Savant

it's not a good day to worship Jesus

If you are sick/unhealthy isn't that the optimal time to worship Jesus? Healing sick people was kind of his thing.

I convert to Christianity on Friday.

Not on Sunday?

Speaking of 2028, who do you think will be the Republican nominee for POTUS?

https://polymarket.com/event/republican-presidential-nominee-2028

I tend to trust the market over my own judgment, same reason I buy index funds.

I think it's harder to consistently keep a clean track record than you are assuming. Plus someone can be genuinely nice but a bit stilted at public speaking. Additionally, someone who wants to seem nice is gonna be motivated to keep seeming nice by not suddenly acting like a psycho once elcted.

He's one of the creepiest to me.

Talarico seems like he has this little 'duper's delight' smile just behind his mask whenever he's talking.

Come on, dude. This can't be a bigger red flag then just being an obvious jerk to people.

Every single politician from Texas makes my skin crawl, I feel like they all have lampshades made out of human skin at home.

Eh, Talarico seems genuine even if I don't agree with all his policies.

From a utilitarian perspective, I'm not sure about whether the marginal impact of voting is worth the time. If you're willing to spend some fixed amount of effort contributing to society, volunteering at a soup kitchen or working and donating to buy mosquito nets is probably more efficient than casting an isolated vote.

That aside, I don't think the discourse around campaigning is all that great. I think the biggest issues motivating votes are probably foundational views on abortion or immigration or climate change or gun control etc. But people know they're unlikely to convince opponents of all that at once, so threads end up being motivated reasoning grabbing embarrassing headlines about the other side because that seems more likely to get votes in the short term. Personal qualities do matter in terms of policies passed, but I do think people avoid addressing the philosophical issues that matter because they're hard to convince people on in a short period of time. But long term those matter the most.

I think I've spent significantly more energy giving my opinion on specific policies and philosophical dilemmas than I have doing any "campaigning." If my arguments are good and smart people hear them, they will find candidates who achieve the right goals.

For example, if I want to convert Muslims to Christianity, I could appeal to immediate emotion ("that Muslim just did a terrorist attack, and look at the money these Christians raised for the poor"), because it's easier than arguing about miracle claims. But if I'm trying to move society toward objective truth, it's the hard stuff that matters, and who did a terrorist attack or raised money for the poor isn't super helpful information.

Killing unconscious people is actually considered mercy, braindead people's family usually demand withdrawal of life responses if there's no hope

The majority of unconscious people are not brain dead...if a fetus is not viable then sure, abortion is justified. If not then it's a human who is going to be conscious soon, much like the majority of unconscious people. If you know the patient is gonna wake up in 9 months, unplugging them is not justified.

A sperm doesn't have consciousness, an egg doesn't have it. Yet girls have periods, and its not murder, boys jerk off, it's not Genocide but abortion is murder ??

I have elaborated on my position in more depth here, but I will summarize it: individuals are entitled to processes their body is in the process of developing but lack nutrients to develop (for example, an unconscious person who is starving from lack of nutrients is still being harmed by the starvation). This is analogous to the unborn child. But individuals are not entitled to have totally new development processes added to them (for example, I'm not being harmed by someone not giving me the ability to fly, even if such an operation were possible). The latter is comparable to contraception.

Your stance is basically nearer to Shoe Tucker than a child loving person

My position isn't "kill children who are born." I can be against killing both before and after birth.

Zeke didn't had a choice, he was the dog of marley

Sure, I'm just saying sterilizing people isn't pacifism, regardless of if it is justified.

Marley wanted all eldians to die, Zeke wanted that they simply stop reproducing, a pacifist idea.

Zeke wanted to sterilize the Eldians, not kill them in utero. Also, sterilizing people without consent is not pacifist.

They use false Equivalence to equate a lump of cells with a human baby

"Lump of cells" is not well defined enough for me to really understand your position. At what point does a human made of cells stop being a lump of cells? I assume your answer is probably consciousness, but then is killing unconscious people fine? What if we know when the unconscious person wakes up they will be poor? The cells in the unconscious person are developing consciousness, but then the same is true of the unborn.

if it doesn't result in unequal treatment, then what's the point?

In this case, to answer a hypothetical about encountering people in a forest. I could say "that's absurd and would never happen," but that seems to me a bit of a cop-out. To a large extent, debates kind of rely on people being willing to answer unrealistic hypotheticals.

In this case, the treatment is what person you are teleporting to the woods I guess? So if anything, choosing to encounter like a white person for example is actually punishing that white person by teleporting them into the woods. Or maybe it's just what person you stumble upon.

