Let hear them conjects
I believe that life as we know it exists somewhere else in the universe .
Tied to this, I believe there is no intelligent life close enough to ever reach us physically (short of freezing themselves and traveling millions of years, but we really aren’t worth that trip lol) I don’t believe faster than light travel will ever exist.
Yeah, I’ve lost my interest in their being other intelligent life in the universe. It’s pretty clear we’ll never be able to meet and quite likely never be able to even see the evidence for their existence. So, how does it matter?
Yeah, I don’t think there’s intelligent life in our galaxy. Life definitely, on the level of microbes. But probably nothing higher.
I believe the opposite.
I think there’s so much evidence of intelligent alien life visiting us that it takes a massive act of denial and self-delusion to ignore it.
In fact, I think the idea that alien evidence is all faked is a massively unbelievable conspiracy theory. The alien hoax would require a level of secret conspiracy that puts chemtrails or CIA mind control conspiracy theories to shame.
The organization necessary to produce the constant stream of alien evidence would dwarf the Manhattan Project.
In the same respect the level of organization and silence required to hide such evidence is extraordinary. It’s every government of every country that would have to keep what they know under wraps. The more people involved in a conspiracy the more likely it is for the silence to be broken. It’s not that every bit of “evidence” is faked, it’s that the majority of it that comes from a government source is misinterpreted from someone who wants it to be aliens as opposed to having an independent expert in whatever field study it.
As far as we can tell, other than people looking to sell books, all the “evidence” we have of visitations/technology has been disproven by either independent analysis of footage, or the eventual release of government documentation that shows it was an experiment “we” conducted. Those kinds of things are kept confidential for a certain amount of time in case they are connected to potential military research.
There is absolutely nothing from what we currently understand about physics that would allow for traveling the kinds of distances necessary. The vast majority of what is left to understand about how “physics” works is in relation to the types of energy/particles that don’t interact with matter as we currently understand it so it couldn’t carry anything “physical” with it, unless we’re now talking about “dark matter” aliens, but if that were the case then we’d have no evidence of their existence because we can’t observe that as it doesn’t interact with the matter we have access to. A camera cant capture a “dark matter” substance.
I say all of this as someone who WANTS aliens to exist and be able to visit us. It’s very upsetting to me to think it isn’t possible lol
What “evidence”? Lmfao what the fuck are you talking about?
Has anyone calculated like “the odds” of it probabalistically?
We don’t have enough data about the frequency of life to say for sure, since we only have one data point (our planet). If we knew more about how life can arise originally, then perhaps we could make a prediction.
If you take standard cosmological assumptions (the universe is infinite and homogeonous) then the odds are 100% as everything that is physically possible happens infinite times.
unless you mean the observable universe, in which case we dont know, but given the vast scale of it is likely very close to 1. We cant calculate it without knowing how likely life is to form in the first place.
It was calculated decades ago. I remember Carl Sagan talking about it.
I think you’re referring to the Drake Equation, but that’s more of a thought experiment, there’s no way to calculate any of the required probabilities inputted to the equation to be able to calculate the output.
I’m not sure exactly how else you might calculate it, but, we know life is possible, so in an infinitely large universe, containing infinite stars with infinite planets existing for an infinite amount of time, the odds of life existing on another planet can’t be less than 100%.
What if the earth is a singular and universal outlier?
That’s just arrogant.
Please subtract the assumptions and respond to specific claim. Life is a lottery. What are the equivalent chances of that in coinflips analogy and then give the response in the approximate amount of times that could happen over an eternity or minimally the “death of our galaxy or universe” context
I’ll break it down further.
We know life is possible, because we’re here.
Nobody knows the exact odds of life being created, but we know it’s >0. One in a billion? Trillion?
So imagine a trillion sided die. If you roll a 1, life is created.
If you get only one chance, you probably aren’t creating life, but if you are allowed to roll the die constantly from the instant of the big bang, until the end of time, you WILL roll a one. Now, imagine an infinite number of planets rolling an infinite number of trillion sided dice for billions of years.
