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Why I’m not “normal”.
I don’t understand popular culture. Things like “The Bachelor” and why people choose to spend their time watching this stuff on a regular basis for decades. I like sports but the fanaticism can be obscene (says the guy from Philly). I understand TikTok releases dopamine but how do people not realize they’re addicted to these things? How is it that so many people are so gullible and unable to discern obviously fake or subjective or biased information. How do people fall for advertising? How are people not curious to know the reality of a situation? How can people defend things that are so obviously wrong or bad for all humans? Why is “obvious” obvious to some and entirely vailed and twisted for others?
There’s something that a lot of people share that I don’t understand. Something about the need to be right. The need to be protective. While also having the need to not care too much about anything more than entertainment. There’s a subconscious desire to be part of something, to be a cog in the machine, to be a consumer, and to be lead by someone else.
I vividly remember, at eight years old, going to catholic catechism class and realizing that every religion claims to be the true religion and if that were the case it’s plausible my religion was the wrong religion or that all religion was simply made up. I’m by no definition a very intelligent person so why is it that I can figure this out, before I barely even know what sex is, while the vast majority of human civilization for the past 2000+ years hasn’t asked this question? How are we still warring over verifiably made up stories (the Bible’s Jesus was a story based on several preexisting religions)?
I certainly have strong, sometimes less-informed opinions, but I’m here to learn. I like to think I’m humble but sometimes I let semantics get in the way. If you prove me wrong or offer something I hadn’t considered, I’ll at least shut my mouth about it and do more research.
To make it less about me, I want to learn more about whatever the subject is that I’ve just described.
Edit: This is funny and kind of relevant. Someone else recently posted a question on Lemmy about using the Internet Archive. This lead me to go back and look at a personal blog I had starting in 2005. This quote from 2006 is relevant to not understanding why people do what they do:
Look, I understand that Chain Mail will never go away, and it’s not even the hassle of hitting the little delete button. It’s just that I am so irritated by the people who think that they are either going to find themselves falling in love with the person they have in mind when they hit the send button or that they will be financialy independant because they SENT-AN-EMAIL. Do you idiot’s have any clue at all?! COME ON!!!
Seems pretty rational to me, in an irrational and absurd world there isnt much you can understand. Learn what you can, leave the world a better place than you found it and dont let it bother you. Come on, lets go to the pub.
irrational and absurd world
I think some people get overwhelmed and default to being happily ignorant. Or, they try to reduce the complexity and absurdity to fit what they already know.
Thought this would be a post about having your head up your butt or navel gazing. We should be best friends.
Nothing you listed fails to ring a bell. For example; I too had religious questions that the preacher and adults couldn’t answer. Figured I must be a dumb kid, I’d understand someday.
In high school the quote about the unexamined life being not worth living resonated. I couldn’t understand how people were fine being ignorant. Obviously I can’t know everything, but I’m a voracious reader and always have been.
How can people be content lacking curiosity? My wife is like that. She’s perfectly happy with her ignorance in all things related to science and religion. Imagine a Catholic who doesn’t have a clue about common Sunday school stories.
And I too want to know if there’s a name for what we’re seeing in others.
Electrical engineering. I feel like I have a nack for it but I went and became a biologist
Study electric fish and eels. Problem solved!
Physics. Got put in a Physics class in HS after getting kicked out of public schools and had to transfer to a catholic school with advanced curriculum. Fuck everything was so interesting to me. WHAT THE FUCK IS IN THE SPACE THAT MUST EXIST BETWEEN ATOMS?! WHAT?! You can never measure the exact location of an object?!?! WHAT WHAT?!? Even if you could if you’re observing it passively, it alters the results?!?! WHATWHATWHAT?!? No matter how random an occurancw may seem it can still be a patterned algorithm?!? Fuck me they couldn’t teach their way out of a sex Ed paper bag but they sure as shit taught the fuck out of Physics
Quantum physics. But I’m at a stage where I actually would have to really start learning. YouTube videos don’t cut it anymore. I would have to actually understand the maths and my brain can’t handle that at the moment.
Same for me
Use IBM’s cloud quantum computers to learn a bit, you can indeed find YouTube videos that explain to you how to do the calculations and then you can just play around making algorithms on their systems and verifying that you can do the calculations correctly. With that knowledge alone you can then begin to learn how to step through a lot of the famous experiments that all purport to show the strangeness of quantum mechanics, like Bell’s theorem, the “bomb tester” thought experiment, GHZ experiment, quantum teleportation, etc, as most of the famous ones can be implemented on a quantum computer and you can get an understanding of why they are interesting.
You’d have to start with linear algebra and differential equations if you want to grasp it.
Geologic time.
Same. There is so much I see online and IRL that I don’t understand. For that matter, I’d like to understand geology on a decade or century level.
For example; I have 2.5 acres of swamp. Talking to a guy who was a kid there 30-years ago, it seems mostly unchanged. How not?! I would think it would fill up, shift course, something in 3 decades.
Was it different 300 years ago? Maybe not. 3 Million years. Should be different? Right?
I’d like to learn Spanish. My wife giggles uncontrollably at my Tagalog accent, so I kinda gave up on that one.
Sex. Yeah i know it sounds shallow. But for some people is not a possibility to experience it.
cognition, learning and bias.
anything related to the saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”
also retention on how well you keep what you learned.
TIME :deeper meaning of it. it’s the concept even cracked a bit more could lead to multiple advances , it’s fantastic dimension but unfortunately we are almost at limit it seems in terms of research.
Nothing really. I’ve had too much education. I’m ready to step away from it and just live.
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This whole experiment was wild! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o23O7_0QChY The dolphin ended up demanding sexual gratification too if you really want to get into that experiment.
