CraigOhMyEggo

So it's almost the end of 2024 and many of us are still in the "New Atheist Movement" mindset (not dissing on atheism, just the movement).

I was in a conversation with someone recently and it made me think of the title question. We had an adventure in philosophy. The person said they were from Pitcairn, as in the country known as Pitcairn, the one with only fifty people living in it. I naturally responded with "uhhh yeah that's going to be a big pill to swallow."

"Where are you from" the person asked?

"I'm from so-and-so."

"Oh, that one village in the Southern US with only forty citizens? I'm going to take a while to register that."

"But you said you were from an island."

"Literally the only difference between where you're from and where I'm from is it's surrounded by water. Does the water affect the odds?"

The message she was getting across seemed clear. "Proof" is relative.

At another point, we spoke about religion.

"Can you prove Jesus existed?"

"No. Can you prove Genghis Khan existed?"

"No, but Jesus made some high claims."

"And look at what people said about Genghis Khan who was said to conquer a whole continent."

At one point, we spoke about God.

"Can you prove God exists?"

"Well... have you ever heard of the church of Google? Is it impossible for something to be considered a true god? Are some things not based on proof but rather criteria?"

"So basically you're saying anything can be a god if you try hard enough?"

We also spoke of dating at one point.

"You got these guys who say 'pics or it didn't happen' but here I am, belonging to a subgroup of humanity that consists of approximately fifty percent of the population if not more, and suddenly I'm held in suspicion because the demographic of the specific community I was in had my subgroup of humanity slightly outnumbered, yet you can say you have something rare like ELS syndrome and people take your word. Go to Lemmy and ask what separates a claim that calls for proof from a claim more fitting in peoples' minds to take their word for it."

"Maybe don't make claims then."

"Why not? On the world's largest source of knowledge I can't make descriptors?"

"I tend to think peoples' definitions of claims-that-need-proof to be subjective."

"Hence why you should ask. But... does each individual have a consistent sense of it? Can they describe in words why claim A can be taken in their mind as is while claim B requires proof? And while some will say it's a matter of knowing someone and trusting them, if someone came running through Walmart saying 'run for your lives, there's a bad entity on the loose', I'm sure people would panic even though they have no proof of anything."

So I'm asking you. What separates them?

I'm not sure if this is going to sound strange, but I'm so accustomed to the voices of different kinds of people that my mind at this point just registers the many different accents as different voices within one accent (as in my mind doesn't say "oh that's another accent" anymore, it doesn't register it) and I actually miss being able to appreciate peoples' accents as accents, which sucks when for example you're attracted to them.

Question inspired by looking through the photography collection of a very controversial figure, and at one point I spotted her reflection on a spoon at a dinner table, and I thought "wait, is that Anne Hathaway?"

It's always fascinating to know when you secretly have a celebrity in your social circle.

That moment when, if I ever get banned from the ML instance, one might as well tell me to treat it as an extension of the act of fleeing while entrusting Archive Today and the victim to relay this message (totally becoming of the spokespeople for the people's liberation, /s also I would not voluntarily remove a thread of mine, so if this is gone by the time you get the archive...).

I consider myself a typical Orwellian person within the ML instance (fun fact, stands for Marxist-Leninist) who believes in the validity of debate, diplomacy, and standing up for oneself, having signed up for ML because the others were overcrowded when I was led to see Reddit as bad news due to the API (yet here I am). If I don't want to engage with someone, I leave, and if someone disobeys the rules of something I'm the admin of (not any instance), I ban them with tools already at my disposal (as opposed to actual attacks using tools not anyone's business, and that was after banning her). Sadly this isn't everyone. Worth mentioning on behalf of someone afraid of breaking rules against block evasion/retaliation, being the Orwellian I am who won't stand for things like the creed-based/LGBT discrimination I see. I see this (unauthorized username revelation and a false excuse of finding a rabbit hole) and I think "what's next, will admins threaten to reveal our passwords as the norm in due time". The US is on the verge of banning Tiktok for such shit, and here we are thinking of ourselves as invincible, like some cult.

When someone then mentions it on Reddit with her permission (and yes I have permission too), he shows up, claims she has the same name on 20 sites (when the dox that anyone can read clearly shows otherwise, and I did doublecheck his new claims, they're false again), and tries to demoralize the thread. I'm ashamed personal attacks and stealing info/photos is the norm for my brethren. And I'd bet a pretty big wager to prove me wrong, just to see if people would think they can.

This is out of hand, can we either overhaul admins or defederate ML considering all the threats of banishments make it dead weight? Because I feel like a sanction is in order.

