this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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I think part of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns that can be abstracted and generalized, and memorizing data is just one means of making the data available to your brain for pattern recognition. Like, if you come up with a possible theory, the quickest way to test it is to see if anything you already know would invalidate it; so the more you know, the more quickly you can sift through possible theories.
So, yeah—education reminds you that you might be wrong, while memorizing things gives you a tool to prove yourself wrong.
I don't think it's related to patterns, it's the methodology.
Sure, there's some groundwork that needs to be memorized in different fields, but this is like learning your first words. These are necessary so that we can communicate with each other, and they serve as building blocks upon all rest is built upon.
Everything else we are mostly taught by learning how some old guy came up with an answer, making clever use of the tools that we also have.
After a while it sort of clicks that there's a method to the madness, you build up and up until you get to the moon, and you get this feeling that anything can be explained logically - we might not know how yet, but surely it will be at some point.
Unless it's quantum physics, fuck that.
It feels like there's a lot of people who skipped these building steps, maybe they were just memorizing stuff to get by the exams without exercising their brains on the methods to reach those solutions, or were simply never taught, and now they just don't have the tools to make sense of what's around them, and will blindly follow a monster that assures them that they'll be ok as long as they do this or that...