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Cake day: November 8th, 2022

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  • I’d argue Hanlon’s razor is not a very good heuristic. It ultimately presupposes the user of it is the mental superior in the situation, and does not take into account polarized and ambiguous controversies. It also encourages energy wasting by presupposing the issue lies with mental capacity or education, suggesting that you could educate your opponent out of their stance.

    I’d recommend moving towards more energy-conserving practices. Rather than arguing your points directly, it’s better to first understand why the opposition would be taking their current stance and adjust your argument based on what common ground you both share.

    Possibly the greatest skill is to just learn when it’s no longer worth your time to argue with them.










  • _NoName_@lemmy.mltomemes@lemmy.worldDeep thoughts.
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    21 days ago

    I think it’s kind of hilarious some of the insanely close conclusions some ancient philosophers got to being correct.

    For example, Xenophanes observed that there were fossils of fish and shells, and correctly concluded that Greece was at one point underwater. He also had a bunch of insane claims on top of that, but the underwater part was correct.

    His teacher, Anaximander actually said humans came from fish, which is hilariously close to correct despite the incorrect reasoning.

    Empedocles is probably the most interesting. He concluded that humans and animals originated from these disembodied organs, which found each other and would form wholes. The catch was that many weird forms came about, like people with heads in the center of their bodies, and any other creation you can think of from just slapping animal organs together. He asserted that the forms which were unfit for life died out, leaving only the ones which worked to continue living. Empedocles almost describes a concept adjacent to multicellular organisms forming from single-celled symbiotic relationships (obviously Empedocles didn’t know about bacteria or cell theory), and then goes on to pretty accurately describe the mechanisms of natural selection.



  • I am not following what you mean by “this” when you’re asking about what I’m advocating.

    In explicit terms, my understanding is that Leninists and similar ideologies believe that humanity is in its capitalist phase, and that the next phase is communism. That is what I mean when I say that they believe a revolution in the US is good for humanity.

    I don’t feel good about the impact of the US being dismantled, nor do I feel good about any western nation being dismantled. I don’t think anyone has a full clue what the US collapsing would cause, but I think it would cause catastophe. I am not advocating dismantling, if that’s what you think.


  • I expect downvotes, but I figure thinking out loud about online discourse can be healthy to the general community and so I’m gonna do so.

    The real issue here is not the fate of Gaza, I think. I believe that in reality, your failure is choosing not to be apart of the revolution that aims to dismantle the US government - the only way these groups view Gaza has any chance of being saved (by “this group” I’m referring to the condemners, who I suspect are Leninists and similar idealogues). Saying this openly is currently outside of the Overton window in the US still, since a majority Americans are uninterested in actually fighting and dying for a new system. Instead, they just imply it, or condemn stances that constrain to the status quo.

    IMO, Such a revolution would need to happen within Israel for it to halt the genocide, and a revolution in US would fail to impact the Israeli government quickly enough to actually save Gaza.

    Your individual likelihood of becoming fodder against police, and eventually the US military itself, is also ignored. The revolution itself is for the greater good of mankind in their eyes, and thus your life by itself is inconsequential.

    Probably should be directly shutting down this call for joining the revolution rather than trying to appeal to reason - or explicitly state how you’re participating.

    Overall, I think that the holy week riots demonstrated how effective violent protest can be and that something like that happening again could be good for the US. I’m aware how extreme that statement will seem to some, but the fact that the fair housing act was passed in a week should really show just how effective that kind of violent action can be, and that we shouldn’t rule it out.

    At the same time though, I understand that many leftists currently are doing what they can to leverage the system to their advantage. This is not out of indoctrination, IMO, but because they have a respect for the lives of those immediately around them - they understand the alternative is sending a large portion of those around them to their die for a cause and they can’t conscionably do that. I couldn’t do that either, and I’m gonna respect how they’re operating currently and try to help how I am able.




  • I think this is coming from a “plugins enshittify projects” mentality where the assumptions are:

    • code bases should be as succinct and stable as possible.
    • plugins add large amounts of unused code and obfuscate many granular aspects of program execution, increasing debug and research time.

    Seems that the author views that the above devs chose to use plugins instead of writing their own code and shot themselves in the foot by doing so. The final portion seems to suggest that the person pushing all these changes then bobs out before any of the problems caused by these changes actually get solved.