Yeah, as I just responded to someone else, this is the weird intersection between science and philosophy. If I had perfect knowledge about the universe, but I can’t predict this quantum interaction, then do I have enough knowledge to predict your actions? How much room do I have before this interaction becomes “well, i can predict with statistical chance, and that is good enough”.

BTW, I wasn’t throwing up my hands with "we can’t predict quantum, so it’s all moot’. Like, yeah, I now there’s statistics around it, I know more than I let on in that comment, I wasn’t here to lecture about quantum mechanics, and as I stated, the ones that do state that this is not fully known science.

Like, literally we don’t know if we have free will. That’s why this is a philosophical argument. This is just one piece.

This is why it’s hard to talk about any scientific facts, even when surrounding a philosophical argument. Yes, maybe we could find a way eventually, but we need that evidence first, and as of right now, there’s evidence to show that we actually can’t have perfect knowledge.

But yeah, “anything could change” is like, always there, so, sure.

This is just so goddamn funny.

Oh no! We can’t compete on the global market because China is creating… High quality solar panels at affordable prices…

It’s just impossible to compete! The evil see see pee destroyed our business!

There’s one practical scientific argument against free will. And that is that: that:

1. Given the base of all decision-making, and even thoughts, in humans is on chemical reactions in the brain.

2. The chemical reactions we are referring to affect neurons firing. Neurons firing is actually how the brain works.

3. The action potential is what determines whether or not a neuron will fire. The action potential is based on a ton of teeny tiny interactions at the chemical level.

4. Those teeny tiny chemical reactions are quantum.

5. Quantum things are inherently unpredictable. No, I do not mean they are difficult to predict. I mean, even with perfect knowledge, they are literally unpredictable.

6. Even with perfect knowledge, you will not understand entirely if someone is going to have particular neurons firing, and they can have many downstream effects because there are billions of neurons, and sometimes entire thoughts are caused by only only thousands of them, and literally that would be unpredictable.

Okay, but here’s some caveats.

A. Just because something is unpredictable does that mean you have free will. In fact, in theory, if it’s completely unpredictable, even if you have perfect knowledge, then that actually means you don’t have free will and that your actions are just random. So I wouldn’t call that better.

B. Anybody who claims they understand quantum mechanics is lying. Even here I’m kind of just using it as a philosophical tool because I have no idea if you can actually predict anything in quantum mechanics. I just know that the quantum mechanics scientists basically say that you can’t.

Back in my liberal, scientific, neurological, philosophical days. This is basically the end of the conversation I made it to in terms of free will. I haven’t really thought about it much since then. Food for thought if you are interested in thinking about it further.

I think the other comments are worth reading. I just wanted to make an addendum that I’m not sure that this is anything more than a definition technicality.

Of course, Marxists use the term “state” to define an entity which oppresses some group of people as a communist. We want to oppress the bourgeoisie.

But let’s think for a moment about what a government is or what a state is. It is a group of people that either represents the people’s interests or doesn’t, but either way it is a group of people that create rules and laws and have an effect on other people in society.

So if we decided not to have a state or government or anything like that, but then revolutionists still understand that socialism is required as an intermediary step to communism. So they build a group, whatever they call it, which is in fact a group of people that creates laws and regulations and make sure that the capitalists don’t get out of control, etc.

What would you call that? Is that a state? Is that a government? Is that just a group of people? Either way, it seems to create the same function that a state or government might do. Therefore, this to me seems like a technicality of definitions.

Let me know if this isn’t how you’re thinking about it. Maybe it’s deeper than just a definition change, and maybe I miss-understood something.

I’m gonna be honest. I kind of probably was sort of somebody like that back in my liberal days.

I put in a lot of wiggle words because I don’t know exactly what you’re referring to, but it definitely is how I felt.

I’ve done a lot of college. I have science degrees, I have a computer science degree, and I have spent a lot of time in my free time, in my liberal days studying math and science and skepticism and woodworking and finance and repairs and all kinds of stuff.

