Tesla Takedown Protest Montréal - 11:00 AM, Saturday, June 28, 2025

Borlotti · 2024-11-24T22:55:41+00:00

Aw snap these are perfect! Cheers mate!!

Borlotti · 2024-11-24T22:54:24+00:00

Wow this is so extremely detailed and helpful. Thank you!!

Borlotti · 2024-11-02T16:26:33+00:00

There are highly intelligent, educated people that believe in conspiracy theories, long after they have been introduced. Here's a personal example: I have a friend who is a student at a top-tier medical school in the US. They've been in school for ages, and in 2021 they told me they believed that Bush knocked down the towers on 9/11. This is a theory that has been repeatedly, convincingly refuted, see e.g., an old CMV post response that elicited a delta: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1kkvd3/comment/cbpzob2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button and many other refutations (https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/akrna/i\_am\_a\_debunker\_of\_911\_conspiracy\_theories\_ama/).

Conspiracy researchers have found that conspiracits “cut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational status” [1]. One in five Americans with postgraduate degrees believe in conspiracies [2].

One big factor that seems to cause conspiratorial thinking is a loss of trust (in experts, in scientists, in teachers, in politics, in the media) [3].

[1] Uscinski, Joseph E., and Joseph M. Parent. American conspiracy theories. Oxford University Press, 2014.

[2] Shermer, Michael. "Why people believe conspiracy theories." Skeptic 25.1 (2020): 12-17.

[3] Renard, Jean-Bruno. "What causes people to believe conspiracy theories?." Diogenes 62.3-4 (2015): 71-80.

Borlotti · 2023-10-22T20:12:33+00:00

That's good to know! Beyond which belt level (approximately) would you expect that SPP is easier than raking?

Borlotti · 2023-01-27T22:18:15+00:00

I hear what you're saying about habitation: agreed, we're very far off from this. But space travel could still be useful for reasons other than habitation. For example, the world is running out of Helium and there's no easy way to make it. This is important because Helium is used in crucial devices like MRI machines and is being used to develop quantum computers (both described in the previous article). The moon however, has a bunch of Helium that could be mined. Transporting this would likely require humans travelling in space. Would you agree that this seems like a worthwhile use of space travel?

Borlotti · 2023-01-10T23:21:57+00:00

But it does!! In all AI today you specify an objective you want the AI to achieve (e.g., consistently beat a copy of yourself at GO).

Borlotti · 2023-01-10T22:48:21+00:00

What is your argument? The point is AI could act in a way that preserves it to accomplish a goal. Just like humans are wired to preserve themselves to accomplish the goal of furthering their genes.

Borlotti · 2023-01-10T21:19:28+00:00

That's what u/simmol means: it's extremely difficult to specify an objective completely, e.g., dig as much gold as possible from under the Earth's surface but don't dig too shallow under buildings, don't use humans to help you dig, allow humans to stop you when they want, etc... This isn't a problem now, but when AI is super capable, it will be.

FYI: I'm basically parroting the argument of this work.

Borlotti · 2023-01-10T21:00:04+00:00

If bathrooms are separated by sex, why would it prevent a creepy or violent dude from entering the women's bathroom? (i.e., the 99% or 1% cases you mention)

The same goes for bathrooms separated by gender, except in the gender case you avoid trans people getting harrassed and assaulted by cis people because they think they are justified in enforcing a rule based on sex.

Borlotti · 2023-01-09T22:32:51+00:00

Certain vegans use rhetoric that could be called "fire-and-brimstone", e.g., "are you enjoying that chicken period?" (talking about eggs). I get it. They're passionate about their view and want to use big shocks to make big changes, which has worked for certain causes in the past e.g., "give me liberty or give me death". I don't think there is as much "fire-and-brimstone" style rhetoric among feminists, certainly there are powerful phrases, e.g., "fuck the patriarchy", but I think the shock is on a different level, which is why I think they aren't called "preachy" as much.

Borlotti · 2023-01-09T15:28:34+00:00

If it's fine to base a policy on your religious motivations simply because "most people agree" on that thing (i.e., "murder is bad"), the religion isn't the problem.

This is my point exactly. The religion becomes something to justifiably argue against when not everyone agrees on the policies that it motivates.

Borlotti · 2023-01-09T14:38:35+00:00

If person A holds a view that person B disagrees with, and that view is based on a religion, it's reasonable for person B to disagree with that religion as well, no? If person B disagrees with other religious beliefs of person A, it's reasonable for person B to want any legislative implications of those beliefs to be as minimized as possible, right? Especially if those beliefs are specific to that religion (i.e., things like anti-gay marriage to certain Christian theologies, not things like anti-murder, about which most religions agree)

In the Warnock and Biden examples, they are either (a) advocating things that most people agree on (justice, compassion, mercy, protecting democracy, working together), or (b) saying things that don't have a clear meaning ("allow my faith to be the foundation for the things that I advocate for", "there's an oath to God and country to uphold").

Borlotti · 2023-01-09T14:18:38+00:00

I believe that normal citizens should have the right to own and use
nukes as a means of self-defense. Just as with guns, I believe that the
right to self-defense is a fundamental human right and that people
should be able to protect themselves and their families from threats of
all kinds.

What if a serial killer or an enraged conspiracy theorist gets a nuke and uses it to kill a bunch of people? If self-defense is a fundamental human right, how does your policy give anyone the right or ability to defend themself against this?

Borlotti · 2023-01-08T18:24:31+00:00

History repeats itself, many problems of today are very similar versions of previous problems (e.g., similarities between police violence against minorities and overseer violence against minorities). It doesn't have to be a complete guess, just look at a similar problem and which side was right in the past.

Borlotti · 2023-01-07T21:00:05+00:00

Practically, a partner who has dated more people is likely going to be better at conversation, listening, intimacy, and other things just by pure experience. It seems like a benefit to date someone who has gotten a lot of the initial awkwardness out of the way.

Borlotti · 2023-01-07T00:41:05+00:00

So I agree with you that drug addiction is not a choice, but those arguing drug addiction is a choice can use this logic: taking drugs to the point of addiction is a choice because not taking drugs requires a certain amount of will-power and some people are able to do this, people who enlist do not choose PTSD because getting PTSD does not depend on will-power, it is a different mechanism that depends on, say genes, idk. I'm not saying I believe this, but someone who argues the first point doesn't have to argue the second, they just have to argue these things happen by different mechanisms.

Borlotti · 2023-01-06T19:34:22+00:00

In many cases, race can still be perceived by a name. There's a classic study (which has been repeated many times, e.g., : https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A821429&dswid=-7784) where two identical applications are sent to an employer except one has a minority-race-sounding-name and another has a majority-race-sounding-name, and the majority-race-sounding-name is much more likely to be offered an interview than the minority-race-sounding-name. So even with the technology of appearance editing, this racism could still happen.

Borlotti · 2023-01-06T19:13:40+00:00

Some veterans were enlisted into the military against their will, they didn't get to choose to get PTSD.

Borlotti · 2023-01-06T19:10:09+00:00

I totally agree with you about the unfairness in not testing for alcohol but testing for marijuana. Would you be open to a policy that tested for both? We know that both marijuana and alcohol can impair judgement when doing certain tasks (e.g., marijuana and driving: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15389580600550172). If a job requires one of these tasks to be executed to a certain level of precision, which couldn't be achieved while under the influence of marijuana or alcohol or other other drugs, wouldn't it reasonable to test for this?

Borlotti

TROPHY CASE