I absolutely reject the idea that you should take something as true without true evidence just because it’s too difficult to get that evidence.

So do I.

This idea came from a couple case studies where a heart transplant recipient would seem to gain memories or personality traits from the donor. These cases sounded a lot like the typical “paranormal knowledge” story. Two particular cases were someone liking a food they didn’t like before but the donor did, and a child avoiding a toy that donor had with them when they died.

Being able to accurately describe the location of objects (in or outside the room) or describe specialized medical equipment, the appearance of the doctors in the room (even if the patient hadn’t met them before or after), and so on. This is all very strange stuff. To have hallucinated this stuff perfectly would be remarkable. Forget about being dead, some of these stories would be impressive even if the patient just had their eyes closed (or, in some cases, even if their eyes were wide open). In comparison, someone changing their toy or food preferences to more closely align with those of a particular stranger is, really, not that shocking. So I don’t think this is a fair comparison at all.

Again, we are running into the same issues we had before regarding your statistical noise hypothesis. We don’t know how many NDEs occur, or what percentage of them are reported to have components that require supernatural explanations. So to assert that it’s all just statistical noise is to assume, without any data, that these numbers are going to match what you’re looking for. Despite our data being constrained here, I actually think the absence of certain kinds of data counts strongly against the statistical noise hypothesis.

Because, if the statistical noise hypothesis were correct, it would be extremely common for patients to hallucinate what was going on in the hospital room inaccurately. But all the reports I get are of one of two categories:

• [1] reports of visiting another realm (these are the most common types of cases) or
• [2] reports of staying in the hospital and observing what is going on with surprising accuracy (these are the most interesting cases).

But I am not aware of even a single report of a third category of case,

• [3] reports of staying in the hospital and observing what is going wrong with total inaccuracy.

And I get that cases in the third category would be less likely to be reported on because those cases are less interesting. I see that concern. But we have to appreciate how, given your hypothesis, just how thoroughly these inaccurate accounts would dwarf all these seemingly supernatural ones. Cases in the third category would outnumber cases in the first category by the thousands at least (realistically, it would be more like the millions, due to the sheer level of detail in some cases in the first category, and just how unlikely it would be to hallucinate that detail accurately). If it really were the case that cases in the first category were so common then I would expect at minimum at least one or two of these inaccurate hallucinations to be reported in the medical literature. But I am not aware of a single case like this (is there really not one doctor that would write in their notes, “patient reported this and that occurred in the operating room, but he was wrong”?). So I have a challenge for you: can you identify even a single case that matches the description in (3)? After all, if you’re right, then these types of cases would be extremely plentiful so even if only 0.01% of these cases in the third category are reported on, it should still be fairly easy for you to identify at least one.

So, to sum it up, you’re making a number of assumptions here. The first assumption is that these NDE cases are banal enough that they could be ‘statistical noise’ (which, I think, is demonstrable false; these are not cases where someone changes their food preferences, they are cases where someone has detailed information that they should not have). Then you are assuming that there are an extraordinarily large number of NDE cases where people inaccurately report on what is going on in the hospital when they are going through an NDE (though this second assumption isn’t demonstrably false, it is at least extremely suspect since there doesn’t seem to be any cases like this reported in the medical literature, despite the extreme frequency of their occurrence). So your statistical noise hypothesis relies on these two assumptions, and both of them seem to collapse under scrutiny.

On top of that there are other things going on, too, such as preterminal lucidity, that also point to the possibility that we ‘survive’ our death. If you recall from my earlier comments, I was using NDE as an example from a particular book (Surviving Death by Leslie Kane). I chose NDEs because they are an example that is familiar to a lot of people. But it was only one chapter from the book, and it was one of the least interesting chapters. I’m not saying this because I think this book is the ultimate source of truth on this topic, I’m just saying that there is more than just NDEs to suggest that death is not the end. Unfortunately this stuff is so thoroughly stigmatized that people can’t even bring themselves to look at this data. But any honest person that did would realize, at the very least, that this stigma is unwarranted.

How would the moons gravity affect the growth of crops?

The problem with this is that parenting your own kid doesn’t address the strong network effect these platforms have, which is what makes them enticing for kids to begin with. But making it illegal for kids gets ride of this network effect

Ideally this would be implemented in a way that had some sort of mathematical guarantee of anonymity, similar to the guarantees you get from encryption. I’m not sure what that looks like but I known people smarter than me have put a thought about this sort of thing (it involves two factor authentication keys or something). If there could be some sort of way to have age verification and also have zero-trust proof of anonymity, that would be ideal in my opinion.

Politically this seems like a bad move. I imagine if this passes that it will be a sticking point that the conservatives can fixate on, sort of like the carbon tax

What’s wrong with Nvidia? Genuine question

Deflect is also a good alternative. It’s based in Montreal, Quebec. It’s what a lot of Canadian instances in the fediverse are moving too (see here).

Well it’s more than just the accent. The grammar is slightly different too, right?

This is correct. this is what stop signs like in Quebec:

Even outside of Quebec you’ll find stop signs with both Arrêt and Stop in areas with large francaphone populations:

I don’t know anything about accounting, but at first blush it seems like tax evasion and so forth would be easier to detect because the government can look at their bank activity and perform random audits, and so on. In contrast I don’t really know what tools we’d use to catch people lying about their training data

You can bridge it over to Matrix if you feel like thats worth the time and effort

Elon Musk’s xAI has lost its bid for a preliminary injunction that would have temporarily blocked California from enforcing a law that requires AI firms to publicly share information about their training data.

How do you actually enforce this? What’s stopping these companies from just lying about what training data they use?

The strongest evidence is the fact that modern equipment can see the actual tracks the A11 astronauts left while hiking and driving on the moon.

The problem with this is that if you’re someone who thinks the moon landing is fake then you’re simply just going to dismiss this as yet another example of NASA propaganda. Because though those tracks are there, no one can actually see it for themselves (unless you happen to have a really high powered telescope, which is unlikely). The moon dust thing though, that’s something you can reason through and examine for yourself

Don’t you think this kind of trivializes what transgender people go through? Saying you can be trans for species sounds like some sort of mockery of transgenderism

and it turns out a lot of furries DON’T like to be animals, they just… pretend to be animals but “oh that’s a character not really me” and they still consider themselves human…?

Do you not consider yourself to be human?

I think the most convincing evidence that we did go to the moon has to do with the dynamics of the moon dust in the original Apollo footage. If you look at the footage you’ll see the dust gets kicked up pretty high, higher than what you’d expect given Earth’s gravity, and it falls at a slower rate too.

So the question is: if they faked this footage then how did they get the dust to behave like this?

One possible explanation is that the footage was filmed underwater. The issue with this, though, is this is not at all how you’d expect dust to behave underwater. (you can go to the beach, kick up a bunch of sand underneath the water and see for yourself).

Another possibility is suspension cables. I guess you could explain the astronauts perceived lower gravity with suspension cables, but for pieces of dust? You can’t have suspension cables for individual pieces of dust.

So the simplest explanation is that this footage really was actually taken on a lower gravity environment, such as the moon.

Serious question: how would we be able to detect if we’ve over diagnosed a mental disorder such as ADHD? What would evidence for that look like?

There are also fewer heart attacks and car accidents when we gain an hour though, so it cancels out in the end.

It wasn’t a particularly funny joke

Well I, for one, thought it was funny

GrapheneOS is Canadian.

Oh wow I didnt realize that. That’s awesome