundred, even a thousand people, but what’s that compared to the benefit advancing this technology will bring to all mankind? There are going to be billions of people befitting from this in the future!

    But that’s not really true. Because we can’t be certain that those billions of people will even exist let alone benefit. But the people suffering at his rocket company absolutely do exist and their suffering is not theoretical.

    The greatest criticism of this line of thought is that it gives people, or at the moment, billionaires permission to do whatever the fuck they want.

    Sure flying on a private jet is ruinous to the environment but I need to do it so I can manage my company which will create an AI that will make everything better…




  • All the Great Apes (probably, definitely), including us, have an instinct and built in skill at identifying snakes.

    Researchers did experiments with both humans and other apes where they were shown progressively less obscured images of different predators and without fault we and our relatives were able to identify the snakes faster than any other creature.

    This means that the instinct to find, and kill snakes goes back millions of years. Yet now when I encounter a snake my instinct is to move it to a safer spot so it doesn’t get hurt or hurt me.

    I think that if we can get over such a deep rooted instinct, we can get over the ‘Us Vs Them’ instinct too.


  • Honestly, for a while on Reddit, downvote was the only action other than posting comments that I engaged with on Reddit, mostly because I never felt strongly enough to upvote or block or save. And then I went in and seriously prunes Subreddits and basically cut all the Subreddits that I would ever downvote in and the ones that were negativity based like all the Subreddits dedicated to showcasing trashy, racist or otherwise shitty people. Also, any subs generally based in being down on something, even if it was something that everyone should be down on. Also nixed subs like latestagecapitalism because while I broadly agreed with the sentiment, they very vitriolic about everything. Reddit really improved for me since then. Highly recommended, I then spent a lot more time upvoting and commenting. Obviously don’t have that problem on Lemmy.