Ask Lemmy

I believe that life as we know it exists somewhere else in the universe .

When I started working decades ago, we were taught how to use bent bits of fence wire to find underground pipes before digging

I literally found scores of pipes that way, and saw dozens of other people do it regularly. It was even taught at a local agricultural college as part of the horticulture course

Then someone told me it was a myth and doesn't work, so I set up a blind test with a hidden bucket of water and I utterly failed to find it

I simply cannot explain this

People are basically good

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most.

That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies.

You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not.

You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in."

• Hub, Secondhand Lions (2003)

I believe that the reason why so many people are going crazy in America at least is because they are approaching the end of their life and they have been told the whole time they've been alive that they would be living through the end of times, and if it becomes true then their lives have not been wasted but if it is not true or if it doesn't happen until after they die then their lives have been wasted and it's driving them crazy.

My BS, unprovable hypothesis: The Golden Age of Piracy was actually a successful Socialist movement, with Nassau being a disruptively successful enclave of Socialism in action. The pirates deeply threatened the budding power structures in the US (not conjecture) and the entrenched powers in Europe. While some powers, most notably royalty, were willing to use pirates as mercenaries (privateers), there was an excess of democracy and human concern (somewhat my conjecture) among the Nassau pirates. The Nassau pirates had pensions, a form of worker's comp, disability, democratic command structures at sea, and healthcare (such as it was given the era). According to the historical texts on the Nassau pirates, there were almost no written records, which strikes me as especially odd since they had so many long-running financial and governing processes.

That P != NP.

That global democratic socialism can work. Currently the only states successful in implementing it are oil-rich nordic countries, and I want to believe it can work elsewhere but it'll be hard to prove.

The Pizzagate conspiracy was created to cover up any media coverage of the police reports from the early 90s when Trump was hanging with Epstein and dumping 'used' underage girls at a pizza parlor the next morning.

Either greed or religion has killed the most people before their time. One of them has to go.

I've mentioned them before and they're semi-related, in a broad sense:

I believe the Congressional baseball game shooting was likely intended to benefit Trump.

I believe it's likely that the Russian government has knowingly promoted interracial cuck porn, in some capacity.

What we know about the age of the human species, and other life, the earth, the universe etc. depends on so many guesses that we know essentially nothing.

Specifically, I think that elements and materials may have changed some of their properties and behaviour at some time in the past.

We do not know that. Most people just assume they have remained constant at all times. And we build quite many of our guesses on this assumption.

If, for example, C14 has changed it's disintegration rate at some time, then quite many of our guesses would be very wrong.

Inductive reasoning. I don't have any non-circular reason to believe that previous experience should predict future events. But I'm gonna believe it anyway.

absolute truth.

That I'd be a fool to strongly hold a belief without equally strong evidence.

Most of my moral convictions aren't provable because the most basic ideas are simply axioms. "You should be a good person" cannot be justified in a way that's non-circular, and defining "good" is also similarly arbitrary. The only true "evidence" is that people tend to agree on vague definitions in theory. Which is certainly a good thing, imo, but it's not actually provable that what we consider "good" is actually the correct way to act.

I have started creating a moral framework, though. I've been identifying and classifying particular behaviors and organizing them in a hierarchy. So far it's going pretty well. At least my arbitrariness can be well-defined!

I believe that there are metaphysical aspects of reality and unfalsifiable truths science and mathematics will never be able to prove.

I think our model of cosmology is likely way more wrong than we think. I LOVE it when we get new data that challenges our accepted notions, which is why I'm loving all the "how are these ancient galaxies so big" stuff coming out of Webb.

My running theory is that what we call the universe is an inverse version of what we would consider to be the real universe, were we not stuck in this crummy inverted one.

The reason John Mulaney got divorced was that after getting off cocaine he realized that he did actually want kids but Anna didn't