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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • I didn’t link Wikipedia because people like you tend to jump on links to Wikipedia with big brain takes about how the article is probably controlled by whoever their boogeyman is.

    Both the articles I linked, SCMP which you dismissed because it has China in its name and Daily Telegraph are from the Wikipedia article references if you care to look.

    There is nothing to be skeptical about in terms of my sources. There is at this point no credible evidence he was the high level Chinese defecting spy he was presented as initially (just like they’re presenting this one). At this point, it would be incumbent on anyone claiming he is a high level defecting spy to prove it, because even the Australians realized they were had and gave up on suggesting that. Or maybe not so much had as no longer useful for their purpose of pushing a narrative.










  • Stay intellectually humble. It’s a huge component of wisdom in my observation. Understand you can always make mistakes that can be corrected, and that you have arrived at your opinions through limited information that can always be supplemented, so stay open to both of these possibilities.

    You can be confident in your opinions that you arrived upon through spending a lot of effort thinking about them, and you don’t need to have self doubt when challenged on them baselessly. But when someone does point out an error or something you missed, it’s essential you haven’t become closed to accepting it.

    Always remember what the basis are for your opinions and how well-founded they really are. For example: how much do you actually know about a thing when you’re relying on something you read in the news? How much do they really know about that thing?

    As a check on yourself believing you’ve put a lot of effort into thinking about something, be on the guard for unwarranted confidence. If a professional has put their efforts into something in their field of expertise they’ve spent their whole lives working on, chances are you haven’t thought of something they haven’t in the first five minutes of hearing about their work. That might seem ridiculous, but you see this all the time on Lemmy, where for example commenters seem to think they’ve figured out key errors in scientific papers after reading a single popular science article about an experiment or figured out solutions to incredibly complex problems like fair taxation.







  • That’s an axiom that people always just themselves by their intent and others by their actions.

    This leads to excuses for themselves and harshness on others until proven otherwise.

    I’ve been trying lately to internalize my understanding of this to fight my natural impulse to fall into this universally human trap. Basically, be a kinder person by judging the actions of others by considering plausible reasons they may have had for doing something that rubs me the wrong way. Also the opposite, and being understanding when someone flips out on me for something I did because they don’t have access to all of my mental state that led me to that point.





  • I don’t think waving away being a Luddite just by saying so makes it so.

    I can’t think of a single angle of principled moral theory that makes this okay. Vandalizing or stealing someone else’s property they paid for. Hurting both the restaurant and the customer by depriving them of their food. Holding back progress on an invention that can reduce the need for humans to engage in a type of work that is hard, dangerous at times, and low paid.

    From a purely rational on paper view, it doesn’t look terribly different than saying vandalizing or stealing from delivery vehicles driven by people isn’t wrong. What possible justification could there be for this view besides Ludditism fuck robots?