It's the driver for misogyny, homophobia, racism, xenophobia, and so much else.

It has been my experience that, if you could identify these people, they are the best to avoid. Excising these people from your life can very quickly prove it.

Capitalism is worse. It's literally Monopoly. We've all played that shitty fucking game. With capitalism you get perpetual inflation. A negative sum game. A zero sum game at least implies some basic conservation mechanics, perhaps even a fairness. A negative sum game is a total debt based economy. Waste is a feature. Disposability and commodities go together like peas and carrots, and that ethos sadly reverberates across ecosystems until the planet is dead but you got those pounds or dollars or pesos or whatever. Can't eat them. Can't really do Jack shit with them.

The rich gonna wake up some day soon and find the farmer has a well oiled rifle. They'll make rich fertilizer.... 🤑

These people must fail to understand how consensual sex works

And also assuming that someone who's not smart in one area is not smart in any area.

Similarly, people who assume that anyone who struggles with English as a second+ language is an idiot

Yup this is me and my dad, he's great with handy work and has built numerous homes. I am good with technology and can build a server and make my own software. Put us in opposite roles and were both dumbasses.

Or if they are rich, they must be smart or a genius, because they got rich while everyone else did not, its further from the truth, since most of these people come from wealth to begin with. adjacent, same goes for these succesful youtubers/streamers/influencers, these top ones we see all the time dint come from rags to riches, they came from being rich or very well off.

Sure, but without this flaw engineers wouldn’t have any personality at all.

I can differ 17 different kinds of glue by taste!

This effect was described by Dunning and Kruger.

Absolutely. I’ve learned over the years that it usually works out pretty well to find out how much the cheapest dogshit option is and aim for an option roughly 1.5x the cost. Obviously not a blanket rule but it covers a surprising amount of common items and I’ve gotten plenty of long-lasting affordable alternatives that I actually enjoy using rather than having the crappiest version of everything.

That’s true but the other direction is generally true. Not always, but often high quality does come at a cost.

Broke: You get what you pay for.

Woke: You don’t get what you don’t pay for.

With automobiles, there is an anti-correlation.

that is true, or just slapping a label like supreme, or tesla on thier products and people thinks its high quality. or with ELECTRIC toothbruses, 100-200 seems to be more likely to be defective than cheaper lines of the same company. Always seek out reviews and peoples experience on specific products. same goes with healthcare/insurance, paying more doesnt mean you will get better quality(it actually incentivized that customers dont seek out care due to potential costs), likewise if you get too cheap of insurance you will get cheap results, not decent and not so-so.

Benefit cliffs do exist however.

I get that this might not be super intuitive. but how can one not notice that this is untrue? don't people check their accounts and see that there is still more coming in and not less? just not as much as one might want, but still.

This depends on the country

Is this really a common misconception?

This is true, but at the same time it does not mean that people shouldn’t be given reasonable accommodation for their particular needs.

Many people struggle to grasp that these two ideas can coexist.

Oh god yes. Good friend of mine was dating someone with autism, and he was constantly asking me, "is neurodivergence just an excuse to be a dick to people?" Yeah sometimes it sure is, just a helpless excuse to act out your baser, ruder instincts. If you're neurodivergent and not in therapy, you should be asking yourself regularly, would others around me benefit from my being in therapy? Because the answer is almost certainly yes.

Or that refusing to understand is a valid counterargument.

Way too many people think that if you explain something, you're endorsing it--even when you explicitly say that you do not endorse it. So frustrating, and it's a huge problem here on the fediverse.

Or that not vocally disagreeing is agreement.

On a related note, this is one of my favorite quotes: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." -Aristotle

Folks, you can understand why someone decided to kill themselves: e.g. a tragic life, and from their perspective, there's no one to support them, no one to love them, no one for them to love.

But it doesn't mean you agree with their decision to kill themselves.

If understanding = agreeing, a lot more people would be committing suicide while trying to understand why such a person would kill themselves. It makes no logical sense. Or it means that those alive is either of these: they either don't understand it out of naivety, or choose to not understand it to not kill themselves. Assuming it's an adult with their full faculty, who witnessed such a tragedy, that's just... such a sad world.

One thing to note is that they are allowed to lie to you, so like you said, important to know your rights, but mostly they can find probable cause to do whatever.

Best advice I ever heard.

Always treat cops as if they just came from dealing with something really awful.

They might have just seen a child abuse case, or a really bad accident, of a fire.

Assert your rights in the court, not in the street.

