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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Opposition to genocide isn’t an option on the ballot, you can’t vote for it, especially not for president. And not voting sends a very clear message whether you intend it or not: “I don’t care”.

    Do you value minimizing harm? If you care most about genocide, Harris seems to be the least-worst option. But if you care more about ideological purity than harm reduction, you can vote for a non-serious candidate like Stein, or none at all. Nobody will ever solve this kind of problem at the ballot box, that isn’t how democracies work, but if letting things happen instead of exerting what little power you have eases your conscience, that’s your right. Doing so does mean a greater risk of a Trump presidency, especially if you live in a swing state.

    I would rather minimize harm, so I’m voting for Harris, and encourage others to do the same.



  • nfh@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzEat lead
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    11 days ago

    We can’t prove that the world we live in wasn’t created last Thursday, with our memories, the growth rings in trees, and so on created by a (near) omnipotent trickster to deceive us. But science and rationality give us tools for determining what’s worth taking seriously, and sorting out the reasonable, but unconfirmed, claims from the unverifiable hogwash.



  • I knew about ad blockers before I started using one. Small sidebar or header ads weren’t really enough to convince me I needed one.

    Now the Internet has so many popups, ads, aggressive video players, requests to accept cookies, all because some people figured out how to make websites more profitable by making them worse. It’s sad, really. The Internet of old was great.


  • nfh@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzThe 1900s
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    17 days ago

    And even then it’s probably not a hard rule as much as a good heuristic: the older a source is, the more careful you should be citing it as an example of current understanding, especially in a discipline with a lot of ongoing research.

    If somebody did good analysis, but had incomplete data years ago, you can extend it with better data today. Maybe the ways some people in a discipline in the past can shed light on current debates. There are definitely potential reasons to cite older materials that generalize well to many subjects.








  • Knowledge is what happens when you’ve evaluated enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis that something is false. If you haven’t seen the evidence, but still think it’s true or false (you don’t lack belief), then you have a belief about it. As such, knowledge is a type of belief with extra justification.

    If I’ve reviewed enough evidence I’m comfortable saying I can reject the null hypothesis, that is I have a belief that it’s knowledge, I’ll call it as such. If I haven’t, I’ll couch my confidence in my belief accordingly.