3d ago

What popular belief do you disagree with?

158 comments

It's common to advise young people that Working hard and grinding when you are young, then having relatively calm and relaxation life for the rest of the life.
I think the relaxation never comes, if you work to death right now then still there is a pretty good chance you would be doing same 10 years from now. I believe ther should be balance between work and life no matter what age.
- Also working hard doesn't get you anywhere. You have to also be an asshole that claws your way out of the bottom of the bucket of crabs.
  There's so many really good hard workers at dead end jobs that get treated like shit.
- I encourage everyone to aim to have their midlife crisis moment sometime in their mid twenties.
  Get off the treadmill of life while it's still cheap to hop on and off.
- About relaxation. I've found that I can't relax untill I've chilled for 2 weeks. Until then I have a wheel in my head that just won't stop spinning. But after that 2 weeks I transform.

"Natural" means healthy
- I like to point out to those people that arsenic is natural. Malaria is natural too.

That "growth" is inherently a good thing to do and if you aren't trying to grow as a person everyday then you're not living 'correctly'
- Can't even "grow" when your parents destroyed your self-confidence.
  
  Eh, you can circle back through nihilism into absurdism, and wind up in a place close enough to self-confidence to actually turn into it eventually.
  Ask me how I know.
  
  Have you considered growing past that? /s. Stupid joke aside, wholly relatable for lots -- including myself -- i imagine.
- Excuse my curiosity. Do you think learning and experiencing new things is not an important aspect of life? Or maybe you just have a different definition of growth than me?
  A life without would be stagnant and boring to me.
  
  I believe where we differ is the degree. I do still learn new things for fun and whatnot, but if there is ever a time I am NOT doing that (besides work, sleep, or helping society as a whole in some other way), I've been conditioned to feel guilty. Like, if I'm not growing at all times, then I am personally spitting on the graves of all my ancestors
- the industrial revolution and its consequences. also the enlightenment, fuck those guys
- aaah. the morally of cancer
- One of the best takeaways from the Wizard of Earthsea books. Ambition can be poison.
  
  I love Earthsea

That a god exists.
- Or karma, or fairness.
  
  Karma is only the law of cause and effect nothing more, anyone saying it is anything else is misguided. When people start thinking in terms of good or bad coming to you for doing good or bad it is only as much as you have built systems in your life for good or bad coming to you, like not choosing to cause a problem for someone else because you feel bad means they aren't going to snap back at you.
  
  Karma exists. Western karma is nonsense.
  It's not supposed to fairness/consequences in this life but rather across lifetimes.
- I'm right here dude
  
  Oh, thank Albert! I was looking for you.
  Here is the list of new things I want that I came up with since we last talked...
- Meh. I don't see that belief much on Lemmy.
  
  You didn't specify it had to be a popular belief on Lemmy. 🤷‍♂️

Cynicism isn't inherently more mature than believing that things can be made better. For a lot of people "everything is fucked, nothing matters" is a way of absolving themselves from the responsibility and personal risk involved in actively trying to make the world a better place.
- They get mad at the very idea that people can work together and successfully create change, despite numerous historical examples. It's actively immature to be wholly cynical
- I agree. And I think that cynicism is just easier. The claims of maturity part is mere justification.
- I agree with this. People think being pessimistic is more realistic than being optimistic. They think spinning things as negative is automatically more realistic than the positive spin. In reality, realism sees both sides and adjusts one's behaviour to make the best out of everything

That attention span exists as a relevant concept and that people are ruining it with technology.
If our attentiveness is struggling it is undoubtedly because life is harder and crueler these days.
Our attention, if we are being treated humanely and sustainability by the societal conditions around us, is fine (we aren't though, this being the issue).
edit Same thing with all the "kids these days" things about kids not being able to focus, being a kid these days has got to feel hopeless in a million ways that are too crushing to focus on not the least of which are the adults around you condescending your fears of the future even as they destroy it.
- life is harder and crueler these days.
  I think you just found the popular belief that I disagree with.
  Compared to most of human history, life now is pretty good. This article uses childhood mortality (globally 4.4% versus 50% for most of human history) to make the point. There's still lots of room to improve - the EU has a tenth the global average - but humanity has made incredible progress on that front over the past two centuries.
  Looking at a smaller time scale, the human development index is trending upward everywhere since 1990.
  