Pre-Marxism, my favorite types of podcasts were literally just random podcasts talking about random science-y or factual things, and I absorbed it all, and honestly it probably prepped me to learn about Marxism too because I learned to be very focused and able to take in a lot of information very quickly. In essence, I practiced being able to learn a whole lot even when not under school pressure.

But…

I don’t think anybody would have called me a mean person or an asshole. In fact, even when I told people I felt that way, they were like, “Nah man, you’re fine.”

But I was talking to liberals, not Marxists. My perspective has changed a little bit ( Just joking, it’s changed an exceptional amount.), and in a lot of ways I actually do kind of consider myself a douchebag compared to what I know now.

No matter how much someone knows about a particular topic, it’s really easy to put blinders on about every other topic. I got pretty good at this over time trying to admit what I didn’t know, but I think that’s what helped open me up to Marxism versus all the people who aren’t willing to learn about it because of the scary communist terms.

I put on my alternative hat and I think, “Okay, from this person’s perspective, what do I think? What would they think? How would I feel if I was in that position?” A lot of people don’t do that. They learn science or facts or something very specific, but they aren’t very good at emotionally connecting to other people.

It’s why emotional intelligence is considered something completely separate from typical intelligence. And of course you can’t really measure either of those things very accurately. They’re just words that we use to describe them. But you can tell when somebody has low emotional intelligence.

I definitely held emotionally charged beliefs about China and Russia and pretty much anybody that the Western newspapers told me to hate. It wasn’t very easy to see things from other people’s perspectives. It took a lot of time to open up and that requires dedication. And if somebody’s really interested in math or science but not interested in people, they aren’t going to put in the time.

Liberal democracies really like it when people learn science and mechanics and engineering and finance because that is stuff that the professional managerial class does, and that helps the bourgeoisie make money. But learning about Marxism and communism and the idea that there is oppressive systems and not just individual faults of individual people, well that threatens the existence of the establishment. These indirect, or even direct, threats of the establishment get translated into a culture among liberal democracies that biases against these ideas, even among the intellectuals.

Shoot, sorry about that comrade. Missinterpreted on my end. Sometimes I fail to see the sarcasm.

Edit: I failed to see the sarcasm in comradsalads post. Sometimes I fail to get out of Reddit mode. Haven’t even been on there in a long time! Keeping this comment for history. Sorry comradesalad!

Is that what’s going on in this case though? Because the prison isn’t claiming that.

A federal judge held a hearing in the Dotson case last week. Al.com reported that the hearing provided no answers about the location of the heart. The lawsuit filed by Dotson’s family contended that the heart might have been retained during a state autopsy with the intention of giving it to the medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham for research purposes. Attorneys for the university said that was “bald speculation” and wrote in a court filing that the university did not perform the autopsy and never received any of Dotson’s organs.

So no, the prisoner did not donate their organs to trade off a shorter sentence. That should be easily provable, with documentation and evidence to back it up.

By the way, I’m a communist, I think that morally the best thing would be for organ donations be done by default, and we have an opt-out system. I think that prisoners have rights and should not have their organs taken against their will, but it would be ethically better if there was an opt-out system instead of an opt-in one.

Of course the real issue here is the propaganda from Usonians that China harvests organs from prisoners against their will, while at the same time Usonian prisons are seemingly doing the same thing.

Also also, isn’t it just capitalist garbage that people can trade organs for shorter jail sentences? Like, what the actual fuck? Organ donation rates should absolutely not be determined by how many prisoners we have. That’s fucking disgusting. I absolutely disagree with “no ethical concerns with this course of action” even when someone in prison donates as a trade off.

Congrats on not dying another year!

I have a feeling (And I’m in the tech field so it’s not like my feeling is uninformed, but I also don’t have a lot of data to back this up so sorry about) that because most people who watch YouTube are in the United States ( And because of how populous we are as a country as opposed to a conglomeration of countries. ), the algorithm sort of promotes them a little easier. Whereas people in other countries, Britain included, have to get more popular before they are shown to most of YouTube’s audience.

