I often wonder about this with regard to right wing Americans believing such ridiculous things. It’s seem that what Trump supporters ultimately have in common is not one set of beliefs but a shared belief in things that make no sense: that all Democrats are paedophiles, that JFK wasn’t really assassinated, that vaccines don’t work, that climate change isn’t real, that Donald Trump is anything but a foolish, evil corrupt man. What do these views have in common? They’re fundamentally foolish things to believe.

The fact is that once you believe one patently absurd thing - for example, that an interventionist god exists - your thinking gets warped. When you then make this absurdity the centre of your worldview and your identity, your views on everything become warped. After a certain point, they seem to start believing things because they make no sense.

If a person believes God actually answers prayers, something there is no reason whatsoever to believe, they’re primed to believe all kinds of other nonsense. This is exactly why many religious people have stopped believing in that kind of thing, and now take refuge in the idea of prayer as comfort or as asking for ‘strength’ rather than asking for anything specific (note that even this compromise requires them to ignore the plain meaning of the words of, e.g., the Lord’s Prayer). Most people find it uncomfortable to believe in nonsense. For others, it becomes the point.

I’ve been meaning to read some stuff about how to approach criminal justice if we don’t have free will, but I keep reading other stuff instead. So many books, so little time!

I still think prisoners should be treated well, no matter the crime.

Yes, absolutely. Even for the worst of the worst, their should be rehab attempts, whether it’s anger management, getting them away from gangs - whatever it is they need. I think there are only small numbers of people, if there are any at all, who are really irremediably violent and dangerous, but even for them I’m not exactly happy about putting them away indefinitely.

Prison seems the obvious one. It’s obviously (to me, that is) not desirable to deprive anyone of their freedom, but for persistently violent people I don’t think there’s a better solution, unfortunately.

People are already painting his face on walls.

That some, most or all art is partly or wholly derivative of other art is not relevant because the process used by ‘AI’ does not resemble the artistic process. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (a work derived from an older play, itself derived from an older myth which itself had been through countless retellings, variations and translations), he did not do what an LLM does, which is approximately to say: ‘It’s statistically likely that the phrase “to be” will be followed by the phrase “or not to be”’. Putting together statistical likelihoods is not creativity. This alone shows that AI ‘art’ is not creative and therefore not art at all.

Additionally, instructing a machine to make things from prompts does not require creativity. Creativity is not ‘having ideas’; it’s an ongoing process. When you tell an image generator to make an image, you’re not asking it to create something, because it cannot do it. You’re saying ‘Show me the statistically likely output for this input’. Again, this statistical generator is not the same as, nor is it comparable to, the human imaginative process.

Yes, it’s metonymy, as people have said. You also get it in similar contexts where people will name a building such as ‘the White House’ or ‘[10] Downing Street’ to refer to the governments of the US or the UK.

Totally understandable. I hate a particular type of architecture because of a job I had in a building of that style.

Musical ability — perfect pitch, great rhythm. I’m an okay musician after years working at it, but I’d love to be better.

I’d like my corpse to be used to frame someone for murder. Obviously I can’t name names, because that would undermine the plot, but I trust my loved ones to frame up someone who has it coming.

Yeah, free soloing is the one. I climb all the time, totally happy doing anything at any height with a rope but without one? Nah.

Here are the Encyclopedia Britannica pages for Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, which have the same dates of birth for both individuals as cited above.

Yes.

Dick Cheney is 83 (born 1941).

Liz Cheney is 58 (born 1966).

83-58=25

So Dick Cheney was 25 when his daughter was born. This seems pretty normal and certainly not impossible.

Whether or not George Mallory summitted Everest.

Mallory was a great climber. People who knew him think he had the ability. Another member of his expedition saw Mallory and his partner, Andrew Irvine, close to the summit, but not close enough to be certain whether or not they made it.

Neither man returned from the mountain. Mallory’s body was later found, many decades after he died. but Irvine was never seen again, dead or alive.

There are various other bits of circumstantial evidence, but the fact is we’ll simply never know for sure. I like to think they made it.

Try to learn Russian really quickly.

You raise a fair point: what exactly is a zombie? To me, a zombie is not a sapient thing, so if it remembers its previous sapience, it’s not a zombie. But zombies aren’t real, which makes it difficult to define them precisely.

No. Jesus had his intellect and personality intact, which zombies do not.

NB: I’m taking the Gospels as gospel, here. I do not think the man himself rose from the dead.

You may well be right and that’s why it’s vital not to be complacent. Donate, volunteer, vote. Get out there and make a Harris win happen!

easy to profit by re selling

This was exactly the reason they shut down the 3DS marketplace: re-selling old games is more profitable via Switch Online than it was through the 3DS marketplace!

I agree with the people here that there aren’t any.

The closest to a ‘good reason’ is that some people want certain policy outcomes that Trump has promised, not all of which are in and of themselves morally wrong. What’s wrong is that they believe that the ends justify the means, which they quite famously do not.

Real (I assume you mean proven) conspiracies start off as theories.

No, they don’t. Conspiracy theories are not ‘theories about conspiracies’. You are both misusing the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and wrongly describing the Tuskegee experiment as a conspiracy, which it never was. One of the people who originally called it out did so after reading about it in a published scientific paper! The pereptrators of that ‘experiment’ lied to the participants, but they were not otherwise secretive, otherwise they wouldn’t have been writing and publishing papers about it.

Fuck off

I’m not going to discuss this further with someone who cannot do so civilly.