The word you're missing is "arithmetic". For most people "math(s)" and "arithmetic" are the same thing, when the latter is only the commonly encountered part of the former.

And for many of those people, algorithms are the only way they can use arithmetic to reach a goal because the intuition isn't there otherwise.

I say this in full knowledge that even though I'm pretty good at arithmetic, much of the intuition I have now took me years after leaving school, and sometimes for more advanced things it's still not there.

For example, on a good day I can complete the square, and I understand the geometric intuition, but most of the time I'm just going to plug and chug with the quadratic formula.

Common core got a really bad rap because of the poor implementations by companies like Pearson. But the actual curricula are very good.

Pure maths that was taught over 5 years in the 18th century in university is now taught in 3 years in high school with several other subjects.

So material is stripped down into small pieces and learnt by heart completely out of context- it is basically just learning algorithms.

For me it was estimation that unlocked the magic of mathematics. What's the fastest way you can get close enough to the correct answer that the innaccuracy doesn't matter?

For example, in salary negotions if you need to convert between hourly and annual salary take the annual value, drop 3 zeros and divide in two and you have the hourly. Or in reverse, take the hourly, multiply by 2 and add 3 zeros for the annual. It gets you close enough that you can know you're talking about for salary negotiations, budgeting, etc. and you can let the computer calculate out the exact conversion for payroll and tax withholding purposes

And also worth mentioning that 1 great photo comes after 50 or so not-so-good ones. A lot comes down to luck, especially with more dynamic shots. Take a shit ton of photos and a few of them are bound to turn out nice.

I learnt the team "Point and shoot engineer" to refer to modern cinematographers/ photographers.

Even open source projects with lots of contributors, most work is only done by a fairly small number generally. Have seen delegation before though, like "would be cool if you all make PRs for this" where it's a time consuming but essentially low programming high creative skill task.

Sure some software has huge numbers of people working on it

But this makes usually a overengineered and buggy bloat for the task at hand. Just like Google.

Yeah, I wholeheartedly encourage constructive debate and skepticism. However, it doesn't excuse repeating shitty arguments without doing anything thinking or research just because it makes you feel less bad and lets you not do anything.

One example that particularly bothers me was "humans affect on the climate is less than a single volcanic eruption". There are a lot of things you could not trust about scientific reporting, but the base premise of 8 billion people flying around the world using decomposed dinosaur mass is at least an order-of magnitude larger in scale compared to a single volcanic eruption. At that point, you'd have to believe that there isn't really 8 billion people or that oil is actually from somewhere else.

In summary I agree, I just want to add nuance that this doesn't excuse people acting in bad faith. It's important that everyone, not just scientists, recognize their emotions and bias and challenge their own arguments against these (I.e. am I just making this argument because I feel defensive?)

The phrase I've heard is "epistemically privileged." And deservedly because from a standpoint of pure ethics, "science" has done way more good than damage than competing ways of looking at the world.

But let's say someone asks you how a car works. You go into a bit about the internal combustion engine. You explain how little explosions make pistons go. They ask you about these explosions, so you have to take them to a chemist to explain. Then they ask the chemist why does this reaction happen, and the chemist sends them to the physicist. You go through the Newtonian bit, which seems intuitive enough, but when you ask about atoms, you have to go into subatomic physics. Which is something you cannot experience without special equipment that you trust the physicist is telling the truth about.

So, yeah, while the empirical method is fantastic and the best model we have, in the end it relies on faith as much as any religion.

in pseudoscience, person will seek answers they want to hear, and not ones that will contradict them at all. an example, chronic lyme which is a pseudoscience, is a belief that Lyme is a 'permanent infectious disease', and you can get it numerous ways other than the known vector, a deer tick(it is the actual way to get lyme) theres a whole industry built over this surprisingly, and hazardous because MDs have jumped into the scams too, and its primarly amongst MIDWESTERN white woman/men, how this scam works is the "patient" will go seeking online forums, sources and eventually end in the office of LLMD("lyme doctors" which are actual doctors peddling the fake disease) which often charges alot of money per visit, usually several hundred and they dont take insurance(red flag) or the insurance rejects the DOCTOR and they give all thESE BS excuses why you have this symptoms and then prescribe you a blood test for lyme(another red flag), and then have you multi-month ANTIBIOTIC regiments, which can be hazardous because of the side effects. i happened to find these forums along time ago. most of these people have underlying mental issues, or a psychosomatic illness.