I saw a thing years ago about why PewDiePie was the most subscribed person. Although I think that information’s old. I don’t think he’s number one anymore. But it basically came down to “he moved throughout Europe a lot and then moved to the United States.” And because of that, they kept showing his stuff To new audiences based on the region he moved to, but then he kept his subscribers and his subscribers kept seeing his content over time. And once he ended up in the States, he had the biggest new audience of all, and since he already had a lot of subscribers, it just rolled up from there.

Now, to be fair, that was years ago, and the YouTube algorithm has probably changed many times since then. But I still bet that there’s some regional bias, and the fact that there is so many people in the United States, and that their content gets pushed so much more regularly, is probably just a product of that regional bias.

Now of course there’s like twice as many people in Europe as a whole compared to America, but borders matter to the algorithm. So with all the countries cut up a lot smaller and with states not having the same border rules as countries do, things in the United States just tend to spread faster, quality be damned, I think.

Because YouTube doesn’t publish their algorithm in any way, we will probably never know the real reason. But this is as close as I can get based on what I’ve heard about previous algorithm practices.

Jesus christ, that chinese bourgeoisie is literally planning on emigrating to America because his children in China would have to… Play fair and equal to the other children in school, and he couldnt just pay for themthem to win… What a fucking asshole.

I’m of two minds about this. Let me explain.

On the one hand…

People are scared of “Marx”, “communism”, and sometimes even “socialism” (Though some people think it means “just some parts of europe with more social programs than us”, and those people are wrong, but at least have positive associations with the word). Terms like ‘tankie’ get thrown around loosely, and the USSR, China, DPRK, Cuba, are all “bad places” that westerners don’t want to be associated with. In this way, re-naming things can help introduce the concept in a fresh way, because most people actually want to bring about the change that communists/socialists do, but they are conditioned to ignore everything positive about it’s history. So far, my biggest problem with explaining communism to people is using communist terms, this throws them into a bad place and think my arguments are wrong from the get-go. But if I introduce something in a terms-neutral way, explaining in great detail instead of using descriptive communist terms, most people are on the same page (With some exception because liberals still believe in ‘personal freedom’, and it can be difficult to get them to track all the way from a ‘peoples congress’ to a party that only acts in the way the ->people<- want. Most people of western countries think that it’s basically impossible to build it, but would like it if it’s possible… Ugh these people need to learn about China…)

On the other hand…

If we continue to use terms like “Means of production”, “liberal”, “fascist”, “dialectics”, “materialism”, “reactionary”, “neocolonial”, etc. then people can look these terms up, read old books, and see that the arguments of communists/socialists of the past 200 years have been talking about this. It’s a powerful message to send, that this is not new, this information has been suppressed, that the red scare did actually control information and was just as authoritarian as any socialist country they’ve heard of, and these things are relevant and important to know. Connecting communism to historical events and ideas is important.

On the third hand…

This, of course, takes a lot of time. I’m a new commie and it took me a few months of just reading, listening, and studying before I even really uttered the word “communist” to anyone I knew. I just didn’t feel comfortable until I could understand enough to speak intelligently about it. Most people are not patient enough to do that, they want to scroll tik tok, facebook, twitter (or x), or reddit, or whatever they do daily, and not think about these complicated things. Most people get their “info” from these garbage sources, and it takes real effort, that a lot of people don’t have the energy to give, to understand these things.

As a final argument…

I don’t know if I want to sell a bunch of libs on the idea of robots building/running everything. See, like in the movie “Elysium” (Yes it’s a lib film, not communist, but it does give insight into the struggles of the global south from a lib perspective, and was actually inspired by the writer getting arrested in Mexico and seeing ‘the other side of the fence’ himself, and forcing some self-reflection about living in a rich place bordering poverty) a lot of those libs will see the shiny technocratic future of making their lives insanely, extremely better, but won’t extend that privilege to the global south. If we, as communists, sell them on this future, but then when we are in charge, do something like open our borders, or actually treat Mexico like human beings, or even build that technocratic future of robots building things, but we spread the wealth, and instead of making our lives 1000x better, we making the entire world 100x better, but maybe only make our lives 1.5x better, then those libs might see our work as a ‘failure’, or as a ‘compromise’.