Sure, it’s very unlikely for any individual roll to be 1, but it’s downright IMPOSSIBLE for NONE of them to EVER roll it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming that there are aliens flying around and probing people. I don’t believe that’s true at all. But there is life out there. Maybe it’s just plants or bacteria, or some form of living rock that we’ve never encountered before, but it’s out there.
I say it’s arrogant because Earth is a tiny insignificant speck in the universe, and assuming that only YOUR planet can randomly produce life is a very self centered point of view.
Bold of you to assume life on earth originated on earth.
For life in general I would agree but for human level intelligence I’m not so sure, in our galaxy anyway. The number of things that had to line up for us to be the dominant lifeform on the planet is enormous.
Goldilocks zone. Life. Large outer gas giants. Complex life (someone correct me if I’m wrong but I believe this has only happened once in 4B years / all complex lifeforms have a common ancestor) Oxygen tolerant life. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Multiple mass extinctions. Planet habitable for enormously long periods. Evolution of large brains for the first time. Etc
Chances are they won’t be oxygen breathers anyway.
Don’t be too sure about that. If you look around online, you should be able to find chemistry predictions for intelligent life. While not assuming any compatible chemistry, we can look at some of the basic types of reactions needed to support a life form and the type of environment we assume. Apparently carbon and oxygen based chemistry is most favorable
Do we already have that with the crazy anerobic volcano or the high-temperature deep sea vent dwelling microorganisms or something?
The Drake Equation is a probabilistic formula meant to derive the number of civilizations which humans could potentially communicate with.
The fermi paradox does challenge the formula though, as it implies fi and/or fc are very small or zero.
My BS, unprovable hypothesis: The Golden Age of Piracy was actually a successful Socialist movement, with Nassau being a disruptively successful enclave of Socialism in action. The pirates deeply threatened the budding power structures in the US (not conjecture) and the entrenched powers in Europe. While some powers, most notably royalty, were willing to use pirates as mercenaries (privateers), there was an excess of democracy and human concern (somewhat my conjecture) among the Nassau pirates. The Nassau pirates had pensions, a form of worker’s comp, disability, democratic command structures at sea, and healthcare (such as it was given the era). According to the historical texts on the Nassau pirates, there were almost no written records, which strikes me as especially odd since they had so many long-running financial and governing processes.
The reason John Mulaney got divorced was that after getting off cocaine he realized that he did actually want kids but Anna didn’t
Once I got sober I realized immediately that I married the wrong person. Part of that was her absolutely not wanting to have kids, whereas I just wasn’t ready for them yet.
People are basically good
Do you think (on the balance) its more nurture than nature to be shitty to other humans?
I definitely do. Those who act the worst towards others were usually raised that way, or encountered some kind of struggle that made them bitter.
I strongly believe that if everyone was raised with compassion, and if everyone was supported and had their needs met, then we would see very little evil in the world.
Our society seems structured to bring out the worst in us, and rewards those who behave unethically. A better world is possible though.
This is pretty harsh on people whose children turn out badly in spite of anything they did. And there are many such cases.
On this subject it seems best to stick to the science rather than to cling to intuitions.
Maybe I phrased this badly, but I definitely don’t think it’s 100% on parents, society and life experience play a huge role as well.
There will always be a very small percentage of people who just turn out cruel, but I believe 99.9% of people are fundamentally good. It’s just fear or pain in their past or present that causes some to be bad to others.
Also I think this is pretty firmly in the realm of philosophy, at least for now. I’m not aware of any research that can really answer this, although more broadly nurture seems to matter more than nature.
I’m not aware of any research that can really answer this, although more broadly nurture seems to matter more than nature.
In my understanding, the research shows it’s rather the other way round. But these things are pretty hard to quantify so the debate is always going to be a bit sterile.
I do however take objection when science is instrumentalized in the service of political ideology. As you surely know, a core tenet of Marxism is that human beings are socially constructed. Therefore, rather like religious fundamentalists on the subject of evolution, doctrinaire leftists have a strong incentive to deny science on this subject.
I do however take objection when science is instrumentalized in the service of political ideology.
