• 3 Posts
  • 57 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle
rss

  • Yha, all the people around me are staring into their Smartphones and attacking humanism on social media like you are.

    I was just reading through y’all’s conversation and this piece stuck out to me. I read a lot of loneliness, hurt, and isolation in your comments, yo, and then I read this piece. Man, do I get that. That reminded me of me throughout high school and college; I didn’t feel like anyone saw what I saw. Which was pain. And if I’m being honest, I was seeing others’ pain, but I was mostly seeing my pain. I met my best friend late in college, and she was a god-send because she got me. She saw their pain too. And more importantly, she saw my pain and honored it, and that was such a relief.

    When I feel alone and isolated, I usually feel like withdrawing more. Since her, I’ve found that that’s usually a sign that I actually need to connect. I need to find others that get me. Not as another avenue to vent my frustrations and anger and pain, but as an avenue for joy, as an avenue for remembering that I am more than just my pain.

    That’s a lot of shit off the top of my head, and I dunno if you’ll resonate with any of it because I only know you as far as a few comments online. But wanted to write it in case it would resonate with you or anyone else.

    Take care of yourselves, y’all.



  • Such good points; I’m convinced. To continue on your line of thinking, after learning some media literacy and starting to notice different patterns and forms of discussion, I wonder if learning Aristotelian syllogisms would be a good next step. So we still aren’t jumping right into fallacies per se, but we start to understand logic structure and what is formally valid/invalid. So now it’s got them thinking about how to structure and challenge their own beliefs and arguments. And while we are now potentially hitting formal fallacies, I think this would not give any immediate tools for dunking on anyone either because, in my experience, converting a real-time argument to a syllogism is very very difficult without a ton of experience and practice breaking arguments down into simpler ideas. What do you think?


  • Rather than not encouraging focusing and learning fallacies, maybe we are simply saying that they need to also learn to use them appropriately? Fallacies are not just the informal ones that everyone is referencing here in this thread, but also the formal ones which are very much required for logical argument structure. So even in learning about fallacies, there will be opportunities to understand the difference between informal and formal, why they are different, and how that applies to discourse. Knowledge is power; it just needs to be balanced with understanding on how to use and I think a deep dive into fallacies could actually assist in that regard.







  • Got a physics question everyone. Or maybe it’s more of a sanity check? Can someone explain to me the relationship between entropy and relativity? I’ve been reading about entropy and how it is one of our theories, if not the only, that is tied to the arrow of time, with most or all of our other theories working regardless of time’s direction. My understanding is that this has led some to consider that the probabilistic functioning of entropy creates our subjective experience of the arrow of time, despite relativity seeming to inform us that all spacetime already exists as a 4D manifold.

    But I’m struggling to conceptualize that in combination with relativity, or even come up with good questions to understand what it is I am struggling with lol. Maybe this is it: If entropy creates our subjective experience of moving along the arrow of time, that would still make sense with relativity, right? Because any entropy related to me is in my frame of reference, whether I am moving at just below the speed of light or I’m affected by this planet’s gravity? And this is what we see with particle accelerators as well - that radioactive particles with certain half-lives will have extended half-lives relative to an observer’s frame of reference outside the accelerator.