After considering this, I really can't come up why a reason that racial/gender/anything profiling for the sake of personal safety would be morally wrong in and of itself if it doesn't involve harming the other person. In this case it's literally just "what hypothetical individual would you rather encounter" and not who would you hire/buy from/etc. In a hypothetical like this, all you have to go on is statistics and generalizations. Maybe it's rude or mean-spirited to bring up the thought experiment in the first place, but that seems very context-dependent, and I wouldn't want to use it as a cop-out to avoid answering the question. Although it might be factually wrong if someone got statistics wrong and was like "I'd rather be around a random polar bear than a random Muslim because polar bears kill fewer people," not accounting for the amount of polar bear encounters vs. Muslim encounters. Kind of like how car collisions with deer kill more people a year than sharks, but I'd rather be around a deer than a shark.

I think I've said this before, but a few things that makes quality debates hard are that (a) very few people are qualified to make strong arguments, (b) it takes significant effort to identify high-quality arguments, and thus (c) the algorithm rewards entertaining arguments more-so than high-quality arguments. I do think most people can make good points, but it takes someone else to come in and aggregate them into a strong argument.

If you want to brute-force truth finding, go to a subreddit filled with people who disagree with you and argue with them until you hear a response you don't have a great answer for. Then go to the other faction's subreddit and argue with them, etc. This seems like a lot of work but if you do things the typical way it will be much more inefficient, as 90% of arguments will either address things you already have responses to rather than addressing where you personally have gaps in your knowledge. AI can also fill you in on many of the most defensible arguments/responses, but it has its limits.

This is part of why I made the argument database. Basically it's the same principle there, you make an argument and then over time the strongest counterarguments will rise to the top. We'll just have to see if that grows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPwUh0gqv7Y

It doesn't work on anarcho-capitalists, but it works on virtually all religions and almost all political sides. Left, right, communists, Nazis, MAGA, progressives, they all hate map.

I would dare say the majority of people don't hate non offending pedos for something they can't control. Otherwise it would be a crime to have said condition.

Ok, thank you

Quite the contrary. The whole point of being a millionaire is to spend it.

You can spend more long term if you invest then wait a few decades then spend.

It greatly depends on what the salary is. Salary which is high enough requires no investing because you already have more than you can spend, and investing a lot merely delays the time you get to use your own money. For salary which is too tiny, investing a lot merely condemns you to 40 years of poverty, because most people barely make ends meet even when they dont invest.

Sure but there's a significant range in the middle where it makes a big difference.

Well if you spend too much you won't become a millionaire. For some salaries, investing instead of spending can make the difference.

You don't need to be a millionaire to be able to invest that much. You could do it comfortably in some places on a six figure salary, which is well above average, but not millionaire-level.

Average investor gains only 10% a year, so yeah after 40 years, those 10$ will be like what? 50 dollars?

So...invest more than ten dollars. If you invest 30k every year for 10 years and wait a few decades, you'll be a millionaire (even in today's money, accounting for inflation).

I keep telling you, being a millionaire isn't about investing or working hard. It's about knowing which buttons to press on a controller, not just randomly pressing buttons.

Okay but some of those buttons involve investment. Warren Buffet became a billionaire because he could beat the market.

Wealth has nothing to do with savings. You could keep 10$ in your wallet for 50 years, and it would still be 10$.

Yeah, but not if you invest it.

Can't start until last round debates all have 3 votes so we know people's rankings. They each need 1 more vote so if you got a lot of free time lol.

You can not put other people's money in it

Can I borrow to put money in it? I guess that's kind of a loophole, especially if I tell people about it so they know I will pay it back.

Even without that, I think with reasonable annual savings every year the higher rate of return beats the million after a few decades based on avg global stock market returns historically.

Equation I used in desmos that shows it pays off after 30 years:

If you want to paste it in, paste: 30000\cdot\sum_{i=1}^{x}\left(1.12^{i}\right)-30000\cdot\sum_{i=1}^{x}\left(1.06^{i}\right)-1000000\cdot1.06^{x}

And another equation where x is how much you invest a year and y is how many years until it pays off to take the bank account over the million: x\cdot\sum_{i=1}^{y}\left(1.12^{i}\right)-x\cdot\sum_{i=1}^{y}\left(1.06^{i}\right)-1000000\cdot1.06^{y}=0

my votes were removed for not pleasing the mod

There is a clear voting rubric, it's not about pleasing an individual mod.

mods are allowing people like Remmy Brown to do whatever he wants on this site

Remy isn't voting. I believe he's had votes removed.

Or instead make a post insulting the mods that increases activity, apparently.

GajarMooli wrote:

Ad-Hominem on a site meant for intellectual debating

👏👏👏

Is "Some stupid moderator from Israeli , or whatever" not an ad-homenem? And also kind of racist since you are clearly mentioning the nationality in a derogatory tone?

They can comment in the comment section saying they think a user won. Also the existing rules resulted in this thread being created, so you could say it's a net positive.

You know, we could always keep insufficient votes and just not include them in the final calculation.

We have some good votes, and it's better to have those without noise.

We could have more votes, sure, but if they don't actually analyze debate arguments they are just noise. At least now the problem is visible, we can't pretend there are more high quality votes than there are. So if we find a fix to get more high quality votes we will know whether it works.

People who don't meet the standards, yes.