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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Why not?

    There is no intrinsic meaning to life, we are a random chemical reaction that is really, really good at propagating itself, and we’ve evolved to be so good at pattern recognition that we psychologically need to see patterns like meaning where none exist.

    My response to that state of affairs is that I get to define the point of life for myself. Some days the point is to advance human knowledge. Some days it’s to protect people I care about. Some days it’s smoking enough weed to make a cloud visible from space. None of those have to sound even remotely reasonable to you because they are things that I’ve seen as the point of my life at various points in the past. Yours can be different, but I bet if you spend some time analyzing your values and what you believe in as a person you can probably identify a few things you find important enough to consider the point of life, even if only temporarily




  • There’s a huge difference between being progressive to attract women and being progressive and noticing that some women find that attractive. I’m glad you were able to work out/are working on your demons. I don’t appreciate being accused of the same based on a comment that only relates to your situation if you make significant assumptions.


  • Sure, if you’re a TERF and believe that validating trans people is violence against women. Giving you the benefit of the doubt that you probably don’t recognize that as a TERF talking point, I’d advise you to be more careful about where you source your facts lest you end up accidentally spewing hate. If you are a TERF, I’d advise you that trans rights are human rights and you should stop being a bigot.





  • I used to have an old man cat that was like that. He wanted to sniff everything that came in the house; not super urgently but he was always interested. It got hard for him to walk eventually and my girlfriend would always poke fun at me for carrying him around and holding him up to each new thing so he could investigate. He seemed happy about it though, he never stopped being interested in investigating



  • Ehh. We’ve had the divisiveness and vitriol that comes from leftist infighting for at least as long as I’ve been here. That being said, I myself came here from reddit when they banned 3rd party reader apps so idk if lemmy was some pre-corpo internet paradise before I got here. The only thing I really notice when waves of people leave reddit is that we get a handful of conservatives on lemmy when that happens, which is a magical time when all of the disparate leftists on the platform come together to cyberbully the conservatives off of lemmy.



  • I wouldn’t even give it that. Imo “intellectual capacity” is entirely a confidence thing. If you have the confidence to give an answer that may be incorrect, you have intellectual capacity. If you give an answer and it’s wrong, you’re learning. If doing that and being wrong over and over again a million times doesn’t discourage you, somebody is probably about to hand you a degree. “Intellectual capacity” is a fairy tale for the privileged to ensure they aren’t discouraged from pursuing an education, and a source of learned helplessness for most others.


  • My personal take is that iq is effectively meaningless. Measuring intelligence is a problem that is extremely hard, maybe even impossible given that what constitutes “intelligence” can be subjective. Some people ascribe value to it iq because it’s an extreme oversimplification of a problem they don’t want to think to hard about, and as a bonus it creates another hierarchy in which they can baselessly feel superior to others.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Validity_as_a_measure_of_intelligence

    has a pretty good summary of scholarly debate on that question.

    TLDR: iq has an extremely narrow take on what “intelligence” means, and ignores the vast wealth of what people consider to be human intelligence. For that reason most scholars think it’s nonsense.