241–250 of 325 posts
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It’s down to 30% in the US; it was over 40% twenty years ago: https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declin...
Wow, today I learned. I'm gratified to see that the lizardman coefficient is consistent. In the chart, 2% of "None/Atheist/Agnostic" apparently attends religious services every week.
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There are without a doubt large drones with nav lights flying around multiple states at night now. There are a lot of people seeing drones where they aren’t, too, and it would be odd if that weren’t happening. But to take that and say “nothing to see here” is ignoring the mass of solid video and official non-statement evidence to the contrary. I myself saw a drone, and tried to paint it as a plane or helicopter at fi…
> ignoring the mass of solid video 100% of the ones I looked into have been debunked, helicopters, planes, out of focus stars, fireworks, &c. > (seemed a few hundred feet up at most) At night you have absolutely no way to tell > And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish. My $300 dji can accomplish that, it's not a chinese super weapon nor an…
It's a natural approximation to a Total Perspective Vortex. Knowing what it represents probably makes the likelihood of an existential crisis more likely.
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I know. Being in favor of free markets isn't popular.
This is such a lazy take Walter. Almost literally everyone here is in favour of free markets, just not completely unregulated ones.
> Almost literally everyone here is in favour of free markets
How does that fit in with single payer health care, rent control, universal basic income, calls for wealth taxes, calls to eliminate wealth "inequality", government football stadiums, government deciding who can play on sports teams, government funded TV, Amtrak, government subsidies, government bailouts, "you didn't build that", and, of course, the ever-increasing taxes and catastrophic amounts of spending?
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> The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. And this is why "conspiracy" theories exist. I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories, as I fee that is a more accurate name. I am do not intend to pass judgement on this commentor or on people who believe in these theories; in fact, I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE l…
This is like saying you're more likely to fall for scams if you think you're too smart to fall for them. I don't think it works that way. I wouldn't use the word smart to describe the people (that I know) that fall for scams/conspiracy theories. Now, you could say that they incorrectly think they're to smart, but then that means how smart you consider yourself isn't relevant, i.e. a not-smart person and a smart perso…
Assurance makes you a sucker.
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But again, that is access to knowledge. How good would your college education have been if there was no library or textbooks? If you took the athletes today without their support team and sent them back in time two years before an Olympics event to compete on their own, I don't think it would be as big of a blowout as you suggest.
It would be a huge blowout. We didn’t know how to train or eat and athletes smoked and drank substantially more. Meanwhile, the gear evolutions make significant difference. But take distance running - prior to 1954, nobody had done a sub 4 minute mile. After that was known to be possible multiple people sub 4 minute miled in the following decade. If you sent a top runner back a hundred years they would be able to run…
Are you sure about that? Can you post a result where someone ran with leather shoes on asphalt?
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The majority of people (in the US, at least) spend half a day a week being taught to believe in magic. From birth. Usually on Sunday.
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> Most of my STEM classes in college did not have a textbook, or recommended a book that was kinda irrelevant to the direction the classes took. So you went through classes with no written material? You listened to lecture, took notes, and then did assignments and passed tests with no documents to study? > BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge. The scie…
> So you went through classes with no written material? You listened to lecture, took notes, and then did assignments and passed tests with no documents to study? That's right. I learned to never miss a lecture, and take copious notes. I also never missed a retch session. And still sometimes I needed help from a patient classmate. The fun thing about the notes was when reviewing them, I'd recall the verbal part of th…
The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer than "essentially we can all start losing our mind at once, and it takes very little to trigger it".
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> The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. And this is why "conspiracy" theories exist. I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories, as I fee that is a more accurate name. I am do not intend to pass judgement on this commentor or on people who believe in these theories; in fact, I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE l…
This is like saying you're more likely to fall for scams if you think you're too smart to fall for them. I don't think it works that way. I wouldn't use the word smart to describe the people (that I know) that fall for scams/conspiracy theories. Now, you could say that they incorrectly think they're to smart, but then that means how smart you consider yourself isn't relevant, i.e. a not-smart person and a smart perso…
Scams rely on two things:
1. Over-confidence. The often (but not always) target the elderly because the elderly have pride that comes with long living. When you think you've seen it all, you think you know it all.
2. Emotional irrationality. The scammer is expert at quickly putting a person in an emotionally agitated state, negating good rational thinking. This is easier to do when pride creates a blind spot to catch someone off guard.
People fall for scams not because they are stupid, but because they are humans which tend to be easy to manipulate by playing our cognitive biased and emotions against us. Scamming is both an art and an industry as a result.