  I don't think it's that life is hard or less hard... I think it's that it's lost its meaning and reasoning.
  Like farming and hunting gave reason. Being able to buy a home by working gave a reason... Etc.
  But now for many people they just basically work for other people and eat shitty food and sleep. Nothing really comes back to them...
  
  facepalm have you tried looking up at the real world around you recently?
- I can think of two relevant things that bear upon your attention here.
  Stress, which makes your attention kind of jump around.
  Temptation, which makes your attention go places without you choosing it. It's a kind of loss of control.
- I think most people have always had short attention spans but technology has taken advantage of that to captivate us. History just tells the story of those who lengthened their attention spans on purpose. History is rarely the story of common people, it is often told by the exceptional about the exceptional and this distorts our perception of humanity significantly

People argue back and forth whether capitalism or socialism/communism is a superior system and they are all wrong. Those concepts are just tools. Saying one economic system applies to all situations is as silly as saying the only tool you need to build a house is a hammer.
- it's more about which one is better for more situations, no? it is much harder for different situations in the same area to dynamically decide which economic system is better.
  
  Not really. It's entirely possible to pick and choose. We chose a socialist model for fire department because the capitalist model proved disastrous. Many countries successfully did the same for healthcare, retirement, and all sorts of things. At the same time, capitalism is great when you want a million choices on TV to watch or a grocery store with a whole aisle of different types of cookies.
  To me, the difference is the impact of failures. If someone starts a company making a new type of cookie and it proves not to be profitable, it goes bankrupt. Unfortunate, but ultimately not a big deal. If someone has cancer and curing them isn't profitable, you can't just give up. That person's life is more important than profit.
- I think public conversations are made of simplistic ideas. Maybe because they're stronger. Easier to convey and digest.
  So people may think deep and complex but societies think shallow and simple. Something like that.
  One of the downsides of democracy no doubt.
  
  “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”

I disagree with the belief that all police officers are automatically bad people
- A friend of mine is a cop & a nice guy. I asked him why the hell he became a cop of all things & he said "this way, I know there's at least one cop in existence who's not a racist asshole."
  I countered with "Oh, so you're just a regular asshole, then?" An he said "No sir; I am an ass hat. An asshole is an ass the whole time. If people are cool, I'm cool with them, but if someone wants to be an ass, I can put my ass hat on to match their energy."
  I can respect that.
- One of my friends was a rural police officer, which I didn't know. Dude is super friendly and queer. Unfortunately he had a lot of terribly sad stories of AD&D and DUIs. He finally called it quits when one woman rode up an industrial garage door to impress her friend and got lethally caught in it. Found her friend holding her legs to try and save her. Too many terrible things happened to nice but terribly misguided (or drunk) people.
  I think that job hurt his heart.
- It’s not the premise that they are all inherently bad. It’s that there are plenty of bad ones and the good ones do nothing about them or actively protect them.
- i agree with you.
  My best friend is ex-police. My brother is police.
  They're not saints but they're good people, certainly not exploring or abusing anyone.
  Then again, we're not in the USA so I can't comment on what it's like there.
  
  Biased
- I have cops in my family. They're actually all really great people and weirdly positive parents.
  
  If they know a bad cop, and didn't do anything about them, they're just as guilty.

I think lots of people believe that the ends can justify the means.
But to me, that expression means the same thing as, "Whatever causes a good outcome must not be bad." And I not only disagree with it, I don't even think it makes sense.
I heard a story about a guy who was stabbed in a mugging and during surgery for the stabbing, found out that he had cancer, which saved his life.
But nobody is going to go to the judge during the mugger's trial, and say that his decision to stab the guy was "justified," and so he should be released to stab again with his completely justified stabbing history.
No, the things that are justifiable are those which are good and informed actions. You can't justify bad or ignorant actions simply because of luck.
- I agree with you, but I think your example is lacking as the stabber purely intended to mug and not uncover cancer.
  
