schipelblorp
@schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Arizona doctors vote to form state’s first physicians’ union 11 hours ago:
Who are these fucking doctors to tell us how to treat patients?
- Comment on How do we stop people from defending billionares and trillion dollar companies? 12 hours ago:
Well, you know what Adlai Stevenson said when someone told him he had the vote of every thinking American?
- Comment on How do we stop people from defending billionares and trillion dollar companies? 12 hours ago:
I’m just saying your social experience doesn’t map onto the rest of society. If rich people are dumb, that means poor people can be smart, and that would mean that we do not live in a fair world. So for this to be a just world, rich people have to be smart and if they’re really they have to be geniuses. Keep an eye out for articles about rich people giving their opinion about shit they know nothing about; the undergirding assumption is that we should listen to what they have to say because they must be smart if they’re rich.
This is how we got Elon Musk, who, as far as I can tell, is good at some aspects of business, but really masterful at pretending to be smart before extremely guillible audiences.
I know you don’t watch new media, but Angela Collier has more than one video complaining about rich people who claim they could have been physicists. “What’s stopping you? You have the money. You can take time off and even run your own research lab and hire the best professors in the world to teach you.”
- Comment on How do we stop people from defending billionares and trillion dollar companies? 12 hours ago:
There’s a halo of genius around rich people because they’re rich. Like the guy that invented the pet rock.
- Comment on Arizona doctors vote to form state’s first physicians’ union 13 hours ago:
In a statement to Arizona’s Family, Banner Health said its culture is one of its greatest strengths and that it would not allow a union organizing campaign, which it said is built on the concerns of a few, to define who the company is or how it cares for its people and patients.
Yup. Sounds like they definitely need a union.
- Comment on Alcoholic billionaire says he wants to shove a camera up every workers ass. 1 day ago:
I expected more from the DredPyr8Roberts. You’re going to have nothing but work, work, work all the time now.
- Comment on How hard/fast would a baseball have to go to completely pass through a pitcher? Like leave a hole through flesh? 1 day ago:
Cannonballs are insanely OP. Mythbusters shot a small cannon once; it blew entirely through their backstop and went through a few houses before stopping. Your method will result in an overestimate.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
I mean, your reference is a youtube video.
- Comment on hi its me, the real dean 2 days ago:
That’s Moby!
- Comment on How long will it be before everyday AI like chatgpt can easily do videocalls? 2 days ago:
If you do it right, you can have your AI scammer burn a lot of tokens; and if you’re lucky enough to get two AI scam callers at the same time, you can connect them with each other and they’ll talk all day.
- Comment on How long will it be before everyday AI like chatgpt can easily do videocalls? 2 days ago:
Honestly, if AI is going to rate my performance, I’d just as well as have an AI do my interview.
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 3 days ago:
Sure! Love to hear your thoughts.
She’s like a third-wave atheist, recognizing that hating women and muslims isn’t a coherent philosophy to build a life around, that there’s more to the human project than being technically correct actually.
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 3 days ago:
Did you read in the intended “not” into “Pascal’s wager was intended to be taken seriously.” ? Because I think it was an idle thought experiment that got taken up by Christians.
I have spent more time reading monster manuals than I ever have playing… it’s mythological crack.
If you want more, the person that’s pushed forward my thinking most recently is Britt Hartley of No Nonsense Spirituality on YouTube. She cheekily refers to herself as “your atheist spiritual director”, but there’s a lot of wisdom there. I think you’ll appreciate her attempts to separate the baby from the bathwater, as you have with Catholicism here.
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 3 days ago:
Pascal’s Wager was intended to be taken seriously, but it sort of took on a life of its own.
Yes, and Gnosticism is definitely cool; just saying reading the source texts is a pretty miserable experience. Better to Monster Manualize it, boil it down to critters and cosmology without the lard of worship.
And, yes, there were a lot of people attracted to world-as-torture-device, but it’s interesting that can invalidate a philosophy when the countervailing philosophy of God Loves Us attracts a greater amount of disordered thinking… This is an artifact of exactly what we’re talking about–the need for people to avoid acknowledging existentially destabilizing realities. Check out The Last Messiah for more on that.
