Just enjoy your figs, Paul.

The longer something has been around, the longer it will continue to be around. The longevity of something also validates its efficacy and resiliency.

If people have been eating figs and drinking wine for thousands of years, then it's probably good and safe for you to do as well.

If traditional salad recipes avoid the use of conium maculatum, then you should probably avoid it too.

If your ancient ancestors didn't cook with margarine, then you probably shouldn't cook with it either.

No, the wise man doesn't have strong evidence to the contrary. And no, he's not interested in finding out either. The consequences of ingesting a novel non-Lindy chemical is an unknown unknown that the wise man is not interested in discovering.

Of course, if the potential upsides are great enough, the risk of downsides might be worthwhile.

In the case of the chemical spatula, the downsides are uncertain, but there's the possibility of cancer. The upsides are...greater corporate profits?

The wise man is going to have to pass on that one.

Moderns would do well to try and be more like the wise man. Scientific studies are not the holy grail of knowledge. New studies are coming out all the time, both negating and reaffirming old conclusions. Is this schizophrenic flip-flopping not enough to convince the modern that Scientism isn't the end-all-be-all?

Unknown unknowns emerge at the tails of novel changes introduced to complex systems. Scientific studies are unable to account for these long-tail events. When it comes to your environment and your body, be more Lindy, and stop deferring to the myopicity of Scientism to guide you.

>Eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years.

Every single site I've bought from has the same boring and functional checkout experience, whether it's Stripe Checkout, Google Wallet, or Shopify. They're practically all the same, and they all work fine.

what?

In my culture, as well as that of the critics, we agree that 60 is not old, and it's also quite normal to be starting a business at such an age. But his culture, which makes berth in Bengaluru, India, obviously has different expectations regarding age, and so that's why it's unusual (but elating) to see his father do this at such an age.

Just remember that, and cut him some slack.

They are religious rituals with only the trappings of the scientific method. These rituals are often purely performative, but the outcomes can be useful for effecting political goals, as the studies have historically given authoritative weight to bureaucrats and their designs.

The ruse is failing though, and I think New Zealand's actions here could be evidence of this trend. No longer is "studies show..." a sufficient enough deception for enacting political ends. People are demanding sounder reasoning in politics than what Scientism has to offer.

Most invocations of Scientism are directed at these social sciences, due to its egregiousness.

This is why I despise practically every discussion of "why" when it comes to talking about observed traits and evolution like this. People invent this bizarre deterministic model of life as it it were purely chemical or computational and could be controlled & understood as such. As if every single little trait has design intent.

You have one guy in this thread that's like, "Would this imply that humans’ propensity to keep pets is also an association error in the brain?". Like holy shit dude, I don't know, but maybe people just like pets. Maybe pets like pets. Maybe pets like us. Maybe we aren't computer programs whose nature is defined by scripts and wiring. "Association error". The fuck? We're not computer programs. We don't have "errors".

Like what a dull and inhuman lens to view the world with: "We're all just computers", or "We're all just a bunch of chemicals". I wonder, do you also think of me as a computer or a chemical sack? Do you view my child that way? My cat? If you do, that disturbs me, because then you may be tempted to treat us as such, when we're all so much more than that.

Stopped reading here. You get like 50-60 pounds of meat per deer. A family of four is not eating that in four days.

But that's the wrong comparison to make. The rosier Dutch government won't be taking over control here. The rebels will be.

And if you compare the Assad regime to the actual alternative, the rebels, you'll instead realize: the hard times have only just begun [1].

[1] https://medium.com/opacity/the-syrian-war-condensed-a-more-r...

Obviously not, because a European court literally just overturned the results of a democratic election due to foreign influence on the voting population.

Why don't they even try to hide their disdain for plebs?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was also an unknown pleb who quickly became an elected official. We don't question that, and in fact, we celebrate it. It's a great American underdog story. We love it. It's the spirit of our culture.

Why is Georgescu's rise disdained like this? Is it because he's on the "other side"?

- laser toner is bad for your health

- laser has a larger upfront cost

Poetry is for everyone, not just poetry connoisseurs. It's a simplified primal expression of language, taking the form of pretty soundbites & snippets, pristine, virginal, uncorrupted by prose and overthinking. Poetry is not the domain of middlebrow academics.

Because many people today would prefer that animals NOT be tortured and killed. Good people don't torture animals at all in general, and when we do kill them, it's for a definite end like food or to end suffering, and they are killed in such a way that they do not feel pain.

Increasingly, people don't want to see animals tortured and killed for some unknown or arbitrary end, like "let's just see what happens when we drown this rat dude, for science! lol".

How do you do that though? How do you knock down an idea that:

- has at least hundreds of millions of subscribers, for many of whom the idea is an unassailable religious tenet

- has survived and endured for centuries (Lindy)

- manifests itself in the form of laws, businesses, and NGOs, and is propped up by violence, and also by the hundreds of billions of dollars behind those organizations

Even if the idea is wrong, with all this momentum behind it, with all this skin people have in the game, all they've invested into it, how do you get people to abandon the idea?