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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by cheese_greater@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

Let hear them conjects

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[-] cmoney@lemmy.world 49 points 1 week ago

I believe that life as we know it exists somewhere else in the universe .

[-] Asafum@feddit.nl 26 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Tied to this, I believe there is no intelligent life close enough to ever reach us physically (short of freezing themselves and traveling millions of years, but we really aren't worth that trip lol) I don't believe faster than light travel will ever exist.

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[-] Mr_Blott@feddit.uk 36 points 1 week ago

When I started working decades ago, we were taught how to use bent bits of fence wire to find underground pipes before digging

I literally found scores of pipes that way, and saw dozens of other people do it regularly. It was even taught at a local agricultural college as part of the horticulture course

Then someone told me it was a myth and doesn't work, so I set up a blind test with a hidden bucket of water and I utterly failed to find it

I simply cannot explain this

[-] MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago

I was taught this too growing up in rural america. Did it myself at some land my grandparents had.

Best explanation I've heard for why it "works" is that when looking for places to first install pipes the location tends to be obvious or intuitive, so then years later when someone needs to find it again we naturally trend to the same rough area, pull out those stupid rod things and when they randomly cross there's a pipe there cause we're already standing in the general right spot. Get a high enough success rate and our brains start to think there is causation to the correlation.

[-] evroid@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago

It's called Dowsing

Dowsing is a type of divination employed in attempts to locate ground water, buried metals or ores, gemstones, oil, claimed radiations (radiesthesia), gravesites, malign "earth vibrations" and many other objects and materials without the use of a scientific apparatus.

[-] ivanafterall@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I had the opposite experience. Consistently derided and dismissed it as woo. Went to my parents' land a couple of years ago and my dad told me to try it. I didn't want to, that's how ridiculous I found it. But those things were moving in my hands in a way that had me halfway believing.

[-] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Fascinating twist. Its like it was a subcultural mass delusion

[-] bizarroland@fedia.io 5 points 1 week ago

There's a part of me that believes that magic/psyonics/spirit whatever intentionally and willfully does not respond to the scientific method.

Whatever entity is behind it refuses to be subjected to scrutiny and furthermore refuses to be turned into a machine with an on-off switch.

You can have your magic or you can have your proof that magic doesn't exist but you can't have proof that magic exists and magic at the same time.

[-] mangaskahn@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

If something is tested and proven, it falls outside the realm of magic and just becomes normal everyday science or technology. It's like the saying about alternative medicine. Anything that is proven to work is just called medicine.

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[-] randomdeadguy@lemmy.world 32 points 1 week ago
[-] A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago

We are social animals that evolved to work cooperatively. We have deeply ingrained mechanisms that encourage pro-social behavior.

I agree. People are by default "good" and want happy lives within their communities. It's when tribalism steps into the scenario that most problems arise.

[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 week ago

Thing is, that tribalism is what drives the good parts.

It falls apart with distance or numbers, though.

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[-] Mango@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

Weird. I think the opposite.

[-] BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah, I believe that too. As an actual proportion of all living people, actually (as in from birth, with a pathological lack of empathy or similar) bad people are most likely a very thin minority.
The rest come from nurturing (friends, family, economic situation), political choices (affordable healthcare, housing, food safety), and bad luck.
We are also gullible and ignorant most of the time, which probably doesn't help either.

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[-] Okami_No_Rei@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most.

That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies.

You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not.

You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in."

  • Hub, Secondhand Lions (2003)
[-] bizarroland@fedia.io 20 points 1 week ago

I believe that the reason why so many people are going crazy in America at least is because they are approaching the end of their life and they have been told the whole time they've been alive that they would be living through the end of times, and if it becomes true then their lives have not been wasted but if it is not true or if it doesn't happen until after they die then their lives have been wasted and it's driving them crazy.

[-] ivanafterall@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago

"Christianity is a death cult," essentially. Why bother to make it better here when paradise is guaranteed?

[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 week ago

I heard "the moment you start praying is the moment you've given up trying" the other night. I almost spat my tea.

