Interesting Links for 20-09-2025

[andrewducker]

1. Popper was right about the link between certainty and extremism

(tags:politics psychology belief )

2. Plastic from takeaway containers may fuel Alzheimer's risk (in mice)

(tags:mice alzheimers plastic )

3. Is it cheating if your illicit affair is with AI?

(tags:relationships ai )

4. The US "healthcare" system is not fit for purpose.

(tags:healthcare USA OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[aldabra]

That line that we should never be certain about anything is problematic [waves from the extreme!]. If it could be demonstrated that I am a brain in a vat and the rest of you are artificial holograms with no consciousness or cognition then my political beliefs would shift radically. How confident am I that this isn't going to happen? Very. 100%? Are you a YouGov survey or a philosophy exam? I would give different answers.

How likely do I think it is that refugees or women or trans people or Arabs or Jews or the disabled or the elderly or foreigners or the poor have no consciousness or cognition? Zero, for all practical purposes. Animals? I'm pretty close to zero there too. What kind of evidence are they imagining they could produce that ought to convince me otherwise?

[andrewducker]

It says, in the article "Technically speaking, one cannot (rationally) be absolutely certain that the Sun will rise tomorrow"


But the questions it talks about are beliefs about how society should be ordered, not about whether people have consciousness. Being sure that "People must behave in way X" is the problem, not "We should have empathy towards people".

[aldabra]

What are you ordering society *for*?

If you're playing a simulation game then there is no problem with razing Gaza to build a profitable riviera. If you're in the real world then it's unforgivable. The difference is the consciousness of the people you're destroying.

So the orderings it is permissible to consider depend on whether you're optimising for the people you're ordering or for the produce you can extract for them. Those result in very different outcomes, and the Trump administration versus its popular opposition epitomises this. The problem with the Heritage Foundation's extreme rightness isn't that it's wrong about how people behave. It's wrong about whether people matter. That's the underlying issue which people have 100% certainty about, unless you have been very very careful to frame your questions about being about micro level policy in specific contexts rather than macro level, and there isn't any evidence that this survey has done that.

Is X cheating...

[wildeabandon]

... is a question that has both a different and the same answer for every non-abusive relationship.

If you're hiding it from your partner(s) because you think they'd consider it a breach of your commitments to one another than it's definitely cheating. If you're deliberately hiding it from your partner for some other reason then you should have a good hard think about whether they'd consider it a breach of your commitments to one another.

Re: Is X cheating...

[andrewducker]

That was almost exactly what I said when a friend sent me the link!

My own definition is very simple. If it's something that would influence whether your partner wanted to be with you and you are deliberately keeping them from finding out, then it is cheating.

I have a rule, for myself, that if I ever find myself thinking "Would it be better if I didn't tell Jane about this?" then I have to go find her immediately and tell her.