Unmentioned Question Detention
Blindfolded soda testing- Its time for a pop quiz.
This little piggy went to the Duckstack
Duckstack scientists have been asking, what do we know about nails, really? I’m not talking about the ones on your body, we’ve all been studying those since birth and I think we’ve got them figured out by now1. But construction nails? Most of the time you would just use a screw, nails seem a bit outdated since we've invented those.
I will tell you what we know about nails: we know they aren't sentient. In fact just as a triangle cannot have four sides, sentient beings cannot be used as nails. We have tested this extensively2. I apologize if you had aspired to be one. Now is the time to follow the science, and stop trying to be a nail. Stop that. Doesn't that hurt?
Try being something achievable instead. Like a duck.
What Is Truth?
Truth is a warm puppy
I am not a trained psychologist3, but some view me as wise4, and I would like to think they are correct, or at least that I have a moderate insight into human nature which if not correct is at least useful, and if not useful is at least interesting. And using all my powers of philosophy (philosophy is what we call psychology minus power and authority) I am going to make some things up about mental illness which I am pretty sure are correct.
Mental illness diagnoses have skyrocketed5 over the last couple decades, and I believe there are many reasons for this, such as
the water is literally poisonous
psychologists are eager to make a quick buck
Mental illness is socially transmitted
People have very little hardship and have begun hallucinating like a sensory deprivation chamber except for the mind
Not necessarily in equal weights, of course. But the rise in mental illness has mainly concentrated around “soft” mental illnesses, such as depression, bipolar, and anxiety, and I’d say homosexuality and some others. The hard ones like schizophrenia, OCD, multiple personality disorder have in diagnosis rate remained mostly constant, and that's because the soft ones are for the most part social disorders.
So why are you anxious? Is it because the world is more dangerous than it was in your caveman days? Is it because dangers are more life threatening? I submit it is because your philosophy of life is worse than your ancestors.
Everyone has a worldview, but people don’t really hold worldviews because they are true, they more hold them because they are useful. The question behind each is more “for what”. The answer could be its for “avoiding wasting time”, or “for avoiding making waves with my social group”, or “preserving my self esteem or self image as a ‘good person’” (or the inverse, “preserving my self image as a bad/weak/pathetic person”). This would all be well and fine, and everyone could be out there having fun, if not for having a fatal flaw, which is: Worldviews are used to make decisions
This means your worldview, in one way or another, is going to be tested.
Since nobody’s worldview encompasses the world6 people must rely on external memetics such as religion to inform decisions beyond what they themselves can see. The predictive power of these combined worldviews contributes directly to your happiness, but for our purposes here its more important to point out that it contributes directly to your feeling of confidence. If you are constantly making poor predictions about other people, or worse, if you are constantly making poor predictions about yourself, there is no way you could avoid a diagnosis with a mental illness such as anxiety. Why wouldn’t you be anxious? Its been proven to you again and again that you have no idea what’s going on7!
This is why therapists take a role heavily analogous to priests. Their job, when functioning correctly, is to help you update your worldview. If you have a debilitating phobia, they help you to understand its not that scary. If you have PTSD, their goal is to help you properly rank your trauma in terms of ordinary life.
Doctrine and Covenants section 93, verse 24 says:
24 And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come;
In other words, for something to be true means it has to have predictive power, either for the past or the present. This isn’t how most people conceive of truth- For example, missionaries in the church are constantly told that their religion “is not true”. Charitably, the person is telling the missionary that he isn’t correct about the afterlife, but unless you’ve been there that’s kind of tough to prove, I imagine.
But there’s a lot of things intermediary to that state that are a lot more tangible, and that is where things get interesting for me. I often hear nonmembers of the church, and even ex-members, talk about how good the church is/was for them, that it provided them with so much and kept them out of trouble and set them up for a lot of successes and stability in life, and then they say something like “except its not true”. And I ask those people: What does “not true” even mean at that point? If a Latter-Day Saint is on average better off than someone of any other religion, it sounds to me like that’s a compass that’s pointing due north. That’s a reliable compass! You might even call it a “true” compass, in an archaic meaning of the word true. I’m sure the antagonist would argue that while the community is really good and true its going to suddenly stop working in the afterlife, but that aught to be an exercise for the reader. If I was going to follow a religion on purely pragmatic grounds, an Earthly track record is pretty obviously important. The voice that sometimes comes in my head after I pray to Heavenly Father in the name of Jesus Christ, which I call “God”, has a very reliable track record. I’ve learned a lot about God from his mortal guidance to me in real-time, here on Earth. I don’t think you can learn some things about God just from reading about them.
