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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Does the article say the headline is wrong? Or does it say conspiracy theorists listen to facts because it relies on a handful of willing participants who changed their mind when seeing facts and reports? Because that’s not the crux of the crazy conspiracy theorists.

    Try again when the chatbot talked to the likes of Graham Hancock or the hardcore MAGA death cult. Facts don’t matter.

    Rand pointed out that many conspiracy theorists actually want to talk about their beliefs. “The problem is that other people don’t want to talk to them about it,”

    Just look at this guy who straight up pretends that no one tried to talk to them before.

    It does talk about gish gallop at the very end, and claims that the chatbot can keep presenting arguments - but doesn’t actually say that it has worked.



  • The “gospels were dictated by first hand witness” idea is a massive problem because that’s not first hand account at all, that’s actually someone claiming that someone else told him “dude I swear I saw it happen in front of me as clear as I see you” (or worse, the guy who wrote it claims that he found this text written by someone else 50 years ago) and we somehow chose to believe both the guy who wrote it and the supposed guy who told him that. Having something dictated is second hand account, not first hand, because that’s just changing the pronoun of the person speaking. And there were extensive analysis of the text itself to try to figure out what kind of person would have phrased this or that in certain ways, whether it says “I saw that myself” or “my uncle who works at Nintendo told me he saw it himself”, and that analysis, done for the entirety of the Bible, has gone pretty far, including the gospels. As far as I know about it, the biggest point about that analysis is which gospel was written first and which ones copied from which ones or added their own thing, rahter than 4 different people recounting their memories of the same events.

    I don’t know about the timeline of the temple; I’ve heard it brought up before, but I haven’t heard that it was considered conclusive evidence for dating the text, so I don’t know more than that and how it holds to the text analysis.






  • There’s a field that was called Gu-edin (meaning “open fields”) in the mid third millennium BCE that was the subject of a border war that lasted a couple centuries, between the cities of Lagash and Umma (which is right where you said), because the founder of Lagash bought an unassuming piece of land from Umma and a bunch of surrounding terrains, and then did mad irrigation work and it became crazy fertile. According to Lagash’s records, Umma got mad that it was swindled out of such great land and kept attacking Lagash over it, and kept getting its ass kicked and its kings killed. People from Umma were “allowed” to till the field for Lagash for a time, but most of the grain would still go to Lagash, causing more revolts from Umma (and more punishment).

    It’s fairly agreed that this place probably gave some degree of inspiration for “Eden”, along with some rare green gardens in the region created with irrigation work. The apple bit, the woman rib bit, and the knowledge bit came from other Sumerian myths.

    I’m not sure if it’s the Galapagos, maybe in the Canaries instead?, but some island famous for its apples, weather, and safety did play a part in inspiring the myth of Avalon, the island of apples.



  • Easier on average, still. Of course the labor was different - more long lasting strain and stress that we can see in the bones and the teeth, but with less everyday danger from going out. One hunter-gatherer may have more free time, but half of the population of a city can straight up do something else for a living. I’m no expert in why hunter-gatherers couldn’t do the same, probably something to do with storing food all year round without rotting, but the massive difference in how many people could be fed with a lesser fraction of people doing the works, mathematically shows that agriculture was more energy efficient per head over the years. The population jump from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands in cities like Eridu then Uruk during that period is insane.