It's one thing that copyright/IP is such a matter of debate in the creative world, but a whole new layer is added onto that when people say that it only matters for a certain amount of time. You may have read all those articles a few months ago, the same ones telling us about how Mickey Mouse (technically Steamboat Willy) is now up for grabs 95 years after his creation.

There are those who say "as long as it's popular it shouldn't be pirated", those who say "as long as the creator is around", those who don't apply a set frame, etc. I've even seen people say they wouldn't dare redistribute paleolithic paintings because it was their spark on the world. What philosophy of statutes of limitation make the most sense to you when it comes to creative work?

Was wondering this in celebration of the fact dolphins have officially been confirmed to have their own translatable proto-language, a longtime speculation we kind of already knew and which fulfills a friend's prophecy. It's common to train animals to perceive and perform art, and/or for them to already have a sense of what it is. Give an elephant a brush and a canvas and they'll paint glyphs of other elephants, chimps can draw avant-garde "masterpieces", and pigeons can even be trained to recognize the difference between good and bad art.

Dolphins surpass all of these animals in intelligence. But there's just one problem, they live underwater. And water tends to destroy most art mediums. Paper canvases shrivel, residue washes and floats away, hammers made for sculpting tend to strike softer, sculpting ice floats, fashion requires sources of fabric you can't get underwater, you get the idea. A dolphin's life is Murphy's Law for an artist. But for an artist, if there's a will, there's a way, and humans are known to challenge what we expect to be ways in which art can be created, such as with crop circles, Nazca lines, shadow art, and soap sculptures made from microwaving soap into molds. What improvised method/means of artform would you coach dolphins to do who want to be artists if you had to do so in some way?

I might covertly edit this post for clarification, but basically my concern goes like this.

We have all seen it, we're watching a commercial for a fancy new site and at the very end they say "ask for parents' permission before joining".

We like to think the collective exists for all mankind, the final bastion of stoic cosmopolitanism and truth. But there are times when you may think "err, maybe not this person".

I have a friend who is registered for a certain service and likes it a lot, and recently got scared out of her mind because a relative of hers who has autism and doesn't understand so much as digital etiquette got banned from the same service due to getting scammed and just kept re-registering and getting re-banned over and over because this was an example of an inexperienced mind who had all the resources to break the norms, and several times the people in charge of the service thought about banning the whole family (I am in fact active in a certain community that is full of this kind of poor soul). This at one point got me thinking, how helpful it might be if we federate everything in existence, similar to Neopets services which gave you a different experience depending on your registered age group. You could have "the kids corner" or "the autism corner" or even an animal corner or robot corner or alien corner, a seeming limitless potential, fediversal accommodations to the different types of minds out there, with people not having to worry about what trouble is caused by their youngsters and whatnot because they have "the kidernet" which connects to the other "nets" and can keep them out the same way.

Does nobody think this? I personally think we should fediversify existence itself, with language and identity being one useful example.

As someone with good parents, I get very demoralized hearing about how ungodly awful most peoples' parents were. It's so ubiquitous that I almost (almost but not quite) subscribe to the philosophy my friends have where they hold that children should (literally) be raised "by the village" rather than by two parents, which in theory would minimize the effects of one imbalanced mind having full control over the children.

Lately I've been reading a lot of books on narcissism and have been picking up on the idea/notion/possibility/viewpoint that narcissism is a spectrum like autism is. In autism, which itself is incredibly common due to the fact that it's multiple genes/processes/whatever performing multiple parts of a spectrum (think a carpet representing humanity and a shattered cup on the carpet, I use the shards in this visual to represent pieces of the spectrum scattered across humanity, apologies if anyone thinks a shattered cup seems like a negative comparison, I don't), you have the majority of humanity having some variance in it, which goes to demonstrate there's no such thing as a neurotypical. As in, if a scouter was invented that instead of scanning your power level scanned your autism level, everyone would have their very own signature number. ~~I would be over 9000.~~ Same with narcissism, if this view is correct, as it would be another shattered glass on the carpet that is humanity, with the shards from both glasses overlapping in their territories (which when you think about it makes the family dynamics in The Good Doctor all the more awkward, it's one spectrum at odds with another in a show where the main character is a medical savant with autism). And again, not trying to make an awkward comparison, I have friends who openly confess to me they're deep on the narcissism spectrum, and these people at least are trying their best in life, as well as showing narcissism is a neutral condition that just happens to seem more negative in modern urban situations.

Consider this the sequel to my last such question which had a similar idea to it. What's the most narcissisty your parents ever come or came, even if you hold them in generally good regards?

Similar to the time Soviet Russia wanted to join the anti-Soviet alliance which was trying to pretend wasn't made to plot against the soviets.