Anyway TLDR: libs believing in a technocratic future prefer to see see themselves ->living<- on Elysium, having that personal medical machine keeping them young and pretty and acne free forever, instead of letting those medical machines heal disease worldwide, saving a billion lives.

Ah yes, banning outsiders from having sex with your women. Totally not something fascists would do.

This one was hard for me to shake as well. It was common double-think to believe that most government institutions were corrupt, except for the ones run by Democrats. The dems were fine. The more dems the better. Blah, blah, blah.

And at some points in time I would see CNN or NPR say some stupid shit that was easily falsified. And I would “Give them a pass.” It was weird because I was even conscious of it, but my attitude was on the lines of “well, there isn’t anything better out there.”

Also the Gell-Mann amnesia effect comes to mind.

Fair enough! Good to know this isn’t ageism at least.

Oh this is super frustrating for me too. I’ve only been really considered a communist for like 6 months. So all my friends and family and everyone around me had the exact same opinions as me more than 6 months ago. But now that my opinion has changed on a bunch of topics, all of the sudden they need to explain things like I’m 5 years old. I’m a full grown adult and we’ve known each other for years! You don’t need to explain your perspective to me! I already know it!

I am not the original commenter, but this comment is two hours old, so I figured I’d at least respond with what I use.

The kagi summarizer, which has both a very short paragraph description of a video or website, and a more detailed “key moments” breakdown that is in list form.

The kagi summarizer just takes a URL and it will summarize whatever it’s pointing to. A video, a PDF, a blog post, whatever. Although Kagi does have a context window, it’s quite large. I’ve never seen it miss major details.

It has a free version, although you only get so many summaries per month. The paid version isn’t super expensive and you get unlimited summaries.

That five-minute section breakdown looks like it might be done by a person? I’ve never seen an AI do anything like that.

Yeah, this was a quick and dirty thought, but effectively that’s exactly what I mean. An application built from scratch today using modern high-level programming libraries will take more RAM and more CPU to do the same thing than an app written in 2005 does, generally speaking.

Of course, for those people who still write C, C++, or choose to write Rust or Go, or some of the other low-level languages, or even Java, but without major frameworks, can still achieve the type of performance an app written in 2005 could. But for people coming out of college and/or code schools nowadays, you just reach for a big fat framework like spring or use a high level language like JavaScript or Python or Ruby with big frameworks, and your application will by default use more resources.

Though the application might still be fast enough, I’m not even saying that an application written in Python will be slow, but I will say that an application written in Python will by default use about 10x more CPU in RAM than a similar application written in Rust. I mean, maybe the application only uses 10 megabytes of RAM. When the equivalent efficient application would use 1 megabyte of RAM, both of those are very efficient and very fast and would be just fine. But when the difference is between 10 gigabytes of RAM and 1 gigabyte of RAM, yeah, at that point in time, you’re pretty much just taking advantage of RAM being cheap.

And it’s not even necessarily a bad thing that we do this. There’s just a balance to be had. It’s okay to write in higher level language if it means you can get some stuff done faster. But major applications nowadays choose to ship an entire browser to be the base layer of their Application. Just because it’s more convenient to write cross-platform code that way. That’s too much and there’s already a lot of work going towards fixing this problem as well. We’re just sort of seeing the worst of it right now.

More high level in that, think really deeply embedded JavaScript frameworks. In this situation, even Java is comparatively low level. Although a lot of people just rely on spring and spring boot, and don’t understand how it works.

Yeah, I’m not one to use insulting terms, it’s more of a natural process of an industry lowering the bar to entry.

But there really is something to be said for those old applications that were built rock solid, even if they only came out with a new version once every four years.

More frequent releases of a smaller feature set isn’t wrong. I’d be happy getting high quality application updates every month or so.

But as with all things, the analysis falls on the side that capitalism just doesn’t incentivize the right things. Quarterly profit drives lots of features delivered poorly instead of a few good features delivered occasionally. Of course the developers get blamed for this when really they are just a product of a broken system. We invent insulting terms for them instead of going after the real problem, Because, of course, we don’t have an understanding of materialism in the west.

Oh well.