Back to Catholicism: it’s a religion. All religions have psychological and social value, lest they would not exist. There’s not any real point to rate and compare religions, because I believe they are simply the result of society and not its determiners.
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 3 days ago:
I thought I’d get a lot out of reading the Gnostic texts directly, but it was mostly the same religious garbage I’ve outgrown. One thing that really kills the vibe for me is when people take religion, you know, religiously. Seriously unreadable trash, chapter after chapter about how GREAT God is, as if greatness automatically made something worthy of worship. Servile horseshit.
I got a lot more out the prison planet subreddit, which is sort of gnosticism redux for people with obvious delusion and people like me, interested in the power of a radically different perspective.
It’s really interesting that imagining the world as a place created as a prison to torture us IMMEDIATELY makes so much more sense than the tri-omni God of traditional Christiainity, but offering that as a possibility had to be heavily regulated at the edge of a sword… makes you realize how much of religious debate is based on a very narrow range of choices. Pascal’s Wager works in the popular imagination because the bedrock assumption is that there is only one God that exists and that we are choosing to believe in the right one. When you consider infinite gods and infinite risks of choosing the wrong one, the wager falls apart.
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 3 days ago:
I’m not sure what concessions Catholicism has. It built itself into a major political player and was the spiritual foundation of the feudal system and king’s right to rule… and this for over a thousand years.
The Catholic Church was aware there was stuff in the bible that wouldn’t go in its favor, which is why they killed anyone who tried to translate it into a popular language… At the same time, all these priests and bishops and cardinals and popes COULD read it, and they consistently chose to support their own power. Very human, that, craving power above all else.
One defining weirdness of Christianity is the emphasis is puts on FAITH, on protestations of belief. I don’t think even Judaism cares that much about it.
But the religious situation around Jesus’ time was absolutely WILD. I’d start with The Life of Brian, but then read about the Gnostic Gospels. There were cults springing up all over the place, each with their own vibe-coded stories that were ChatGPTd from prevailing culture. I think thinking of “Judaism” as an unitary religion/culture is a bit of anachronism.
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 3 days ago:
The term “broicism” is implicitly a critique. I don’t know much about the stoics, but I understand it has a bit more emotional complexity where as broicism is just machistic indifference repackaged. Here’s one article: trillmag.com/…/broicism-the-manospheres-obsession…
I think all monotheisms are toxic; not sure how you think Christianity and Judaism are different, architecturally speaking. It just cracks me up that Jesus explicitly talks about all the ways religion is misused (Good Samaritan, Pharisees, etc.), he lays it out and black and white, and it just gets ignored. Not to mention how its used to support hierarchy when smashing hierarchy is absolutely in the text; but it’s complicated because the appropriation of Jesus was well underway when the bible was decided on. I think if Jesus was able to self-publish his memoirs, Christianity would never have gotten off the ground.
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 3 days ago:
For all the good it does you. The public will ruthlessly interpret your work however it wants; look at Broicism (neé Stoicism) or Christianity.
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 3 days ago:
Philosophy aside, the comment on LessWrong that said “Nietzsche is a great source of aphorisms, and may be able to trigger some Deep Thoughts in readers, but a lot of his writing seems more like a sort of performance art to me. At least on a superficial level, he’s much easier to read than Kant or Hegel, but that also means he does not even try to argue his point in a rigorous way”.
Meh. If rigor were the path to the truth, wouldn’t we have the found the One True Philosophy? At the end of the day, all that matters is if the philosophy vibes with you, which you can discover just as well from a comic book version of the philosophy as painstakingly deriving every point.
I think thinking you’re using your rational mind to determine the capital-T Truth is delusional.
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 3 days ago:
Correct, but maladaptive and evolutionarily unfit…
If you want to be entertained, you can watch True Detective Season 1. Someone brought up Rust, already.
If you want to ruin your life in ten pages, the source is The Last Messiah by Zapffe.
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 3 days ago:
Yes, read Simone Beauvoir along with Sartre. Sartre is kind of a comically a privileged white man. As you say people can be free to choose the path of their lives, but some more than others.
