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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: October 29th, 2024

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  • I feel the same way, but it’s good to be aware of our own biases - there’s a bit of an aphorism that goes around about advertising and propaganda, that it works best on people who think it doesn’t work on them. If we think we’re immune to something, we let our guard down a bit. I used to think of myself as a very rational, intelligent, realistic guy, but in recent years I came to realise that I was kind of using that to protect my ego - I was wrong about a lot of things, and I could always find excuses to justify my beliefs as rational.

    Maybe I still make the same flaw, I don’t know. Nowadays, I try to stay more focused on being nice than being right. That way, even if I’m wrong, I’m not making people’s day worse.

    I’m not always successful with that.


  • That’s perfect, drag, I don’t think anyone could have put it better. The trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment, yet so many people approach it like it’s some sort of engineering problem that has right and wrong answers, I think it’s probably a consequence of our sort of “tech bro” culture that everything needs to fit into this rational, quantitative framework - we have this drive to put numbers on things that just can’t be rationalised in that way.

    People are funny, complicated things, and I love them all!


  • Thank you so much for being honest about making that choice - almost everyone would choose their friends, but lots of people wouldn’t admit to that. Being honest myself, I’d make the same call - and if it came down to me picking between my friends and drag’s friends, I’d choose my friends. The whole “calculus” we run (comparing how good our friends are to average people) is a way we justify making our decisions, a way to deal with the cognitive dissonance of our values (save as many lives as possible) being in conflict with what we actually do (saving our friends rather than as many lives as possible). In reality you would have no way of knowing who those other 11 people would be - for example, if I said that one of them is a researcher on the brink of curing cancer, how would that change your decision? These are really tough questions to deal with, and that’s the point of the trolley problem - that people make different choices because they have different perspectives, and different values. There’s no objectively right and objectively wrong answer to any of the scenarios. Just different interpretations and ways to think about it.


  • I think the thing that people often don’t seem to understand about the trolley problem is that it doesn’t have a “single version”, it’s a framework for exploring human decision making. And the correct answer, it’s all a matter of perspective. For example, if all of drag’s friends were on one side of the track, and on the other side of the track, were a number of people who drag does not know, equal to the number of drag’s friends plus one, would drag kill their friends, or the innocent people?


  • Don’t bother trying to explain philosophy directly to people online. We’re so convinced of our own intelligence that we refuse to consider that our knee-jerk reaction to anything might be worth exploring.

    If you want people to learn anything, you have to first of all tell them that they’re right, then add whatever you’re trying to teach them as if it’s some nuance of whatever they’re right about. Even if it makes their original opinion completely wrong. It works surprisingly often.

    Our egos have an outer layer of armor that prevents us from easily absorbing ideas unless they have a starting point of agreeing with whatever we already believe.


  • If you want to stop climate change, the only thing we can that has any hope of working is a peaceful revolution.

    To start with, join a union or learn how to unionise your workplace. If you can, look into setting up co-operatives. The IWW has some great resources. Anyone can start a union, you don’t need any sort of special qualifications or knowledge. Join the IWW, they have some great free trainings you can join to learn how to make real change at your workplace.

    Once enough people are unionised, we can start building a coalition of unions, all of which can work together to tackle larger and larger issues. If we have strong union efforts in each industry then we can protect the working class against the negative effects of striking - for example, if there are unions in the food production industry, then people striking don’t need to worry about going hungry.

    This is how a true people’s revolution happens. With the least amount of violence possible, a bottom-up, people-led movement.

    If you believe in this in any way, please, join the IWW. I know it seems like a long journey, but it begins with a single step, and that single step is joining the IWW.