I still haven't read it myself but you might be interested in the book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn

Looking up scientific papers of any kind will immediately blow up the notion that science is rational and objective lol

Linguistics just doesn’t deal with definitions like that. It does mean that, and certainly even connotatively historically. Today, in modern parlance, it definitely means “to kill a large portion of” something, and is almost never used as a 10% reference. So your team could be correctly described as “decimated” in both scenarios.

Linguistics are descriptive, not prescriptive. There can be no "common misconception" in language, because the moment a misconception is common enough, it becomes true

Worked in a company that decimated their workforce with redundancies. I word it correctly and other people wrongly assume it means something else.

As an add-on to this, people having the thought pattern of:

They're saying that my friend said something racist -> Therefore they're saying my friend is a racist (TM) -> However, my friend is a good person -> Therefore they're not a racist -> Therefore what my friend said wasn't racist -> Therefore the people calling my friend out are the bad guys

You can substitute in words like homophobic, transphobic, ableist, classist etc. for racist — the flow goes the same. An excellent book that helped me to understand this was "racism without racists". Reading that as a teenager helped me to more constructively respond when I have been called out for prejudiced attitudes, such as racism.

It makes me feel deeply uncomfortable to think of myself as a racist — and so I don't. However, unlike people who default to this thought pattern that turns cognitive dissonance into indignant resistance to change, I work to accept the fact that I am absolutely capable of doing, saying or thinking racist shit — it'd be hard not to, when I've grown up in a systemically racist culture. But I can acknowledge that without blaming myself for it, which allows me to avoid the discomfort of considering myself a racist whilst maintaining my moral fortitude.

A phrase that's helped me a lot is "you're not responsible for your first thought; you are responsible for your second". That helps me to actually interrogate where something is coming from if I catch myself having a reflexive thought that shocks or disgusts me. Unfortunately, this habit isn't one that many people have.

Thinking about things in terms of innate essences people have (even if they're less binary than good Vs evil) is harmful even when we're just looking at harms to ourselves. For instance, I was a super bright kid, and "the smart one" was a core pillar of my identity. However, as I entered my teens, I was so scared of losing this that I became more concerned with appearing smart than actually being smart. It felt like something I didn't have control over, which was terrifying. But I often say that I got a hell of a lot smarter when I let myself be dumb. That's because when I think about what a smart person actually does that makes them smart, it's stuff like being curious about the world, self reflecting on one's beliefs and knowledge and being open to being corrected etc.. It was a lot less pressure once I stopped thinking about things in terms of immutable, innate essences

Yeah this drives me crazy. I grew up where the old white men loved boating and fishing in the rivers, bringing the family out to enjoy nature. Now that it's all getting contaminated and turning gross, even the dumbest person who actually valued 'conserving' would realise we actually have to do something.

Instead, we've got billboards up and down the country trashing the Paris agreement and the old white men are only interested in attacking the other tribe. Not a hint of concern for the environment. They're not interested in conserving anything other than their social status and corresponding power.

For me this has been a curve not a slope. Hard childhood, getting better in later middle age, expect a harder time later but so far things have been easier.

So I think "it gets better" is a reasonable thing to say to kids having a hard time. It can get better.

Old old? Yes I agree. Even healthy old people, your friends are dying around you, it hurts.

'Made with real fruit' is a perfect example...they almost never say how much

"I might have eaten a ton of ice cream today, but I had a lot of protein so that'll make up for it")

There is another one. In the end, you can see proteins as just another form of calories; if you don't exercise them off, a overabundance of them becomes fat. Proteins are not generally healthy or make muscles just like that.
And btw, eggs are the best protein source. While of oats it's still around 10% accessible.

People think anything with protein is inherently healthy, and the more the better, even if their body can’t use all the protein they consume, so they’ll eat multiple protein bars, have meat with every meal, and drink a protein shake every day.

oh i wish that all the protein shakes contained at least a little bit of fat. for some reason, people unreasonably believe that all fat is bad. idk people think that "fat makes you fat" or sth which is very much not true

fat does not make you fat. carbs make you fat, because they give you energy faster than the body can use it. fat, on the other hand, does not provide energy so quickly. so it does not make you fat.

food, especially the "protein shakes" and such, should contain more fat, and less sugar. especially less sugar.

I think some offsets are valid. For example exercise for ice cream. Especially if you do it while the sugars from the ice cream is still in your blood

The fact there's a fairly large amount of people eating raw meat and milk and there isn't widespread illnesses in those communities is an endorsement of how safe our food industry is.

False

I'd agree with you, but then we'd both be wrong.