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 3 days ago:
It’s sort of paradox that a government that is actively looking to liquidate its excess population would put the kabosh on suicide, but I think it would. Cruelty and control.
- Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy 4 days ago:
Britt Hartley takes existentialists to the woodshed, pointing out that it’s a fine philosophy if you’re living a comfortable life, but if nothing means anything and your life sucks, might as well put a quarter in the suicide booth if existential philosophy is all you have.
- Comment on What exactly is the security of direct messages on lemmy? Does anyone actually use matrix? 6 days ago:
I mean, that might be ok. Busy discords are horrible places to be.
- Comment on What exactly is the security of direct messages on lemmy? Does anyone actually use matrix? 1 week ago:
Who has access to the db?
- Comment on What exactly is the security of direct messages on lemmy? Does anyone actually use matrix? 1 week ago:
That’s a bummer, man, because what you’d want to do is send the user a DM with a more secure service, but then you’d be exposing your user account and linking it your lemmy id.
- Comment on What exactly is the security of direct messages on lemmy? Does anyone actually use matrix? 1 week ago:
The app? The website? Explain.
- What exactly is the security of direct messages on lemmy? Does anyone actually use matrix?sh.itjust.works ↗Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 33 comments
- Comment on Fewer People 55-And-Over Choose To Work. But Why? 1 week ago:
Well, this has taken an unexpectedly scenic route through the weeds, but alright, let’s put the kettle on and have another go.
The central issue seems to be that you’re treating my original claim as if I had presented a completed statistical proof of individual causation, when what I actually said was that I was experiencing difficulty finding work and believed age was a contributing factor. Those are two rather different beasts, unless we’ve decided that every statement about one’s own experience must first be peer reviewed by the Royal Statistical Society before being permitted out of the house.
You’re right about one thing: the evidence I gave doesn’t establish that ageism is the sole cause of my unemployment. I never said it did. What it establishes, at least from my perspective, is that I have encountered circumstances where age appeared to be relevant. You can dispute that interpretation, obviously. What you can’t really do is turn “I think age is a factor in my experience” into “I have claimed to have mathematically demonstrated that ageism is responsible for 100% of my unemployment.”
That’s where Karl Popper becomes rather inconvenient for both of us. A hypothesis needs to be falsifiable, not magically transformed into a certainty by either side. If my claim is “age may be contributing to my difficulty finding employment,” then the appropriate response is to identify evidence that makes that explanation less plausible, not simply point at the aggregate unemployment rate and declare the case closed like a detective who has found a fingerprint on the wrong corpse.
And this is where your argument about unemployment rates gets a little slippery. A low unemployment rate for an age bracket does not establish that I personally am not experiencing age discrimination. It establishes that the aggregate unemployment rate for that group is low. Those are different propositions. One is population-level data, the other is an individual claim. You’re using the former to dismiss the latter, which is a bit like using the average temperature of the Atlantic Ocean to determine whether one particular person is currently wet.
Now, could my perception be wrong? Absolutely. I could be mistaken about the role age is playing. There could be other explanations. That’s perfectly reasonable. But “you haven’t proven ageism caused your unemployment” and “ageism isn’t affecting you” are not the same statement. The first is a demand for stronger evidence. The second is a conclusion you haven’t established either.
And yes, the factors I mentioned apply to unemployed people in other age brackets too. That’s rather the point. They’re examples of why the headline unemployment figure is not a complete description of somebody’s experience in the labour market. You asked whether they were relevant to your rebuttal, and strictly speaking, no, not all of them are. I brought them up because your rebuttal relied heavily on a single aggregate statistic as though it answered a question it doesn’t actually measure. In hindsight, that was probably rather like bringing a sundial to a submarine and complaining that nobody had asked what time it was.
As for the “it doesn’t mean it affects you personally” point, you’re correct that my original statement was personal. But that doesn’t make the issue disappear. If I say, “I think X happened to me because of Y,” you can reasonably ask what evidence I have for Y. What you can’t reasonably infer is that because Y doesn’t happen to everyone in my demographic, it therefore didn’t happen to me. That’s not an argument, it’s just changing the subject while wearing the argument’s hat.
