Ask Lemmy

You really want one?

Okay:

Race-Based Affirmative Action is harmful discrimination against Asians and I, as an Asian American, don't really like it, particularly in the context of it being used as a deciding factor in college admissions.

(Affirmative action based on other factors like income or disability is fine, but using race is kinda weird to me... too arbitrary)

David Bowie is overrated.

I support Age Verification

(Not to be confused with: I like Age Verification.)

For a few reasons.

• 1. The government already has all of your info and is spying on you from any device with a camera or microphone and wireless connection and without a warrant or meaningful accountability. We know this objectively because the FBI, desperate to look competent, inadvertently publicized footage obtained illegally in the Guthrie case that shouldn't have existed.
• 2. It's not 2014. We have enough information now to know definitively that social media (and increasingly, use of LLM's) is harmful to children's mental health, and that its negative effects are more pronounced on developing brains. (Though they affect adults as well.) These systems harm a person's mental health and cognitive abilities, and while this bit is anecdotal, I know several teachers who struggle to teach kids because they're no longer able to focus on anything for more than sixty seconds. (And the question: "Why do I have to know this if an AI can do it for me?" is becoming a common refrain.)
• 3. Private entities also already have your data. Go look yourself up on spokeo.com or some other background check site if you don't think so. (And be sure to put in a request there to have your info deleted while you're at it.) Or sub to a deletion service that will remove it for you.
• 4. People say that to cut kids off from social media will isolate them, but I grew up in a world where we only had email, chat rooms, snail mail, and land lines, and somehow we magically made friendly connections anyway. It's a nonsense argument, and ignores that social media itself is isolating people to a much greater extent.

Essentially, I think Age Verification is the lesser of two huge evils, and I don't expect the government in my country to force social media companies to disclose and change their algorithms to eliminate the harm being done to kids, so Age Verification becomes a necessary evil. (Hopefully a short-term one, but we'll see.) The social media companies have too much money for any civil suit to meaningfully impact them financially.

You want co controversial?! Ok
I think we should be able to decide our own deaths if we want too, and that should be law. Depresion is real, yes, but a lot of people want to LITERALLY impose life into others. Not only talking about end stage or crippling disease but also psychological issues so bad living with it is torture. You reading this and disagreeing are doing it becuse you afe either religious, and you are imposing your religion into others, or someone else would feel bad, regardless if the person lives in agony, they have to live to not make someone else sad. "I don't want my son to take his life" YOU YOU YOU.

Of course I think there should be procedures and controls in place, like +21, 1 or 2 years mandatory psychiatric follow up, if you have youngs kid you also can't. But if you are an adult, no kids, fuck your opinion dude, it's their life their choice.

It takes just as much faith to believe that the universe came into existence out of nothing as it does to believe a higher being created it.

Memes made the world a worse place.

Humanity can't be fixed, will always be selfish, greedy, discriminating against other people who differ enough, since a bunch of these things are pretty much hard coded. You might not be, some people you know might not be - but statistically, the majority of humanity will happily watch others get oppressed (or worse) for various reasons. There will always be people who manipulate others for power/wealth, disregarding law, morals or the environment, and there will always be a fuckton of gullible/dumb/mean people who happily buy the propaganda for reasons above.

Therefore, no matter what kind of society you try to form, with enough time we will get back to where we are now, and humanity will never be able to break out of this downward spiral, due to its inherent fault.

...which leads to my main controversial opinion, based on the above: the only cure to the mass extinction and the worsening climate happening today is the eradication of the human species. Yes, it would be such a shame saying goodbye to all the great things we have achieved, dad jokes, poetry, the Backstreet Boys; all this means nothing if everything dies on a scorching/freezing planet. At least if we take out humanity, other forms of life could survive, and life as we know it isn't really found on every other planet.

Obviously there will be nothing wiping the human race off of the face of the Earth, and if it somehow ever disappears, it will be by its own doing - but chances are that will also take all other forms of life with it.

Looking at all the awful things humans have been doing to each other, all the pollution, all the ignorance, all the destruction, I wouldn't hesitate a bit if there was a red button in front of me that could magically make them disappear (including me, of course). In the blink of an eye. I would slam down on it as fast as I can.

Free will does not exist in the way we think of it, as this divine, magic thing that is above anything. Most of your success is more due to chance, and your environment, than your effort.

If you get taught wrong by your parents and/or peers, you are almost guaranteed to be locked into your bad behavior. So it was decided for you that you would play the role of a "bad person".

Pretty much related to Nietzsche's quote: "some men are born post-mortem".

There's also been a study showing monkeys unable to learn certain things, because it goes against the wirring of what they already learned, regardless of motivation, effort, reward.

I have no issue with chatgpt. Or any other LLM based platform. I use it and many other llms in my daily life. They're solid applications that provide real world problem solving.

Sending humans to Mars is evil.

It is impossible to have people anywhere without gazillions of microbes. Once humans land on Mars we've at the very least corrupted any evidence of life, and possibly destroyed an independent genesis of life.

Since all life on earth comes from a single progenitor, this is both an incalculable loss of potential knowledge, and also a greater extinction than all earth extinctions combined.

I propose a moratorium for say 200 years or so, or at least until we've explored more than a few square kilometers in detail.

Rust is for little baby devs who can't handle a little uncertainty and unsafety.
(signed, a JS dev)

Consciousness is fundamental to reality. Science-based thinking (but not science itself) has put matter as the fundamental element but actually has never been able to prove it. To be able to prove that matter gives rise to consciousness, you'd have to step out of consciousness and point to matter. Which you cannot do. Not talking about individual consciousness where you can just point at someone's brain: that experience of pointing at someone's brain is happening inside consciousness, how else would you know about it.

Not to be confused with Solipsism, that's the thinking mind. I'm talking about Idealism, the raw state of pure experience before thought.

That religion is for gullible people.

I both think people have a right to dignity, which by extension means they should have a say of how to live their lives. I also think that the general population shouldn't vote. Against Democracy is a really good read if you haven't read it.

For the record, I literally will drive people to the polls (since our current system creates better outcomes if more people vote) but I do really wish that most of them wouldn't XD.

Obsessive monogamy is usually super fucking toxic, and "cheating" is way less of a betrayal than a dozen other things people put up with in relationships.

People will literally throw away years or even decades of stability and companionship over a single moment of weakness, like some weird sexual martyrdom, but they'll turn themselves in circles to forgive actual ongoing abuse.

And to be clear I have never cheated on anyone, though I have been the third person. This is just a general observation from my many years in the game.

Making out and fucking are basically the same and I don't get why one is tolerated in public and the other is not.

We are breeding idiots.

A lot to unpack here, but the primary reason is that "everyone" survives, is led into adulthood, and encouraged to start a family. From an evolutionary standpoint, we don't have any sort of filter who gets to live and breed, and no "survival of the fittest". This is not only about childbirths, but also about who breeds (and raises) children.

Eugenics is not bad in of itself, but people consider it bad because they fear it will be forced upon them by racist/ableist powers. (Remember, a mother (and father) who chooses to abort if there is something bad unveiled through tests are also doing eugenics.)

Not saying we haven't had this "problem" in the past, nor that we have to do something about it. It's more a statement that we have a lot of idiots around...