I say please and thank you when writing to LLMs, not because I think they care or will remember or to anthropomorphize them, but because I don’t want to develop bad habits. I don’t want all my writing and conversations with actual humans to become curt and transactional because I forget that they are human and talk to them like an LLM.

I can hardly believe that we have devolved so far, so quickly. We are literally one step away from becoming an authoritarian dictatorship. The plan is this:

1. Deport (and by deport, they mean imprison for life) immigrants. These immigrants will mostly be legitimately illegal and gang associated criminals, but there will be a few individuals with legal standing and no criminal records. This could simply be the result of denying due process, or it could be an intentional test. The important factor is that 5th Amendment Due process rights are denied to all of them. The fact that these people (but be sure to de-humanize them as much as possible) are immigrants will be the distracting factor. <---- We are here

2. Deport (and by deport, they mean imprison for life) criminals. These will be legitimate criminals with legitimately horrible records; that will be the distracting issue that will be made the focus of the argument: “They are serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, we don’t want them here, so we should get rid of them.” This has already been announced as the plan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUfrwWz-m5I . That is not the point! The point is that they are still U.S. citizens, despite their crimes. The significance of this is that it will be the final barrier that needs to be broken, and the final protection that must be dismantled for the final solution to be enacted. If no one steps up and successfully defends the constitutional rights of these American citizens, then all the pieces will be in place for step 3.

3. Deport (and by deport, they mean imprison for life) political dissidents, rivals, business opponents, and maybe just anyone the administration doesn’t like. If they are political dissidents they will claim that they have committed crimes like, “hate speech against America™”, if they are a minority, they will be “associated with gangs”, if they are business rivals it will have committed “economic terrorism”, or something like that. It doesn’t really matter because they eliminated due process in step 1 (remember that was the important factor, not the immigrant dis-tractor), and without due process they don’t have to prove any crimes. Our last defense would have been the simple fact that we are American Citizens, but we established that doesn’t matter in step 2 because they were “bad people”, but now the “bad people” are whoever the administration decides is bad.

The context of the 5th amendment is important to understand its intent:

Historically, the Fifth Amendment draws significant influence from English common law. The grand jury clause specifically dates back to the Magna Carta, and was designed to protect accused persons from prosecution by the English royalty. In keeping with that intention, the Constitution’s framers opted to adapt the grand jury to the Constitution, so as to protect citizens from prosecution by the federal government.
Reagan Library

Even in a Monarchy, which is not the form of government we are supposed to have, the Magna Carta offered protections against the King from prosecuting commoners, which is the origin of this amendment. We aren’t just devolving to pre-revolution America, which had enough disagreements with the rule of King George III that it sparked a war…no we are devolving to a pre-Magna Carta England type of Government. We are descending into middle-age feudalism with complete authoritarian rule… and we aren’t fortunate enough to have a dictator like Alfred the Great.

My point is that memes like this use religion as a strawman because they don’t actually want to discuss the foundational concepts expressed by the meme. Which is what I addressed, in my admittedly very lenghy, response.

The TLDR is that science requires a much faith as religion, and that people aren’t willing to take ten minutes to read more than a couple paragraphs and contemplate the fundamental nature of reality, because you know, it’s not as important as a meme…

While trust and faith aren’t perfect synonyms they are closely related: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/trust

As for math, are you familiar with Gödel’s incompleteness theorems?

This is a good explanation/interview for anyone who is not: https://youtu.be/u3GYrEOoKGk

I often see this sentiment on the internet, but I wonder what definition people who hold this view are using for “religion” to reach this conclusion. I have found that the definitions of “religion” and “faith” in use by people are so varied or vague that they are almost pointless to use. The way I define them, everyone is religious and faith is a necessity.

life presents a dilemma to me: I would like to conclusively know everything about the universe and reality before deciding what choices to make, but I do not have that luxury. I must make decisions daily with what amounts to almost no information. Faith is not an optional part of life. Some people recognize that necessity and others do not. It is merely a question of who and what you place your faith in.