And since we’re apparently collecting philosophers now, Bertrand Russell would probably have something unkind to say about that distinction between what follows from the premises and what we’d quite like to follow from them. The fact that something is statistically uncommon doesn’t logically entail that it didn’t happen in a particular case. If one person is struck by lightning, the fact that most people aren’t struck by lightning is not a particularly compelling rebuttal when they’re standing there smoking slightly.
I also think you’re giving “straw man” a rather enthusiastic workout. I wasn’t saying your rebuttal was “older workers have high unemployment, therefore you’re wrong.” I was saying that the unemployment statistic doesn’t by itself answer the question of whether age played a role in my particular experience. If that’s not what you intended the statistic to establish, then fair enough, but in that case I’m not entirely sure what work you think it is doing in the argument.
Ultimately, I think we’re arguing past each other. You’re asking me to demonstrate that ageism caused my unemployment to a standard sufficient to establish the proposition objectively. I’m saying that I have observed things in my own experience that lead me to believe age is a factor. Those are not mutually exclusive positions. I can acknowledge that my evidence is anecdotal and still regard it as evidence. Popper would probably object to me treating it as proof, and Russell would probably object to the entire conversation on grounds of insufficient logic and inadequate tea.
So, yes, if my original wording was “I am unemployed because employers are discriminating against me because of my age,” then I’ll happily concede that that’s a stronger causal claim than the evidence I presented can establish. If what I said was “I’m experiencing difficulty finding employment and I believe age is one of the factors contributing to that,” then your unemployment-rate statistic doesn’t refute it.
It merely tells us that my experience isn’t the median experience of my age bracket.
Which, rather unfortunately for the argument, was never the claim.
- Comment on Fewer People 55-And-Over Choose To Work. But Why? 1 week ago:
First, finding examples of age bias obviously doesn’t automatically prove that age discrimination is widespread. But it also doesn’t make those examples irrelevant. If the question is whether age bias exists or can affect people in hiring and employment, you don’t need to prove that literally every employer is doing it. You need to establish that it happens often enough, and in circumstances important enough, to have a meaningful effect.
Second, the unemployment rate really isn’t enough to settle the question. Unemployment numbers tell you how many people are unemployed among people who are actively participating in the labor market. They don’t tell you everything about why someone is unemployed, how long they’ve been looking, whether they’ve stopped looking altogether, whether they’re underemployed, whether they’re being passed over for jobs they’re qualified for, or whether they’ve had to accept worse jobs than they otherwise would have.
That distinction matters alot with age. Someone can technically be employed while still experiencing age-related disadvantages in hiring, promotions, layoffs, compensation, career progression, etc. And someone who gets discouraged and leaves the labor force doesn’t necessarily show up as “unemployed” in the way you’re implying.
Third, saying “it doesn’t mean it affects you personally” is kind of beside the point unless the original argument was specifically claiming that every person in that age group is personally experiencing discrimination. Obviously an aggregate pattern doesn’t mean every individual experiences it. The existence of racial discrimination, sex discrimination, disability discrimination, or any other form of discrimination doesn’t mean every person in the relevant group has personally encountered it either.
And honestly, I’d flip the logic around. If someone says, “I’m seeing evidence that age can be a disadvantage in certain employment situations,” responding with “but your age group has low unemployment” doesn’t really address the claim. You’d need to show that the particular evidence is unrepresentative, that the effect disappears when controlling for relevant factors, or that the broader data contradicts it.
Theirs also a difference between saying “older workers have higher unemployment” and saying “older workers can face age-related barriers in the labor market.” Those are not the same proposition. In fact, older workers can have relatively low unemployment while still facing particular problems with getting hired after a job loss, changing careers, being perceived as overqualified, having higher salary expectations, or dealing with stereotypes about adaptability and technology.
So I’m not saying, “There are a couple examples, therefore everyone is discriminating against older workers.” That would obviously be an overreach. I’m saying that the existence and significance of age bias can’t really be dismissed just because the overall unemployment rate for an age bracket happens to be low.
If were going to talk about whether age bias is actually widespread, the useful question is what the broader evidence says about hiring outcomes, callback rates, longterm unemployment, earnings, layoffs, and labor force participation, not simply whether the headline unemployment rate for that demographic is low.
