Ask Lemmy

That the world is a zero sum game. That in order to have something, someone else has to go without. That in order to be great you have to drag others down.

People tend to assume if someone is smart in one thing, they're smart with everything else too.

That's not usually the case.

High price = high quality.

The luxury pricing model has totally enveloped markets at this point and the correlation rarely applies now.

Tax Brackets. "I got a pay raise and will now be taxed more and make less money than before the raise"

If <=30k was taxed at 25% and 30+k taxed at 30% and you go from 30k to 31k a year, only the 1k is taxed at the higher rate.

That understanding someone or something means agreeing with them.

That their neurodiversity absolves them of any responsibility and the rest of the world should cater to it.

So many things when it comes to police stops. There is absolutely a problem with policing in America but there is a list of things you ARE required to do when stopped by the police, whether you agree with them or not, and refusing doesn't help you and only helps them. Yes you are required to have your license on you when driving, and yes you must display and/or hand it over to police when asked. Yes they can ask you to step out of the car. Yes they can search your car if they tow it. Hell watch a few videos on YouTube of traffic stops and you'll quickly figure out what you do and do not have to comply with. And you will never, ever win an argument with the police on the side of the road, save it for court.

Math is memorizing and performing algorithms. So many adults looked at the common core math curriculum and said teachers aren't teaching math anymore because they didn't see their favorite long division algorithm taught, but memorizing and performing any particular algorithm is not what is important about learning math. Math is about taking axioms and seeing what you can build with them.

That because a problem is real, any proposed solution to it is a good idea, and anyone arguing against a proposed solution doesn't want to solve the problem.

Yes, grease fires are bad. No, you should not use water to put it out. No, that does not mean I am pro-grease-fire??

Photography is so much more than pointing a camera and pushing the button, even though cell phones have reduced it to that for a lot of people.

Good photography requires intention, planning, luck, skill in knowing how to compose a scene, knowledge of light and color temperature, sensor exposure, how to direct people about if people are involved, and then, in editing in post-production, skillful edits, adjusting tone, doing masking, color grading and calibration, and any other steps to perfect an image.

For me to produce one work here on this site, it can take me two or three hours, not including travel time!

People think successful software is usually made by huge teams.

In actuality, most open source is just one or a couple of people building something they found useful and releasing it. Even corporate software is usually a small team. Sure some software has huge numbers of people working on it (google for example) but its not the norm. Your bank app, this site here, all very small teams.

I remember when bitcoin first started and I got into the idea of sending $$ with it. First couple of years had less than 100 people in total touch it. And 90% of it was a couple of people at most.

A bit of a tangent, but most software has NO plan if that person or people walk away from the project. Or just straight up die. We live in a somewhat golden era when software has only just started outliving its builders. But watch the next 20-40 years. It will be interesting times.

Decimation means "lose 10%", not "lose all BUT 10℅"

If two people suddenly quit your twenty-man team you've been decimated. If eight or eighteen people quit you've been devastated.

(Plus a bunch of "politics" and civil rights things.)

Conservatism.

Just...all of it lol.

Being hesitant to change and wanting to temper out things and make sure things are imolemented effectively is one thing. And ensuring we respect tradition and culture is another (though progressives are more in line with that lol.)

Today's conservatism is just hate and bigotry. And they don't even recognize it as such.

That if something is marketed with health-based language or claims, it must be true. (or that things that are healthy offset other unhealthy activities/behaviors/consumption, i.e. "I might have eaten a ton of ice cream today, but I had a lot of protein so that'll make up for it")

Way too many people buy into "healthy" products, especially the very expensive ones, without doing so much as a single search regarding if it's even necessary for them, or if that particular product is even healthy in the way it appears.

People think anything with protein is inherently healthy, and the more the better, even if their body can't use all the protein they consume, so they'll eat multiple protein bars, have meat with every meal, and drink a protein shake every day.

Someone on social media says eating all raw meat and drinking raw milk is healthy, and they don't even look up how much more likely you are to get a disease from consuming them. (not to mention the impact on their wallet)

A drink will be advertised as a "wellness shot" and is just some fruit juice with ginger, but people will pay 8 bucks for it every day assuming it'll revolutionize their health, then drink a bunch of beer later that night and wonder why they feel awful later.

Hell, people will even take multivitamins or supplement powders that have 100's of %'s of their recommended daily intake, and just assume that if they get 500% of their recommended vitamin B, they'll magically become "healthy" by doing so, instead of "only" getting 100%.

When you grow old, life will be as easy as when you are young.

No, it will be much harder. And in the end, it will be so hard that you can't do it anymore.

That science is rational and objective.

In reality, the way that science works is much muddier than most realise. It's full of subjectivity, and this isn't a bug, but a feature. Intuition and tacit knowledge play a big role in basically any research (and this is why I am confident that AI can't replace scientists). Politics are also present at every stage of the process. Science is at its least objective when scientists convince themselves that they're being objective. We can't escape our biases, so we need to actively acknowledge them and embrace the subjectivity of our situated perspectives.

The problem is that talking about this is a great way to piss off other scientists. I've been accused before of "betraying the side", by a scientist who was aware that science has a disproportionately large epistemic platform (epistemic means pertaining to knowledge — basically just that as a result of the huge benefits of scientific advancements in the last century or so, science has been on a bit of a pedestal in terms of trusted expert knowledge in society. Criticising this is seen by a betrayal by some because of the concerning rise in psuedoscience and anti-scientific rhetoric.

However, I'm of the belief that some of what has driven the rise of psuedoscience is that the average person doesn't like to be told "shut up and do what the smart people say". They feel a lot of mistrust towards society (which, in many cases, is entirely reasonable, especially in the case of marginalised groups who have been heavily exploited by science and scientists),

The problem goes far beyond just science, but I think this is certainly an aspect of it. I sympathise with scientists who want to continue to have the privileged position they hold, but I don't think that's helpful in the long term.

That people are either purely evil or purely good. I once argued with a homophobe who wanted to protect her children from seeing lesbians on tv. She said she had to protect her kids because they came to her from turbulent backgrounds. So she adopted kids in need, that makes her a good person. Still, she was a bigot and teaching her kids to be bigots and that is a problem. Homophobia is bad and harmful but not all homophobes are automatically completely horrible people.

The whole notion that a living is something that needs to be earned.

Basically, anything around exercise. You can get strong as hell while rarely ever being sore. Your body requires rest in order to build up muscle and deload weeks can actually improve gains. However, most people don’t need as much rest as they think they do after injuries. Possibly the amount of rest that people try to get after injuries may prolong the injury.

People who disagree with you are not necessarily evil, stupid or uninformed.

That they need to buy cases and cases of water in plastic bottles and throw them in the landfill instead of just drinking their perfectly good tap water.

many people still ignore, or dont believe white privilege is still pervasive in western countries. aside from the racists, some people of those groups do not want to discuss it ever because they still benefited fom all that abuse, strip mining of resources centuries ago.

not all "sugar free" subsitute sweetner is sugar free. if you look at ingredients, maltodetrexin, dextrose or equivalent is just sugar in another form. these companies word it in a way to obfuscate that they use actual sugar to sell sweetener as"sugar free". misconceptions about gluten free products, unless you re actually have CELIACs, gluten products wont have noticible effects on you. leaky gut or whater gluten is asscotiate with in healthy people is just marketing and pseudoscience.