• 1 Post
  • 188 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 31st, 2023
  • hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•I Quit
    95·
    12 days ago

    We all know some people who are clearly smart and some people who are clearly dumb

    I don’t. I thought maybe Elon musk is smart or maybe he is a good public speaker. Maybe he is charismatic or maybe he is just lying really effectively.

    With 20/20 hindsight it’s good to reflect and understand it was smart to be cautious about my judgement. I will never be sure if someone is smart or dumb, because there’s so much going on I can’t possibly understand.

    Even Einstein who clearly had a lot of very impactful and helpful theories and ideas I wouldn’t say is smart. I would only go so far as to say he is a great physicist.

    I also disagree that being smart is generally advantageous in life. All the people who seemed smart to me were deeply depressed at some point in their life, some even still and some even went a bit further with it.

    What I’m trying to say is the world is complex, and such generalizations only lead to wrong causal links.

    Maybe smart don’t give you money but money helps to learn and become smart. Maybe smarts don’t give you advantages in life but an advantageous life affords you opportunities to become smarter. Maybe being smart is the wrong way to think about it and it’s all just different patterns and behaviors of thinking. Or maybe your thoughts are more profound in some circles and people who think more profound appear smarter to us.

    Let’s just take a healthy dose of skepticism to such studies but also to all those “we all know it” ideas. I don’t. I’m fucking stupid but that leads to smarter decisions than the me who assumes a bunch of stuff.

  • hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml•When you have liberal santa for christmas
    71·
    21 days ago

    To be fair it’s never clear cut. Government is made up of people in a democracy. Russia still labels itself a democracy, obviously it’s been somewhat hard take their word for it given the anomalous approval ratings and the long standing history of corruption as well as the oligarchic roots that are still running through the country.

    You’re both right and wrong, the government is an extension of the citizens as to represent them. However, this government might not be representing them realistically anymore. So if you say the average person is responsible, that means they need to risk their and even their families safety and freedom. I think that’s not fair, I don’t know if I would be capable of this.

    In conclusion (and because we know this from experience out of 1940s Germany) we need to burden them some responsibility for not revolting, but we can not punish them the same as government.

    This excludes the specific perpetrators. If they have actual knowledge of the crimes, there is an argument to be made for moral implications from direct culpability and thus their actions underly a heightened level of criminalization and ethical scrutiny.