  I see what you're saying, that there are two cases. One where the ends is the goal of the person who used the means, and one where the ends is not the goal of the person who used the means. I only mentioned the latter in my comment.
  But from my perspective, if the stabber purely intended to uncover cancer, and for some reason they actually had the expertise and knowledge to know that that specific person had cancer, and this was somehow the only way to prove it, then the action itself is inherently altruistic. From my perspective, it wouldn't be less altruistic even if the person turned out not to have cancer. So, I don't think it would count as the ends justifying the means.
  If the same stabber, with the same expertise and knowledge, actually had multiple ways of achieving the ends, like they could have talked about it rather than stabbing, but they chose the stabbing route, then I think you can't say that the stabbing was justified, regardless of whether the cancer was discovered.
  There may be other cases worth digging into. I'm sure there are lots of examples I didn't think of, but I'd be surprised if they were convincing to me. The reason is that, my experience has taught me that good ends are most predictably the results of just and informed actions.
- But it doesn't mean "whatever causes a good outcome must not be bad".
  It means that sometimes for the greater good, you have to pay a price.
  Think of the trolley problem, would you kill 1 person to save 5? Many people would say yes. They're not saying murder is good, but the ends justify the means
  
  Would the ends justify taking a healthy person off the street and harvesting their organs to save five people?

That GUIs of FOSS applications are less easily usable than GUIs of proprietary software.
- Windows 11 royally ruined their context menus even when I was still using it, since I was a Windows user since I can remember.
  “Less usable” often means “not used to it” since every application has a learning curve. There are some design standards, sure, but the only way to get used to anything is practice.
  Also, a lot of FOSS lets you customize a good chunk of the GUI and shortcuts!
- I some cases it's true that FOSS are less easily usable.
  Always found libreoffice menus confusing almost never able to straightforward find how to get what I want. Also same with gimp.
  
  In my experience they either look horrendous or are less usable, maybe even both. It's not an universal truth tho and it has gotten better in de past couple of years.
  
  I agree, but for these cases specifically I disagree. I agree that the toolbar LibreOffice defaults to is god-awful but View→User Interface... gives you options to select much better menus. Personally Contextual Groups has the most potential but Groupedbar is currently the best. I found GIMP 3.0 as straightforward as Photoshop, especially after I found the search actions tool.
  
  I think the Libreoffice UI isn't great, but neither are its competitors. Probably partly the nature of conventional word processors that try to do everything through a GUI.
- After about a year of dabbling with selfhosting I have to disagree. Some do have decent UIs but UX for FOSS is often really bad, you can tell the person coding the apps is a really good programmer but has no concept of UX, I wish I could help them somehow but any suggestion is often met with "uh? Why explain that in the UI? It's already in the documentation!" or similar

that sex is binary or immutable. for anyone that believes this, get on HRT for a year and tell me if you still feel like your sex is identical to what you started out with
- tried it, your mom said it was different. You're right
- So sex depends on how you feel?
  
  if a cis person goes on cross-sex hormones, they will develop gender dysphoria because their sex doesn't match their gender identity anymore. that's where the feel part comes in
  
  Nope, try reading it again
- I really wish I was immortal or could save/load life, because I'd love to try something like this. Not specifically this, I'm not uncomfortable with myself or anything, its just theres so much experience I'll never understand because we only get one shot.

Pick literally any religion.
Pick literally any belief.
That.
- It's like some kind of low hanging fruit party in here.
  What's a commonly held belief here on lemmy that you disagree with?

God.
- We don't care about God here. You got anything we care about?
  
  Just answering you question.
  
  You said popular belief. You did not say popular belief on lemmy

That there is a correct way to live or that objective morality exists
- You'd like The Good Place if you haven't already seen it.
  
  ”Doug! We all love Doug!”
- Oh definitely. Objectivity schmobjectivity. I think it's something completely different.
- There are very few at ease with moral relativity.

