Ask Lemmy

The reason my memory seems to be fuzzy at times, even for some things that happened recently, comes down to the fact that I was put under for surgery back in 2011 and was under for longer than they expected due to finding something they didn't expect.

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.

"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)

I believe that life as we know it exists somewhere else in the universe .

That P != NP.

When I started working decades ago, we were taught how to use bent bits of fence wire to find underground pipes before digging

I literally found scores of pipes that way, and saw dozens of other people do it regularly. It was even taught at a local agricultural college as part of the horticulture course

Then someone told me it was a myth and doesn't work, so I set up a blind test with a hidden bucket of water and I utterly failed to find it

I simply cannot explain this

People are basically good

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.

We likely live in a simulation.

Assuming it's possible to create a simulation, the odds of us being in a simulation is 50%

But if you can create one simulation, maybe you can create 1 million. Or maybe you can create nested simulations.

So even if the chance of creating a simulation is 1%, but the creation of one simulation means millions are created, the odds of us living in a simulation are above 99.99%.

Another theory is the Boltzmann Brain. Basically the idea that a brain can spontaneously appear in space:

By one calculation, a Boltzmann brain would appear as a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum after a time interval of 10^10^50 years.

Which means if the universe lasts forever, but has already reached a point where worlds can't form, there's infinite time for something as complex as a brain to suddenly spawn. Which also means it's more likely that you don't exist and are just a brain that will last for a nanosecond before disappearing, and none of this is real. In fact, in a universe that lasts forever, the fact you are a brain that will disappear in a nanosecond is more likely than you being a human with a real past.

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!

I believe that the reason why so many people are going crazy in America at least is because they are approaching the end of their life and they have been told the whole time they've been alive that they would be living through the end of times, and if it becomes true then their lives have not been wasted but if it is not true or if it doesn't happen until after they die then their lives have been wasted and it's driving them crazy.

When we die, we're recycled. There's no Heaven, Hell, Rainbow Bridge, Valhalla .etc Because those are man-made constructs to give people a sense of belonging based on what you did in life. Someone talked to me about the Egg Theory and while I have a bit of skepticism towards it, I do understand a plausibility about it.

And if anything from the Egg Theory is true, then cool, I'd love nothing more than to be recycled and born into a life from the past to live it out again.

Either greed or religion has killed the most people before their time. One of them has to go.

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.

That I'd be a fool to strongly hold a belief without equally strong evidence.

That consciousness is real and not an illusion

Even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won't.

That humans are apex predators, and we have been so for upwards of 2.5 million years. Following from this, I believe that most chronic illnesses that we have today (e.g. obesity, diabetes, mental illnesses, cardiovascular diseases, arthritis, PCOS, etc.) are caused by us straying from eating diets with lots of fatty meat.

absolute truth.

I've mentioned them before and they're semi-related, in a broad sense:

I believe the Congressional baseball game shooting was likely intended to benefit Trump.

I believe it's likely that the Russian government has knowingly promoted interracial cuck porn, in some capacity.

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.