Have you ever heard or seen something that initially seemed to be totally fine, until you saw just how truly dangerous it actually is?
What is a much bigger threat than initially presented?
I was walking the Cornish coastal path past some cliffs and saw a side path that the map showed led to a cave. It was really a narrow ledge, cut in the cliff side. I walked along it, stepping over a gap and spent a bit of time looking at the cave.
Heading back to the main path, I had the sudden realisation that the gap I’d stepped over earlier was where a section of the ledge had broken off. Which meant that the bit I was standing on was also at risk of breaking off. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced fear like it. I got a shot of adrenaline that left me shaking. The sea was a long way down, big waves pounding jagged rocks. I had to hug the cliff and wait for my heart rate to settle before I could step over the gap again.
Making exceptions for violations of civil rights.
Welcome to hell!
Yeah, I was alright with it in the 60s.
Hippos. In Fantasia, they’re delicate ballet-dancing animals. In reality, they’re ravenous maws, obliterating everything they become aware of.
systemd
Stress, mental/emotional stress. When my biologist kid was talking about how harmful stress is, I was just thinking it’s normal, right? Like how the fuck am I supposed to avoid stress? No person could, we have to be made to handle it, or even benefit from it? Like how stressing my muscles makes them healthier?
No. Early life stress, damaging. Midlife stress, damaging. Old age stress, damaging. Mental stress causes physical damage.
Cars.
Compressed air
one saw a guy practically deglove his hand when a high PSI line burst when he was holding it.
Ouch. Big ouch.
Digital age verification. It is not “to protect the children”. I saw it for what it was right away but literally everyone I talked to about it thought it sounded really positive.
The masses are SO easily manipulated by just saying something is for the childlren.
The Republicans
Social media. Every person is now inside a filter bubble that is not reality but they think it is.
Affects how they think about absolutely everything. Thats why its the most dangerous threat to humanity as a whole, with big tech algorithms pushing content to people.
Cheap, easy to get, abundant and hyper palatable calories.
The ease of gambling in the US.
I wish that was a problem exclusive to the USA :(
Pretty much the entirety of America (the continent) is suffering with that shit, too
Doesn’t help that you practically get assaulted with ads for gambling if you watch any sort of sports.
In the UK at least, most gambling adverts are showing off how easy it is to stop when you use their platform. Just a solid minute of “stay in control of your gambling” etc.
I dont know what fallacy or whatever it is, but it makes me queasy.
Alcohol
iirc it’s a confirmed, 100% proven carcinogen and is a poison with zero net benefits.
Humanity has a penchant for making “taking some poison” part of social gatherings. This isn’t exclusive to alcohol or tobacco, recreational drugs have been a social lubricant for millenia.
and addictive
No net benefits today.
Various alcoholic drinks of the past were a benefit in helping to provide hydration and calories in an unclean environment.
But doesn’t alcohol dehydrate?
In large concentrations. A lot of beer back in the day was small beer with an alcohol content closer to a light beer today. The drawbacks of the low amount of alcohol was made up for by not getting an intestinal infection.
I mean nobody drinks it because it’s healthy.
But but but muh 1 glass of red wine a day study!
Some of the best times of my life in my 20s were enabled through alcohol. I traveled the world using my own money, met countless interesting people in pubs and at festivals.
As I sit, fully sober at my workstation in the office some 20 years later, I can think back to those times and can only smile when someone claims it has zero net benefits.
yeah. people drink it because its a damn good social lubricant.
keyword is “net” – you made friends, but the health risks involved may considerably offset that benefit.
i’m sober and have made countless friends sans alcohol, many of them drink themselves; and if alcohol was a contingent on them being my friend, I’m not sure I’d want to be friends with them.
Hard disagree, but that might have a lot to do with me being Scottish.
“Only the people who prayed lived” is an easy statement to make as the dead ones can’t speak for themselves.
“Alcohol is why I have friends” is understandably believed because you’ll never know the life you’d have had had you not drank it.
I get it’s the pillar of many cultures and a welcome one at that, but the fact it’s a proven carcinogen should not be dismissed, forgotten, or trivialized.
Nobody’s denying alcohol has risks — it’s a carcinogen, that’s just a fact. But risk isn’t all-or-nothing. A weekend drink in a social setting is not the same thing as chronic heavy use, and public health research makes that distinction.
The “you’ll never know the life you’d have had without it” line is basically unfalsifiable — you could say that about anything from coffee to football to religion. Humans bond over shared rituals, and in many cultures moderate drinking is one of them. That social connection has measurable wellbeing benefits too.
It being unfalsifiable is the point because it meant to be a pendulum to your unfalsifiable original point that you’re thankful for alcohol because you see it as the reason you have the outcome in life that you did.
Many people have traveled and made friends, they did not need a carcinogen to do it, which nullifies it from being a positive exclusive to alcohol.
Zero net benefits my ass! 🖕🏻
username checks out
Before the AI craze, LLMs were a neat niche academic tool. Then the cults started forming…
I don’t know much about the cults. I imagine a bunch of tiktok idiots treating ChatGPT like god.
By cults I refer to the CEOs and influencers proclaiming things like “if you’re not using AI for everything right now then you’re making yourself obsolete.” Then they go and show a few personal anecdotes to support their claim, while at the same time dismissing any and all criticism of LLMs and their products.
no the cults are the people building the things. most of the openai leadership seem to be afraid of roko’s basilisk.
Religion. For most of my life I’ve seen media both implicitly and explicitly claiming that religion is a fundamental human social need, and that people who aren’t religious are the weird immoral outliers. What I’ve found is true though, is that religion is a primer for believing things contrary to evidence or reason. Faith is often promoted as a virtue in religion, and many aspects of religious thought are fundamentally unverifiable. Once someone starts down the path of believing things without evidence or critical thought, it gets easier to believe things contrary to evidence, and once you get far enough in that you could potentially be convinced to believe anything. You see this with the antivaxers, flat earthers, conspiracy theorists, far right extremists, etc. Many of these beliefs have a root in established religions, if not explicit religious justification. These things aren’t necessarily directly because of religion, people don’t really need religion to believe wacky bigoted shit contrary even to the evidence of their own eyes, but religion by it’s very nature encourages people to be uncritical. Even if the tenets of a religion are objectively good, the uncritical acceptance of ideas can easily start being applied to a person’s own biases, because it’s just so easy. It’s already easy to be uncritical of ideas but practicing it makes it so much worse. Religion is basically taking a major human weakness and promoting it as the height of virtue. Faith is intellectual sloth.
That isn’t “religion”, it’s a tenet of a fraction of Christianity.
Many religions (Judaism, Islam, Shinto, Bhuddism) do not hold faith up as a virtue, and many Christian denominations (Roman Catholic, non-evangelical Protestant) assert that your faith must include good action and rational thought.
(We could have a conversation about the good things inspired by religion or the terrible things done by irrreligious folk who share your reverence for skepticism, but I really just wanted to point out that you were using an overly broad brush)
Yeah. Free market Jesus really did a number on religion
Just try to make sure you don’t end up as narrow-minded as they are.