That the cereal should be poured before the milk.
- But cereral first is only sane and moral. We can't have a floating mound. And that's to say nothing of volumetric concerns.
  
  You sprinkle some more cereal on the milk whenever you run out of cereal.
  The whole point is to not have soggy cereal
  Really depends on preference and cereal type
  It's less of an argument between milk first vs second, but people that like soggy vs crunchy cereal.
  The important thing is to not add too much cereal before you can eat it all. Adding in cereal last just helps make sure you don't.
- Thought it was illegal the other way around. You probably think the toilet paper should fold over the back too. Don't you?

That a hot dog is not a taco

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The pilot wave theory makes much more intuitive sense, needs les hypothesis, was supported by a lot of famous scientist in the early days of quantum and is mathematically equivalent.
- does the pilot wave theory respect locality?
  
  EPR proves quantum mechanics violates locality without hidden variables, and Bell proves quantum mechanics violates locality with hidden variables, and so locality is not salvageable. People who claim quantum mechanics without hidden variables can be local tend to redefine locality to just be about superluminal signaling, but you can have nonlocal effects that cannot be used to signal. It is this broader definition of locality that is the concern of the EPR paper.
  When Einstein wrote locality, he didn't mention anything about signaling, that was not in his head. He was thinking in more broad terms. We can summarize Einstein's definition of locality as follows:
  (P1) Objects within set A interact such that their values are changed to become set A'. (P2) We form prediction P by predicting the values of A' while preconditioning on complete knowledge of A. (P3) We form prediction Q by predicting the values of A' while preconditioning on complete knowledge of A as well as object x where x⊄A. (D) A physical model is local if the variance of P equals the variance of Q.
  Basically, what this definition says is that if particles interact and you want to predict the outcome of that interaction, complete knowledge of the initial values of the particles directly participating in the interaction should give you the best prediction possible to predict the outcome of the interaction, and no knowledge from anything outside the interaction should improve your prediction. If knowledge from some particle not participating in the interaction allows you to improve your prediction, then the outcome of the interaction has irreducible dependence upon something that did not locally participate in the interaction, which is of course nonlocal.
  The EPR paper proves that, without hidden variables, you necessarily violate this definition of locality. I am not the only one to point this out. Local no-hidden variable models are impossible. Yes, this also applies to Many Worlds. There is no singular "Many Worlds" interpretation because no one agrees on how the branching should work, but it is not hard to prove that any possible answer to the question of how the branching should work must be nonlocal, or else it would fail to reproduce the predictions of quantum theory.
  Einstein, incompleteness, and the epistemic view of quantum states
  A no-go theorem for Quantum theory ontological models
  An Elementary Proof That Everett's Quantum Multiverse Is Nonlocal
  Pilot wave theory does not respect locality, but neither does orthodox quantum mechanics.
  The fear of developing nonlocal hidden variable models also turn out to be unfounded. The main fear is that a nonlocal hidden variable model might lead to superluminal signaling, which would lead to a breakdown in the causal order, which would make the theory incompatible with special relativity, which would in turn make it unable to reproduce the predictions of quantum field theory.
  It turns out, however, that none of these fears are well-founded. Pilot wave theory itself is proof that you can have a nonlocal hidden variable model without superluminal signaling. You do not end up with a breakdown in the causal order if you introduce a foliation in spacetime.
  Technically, yes, this does mean it deviates from special relativity, but it turns out that this does not matter, because the only reason people care for special relativity is to reproduce the predictions of quantum field theory. Quantum field theory makes the same predictions in all reference frames, so you only need to match QFT's predictions for a single reference frame and choose that frame as your foliation, and then pilot wave theory can reproduce the predictions of QFT.
  There is a good paper below that discusses this, how it is actually quite trivial to match QFT's predictions with pilot wave theory.
  Relativistic QFT from a Bohmian perspective: A proof of concept
  tldr: Quantum mechanics itself does not respect locality, hidden variables or not, and adding hidden variables does not introduce any problems with reproducing the predictions of quantum field theory.
- Copenhagen!!! Woo!!

