AbouBenAdhem
@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
- Comment on Who discovered/"invented" fire? 4 days ago:
Dont say Prometheus
Ok—it was Προμηθεύς.
- Comment on What's the best way to respond to a family member who says the COVID vaccines are being used to depopulate? 2 weeks ago:
Try Bayes’ theorem. Ask them to give percent likelihoods for the following:
A. The odds that the government (or whoever) is trying to kill everyone, before taking the evidence of excess deaths into account
B. The odds of seeing excess deaths for any possible reason, not just their conspiracy hypothesis
C. The odds of seeing excess deaths if the conspiracy hypothesis were true.Then logically, the odds of the conspiracy being real given the excess deaths should be A*C/B. If you disagree on the outcome, you must disagree on one or more of the assumptions (probably A—if it’s B, you can find the objective odds by checking historical data).
If you still disagree on the prior assumption (A), you can set aside the excess deaths argument and ask what other evidence led them to form that prior assumption. Then you can repeat the process until you either reach agreement or they’re left with an assumption with no evidence.
- Comment on Why does Dairy Queen sell food? 2 weeks ago:
They’ve got to do something with the cows once they’re too old to milk.
- Comment on Is empathy based on a financial bell curve? 2 weeks ago:
I think it’s more likely that you need to empathize with someone in order to be able to recognize when they’re being empathetic, and you empathize most with the middle class.
- Comment on why do some people put a space before a question mark or exclamation point? 4 weeks ago:
It was the standard printed style in the US and UK from the 1860s until the early 20th century, gradually phasing out by the 1950s.
For printers with variable spaces, it was more usual to use a thin space before the punctuation and an em space after.
- Comment on Does anyone use a phone without a protective case? 4 weeks ago:
I get the smallest phone available and don’t use a case because I don’t like the bulk.
I also figure a smaller piece of glass is less likely to break when dropped, so the size is a sort of protection in itself.
- Comment on Would having two hearts be better or worse for the human body? 4 weeks ago:
Not absolute pressure, but pressure per unit of work (i.e., efficiency).
- Comment on Would having two hearts be better or worse for the human body? 4 weeks ago:
Even if they were physically separated you’d want them to pump in sync, to maximize the pressure. So having them share electrical signals is just the optimal setup for two hearts.
- Comment on Would having two hearts be better or worse for the human body? 4 weeks ago:
It’s better, which is why we already do.
Mammals have a double circulatory system, with the left and right ventricles effectively acting as separate hearts that happen to be physically connected.
- Comment on what’s the difference between “he died” and “he’s dead”? 5 weeks ago:
And preceded by “it’s worse than that”.
- Comment on What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with? 5 weeks ago:
Do most public libraries have holocaust denial works?
- Comment on What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with? 5 weeks ago:
Legally, you could buy a used copy if you could find one.
- Comment on How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? 1 month ago:
That depends on whether angels are bosons or fermions.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
I think it’s Staten Island.
- Comment on Does the average person know markdown? 1 month ago:
Most people are probably at least aware that there are contexts where you can use some basic, intuitive ASCII-based formatting (like asterisks for bullets) and it will get cleaned up to a prettier format when you post it.
- Comment on Pedestrians Walking on Right or Left? 1 month ago:
I think the general rule (that also applies on one-way streets, etc.) is that the pedestrian lane closest to traffic should face in the direction of oncoming traffic, so cars aren’t approaching from their blind spot.
- Comment on Iceland approved the 4-day workweek in 2019: nearly 6 years later, all the predictions made have come true. 1 month ago:
There were fears of a drop in productivity, increased costs for businesses and difficulties in adapting to maintain service levels. However, the Icelandic experience has swept these fears under the carpet.
I don’t think that metaphor means what they think it means.
- Comment on If the entirety of the internet was a computer simulation how would prove it? 1 month ago:
Look at phenomena that should be totally random, and look for evidence that they were produced by pseudorandom number generators.
- Comment on Can you read and understand this passage? 1 month ago:
I believe so—but I grew up reading a lot of 19th-century novels.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
It’s like when you get inoculated with a weakened form of a live virus so you can build up an immunity to more virulent forms.
- Comment on How does Netflix, HBO and other services get their subtitles? Are they now using AI to help translate? 1 month ago:
The voice-over is usually trying to approximate the lip movements and timing as well as the meaning.
- Comment on What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around? 2 months ago:
Even if every human on earth had their own pet since dogs were first domesticated ten or twenty thousand years ago, their ancestors were facing the stress of migrating into new and unfamiliar environments for several hundred thousand years prior to that.
- Comment on What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around? 2 months ago:
Beneficial mutations are random, but the odds of them persisting are proportional to the frequency of the events in which they affect our fitness. And the proportion of stressful events in which pets were available would have been only a fraction of the total number of stressful events our ancestors experienced.
If pets are available for 10% of the stressful events we experience, the selection pressure for stress reduction that doesn’t require pets would be ten times greater.
- Comment on What is the evolutionary benefit of loving a pet so much you melt into a puddle when they are around? 2 months ago:
That’s a personal benefit, but it’s not necessarily an evolutionary benefit. If it were an evolutionary benefit, our bodies would generate that response spontaneously without needing an external stimulus that wouldn’t have been available to many of our ancestors.
- Comment on How would you run a society? 2 months ago:
Accept that there’s going to be political diversity and social change (for better and worse), and try to create an overarching framework to channel it into something other than violent conflict. One idea:
Let societies do whatever they want, but institute a “risk mitigation’ tax (or other form of resource redistribution) based on size and similarity: if a social strategy is popular and widely adopted, it’s taxed at a marginally increasing rate until it reaches an equilibrium level; and the revenue is used to fund more experimental social strategies. This flips the historical dynamic on its head: instead of each society trying to forcibly convert the rest of the world to its own system, each society has an interest in discouraging others from following its example.
- Comment on If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed? 2 months ago:
I claw my way out of a few feet of soil, and walk about thirty minutes to where the local Olhone maintained a ceremonial shellmound from 800 BCE until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1700s. By all accounts the Olhone were chill hunter-gatherers, so my best bet would probably be to befriend and join them.
They’d be more knowledgeable than me about everything in the local environment, so I don’t think I’d have much knowledge that would be of use to them. (They seem to have known of other nearby groups that practiced agriculture, but saw no need for it.) I might eventually consider traveling north or south along the coast, but many other groups in western North America practiced warfare and/or slavery, so I’d probably be best off staying put.
- Comment on With Tim Pool in the White House Press Pool, will we ever find out what's under that beanie? 2 months ago:
So “Tim Apple” is CEO of Apple, and Tim Pool is on the White House press pool.
Does Trump just believe in some kind of obligate nominative determinism? If I call myself “Tim General”, can I sit on the National Security Council?
- Comment on Why are popes always really old? 2 months ago:
It’s an emergent phenomenon—institutions will naturally behave in ways that increase their power without that being the conscious intention of any given member.
- Comment on Why are popes always really old? 2 months ago:
The older the average pope, the shorter the average term, and the more papal elections in a given span of time.
One of the main powers of cardinals is electing the pope, so more papal elections means more power for the cardinals.
- Comment on What accent would I even have? 2 months ago:
Any accent of English, including more recent ones, perceived as a mixture of American and British English, and often perceived as incorporating the prestige speech of one or both countries