Today at lunch...
Guy 1: Has everybody seen the last episode of Game of Throne? Good. Spoiler alert! Blah blah blah.
Guy 2: Blah blah Night King blah blah.
Me: I haven't seen a single episode of Game of Thrones.
Guy 1: Whoa... Dude...
Today at lunch...
Guy 1: Has everybody seen the last episode of Game of Throne? Good. Spoiler alert! Blah blah blah.
Guy 2: Blah blah Night King blah blah.
Me: I haven't seen a single episode of Game of Thrones.
Guy 1: Whoa... Dude...
@awg @guizzy @masterofthetiger Is thinking without words conscious thought?
@monerica Haha. Yes, but then there is stuff like "how fast are you allowed to drive with a trailer without built-in brakes weighing over 300 kg"?
@guizzy @masterofthetiger I could see the beginning of the motion before I thought I had sent the motor commands. It was spooky.
@guizzy @masterofthetiger Ever try to flare your nostrils in the mirror and notice when the nostrils start to open versus when you're aware of having made the decision to flare them? One time when I did it, I kept surprising myself by flaring my nostrils and then deciding to do so a fraction of a second later.
@thor Categorically?
@guizzy @masterofthetiger We also remember what we felt in some cases, but what we don't remember is what made us act the way we did. We never know. I feel that patients with split brains demonstrate it quite handily. No matter what the other half of the brain is making its half of the body do, the brain half that can talk has an explanation for it, even though this is impossible. The brain halves are not communicating, after all. So, we just make it up.
@guizzy @masterofthetiger Oh, they aren't. We are always making up reasons after the fact. Are you familiar with the book "The Mind is Flat" by Nick Carter? The main message of the book is that all those hidden depths we imagine our minds to have don't exist. Instead, humans are "just" good storytellers, and that includes the stories we tell about ourselves, which are rarely consistent. He further argues that introspection isn't real; we only know what we experienced and what we did.
It used to be far more interesting to debate current issues. I used to think very hard and type up these enormous discussion threads with people. Where are they now? Forgotten. Irrelevant. Also: Not reflective of my current opinions, yet I defended them vigorously at the time.
I know what I think. What I think may change over time, but not because I had an argument with a stranger on the Internet.
@jeremiah Why bother.
@jeremiah Enjoy your straw man.
@jeremiah Look who's talking.
@masterofthetiger I'm not convinced that "meaningful discussions" were ever crucial in the forming of political opinions. If you're on the fence, both sides always seem to have good points and you don't know who's right. If you aren't on the fence, you've likely formed your opinions based on what you've observed, and if you like an ideology, it's mostly because it matches how you already think. Public opinion is shaped mostly by events.
As I see it, the issue of global warming can be debated to death and no consensus of public opinion will ever be reached.
Therefore, the only thing we can do as laypeople in this matter is form opinions and vote according to that.
It's terribly uninteresting to have arguments I have already dismissed repeated to me. I'm not really here for that. I'm aware of the opposing side's arguments. I have considered them. I don't agree with them. The end.
I'll make this clear: Much like you're unlikely to be swayed in your opinion about global warming by bits of trivia that I offer, I'm also unlikely to be swayed by bits of trivia that you offer. Why? Because whatever bits of trivia you offer me will look cherry picked to support your opinion. You will feel similarly about whatever I have to offer. The same goes for any serious accusations or conspiracy theories. Citing sources? Also cherry picking. These discussions are therefore pointless.
Come to think of it, I wonder if you *could* boil them down to a smaller set of axioms that you could derive all the other laws from...
I'm not sure how to make traffic rules and trivia about how dangerous it is to drive interesting to study. It's just so terribly uninteresting, because it's just a long list of constraints, and none of them make the problem (driving) very challenging. Instead, the challenging part is simply to remember the constraints, because most of them aren't an emergent property of the system. If they were, you could just learn the underlying principles and follow those instead.
Most of the stuff they want you to know in order to pass the theory exam for the driver's license boils down to "Don't be a bloody idiot, will you?"
The things they expect you to memorise for a driver's theory exam is... It feels like they're trying to teach 18 year old boys and other aggressive drivers to drive sensibly by wagging a finger at them and going tsk tsk tsk.
Traffic rules is terribly dry material to study.
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