That there is nothing after death. That praying is pointless. I'm not a Christian as such, and I've no interest in debating the topic. I just find confident absolutists slightly annoying, be they religious fundamentalists or obnoxious atheists. Not that I'm saying all atheists are obnoxious, but there's a certain angsty teen attitude that will assert that there's nothing after death and I find it slightly arrogant.
- You and me both.

That AI (as in "generative AI") helps in learning if you give it the right prompt. There is evidence to support that when a user asks AI to implement code, that they (the user) won't touch it because they are unfamiliar of the code it generated. The AI effectively made a psychological black box that no programmer wants to touch even for a (relatively speaking) small snippet of code to a larger program, that was programmed by another programmer or him.
To further generalize, I fully believe AI doesn't improve the learning process, it makes it more accessible and easier for less literate people in a field to understand. I can explain Taylor expansions and power series simplistically to my brother who is less literate and familiar with math. I would be shocked that after a brief general overview he can now approximate any function or differential equation.
Same applies with chatGPT: You can ask it to explain simplistically taylor and power series solutions, or better yet, approximate a differential equation, it doesn't change the fact that you still can't replicate it. I know I'm talking about an extreme case where the person trying to learn Taylor expansions has no prior experience with math, but it still won't even work for someone who does...
I want to pose a simple thought experiment of my experience using AI on say (for example) taylor expansions. Lets assume i wants to learn Taylor expansion, ive already done differential calculus (the main requirement for taylor expansions) and I asks chatGPT "how to do Taylor expansions" as in what is the proof to the general series expansion, and show an example of applying Taylor expansions to a function. What happens when I try and do a problem is when I experience a level of uncertainty in my ability to actually perform it, and this is when I ask chatGPT if i did it correct or not. But you sort of see what I'm saying it's a downward spiral of loosing your certainty, sanity, and time commitment over time when you do use it.
That is what the programmers are experiencing, it's not that they don't want to touch it because they are unfamiliar with the code that the AI generated, it's that they are uncertain in their own ability to fix an issue as they may fuck it up even more. People are terrified of the concept of failure and fucking shit up, and by using AI they "solve" that issue of theirs even though the probability of it hallucinating is higher then if someone spent time figuring out any conflicts themselves.

The battle between socialism/communism and capitalism, in my POV both compliment each other. For the system to work as today there should be both types of countries.
- Capitalism is the best system to live in when the owning class has a genuine fear of a communist revolution.
  
  Unless they go the fascist route, like in Germany.

Epstein killed himself. (same for Gary Webb)
Too many people think suicide is rare, or extreme act. But it's common as dirt especially for people who's life is ruined. It's a joke in movies that "new fish" looking at long sentences kill themselves, but somehow when it happens to someone notable, it's mysterious and suspicious.
Also, the idea that there was a conspiracy to murder Epstein in prison and cover it up by powerful people is an extraordinary claim with the flimsiest possible evidence.
- Killing yourself in a high security 24/7 surveillance prison and the footage is surprisingly missing a few minutes.
  Are you kidding?
  Yes, suicide in itself is not rare but in these circumstances it's fishy as hell and Epstein had dirt on a lot of people...
- I think it's kind of irrelevant if he committed suicide or got murdered. The important thing is that it was allowed. Powerful people (cough couch Bill Barr) made the decision to end his life, one way or the other, to protect their own pedophile asses.
- Sometimes pressure is used to make someone kill themselves. I consider that murder.
  The Fed do this to people. Mafia and gangs do this to people.
- When the concept of suicide was first introduced to me, I thought it was stupid. Like people going through breakups or like have slight stuggles in life and end their lives. I was like 8-12 or something like that, and I remember thinking like: what an idiot, especially if its like a famous person with money. My mom who told me about some famous celebrity jumping off a building in an apprant suicide and my mom suggested a conspiracy theory of someone actually pushing them off the building like a mob hitjob or some shit.
  Then...
  I got depression...
  I understand it now...
  People who never have depression will never truely understand, truely feel it...
  