I didn’t bring up politics at all, and I don’t think that really applies here. It feels like you have an agenda to push…
You agreed that nurture is “definitely” is more important than nature. That’s a scientific truth claim, it can be answered without philosophy, and the scientific jury is out on it. And yet the claim is often deployed in the service of Marxist political ideology as if it’s a proven fact. Which it’s not. Maybe you’re not aware of this context. It’s true you didn’t explicitly bring up politics.
Have you heard of DeVone Boggan and how he managed to reduce gun violence in Richmond, CA?
How does a nature-over-nurture person interpret the success of such a program?
This question has gone back and forth a lot, and the data says: both! The overall development of organisms depends the sum of the effect of the genes, the environment, and the gene-by-environment interaction. In conclusion, to predict human behaviors and personalities, we need a new zodiac system that accounts for multiple hemispheres, precipitation, elevation, socioeconomics, pandemics, popular movies, climate change, and the genome.
“I was a Porky’s kid, born in the southern hemisphere, I ate well, was raised in good home, I had access to education, and it was back when climate change was still deniable. Most people did not know what a pandemic was. I’m genetically predisposed to hair loss.”
“Ma’am, you are, what we call, a Jaguar-5-hypercrab-superbear, and I’m going to have to ask you to go with the nice officer now.”
We are social animals that evolved to work cooperatively. We have deeply ingrained mechanisms that encourage pro-social behavior.
I agree. People are by default “good” and want happy lives within their communities. It’s when tribalism steps into the scenario that most problems arise.
Thing is, that tribalism is what drives the good parts.
It falls apart with distance or numbers, though.
Yes! Cooperative behavior can that result in kin selection, where the individuals of the community have similar fitness. However, selfishness and deception are exceptionally beneficial behaviors for increasing the fitness of a particular individual. That is just within the same species. Perhaps tribalisms are another form of kin selection?
Weird. I think the opposite.
People are basically good, but criminally ignorant on average.
Just look at Asmond Gold’s recent ban. I doubt the dude would ever even think about shooting a Palestinian himself, but boy will he happily dehumanize an entire culture as easy as taking a sip of water!
Yes. I looked that up, it seems he said something very nasty on his Twitch stream and was temp-banned.
Do you think a fourteen day ban is an effective deterrent? Why?
I think he is at least in part rewarded with publicity. We are currently discussing him, right?
Dunno’. I hope so, but Asmond has proven to be a bit … uh… dense. Hopefully he at least learns not to use such negative language when he supposedly doesn’t mean the entire meaning.
Yeah, I believe that too. As an actual proportion of all living people, actually (as in from birth, with a pathological lack of empathy or similar) bad people are most likely a very thin minority.
The rest come from nurturing (friends, family, economic situation), political choices (affordable healthcare, housing, food safety), and bad luck.
We are also gullible and ignorant most of the time, which probably doesn’t help either.
Even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won’t.
Most of my moral convictions aren’t provable because the most basic ideas are simply axioms. “You should be a good person” cannot be justified in a way that’s non-circular, and defining “good” is also similarly arbitrary. The only true “evidence” is that people tend to agree on vague definitions in theory. Which is certainly a good thing, imo, but it’s not actually provable that what we consider “good” is actually the correct way to act.
I have started creating a moral framework, though. I’ve been identifying and classifying particular behaviors and organizing them in a hierarchy. So far it’s going pretty well. At least my arbitrariness can be well-defined!
You should watch The Good Place and/or read the book How to be Perfect by Michael Schur. He made the show too.
He starts from the same standpoint as you and then explores moral philosophy to find answers.
I think it is easy enough to argue without making it circular. As for “good”, I don’t think an objective absolute and universal definition is necessary.
The argument would be to consider it an optimization problem, and the interesting part, what the fitness function is. If we want to maximise happiness and freedom, any pair of people is transient. If it matters that they be kind to you, it is the exact same reasoning for why you should be to kind to them. Kinda like the “do unto others”, except less prone to a masochist going around hurting people.
If we want to maximise happiness and freedom
But that’s what I’m saying, that choice is axiomatic. I think most people would agree, but it’s a belief, not an unquestionable truth. You’re choosing something to optimize and defining that to be good.
