• 0 Posts
  • 143 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 19th, 2023

help-circle

  • It can be very harmful to act on an uninformed opinion. There’s also simply too much out there to be informed on everything, so logically there should be lots of things you aren’t able to have a valid opinion on.

    People frequently get around this by finding people they think they can trust, and borrowing their “informed opinion” on things. But this can also be risky, and easily leads to groups with highly polarized opinions (political parties, etc). Even borrowing scientific/expert “opinions” on things can lead you astray, as we’ve seen with many of the funded studies on food health. Two experts can easily have conflicting opinions on something, with strong arguments/evidence to back up their stance.

    So basically having completely uninformed opinions is dangerous, it’s not possible to learn everything well enough to have a good opinion on it, and borrowing others opinions on things only works some of the time. So it’s probably best to accept that you shouldn’t have a strong opinion on most things, and to be always willing to re-evaluate your opinions if you run into evidence that refutes your current opinions.





  • This will probably be an unpopular take, but this my best guess at why Trump won.

    On the election coverage I was watching (ABC), the biggest point they kept coming back to were questions of if people thought that the economy is better now vs when Trump was in office, and if people feel like they’re better or worse off financially that they were during Trump years. If I remember right, the poll data they showed had twice as many people say that things were worse economy/financially then they were during Trump era, vs people who thought things were better financially now.

    I know that matches with my personal experience, I live in a rural area, and my company primarily does work for other small businesses. The Trump years had a huge amount of negative news, but my business grew a lot over those years. In comparison, the last 4 years have been very stagnant in growth. We’ve picked up some new clients, but many of the small businesses we did business with have closed down or had to sell to new owners. I wouldn’t say our business is doing worse, but everything costs more and our company profit/wages haven’t kept up. And I know it’s worse for a lot other businesses, at least from seeing how many I’ve seen go out of business.

    A lot of the economic troubles came from Covid, so it’s not fair to place them all on the Biden administration. But I think a lot of the country is unhappy financially right now, and they think Trump has a better chance of changing that. I’m guessing a lot of the “undecided voters” that decided the election picked the option they thought would help them financially over all other considerations.




  • Playing with it on my own computer, locally hosting it and running it offline, has been pretty cool. I find it really impressive when it’s something open source and community driven. I also think there are a lot of useful applications for things that are traditionally not solvable with traditional programming.

    However a lot of the pushed corporate AI feels not that useful, and there’s something about it that really rubs me the wrong way.








  • I think some people sabotage relationships for the same reason they throw video games. They have fears/suspicions that it’s going to not work out, and rather than be a victim they want to have some control over the outcome. A loss or failed relationship doesn’t hurt as bad if they caused it to end the way it did.

    However in your case, it sounds more like a fear of something different. It’s a lot easier to keep things like they are, when a relationship gets too serious or life impacting it can be easy to be scared of the change, and instead subconsciously decide you want to keep things like they are.