That’s a self fulfilling prophecy, isn’t it? The effect you describe would not be there if it wasn’t for comments like this. Or at the very least, these comments make the effect bigger.

Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.

Japan’s coal imports are overwhelmingly local – AUS and Indonesia.

That’s roughly as local as France or GB to US east cost, similar distance and similar other differences. IMHO both connections aren’t even regional anymore. But yeah, it’s fairly short what coal import routes concerns.

An (intuitively) working search would be a great step ahead. It should find and show things if they exist, and only show no results if they do not. That a plethora of external tools exist to meet these basic needs shows both how much this is needed, and how much it is broken.

I also feel I have more luck finding communities if searching for ‘all’, instead of ‘communities’. Don’t make me add cryptic chars to my search to make it work. Do that for me in the background if necessary.

It’s been long since I’ve been using it, but iirc, it’s impossible or painful to search for a specific community in your subscribed list.

There’s a famous hill-top cemetery in the city, and sure enough I saw basically all of my classmates there too

That was an unexpected dark turn. Glad you live to tell their story!

From the title, I had a question and found the answer in the FAQ:

What’s an unconference?

An unconference is a conference in which the participants – rather than the organizers – decide which sessions happen each day and on which topics. In the many years we have been organizing unconferences, we have found that for complex subjects like the Fediverse, attendees get more value (and fun!) out of unconferences than from traditional conferences. Sounds disorganized? It did to us, too, until we actually experienced our first one. So don’t worry, it will be fine :-)

Here are some suggestions for how to prepare for an unconference.

Adding a comment so people can experiment more in this thread.

That’s already pretty cool! It surely does generate very random numbers. I still think you can take it a step – or a random number of steps, hah! – further by repeating the process a random number of times! Maybe this way we can reach maximum randomness. Probably need to reroll the number until it’s big enough for that.

I would also check if the result is 4. If it’s 4, it should be discarded. 4 is not an actual random number but a joke random number from a comic.

at that point it will become clear that this is a stupid thing to do

While you’re technically right, I’m afraid things don’t work that way. Pushing people into a corner can have the paradoxic opposite result of strengthening their position, even if it is “clearly” wrong.

Just a guess: to prevent bots from scraping the full content?

So why is this? The answers so far seem unsatisfactory, since things like phones, SUVs and car-centric infrastructure are on the rise in other countries as well, without that staggering rise in deaths.

I spent about 3 minutes browsing the report linked in the article, and am rather less confident than before. For example, on pages 25 and 26 they look at the share of SUVs in deaths and sales. And while both figures are rising, the bodycount from non-SUVs has gone up as well.

The answer is probably not a single factor anyways. Can anyone make a more or less informed guess what might explain the US being so bad?

Are the Dutch naturally more responsible drivers or something?

Maybe: https://www.dutchreach.org/

But don’t take that as a conclusive answer, your question still stands.

Best take imo. Yes, the “bliss” is that we are ruled by ruthless billionnaires instead of cruel dictators. At least some of us.

As pointed out in my top level comment, the post is quite one-sided, omitting the dark truths. Cooperation is the overall best strategy, but so is to exploit as much as you can. Both are true, the combination is true.

Yes, and no.

First and foremost, you need no “justification” for being a decent person. And there are other reasons to be that way, as arbitrary as “I like it this way”.

Game theory is strongly related to evolution. It is safe to assume that everything we can observe in nature is a successful strategy. So this confirms the statement: Cooperation is a successful strategy. But the other side of the picture also exists: Betrayal is as well.

What the excerpt omits about the Prisoner’s Dilemma (not sure wether it’s mentioned in the video, which I did not watch now): The Nash Equilibrium can be the overall worst outcome. What does that mean?

A Nash Equilibrium is a situation in which no player can improve their own position. It is therefore a stable state. Things will change until they have settled in a stable state. It can be shown for Prisoner’s Dilemma that the Nash Equilibrium can be the worst case, where each betrays the other. Yes, they would both score better if they cooperated, but the system will still tend towards the state where both play nasty.

When multiple iterations are played, this changes a bit. It seems, if you not just meet once in a lifetime, but can remember your past, and have a common future, it makes more sense to cooperate. But there is still a place for uncooperative exploitation.

So yes, it’s true what you say about “best performing strategies”, but it should be noted that “evil” strategies don’t go extinct either.

It should be questioned how much these theories can be applied to our lifes. I mean questioned, not implying an answer. Either way I find it interesting how behaviour which we associate with morals emerges in very simple and abstract games.

If you’ve ever tried to hold in a sneeze, this new medical case report might make you think twice.

“In world’s 1st known case”

Contrary to what other people seem to take from this, it rather shows how unrisky holding in a sneeze is. If it was significantly dangerous, we’d know more than one case.

I actually had a relative who died from drinking a sip of water from a glass. Got it in the wrong pipe. I still would not warn people from drinking water after I learned about it. Again, after all, the overwhelming majority of evidence points to the opposite; it’s perfectly safe.

It’s not a great comparison, since there is a good alternative to holding in a sneeze, whereas there is no good alternative to drink water.

One reason might be: Each instance only has a partial knowledge of content in Lemmy. It can be unaware of certain communities on other instances, if your instance has not discovered them yet. Hence the need for all these meta-search tools.

I feel like I’m pretending to know what I’m doing.

I guess that explains the observation. As kids, we’re fooled by the pretenders. So we grow up with this expectation.

They eliminate a part of the emissions, since one big engine (like a power plant) can be run more efficiently than many small engines (in individual vehicles).

Similarly, transporting electricity through wires creates less emissions than transporting fuel with trucks. Both serve the purpose of refueling other vehicles.

Even coal powered EVs are better than gasoline cars.

Maybe it has become worse since all those vegan or vegetarian fast food options became available in stores and restaurants.

When I hear non-vegs talk about living meat-free, the conversation always revolves around these meat substitutes, how unhealthy they are.

It does not come to their mind one can prepare a meal from fresh produce. Yes of course, fast food is unhealthy. On the other hand, I like it.

There are better ways to do this. Examples:

1. Desalination plant provides town with fresh water
2. Town’s waste water is treated before going back into the ocean
3. Brine gets diluted into that treated stream

In theory, this could give and take the same amount of salt water to and from the ocean, while still providing desalinated water for use.

Another way to dilute brine is to add it to the ocean in small bits in multiple locations, so neither location exceeds a certain salt concentration.