[-] Gobbel2000@programming.dev 19 points 1 week ago
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[-] JayleneSlide@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago

My BS, unprovable hypothesis: The Golden Age of Piracy was actually a successful Socialist movement, with Nassau being a disruptively successful enclave of Socialism in action. The pirates deeply threatened the budding power structures in the US (not conjecture) and the entrenched powers in Europe. While some powers, most notably royalty, were willing to use pirates as mercenaries (privateers), there was an excess of democracy and human concern (somewhat my conjecture) among the Nassau pirates. The Nassau pirates had pensions, a form of worker's comp, disability, democratic command structures at sea, and healthcare (such as it was given the era). According to the historical texts on the Nassau pirates, there were almost no written records, which strikes me as especially odd since they had so many long-running financial and governing processes.

[-] OutOfMemory@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 week ago

That global democratic socialism can work. Currently the only states successful in implementing it are oil-rich nordic countries, and I want to believe it can work elsewhere but it'll be hard to prove.

[-] dragonfucker@lemmy.nz 9 points 1 week ago

No, Norway is social democracy.

[-] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

Sweden and Finland have no oil, and if anything are even more "socialist" than Norway.

Back to the drawing board on your premise.

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[-] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

I think the problem is that no system that gives equal weight to everyone's opinions can survive a population that does not have a majority of good opinions. And if the populace does agree on most things, then it doesn't matter much what system is being used. The best the system can do is incentivise certain behaviors.

[-] Skyrmir@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago

The Pizzagate conspiracy was created to cover up any media coverage of the police reports from the early 90s when Trump was hanging with Epstein and dumping 'used' underage girls at a pizza parlor the next morning.

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[-] kalkulat@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

Either greed or religion has killed the most people before their time. One of them has to go.

[-] coaxil@lemm.ee 11 points 1 week ago
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[-] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 9 points 1 week ago
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[-] Acamon@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

Inductive reasoning. I don't have any non-circular reason to believe that previous experience should predict future events. But I'm gonna believe it anyway.

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[-] zxqwas@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

That I'd be a fool to strongly hold a belief without equally strong evidence.

[-] faultypidgeon@programming.dev 7 points 1 week ago

Did this man just call himself a fool?

[-] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

Everyones a fool and knows nothing :)

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[-] ivanafterall@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

I've mentioned them before and they're semi-related, in a broad sense:

I believe the Congressional baseball game shooting was likely intended to benefit Trump.

I believe it's likely that the Russian government has knowingly promoted interracial cuck porn, in some capacity.

[-] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

Most of my moral convictions aren't provable because the most basic ideas are simply axioms. "You should be a good person" cannot be justified in a way that's non-circular, and defining "good" is also similarly arbitrary. The only true "evidence" is that people tend to agree on vague definitions in theory. Which is certainly a good thing, imo, but it's not actually provable that what we consider "good" is actually the correct way to act.

I have started creating a moral framework, though. I've been identifying and classifying particular behaviors and organizing them in a hierarchy. So far it's going pretty well. At least my arbitrariness can be well-defined!

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[-] NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

What we know about the age of the human species, and other life, the earth, the universe etc. depends on so many guesses that we know essentially nothing.

Specifically, I think that elements and materials may have changed some of their properties and behaviour at some time in the past.

We do not know that. Most people just assume they have remained constant at all times. And we build quite many of our guesses on this assumption.

If, for example, C14 has changed it's disintegration rate at some time, then quite many of our guesses would be very wrong.

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[-] sploosh@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

I think our model of cosmology is likely way more wrong than we think. I LOVE it when we get new data that challenges our accepted notions, which is why I'm loving all the "how are these ancient galaxies so big" stuff coming out of Webb.

My running theory is that what we call the universe is an inverse version of what we would consider to be the real universe, were we not stuck in this crummy inverted one.

[-] Smokeydope@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

I believe that there are metaphysical aspects of reality and unfalsifiable truths science and mathematics will never be able to prove.

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[-] theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

The reason John Mulaney got divorced was that after getting off cocaine he realized that he did actually want kids but Anna didn't

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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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