If it matters that they be kind to you, it is the exact same reasoning for why you should be to kind to them
Only if you believe that everyone fundamentally deserves the same treatment. It’s easy to overlook an axiom like that because it seems so obvious, but it is something that we have chosen to believe.
But that’s what I’m saying, that choice is axiomatic. I think most people would agree, but it’s a belief, not an unquestionable truth. You’re choosing something to optimize and defining that to be good.
I’m not really arguing against this tho (perhaps the choosing part, but I’ll get to it). I’m saying that a goal post of “axiomaric universal good” isn’t all that interesting, because, as you say, there is likely no such thing. The goal shouldn’t therefore be to find the global maximum, but to have a heuristic that is “universal enough”. That’s what I tried to make a point of, in that the golden rule would, at face value, suggests that a masochistic should go around and inflict pain onto others.
It shouldn’t be any particular person’s understanding, but a collectively agreed understanding. Which is in a way how it works, as this understanding is a part of culture, and differs from one to the other. Some things considered polite in the US is rude in Scandinavia, and vice versa. But, regardless, there will be some fundamentals that are universal enough, and we can consider that the criteria for what to maximise.
"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most.
That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies.
You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.
You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in."
- Hub, Secondhand Lions (2003)
That I’d be a fool to strongly hold a belief without equally strong evidence.
Did this man just call himself a fool?
Everyones a fool and knows nothing :)
I’d argue we have lots of evidence that people who believe things strongly without evidence are dumb.
That global democratic socialism can work. Currently the only states successful in implementing it are oil-rich nordic countries, and I want to believe it can work elsewhere but it’ll be hard to prove.
Sweden and Finland have no oil, and if anything are even more “socialist” than Norway.
Back to the drawing board on your premise.
Sweden is fairly unique as it’s economy wasn’t destroyed by WWII, and it’s stance on banking, foreign exports, and foreign ownership has enabled it to make massive profits. But the economy is seriously struggling today. The average home loan takes 100 years to pay off.
Finland economy replaces oil with timber and an extremely educated population. Both of which are not sustaining the model well as the country is in recession. The timber industry isnt producing sustainable profits like it used to. The debt-to-GDP ratio is extremely high. The highly educated population is leaving and people don’t typically immigrate to Finland.
So arguably the model isn’t working anymore, without something like oil to fall back on.
Clearly no Nordic country is a panacea. But the issues you mention are relevant to a whole bunch of northern European countries, many of which are pretty “socialist” by American standards.
On the oil question, Norway is in any case the international exception. Most countries with oil are not socialist paradises but rather repressive police states. Or semi-failed, like Venezuela. Even before the climate crisis made it unethical, oil was a decent predictor of bad social outcomes. Norway aside, the world’s most successful countries, as measured by HDI rather than GDP, tend to have few natural resources. Or almost none at all, like Japan and Germany.
It irritates me that, even today, people keep mentioning oil as some kind of magic solution. It’s the opposite and always has been.
Norway being the only exception.
I’m not sure if people are suggesting that oil itself is a magical solution or if they’re suggesting that having exclusive access to an extremely profitable resource (oil) enables a country with a tiny population to make socialism work.
I have a strange feeling that if oil became worthless Norway would quickly stop doing socialism well
Not sure I understand this obsession with Norway. Its neighbors are doing just as well, and are just as “socialist” by American standards. The only substantive difference is that they don’t have sovereign wealth funds worth trillions. Because, all that oil money - Norway does not spend it. It keeps it for a rainy day. What makes Norway successful is not the oil money. The winning formula is human capital, not natural capital.
Denmark is as successful a country as Norway on pretty much any metric.
I have family in Sweden, and that doesn’t sound like what they talk about. A modest salary - local gov worker or a teacher - seems to be enough for a modest 3bd detached house of a pricing similar to ours.
Where are you getting 100 years? Is that a thing outside Asia?