Rather than use the word “religion”, I would be much more interested in asking about people’s worldviews. Wikipedia gives this description: One can think of a worldview as comprising a number of basic beliefs which are philosophically equivalent to the axioms of the worldview considered as a logical or consistent theory. These basic beliefs cannot, by definition, be proven.

I have boiled this down to two essential questions about the nature of life/existence/reality that can be graphed on a quadrant:

The horizontal axis is the duration of existence. The difference between a worldview with an infinite existence and a worldview with a finite existence is immeasurable. If I believe in an infinite petsonal existence, then my actions have infinite consequences which I must experience the results of. Short of infinite personal existence, I may believe that life/the universe will exist forever, but that I will personally cease to exist when I die. In this case, my actions may still have infinite consequences (for future generations) but I will not personally experience them. A purely finite/temporal worldview would mean that I believe that everything will end in the heat death of the universe or similar life ending event. In this case, it ultimately doesn’t matter what I, or anyone else does in life, everything will end the same way for everyone and all life.

The vertical axis represents the nature of our existence. Is the source of life personal or impersonal? If I believed a completely impersonal worldview, then I would believe that we are essentially just biologically pre-programmed to live our lives based on the DNA that we have been built from and that person hood/personal agency is a construct of the mind with no higher meaning. If I believed in a completely personal worldview, then I would believe that I am created by a personal being that is also interested in a personal relationship with me, and I am created as a reflection of their person hood.

These are foundational questions about the nature of reality that demand an answer. Every choice I make in my life should reflect the answers to these questions. But where are the answers?

In our current society, it seems to be accepted that science and religion are diametrically opposed and cannot co-exist. I have observed, especially on the internet, that if I espouse to be religious, then it is assumed that I believe in flying spaghetti monsters and think the earth is flat. I believe that intellectually honest people will find that they are actually in more similar circumstances than they realize. It would be foolish for me to disregard scientific observation and experimentation, but it would be equally foolish for me to disregard the limitations of those observations and experiments:

It is impossible to take a zero-trust approach with science (never trust, always verify). I don’t have access to a Large Hadron Collider to observe the Higgs boson for myself. I don’t have access to the LUX-ZEPLIN to experiment with dark matter. I don’t have access to the LIGO Lab to observe gravitational waves. I trust that these experiments are conducted correctly and that their findings are correct, but by doing so I am placing my faith in the scientists performing the experiments. I do so also knowing that complete objectivity is impossible. I have a personal bias. My own life experience and observations skew the way I see the world. I assume this is the same of other people, scientists included.

Even if I had access to all the equipment necessary, and dedicated my entire life to scientific experimentation, I would only be able to conduct a tiny fraction of experiments necessary to explore just a few of the questions about the nature of the universe. At the end of my life, I would likely have more questions about the universe than when I began.

Even if I had the time, ability, and equipment necessary to conduct all necessary experiments to explore my questions about the universe, I would be making a fundamental assumption that I am actually able to observe everything. I have no idea if there are other dimensions that I will never be able to observe or experiment with. I simply have to accept by faith that these do or do not exist.

Even if I assumed that everything is observable, and I had the capacity to conduct all necessary experiments, I would still have an impossible problem from a practical standpoint: I need to make decisions on a daily basis. I don’t have a lifetime to wait and scientifically determine the nature of the universe before I make a decision about how I want to live my life. I am living it right now. The fundamental truth about the universe matters in the decisions that I have to make right now.

This is why faith is a necessity. I look around, and I see that I am just one of over seven billion people on this Earth, and that Earth is just one of eight planets orbiting our Sun, and that our Sun is just one of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, a galaxy that is so vast, even travelling at the impossible speed of light, would take me thousands of lifetimes to traverse, and that galaxy is just one of possibly trillions of galaxies in what is just the observable universe. One thing is for sure. I am very small, in every sense of the word. To sit here, and read this paragraph again, and then think that I really know-it-all would make me one of the most arrogant beings in the universe. I know very little, and I live by faith.