  When I thought about suicide as a kid, it was always school-shooting type scenarios. Like I'm going to go out, but I'm taking a bunch of these mother fuckers with me. Then I got older, recognized or developed a more pure depression and realized that I was being stupid. If I decide to check out, I'll do it with the least impact on the world.
- It's just soooo weird there's no footage of the time he died. But I do agree a cover up for this case would be a difficult thing. But let's not forget they spent millions of dollars redacting the epstein files so anything is possible.
- Epstien didn't kill himself tho. Pinkertons have methods to get targets to kill themselves see Boeing whistleblowers. It is still murder.
- It's a good point.

Karma

Free Will
Materialism (as in, matter being the foundation of reality)
Words
- What do you consider the foundation of reality if not matter?
  
  Consciousness. Though that too is just a word, which I also don't believe in. But that's the best of all the imperfect words that at least point away from matter.
- free will is just personal agency, something...most people just don't really have in our modern society, especially in most parts of the US with their entirely non-existent safety nets.
  they're so depowered and stressed day-to-day just surviving that they're physiologically incapable of thinking beyond their immediate needs/personal bubble (and that's not considering these social media algos eating away at everyones brains). free will only comes into play when the base of the hierarchy of needs is taken care of, which in our hyper-capitilist world that entire base comes down to $
  
  You're always impacted by something that directs what you end up choosing. Or even thinking. Think of a fruit. Did you choose to think of that fruit? Or did something that falls under the category of fruit just pop into your head? Literally every single thought is like that. Verbal or nonverbal. Sure you can mull over a thing forever if you like, but that too is something you don't know if you're going to do before you're doing it. Or not doing it. I can ask you to go brush your teeth right now. You can deliberate "it's good for me, no reason not to do it, oh but I already did some time ago, I don't wanna just do something because this dude online said so, maybe I'll choose to do it just to prove a point..." endlessly but you have no idea what you end up choosing a single moment sooner than you do. You just tell yourself after the fact that you "chose" to do it or not do it, which also just depends on how attached you are the idea of free will.
- I share your doubt.
- free will? that was long ago. now it's enshitified to hell, ads, subscription tiers...
  all my homies pirate free will.

A surprising number of people on lemmy seem to have this belief, which i think is unpragmatic: They think that to live ones life correctly, or to form a coherent society, one, or the society, must have a Set of Ethical and Moral Principles that crucially, has to be easily enumerable, and preferably named (Like, "The Ten Commandments"). These people also think that they do not have such a named Set, and that this is a really bad problem for them. I think having values is good. However, I think that worrying about how they might be inconsistent seems to be a kind of wild-card disscussion-ender ("Well to solve that problem, we'd first need to sort out Philosophy"), and that therefore, using this worry in any discussion but an abstract one is bad.
(For the society part, holding way too high standards for the Set also creates weird Cultural Homogeneity problems, which irks me.)
If you believe something adjacent, which Sets of values count for you? The Ten Commandments? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Or whatever Kant said?

The "Standard model" in physics. For example, just look at how that 'Hubble constant' is constantly changing! :)
- Okay well amongst physicist the standard model is generally considered to be wrong. It is just our best current understanding that works for most situations
- got a better one?

that racism is still pervasive even in blue/liberal areas, they just hide it better, plus transplants(people who move to blue areas) often come from more conservative or moderate areas, during one of my speech writing classes in college people were telling thier backstory and thier was one saying they became more conservative when they moved here to west coast, plus we have the ones that escaped from "communist" countries, pretty obvious when was pratically sucking off the military/war effort that america does, during the end of BUSH 2nd term. plus the AA on asian violence and racism never truely get addressed in these blue area, it just gets swept under the rug by the media, for the sake of offending AA people.

That dogs are "good boys" or your friend.

Ok. You don't like low hanging fruit, here's one.
I don't believe all landlords are bad and shouldn't exist.
Go.
- yea the single owner, or 2 houses. its the corporate ones, and nimbys landlowrd that need to go
  
  I’d even divide it further. Screw the corporate ones, and even the small ones that won’t take care of a property and charge a lot. There are too few that do a decent job and don’t screw over tenants.

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