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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Not really a course, but Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a pretty good fanfic made with the intent of teaching critical logic concepts and logical fallacies to the reader. I found it a good read, and even if you might dislike some of the literary choices made (Harry makes fast friends with Malfoy, etc), it does cover most of the stuff in a critical thinking textbook in a somewhat approachable manner. It’s free, and you can read chapter by chapter if you just want to give it a glance.




  • I wouldn’t worry about it. I was one of the gifted kids, got my Bachelors then Masters in Computer Science with good grades. But also I got massively depressed and it took me a while to get a job after graduation. One of the more valuable lessons I learned from that experience was that I was often not seeing the forest thru the trees. After all, going to college is just a means of hopefully ensuring that you have an easier time covering the cost of living long term. So, overall, if you’re happy and don’t have to constantly worry about your bills there was no real loss of potential.





  • Honestly, just make them large enough to attach a lot of attention and eventually audit with actual punishments for gross misuse. If they could actually attach those punishments, some other stuff he’s passed (like the electrify America charging stations) would be far more effective. Not gonna lie, he kinda sadly still has my vote as he isn’t Trump. That being said, if Trump were to croak tomorrow, I think it would be a pretty safe bet that Biden would lose a lot of his polling power and some other crazy might actually have a chance to win. Actually publicly doling out punishment for those massively mismanaging funds and generally making life harder for the public would probably make him pretty popular though (at least for a bit).


  • Other than stopping the support for Israel (for reference, besides the obvious humanitarian issues, the US government is throwing a massive amount of our tax money in weapons they are effectively giving to a foreign country that doesn’t really seem to like the US a ton), stop the stupid tariffs on solar panels and other renewables. Yes, the CCP is obviously flooding the market with cheap renewables, and they probably aren’t the most ethically made, but we’ve had decades to throw money at renewables and frankly, it seems we haven’t really bothered much. If you really want to fuel the domestic renewable market so much, give out insanely huge subsidies to them (like the CCP has been doing for years) and invest in the next gen tech related to them. I get we are currently in a trade war, but we also need to meet climate goals and without China it doesn’t really look like we will even get close. Not trying to be a China shill or anything, just facing the issue that it mostly seems like this is just going to be a net negative for the climate.





  • I occasionally go back to reddit for niche communities and for looking up some user generated information/answers. I think the niche community might not easily be solved until more people move to lemmy, but as for the information lookup, if we can port the more useful stuff from reddit I don’t think I’d have much of a reason to go back to reddit (seriously, so much of the newer info in some subs are factually wrong but no one seems to care and it just seems to get worse the longer time progresses). The main issue is how to figure out what is the useful stuff. Idk about Twitter, haven’t used them in years.



  • But just waiting for others to die out doesn’t always work. Take for instance the southern US. It took the federal government intervening (sometimes violently) to actually deal with a lot of the ingrained racism. And even then, there is still plenty around, and in some places it is gaining in popularity. In my mind, the argument you are posing could easily be subbed in as "we shouldn’t allow mixed race couples to have children, as those that are racist will inevitably traumatize the children. " I get that your argument is probably not from a place off outright homophobia, but it is kinda homophobic in that it accepts that children shouldn’t be around gay/lesbian parents because of what others will think and do. Is Poland shitty to LGBTQ couples? Probably, but just waiting for people to eventually accept them isn’t gonna fix the issue.