If you note, I put “businessman” in quotes for both of them because it isn’t the correct term for either of them. It isn’t the correct term for Taylor because it is the wrong pronoun, and it isn’t the correct term for Trump because he seems incapable of running a successful business. It was an intentional construct for ironic parallelism, not an oversight.

Reagan was at least governor of California prior to running for president.

The argument that “you shouldn’t vote for someone just because your favorite celebrity endorses them” seemed like a much more credible argument before the 2016 election when the winning candidate essentially won by literally being a celebrity.

Prior to 2016, Trump was probably best known for being the host of a reality TV show, and being a “businessman”. Taylor Swift is definitely better known, and you could also make a solid argument that she is a better “businessman” as well.

I hate to burst any utopian bubbles out there, but the problem with society ultimately isn’t capitalism, or communism, or socialism, or fascism, or any other system of government or economics. The problem with society is people. We are the problem. While some systems of government are certainly better than others at protecting us from our ourselves, eventually they all crumble and succumb to our depravity.

“We have met the enemy, and they are us” -Pogo

Mr. Ballen featured this story a few years ago if you want to hear a dramatized version: https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=403&v=8MpR4k3-edc&feature=youtu.be

This is true, but it wouldn’t actually be the first time that an arbiter gave an unfavorable result to its employer: https://youtu.be/u9Jmi9BOBNA?si=mOEPKERF8Z8YFrOi&t=8m38s

In my fantasy timeline this is forced to go to arbitration but the arbiter actually is a human being who is so outraged at the circumstances that they award the entire net worth of the Disney corporation as damages in a legally binding non-appealable decision.

Simple solution to all this: We don’t have divisions based on gender. We simply measure testosterone and have a high-T and low-T division. Anyone can compete in the high-T but high-T can’t compete in the low-T division.

He should definitely be wearing orange, just not Netherlands Orange…

The whole purpose of separation of powers into executive, legislative, and judicial branches is to prevent consolidation of power. It is supposed to be like the 3-way standoff from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

I think the root problem here is that a justice shouldn’t be allowed to serve until after the president who nominated them is out of office, and if they would be otherwise eligible for another term, would no longer be permitted to run for the presidency while the justice is serving on the court. This would also cut-down on the issue of lifetime appointments by shortening their appointments by 4-8 years.

That and the President obviously shouldn’t have immunity from the law.

What happens with the vacancy on the court while we are waiting for the president to leave office? It gives the legislature plenty of time to argue about the appointment, which they will do anyways.

Thanks, really no need to apologize. I had assumed it was just selective memory myself and hadn’t considered the temp/voltage drop possibility, but now we have learned something.

I would say some of them are, but some are just funny observations. Like the current issue: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/olympic_sports_2x.png

Zero science in that either.

This is like survivorship bias, but in reverse. Obviously almost everyone who killed themselves with a gun had access to a gun, but this doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have committed suicide by some other means if they didn’t have access to a gun.

This is something that is impossible to determine scientifically. If everyone in this study group killed themselves with a gun, how many of them would have not killed themselves if they didn’t have a gun? They can’t un-kill themselves and let us take away their guns so we can determine the effect.

What this study shows is that a gun is likely the first choice of gun owners who are trying to kill themselves. It cannot determine how much less likely they would have been to kill themselves had they not owned a gun, if at all. Intuitively I do believe that it would be less, because other means are likely more difficult, slower, or less effective. Whether this would result in slightly fewer suicides or much fewer I do not know, but this study doesn’t prove either.

This is a pretty good video explaining why the imperial system in the U.S. isn’t as bad as it seems: https://youtu.be/iJymKowx8cY?si=wcyG7yM150e71Rn4