2016 - 40% of mortgage borrowers are not paying their debt down. Those that are paying principal are doing so at a rate it would take 100 years https://www.swedennews.net/news/225058369/sweden-facing-possible-property-bubble-warns-imf
2014 - Sweden to limit max mortgage to 105 years after average repayment is 140 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/mortgages/sweden-cuts-maximum-mortgage-term-to-105-years-the-average-is-14/
2024 - Countrys household debt to income reaches 180% (down from 199% in 2022) https://www.nordea.com/en/news/household-debt-burden-on-the-decline-in-sweden
The point I was trying to convey is that the only democratic socialist countries that I’m aware of are rich off of either abundant natural resources or rent-seeking from more exploitative countries like the US. Is it a sustainable model for poor countries too? Historically they’ve fallen into autocracy. I want it to work everywhere because I believe in justice, but I can’t prove it with math or precedent.
Firstly, just know that the formula “democratic socialist” is itself almost an Americanism (although it’s true that Orwell used it). In the rest of the world it sounds suspiciously similar to what the former communist countries of eastern Europe called themselves. And they were most certainly not democracies.
Outside the USA the usual term is “social democracy”. That’s what the Scandinavian model called itself. Past tense intended.
For examples of successful, free, and equal societies, I would suggest that the best examples are indeed in northern Europe, with a handful of special mentions like NZ or Japan. The HDI is surely the best indicator.
Of countries that have historically used the word “socialist” to describe their political systems, with or without “democratic” thrown in, none are places that you would want to live.
No, Norway is social democracy.
I think the problem is that no system that gives equal weight to everyone’s opinions can survive a population that does not have a majority of good opinions. And if the populace does agree on most things, then it doesn’t matter much what system is being used. The best the system can do is incentivise certain behaviors.
The Pizzagate conspiracy was created to cover up any media coverage of the police reports from the early 90s when Trump was hanging with Epstein and dumping ‘used’ underage girls at a pizza parlor the next morning.
The Piazzagate conspiracy theory was created by bored 4channers to see how ridiculous a story they can invent and how many people will just believe it. I don’t think anyone realised it would get as big as it did and then they did it again with Q.
Was it really a bunch of bored nerds, or did a PR agent make an anonymous post to start the rumor mill?
Either greed or religion has killed the most people before their time. One of them has to go.
Can we get rid of both?
That might be provable
Ancestor simulation.
Explain pls?
Technology improves to the point where after being born you cannot cope with reality. You’ve gotta go through the ancestor simulation and learn your way out so you can actually enjoy all the amazing stuff of life afterwards.
The ancestor simulation is where I’m at.
That’s fascinating
I also really hate their methods and don’t really want to reach reality.
Does being religious count?
I’m going to ask you to limit it to more material claims if thats ok ☺️
The reason for the common cold being so prevalent in cold weather is because of the cold.
My theory is that cold temperatures best suit the incubation of the germs. You are especially susceptible at night, when you can’t control your breath enough to keep your nose/nostrils warm. Warm face/nose at night = you won’t catch a cold.
I’m absolutely convinced of this theory. I’ve tested ways to keep my face/nose warm at night, and it seems to test very solidly (and I get sick very very easily). Once my room gets too chilly, I’ll inevitably wake up with a cold.
EDIT: let me have the smallest conspiracy theory in the world, thank you.
Hmmm, not sure why you’re getting the downvotes, but your idea is not far-fetched. There have been multiple studies showing things like viruses living longer and traveling farther in cold dry air than in warm humid air, and also about the cold having immediate negative effects on certain aspects of immunity. The studies I’ve seen have usually been about the flu virus instead of cold virus, but some of it would transfer over, like the ones about immunity.
What’s weird is that for years (decades?) doctors / public health / scientists etc swore up and down that it was a myth that cold temperatures had anything to do with cold infections. It doesn’t surprise me now, after seeing the uphill battle it was to get the scientific community to finally, grudgingly accept that COVID is transmitted by floating around the air, sometimes over long distances. Many so-called “scientists” still don’t seem to accept this, despite having aerosol engineers break it down for them.
I might believe this. Temperature is an important part of our environment and I’d be surprised if it had no effect on any diseases that may be floating around
Inductive reasoning. I don’t have any non-circular reason to believe that previous experience should predict future events. But I’m gonna believe it anyway.
That’s… huh. Yeah I guess you’re right