White people often forget (or don't realize in the first place) that, if you're a black person in USA, the police is actively looking for an excuse to put you in jail so they can make you do slave labor

Depends where you live. But overall survival requires effort, whether that’s hunting/gathering or office work.

Ummm, my tap water isn't "perfectly good."

Plenty of people saying their tap water is not good. Just buy/install an RO for your tap ya dummy. They aren't that expensive or difficult to install. Or some kind of brita-type filter. I'm lucky enough to have an in-fridge filter. Cold, clean water on tap. It's the best.

Bottled water companies don't produce water. They produce plastic bottles.

I live in the US, I’m not drinking the tap water lol. That being said you don’t have to buy cases of individual plastic water bottles either.

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Here, you dropped this

I disagree. Why can't a man wear a dress? If they identify as a man but want to wear a sundress on a warm summer day, that's fine. Bro you're rocking that dress should be normalized .

While that's reasonable, there are genuinely people out there who do not know.

My ex hit me with that exact phrase, and once I'd explained what trans people really are she changed tack straight away. Trans people do not have a legal status here, and she's now quite determined to be a good ally.

Recipes are even worse. "Low sugar" recipe, it uses a shitload of honey or maple syrup instead.

Or that sugar substitutes don't cause diabetes. Diabetes rates took off after diet sodas went mainstream.

It's amazing how much good just going "if it looks/tastes like it's mostly sugar and unidentifiable calories it almost definitely is very unhealthy for you" is. My wife's a big soda drinker and my kids are starting to hit the age where many people pick up soda addictions. I push hard for them to mostly drink water and make sure to tell them how bad soft drinks are, and when they get upset about seeing the difference between what I say and what my wife does I tell them "you can make that decision for yourself when you're a grown-up"

i've always thought that it's really simple. there's extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation

extrinsic motivation is when somebody stands next to you and beats you with a stick when you do something that they don't like. the result is i will do the minimum slop required to fit their criteria, like when i'm asked to do the dishes, i'll just make them look clean without actually scrubbing them.

intrinsic motivation is when i see the meaningfulness of an action, at which point my body starts acting towards that goal automatically.

But you win sometimes!?!? /S haha. Agreed.

People who put their toast butter side down are idiots, that much we can all agree on.

Yeah, well, me and Sol are bros, so imma keep calling him by the cool nickname he got when he was travelling through Spain

Isn't sol latin?

I think part of it just comes from the practice of naming other star systems after the star they orbit. E.g. the Epsilon Eridani system orbits Epsilon Eridani. Our own star system is generically called the "Solar System," so sci-fi likes to formalize into the Sol System.

I think animal welfare is the bigger factor for most people avoiding leather, and while artificial leather is just plastic and certainly not great environmentally, traditional leather production is also very very much polluting nature with chemicals (Chromium tanning etc. ) plus it still supports the whole factory farming system which is terrible in its own right. I'm hoping fungus based leather or some lab grown variant will bring a real alternative someday.

I like my professor's view in AI from over a decade ago. AI is the term non commercially viable research. Once something becomes viable it gets rebranded, like automatic text recognition, computer vision, machine learning, llms. It worked great until generative AI was good enough to impress average people, then it became a great way to attract venture capital. It's still not quite viable so the rule holds, but we are in a very messy and public era where several products are likely to emerge and separate from the AI title.

Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is knowing to not put it in a fruit salad.

More than 50% of people can be average, depends on the distribution.

97% of people are average (3 standard deviations), so they are not deluded. Its actually higher than that as the intellectually impaired don't live very long.

It's like that joke on The Simpsons.

Fat Tony thinks of himself as a legitimate businessman with 75 arrests and only three convictions, while Ned Flanders thinks he'll burn in Hell if he doesn't pay his taxes by January 3.

You never know just how you look through other people's eyes.

US is a senate cosplaying as a democracy

Even the best drivers in the world fuck up sometimes, so even if everyone was good they should still exist.

I'm pretty sure staying in the left lane on the interstate for 57 miles is best practice.

well, i know that i'm not a good driver, that's why i don't drive!

Idk if I'd say a baby crying because it's hungry is a display of selfishness. It's the only way they can communicate, and they aren't able to help themselves. I will say however that I don't think selfishness is inherently a bad thing and many people if not everyone does display some form of it.

Faith is the belief in something without evidence, or in the face of contradictory evidence

It's choosing to believe without good reason

I'm never going to respect that.

To say that people have no values because they're not part of some superstitious nonsense says a lot about you, as does your straw man of "consumerism and hedonism"

"Belief" and "values" are not synonymous and not dependant upon one another.