Ask Lemmy

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

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.

Depending on your municipality, sure.

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.

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.

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.

Benefit cliffs do exist however.

Is this really a common misconception?

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.

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.

With automobiles, there is an anti-correlation.

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