You might be onto something here. I’m not sure though. I have a feeling it’s complicated and something we won’t fully understand any time soon.

If anything that text should’ve been sent in reverse.

Last night was fun, but it was weird the way you looked at me when I ate food at a restaurant. I don’t wish to continue this.

I thought were were discussing rationality. It seems like you are saying humans are not rational because they are also irrational, and I’m saying that the only reason we exist as we do today is because of lots of rational plans and decisions. Ultimately we’re both rational and irrational as a species. The fact that it’s much harder to argue that we’re rational in this current moment in time is what vexes me. It’s definitely a change. Facts made a much bigger impact 20 years ago.

I wasn’t very clear about the cooperation part. What I mean wasn’t that you have to be rational to cooperate. What I’m saying is that you have to be rational to plan out things that take dozens or hundreds of years and effectively utilize the cooperation of thousands of individuals who are all looking to solve the same problem.

You are using modern societal issues like inequality as evidence that we aren’t rational, but I dispute that strongly. Those problems used to be much, much worse, literally because the ruling class used a rational but evil plan to take care of themselves. Because of rational working class fighting back in a very organized and rational manner at a few different points in history, we made progress against them. We don’t have a 40 hour work week or OSHA in America because a bunch of emotional and angry public kept trying random things without a thought. We have those things from planning and hard work. Both are examples of being entirely rational.

We are not a logic, rational creature. Our brains are not machines for working out problems, they’re machines for telling stories to create a coherent narrative.

I gotta push back against this. It’s much more complicated than this. Humans have a complex brain, with some parts matching this description perfectly, and others that do not at all. If we were not capable of both being rational and prioritizing facts, we’d probably still be roughly the same as chimpanzees. Instead, we developed incredibly complicated systems for accomplishing long term goals, and throughout human history, cooperation based on rational thought has played a huge role in the direction our species took. Hell, without that ability, there probably wouldn’t have ever been a coherent ruling class. They wouldn’t have been able to put all the pieces in place to hoard wealth indefinitely.

What I see now as a distinct change is that rational thought just literally gets turned off at will, at any moment. In the past, 98% of people would watch a video of a crime and agree at least roughly on what happened. Now people literally seem to deny what their visual cortex perceives in favor of something they heard already. That is new.

You’re right about all of this. What I can’t fathom though – is that in the past, facts mattered. A lot. How did all of the propaganda literally erase that entirely? That’s what I cannot figure out. It’s not like the internet invented the concept of the lie. Before social media, at least most people would have some skepticism and if nothing else, ask their smart friend. How the hell did that go away?

I think the most important thing about this era is to understand how the fuck this happened. I have no answers and have never heard anything convincing. I think if humanity lasts long enough, hundreds of years of scholars will be trying to understand it. Most people on earth could’ve predicted most of this shit, yet no amount of spreading that knowledge made a fucking difference. If nothing else, this tells us how unbelievably irrational humans are.

The only thing I’m aware of which was predicted by anyone which he hasn’t done or tried to do is launch nukes at North Korea. Which he has threatened that. I think he’s enough of a psychopath that he is not above launching nukes if he ever finds himself in the position Hitler did. I mean why wouldn’t he? He’s shown us thousands and thousands of times that he cares about a singular person and that is himself.

But yeah, every fucking concern we had has been validated and then some. And these fucking zombies don’t care because they somehow can pretend he does nothing wrong, literally no matter what.

Never has there been a more disappointing time to have a working brain. All of this would’ve made way more sense before everyone could instantly check facts any time they wanted. Yet somehow, that ability made people less informed. I get that propaganda works and all, but I still will never understand how people could remain so adamantly ignorant when it’s genuinely so easy to learn and to stop being ignorant. I could even understand a world where people hate Trump’s specific actions but support a lot of the things he does. Would still be disappointing but it would make sense. Instead we live in a world where he can do anything and be loved for it no matter how heinous.

Congratulations on getting away from that hellscape. My experience on corporate social media sites is you easily get banned for criticizing awful viewpoints but as long as you stick within certain parameters you can be an awful person with awful views, and mods give zero fucks.

I’ve been banned for calling awful open bigots “bad words”. I reported their bigoted hate speech and crickets. I was permabanned for reposting a widely available photo that embarrasses trump. I even got disturbing death threats from a doctor in Florida for arguing with him about trump. I posted screenshots of him threatening my life on his yelp page for his practice and yelp literally just deleted those screenshots and scolded me for posting them. There’s a doctor out there who fantasizes about murdering strangers and he feels empowered to share those fantasies because Facebook and Yelp proved they’ll protect him if he does.

All these things cause me to find it hilarious when the right wing claims they are censored and banned unfairly. It’s because they literally want to be able to say anything and never see a consequence. In my experience, they’re mostly in that position. But it’s never good enough. They happily create their own safe spaces where nothing short of Nazi viewpoints are tolerated, but they cannot stomach any perceived limit on their speech.

My Wii sold on eBay so fast, I got the email telling me someone had bought it before I got the email confirming it was listed.

“you need to prove your worth because you don’t waste your money on bullshit. Also, I’m a terrible mother”

Can’t be worse than Teams in terms of bugs at least

This makes sense. Any time I see someone acting as though there is one type of phone, it’s an iPhone user. For example, only an iPhone user will recommend an iOS-only app because it literally never occurred to them that another platform exists.

What the hell is “mobbying”?

Is this for iPhone or Android?

Yeah, shocking you can choose whichever mouse you want and probably have been able to since USB mice became a thing.

Even when apple mice didn’t have two buttons, you could right click via control + click.

Ah, interesting. Never knew that. Thanks!

I don’t think they are (strictly associated with programming itself I mean) personally, but recently there’s definitely been this trend of Linux/unix people posting images of their computers and their legs with stockings, usually striped. I dunno. It’s a meme.

Seriously even when I was 15, a 12 hour gaming session would’ve been extremely exhausting. I’m not saying I never did it but I could never keep that shit up for long. I think that rises past the level of clinical addiction.

I recently took an online autism test (probably not super accurate but still) and got 69. Have always suspected I’d be slightly on the spectrum but according to this meme, the government might give me money? I’m in America so I doubt it but it’s an interesting idea. I do feel I’ve been extremely lucky, for example, I make a decent living and work from home 100% of the time now. Honestly may have gone crazy or left my field and gone broke if COVID hadn’t ushered in wfh. The office smalltalk is murderous on my soul.