Have you ever heard or seen something that initially seemed to be totally fine, until you saw just how truly dangerous it actually is?
What is a much bigger threat than initially presented?
Reading
The Republicans
Digital age verification. It is not “to protect the children”. I saw it for what it was right away but literally everyone I talked to about it thought it sounded really positive.
Ur mom
Cheap, easy to get, abundant and hyper palatable calories.
Social media. Every person is now inside a filter bubble that is not reality but they think it is.
Affects how they think about absolutely everything. Thats why its the most dangerous threat to humanity as a whole, with big tech algorithms pushing content to people.
Religion. For most of my life I’ve seen media both implicitly and explicitly claiming that religion is a fundamental human social need, and that people who aren’t religious are the weird immoral outliers. What I’ve found is true though, is that religion is a primer for believing things contrary to evidence or reason. Faith is often promoted as a virtue in religion, and many aspects of religious thought are fundamentally unverifiable. Once someone starts down the path of believing things without evidence or critical thought, it gets easier to believe things contrary to evidence, and once you get far enough in that you could potentially be convinced to believe anything. You see this with the antivaxers, flat earthers, conspiracy theorists, far right extremists, etc. Many of these beliefs have a root in established religions, if not explicit religious justification. These things aren’t necessarily directly because of religion, people don’t really need religion to believe wacky bigoted shit contrary even to the evidence of their own eyes, but religion by it’s very nature encourages people to be uncritical. Even if the tenets of a religion are objectively good, the uncritical acceptance of ideas can easily start being applied to a person’s own biases, because it’s just so easy. It’s already easy to be uncritical of ideas but practicing it makes it so much worse. Religion is basically taking a major human weakness and promoting it as the height of virtue. Faith is intellectual sloth.
That isn’t “religion”, it’s a tenet of a fraction of Christianity.
Many religions (Judaism, Islam, Shinto, Bhuddism) do not hold faith up as a virtue, and many Christian denominations (Roman Catholic, non-evangelical Protestant) assert that your faith must include good action and rational thought.
(We could have a conversation about the good things inspired by religion or the terrible things done by irrreligious folk who share your reverence for skepticism, but I really just wanted to point out that you were using an overly broad brush)
Yeah. Free market Jesus really did a number on religion
Just try to make sure you don’t end up as narrow-minded as they are.
Before the AI craze, LLMs were a neat niche academic tool. Then the cults started forming…
I don’t know much about the cults. I imagine a bunch of tiktok idiots treating ChatGPT like god.
By cults I refer to the CEOs and influencers proclaiming things like “if you’re not using AI for everything right now then you’re making yourself obsolete.” Then they go and show a few personal anecdotes to support their claim, while at the same time dismissing any and all criticism of LLMs and their products.
no the cults are the people building the things. most of the openai leadership seem to be afraid of roko’s basilisk.
The ease of gambling in the US.
Alcohol
iirc it’s a confirmed, 100% proven carcinogen and is a poison with zero net benefits.
No net benefits today.
Various alcoholic drinks of the past were a benefit in helping to provide hydration and calories in an unclean environment.
Some of the best times of my life in my 20s were enabled through alcohol. I traveled the world using my own money, met countless interesting people in pubs and at festivals.
As I sit, fully sober at my workstation in the office some 20 years later, I can think back to those times and can only smile when someone claims it has zero net benefits.
yeah. people drink it because its a damn good social lubricant.
I mean nobody drinks it because it’s healthy.
But but but muh 1 glass of red wine a day study!
Zero net benefits my ass! 🖕🏻
username checks out
Cat.
Yes, hello, I am here having my third ER visit.
This was my hand on Saturday, one day after cat bites (I counted 8 punctures), and after two doses of antibiotics.
In case you are like me, and have no sense of medical emergency, that is a serious infection.
I have had two butt shots, an X-ray, five days out of ten of courses of two different antibiotics, and I just had a CT scan.
Edit: Btw, it looks a lot better now. Most of the swelling is gone, and almost all of the redness. CT scan results came back, the knuckle is good, no deeper infection. :)
Did you never attempt to wash it out after getting bitten? Any time you puncture skin you should wash it.
I washed it thoroughly, cleaned it with hydrogen peroxide, applied Neosporin, bandaged it, then went to urgent care, where they washed it again and prescribed me Augmentin. And even after all that, that’s how my hand looked the next day!
What the fuck. Thats one infected ass cat.
Cat mouths are super dirty. Very nasty bites. :(
Ileven after all that you hand is like this than l am so cooked
Social media abuse
Yeah. “Cyberbullies”/trolls won, they run the internet now. Or rather they run the “front page” parts of it like Twitter, Reddit and Instagram.
A threat I once greatly underestimated.
you know when you see one of those dashcam videos where some idiot has run over a sign or a bollard or whatever and just kept driving with the thing stuck to the car, throwing sparks everywhere and making a big rip in the asphalt behind them?
100 horsepower is a lot.