I’m rambling so I want to leave a quick note of testimony: One fundamental piece of my worldview is that wickedness causes destruction, and righteousness causes blessings. Specifically, many of the troubles Americans are having with immigration/immigrants, finances, political peace and more, originate in having shrines built up to wickedness, more than they have to do with the actual issues themselves. So recently I was playing around with AI, and I was able to make some huge strides in a personal coding project that I’ve been stuck on for maybe four or five years now. It was very impressive to me. I thought, “this is such a remarkable blessing”. So I did some digging and what I found was, AI really started to kick off around November of 2022. And what I found was Roe V Wade was overturned June 24, 2022. This is not the way the natural man thinks about causality, but the question is: Is it true?
Things I cannot explain
Life is full of mysteries. Riddles hence unsolved. Secrets buried from before the foundation of the world. These pale in comparison to not knowing how a calculator works
These things are unexplainable me. Eldritch mysteries of form and function indistinguishable to magic.
-Jellyfish. What are they? How do they eat? What are the tendrils for? I do not know.
Electrical Resistance. How do you resist electricity? If you get electricity in you I think you will just die. There's conductors and there's non conductors but IDK anything that's like, “it lets electricity through, but steals some of it or something”. What partially resists electricity?8 I just don’t know.
-Water. You can slap it and it goes all wavey and splashy, but at same time, and you can pour it and boil it and I can't explain any of it.
-Gas lines. How do they get full of gas? Are they all piped centrally from a single oil drill? I do not know.
History
Did you hear a siren? No, its just the toddler’s new “pay attention to me” cry
I had a lovely experience this week where our baby would do this thing where she would look at me and smiles, then looks away, then looks at me and smiles, then looks away. One or two times would be a fluke but she kept doing it for like two minutes with eye contact and everything. 4 months old is really early for that so I think she might be... Clever!
I had the funniest moment while watching dune which my wife this week, which she has never read. The funny part was where halfway through the movie she randomly asked “was this character supposed to be a man in the books?” And I had to be like “yes, they gender swapped him. I wasn’t going to say anything.” How did she know the truth?
The toddler was eating cereal on the drive and one puff got loose and was sort of rolling across his chest while he chased it and the toddler was heard to comment: “come back you silly thing!”
Another precious moment this week, we were driving somewhere nearby and were trying to keep toddler awake so tickled his toes. He gave this big happy grin… and then his head just flopped totally 100% passed out
Toddler stuck his ice cream cone in his car seat’s cup holder “for later”, and of course it melted, so we threw the ice cream away, and then next time we put him in the car he reaches into his cupholder and goes “my ice cream is gone!”
The toddler has been doing this thing lately where when he is sad or upset he starts yodeling. I don’t think he finds it as amusing as we do.
The Ancient Flip-Flop Mystery
No not that one, the OTHER ancient flip-flop mystery
Once upon a time there was a man named Sherlock Homes, who was a mythical figure in his own right for his ability to solve mysteries, inside of people’s houses. Sherlock had a lightning mind that could take only a few clues and instantly synthesize them and categorize them, locking them surely in place in the right order, to solve the clues. One day a woman comes in (presumably, to one of his homes) and says to him, my shoes have been stolen. They’ve always been there for me but when I went to put them on my feet today, they weren’t there!
Brilliant Sherlock solved the mystery with a single question. He said, “How did you get in my house?” and the woman said “Well I walked here.” And the brilliant detective gestured at her feet, and replied: “The shoes afoot.”
Thoughts on the presidential debate
Not a lot to be honest. Not from me, not from Trump, not from Kamala
Kamala spoke better than she normally does, which I saw a post positing this is because she had a radio in her ear telling her what to say. This seems plausible to me. I watched past debates with her and she was really quite a different person, like in the vice president debate last election she didn’t mention any policies at all. I think everyone kind of recognizes Kamala is like a puppet at this point for establishment voices so it probably was not particularly dishonest to wiretap them and have Trump debate with the people who are actually campaigning to become president of the United States.
Regardless, she ran out of steam towards the end and they crumbled to talking points and Trump found more of his groove, but I don’t think he did a great job “selling himself” to any undecided or low information voters. A similar thing happened with the moderators who were at first fairly unbiased but rapidly started making debate points mostly against Trump towards the end, all in all fairly typical. I don’t think most viewers are informed enough to spot the “catch” with the things kamala was saying.
However, a lot of people liked the things Trump was saying anyway, quite a few people reached out and said they thought he did well. In any presidential debate both sides are going to declare their guy the winner so its kind of fun to hear from more middle/undecideds that way.
Ducksnax
China
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If you haven’t, you should probably give up at this point, that train has passed
please stop asking
strictly speaking, I'm not a trained anything
Such as myself, for example
there are millions of graphs like this
Our brains literally do not have the RAM to store all the variables. At least mine doesn’t. If you are a cyborg with RAM implants, I mean no offense by this Duckstack section
as an aside, this is why leftist bios on social media are always full of mental illnesses- leftism is an ideological fantasy, not a pragmatic one, and as such has poor predictive power.
Grass type pokemon maybe?