deciplex

> Those perspectives both can't be correct!

Uh, sure they can: he saw an opportunity where he could make a difference and bring a program to light where the NSA was otherwise blatantly lying to Congress and the American people, and he took it.

There is nothing he can or could do to stop the invasion of Ukraine.

Which is to say, he didn't merely oppose US crimes. He brought them to light. Everyone already knows about Ukraine.

Probably because the US empire had deteriorated enough by that point that revoking passports for exposing the blatant lies and crimes of our government was on the table by then.

Of course, it's different these days. These days they'd just kill Snowden. And Mark Klein, for that matter.

The universe itself, if bounded, might be a hypersphere.

If you're referring to the increased scroll speed with two fingers issue, that was patched within the last year.

They've yet to top Civ4 but third time's a charm I guess.

>It's the worst of both words.

And it's quickly becoming the status quo.

They really don't ever let a disaster go to waste, do they?

If you're required to RTO and doing it you probably aren't in a position to "insist" on jack shit.

One of the earlier examples of enshittification, before the process had been smoothed out and best practices established.

> Capital follows the most profitable investments.

I think a common error is that people forget the "most" in this sentence. It is a very important word. It's not even that only profitable investments will get funded: even profitable projects might get left on the cutting room floor if they are competing for resources with projects that will generate, or are believed to generate, higher ROI.

And this maybe isn't a problem if higher ROI == better than. But to believe that, you have to also believe that enshittification is a thing that happens in spite of being less profitable (or unprofitable), which for me at least is a hard sell.

> I find it hard to just say “none of this means anything, it’s just a hallucination”.

I don't think that's the claim being made. FWIW I've done psychedelics as well, and I've had "natural" hallucinations (sleep paralysis). I don't think that those experiences were "meaningless" (well, maybe the sleep paralysis mostly was) but neither do I think they allowed me to tap into some new physics or something.

To me, the fact that having these experiences requires me to change my brain, first and only then can I have them, with the experience not persisting after I leave the psychedelic state, suggests that the experience is a function of what's going on in my brain rather than some enhanced perception of reality. I say this, because it seems unlikely that there are physical properties of the universe that are only measurable by a human brain and only in a very specific state. Put another way: if some eldritch knowledge were revealed to me in a psychedelic state, I would expect it to be verifiable outside of a psychedelic state, even if by some other means.

The same goes for certain mental illnesses, by the way. If a brain is operating differently, then it seems reasonable that it will have a different perception of reality. But, importantly, if that perception of reality can only affect them or be affected by them then even if I accept it as "real" I can't tap into it - they may as well be living a parallel universe with different physical laws. But if you ask me which is more likely: that some people just exist partially in a parallel universe with different physical laws, or that some people just think that (wrongly) because of some quirk of perception and cognitive function, then even if I don't have a full picture of all the facts I'm going with the latter.

And that seems reasonable: you and another poster seem to think I'm wrong for assigning probabilities without a full picture of the facts. But I can do that with a partial picture of the facts as well: humans do this all the time and it works quite well for us.

> But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.

I think a lot of people have a mistaken notion that the human brain starts out as a completely blank slate. On the contrary much of our behavior is hard-coded, like any other animal. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that there would be realms of human experience that cut across cultural boundaries. If anything, the opposite would be more surprising.

I will refer you to my earlier post:

  To me "I don't know" is pretty close to "didn't happen" anyway. I mean we will even say "hmm, I don't know about that" to indicate skepticism.

  I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.

I don't know where you're getting this idea that I'm shutting down their experience in the way you describe. But like, do you think this story of theirs is that unique? Have you really never heard anything like this before? Because it kind of seems like it. So it's not that I'm dismissing their story out of hand, but rather stories like this are not that uncommon and generally in my experience you don't need to resort to the supernatural to explain them. So that's where I'm coming from and, again, I'm not even telling them they're wrong as you suggest, but I am reverting to the "null hypotheses" as you say. But, as I already explained, to me that's more of a "you haven't given me any reason to believe this" than it is a "you're wrong, didn't happen." Unfortunately you seem committed to taking equal offense to both, as though they are equal, and we are at an impasse.

At any rate, you're being oddly hostile toward me about all of this and it's getting on my nerves so I'll be ignoring your posts in this thread going forward. Thanks.

Our current understanding has most of the answers you seek, and compelling reasoning for why they are the correct answers.

Human memory is extremely unreliable.

> This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much

Sorry but I am not going to copy/paste hundreds of paragraphs of literature from neural science journals in order to give a comprehensive analysis of what OP experienced. Especially since, based on their other comments in this thread, they aren't terribly interested in that sort of explanation anyway.

At any rate, the compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. You just don't like it because it's not mystical enough for you. You accuse me of dismissing people's experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.

The compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. It's perhaps not as comprehensive and well-understood as Maxwell's equations, but they are well-studied. What happened to you, while fascinating on a personal level, is not a scientific mystery.

You accuse me of dismissing your experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.

To me "I don't know" is pretty close to "didn't happen" anyway. I mean we will even say "hmm, I don't know about that" to indicate skepticism.

I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.