at the most basic level the "minimal but respectful take" for me is just about respecting people i know and the experiences and perceptions i know they've had. i see no reason to believe that they're any less reliable than my own experiences and perceptions
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the next level up from the minimal but respectful take involves just not caring particularly one way or the other whether known physics can explain anything. i am not all the way there yet but i occasionally try to meme myself in that direction
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magic has nothing to do with violating the laws of physics. it has much to do with violating *expectations*, and we can reflect on what in our society causes us to conflate the two
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ah no this was a better QT from that thread
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"the laws of physics" *should* refer to your experience of pushing and pulling and bending and breaking and grasping and stretching but it *actually* refers to a specific kind of propaganda that was shoved down your throat in grade school
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okay, fine, i will own up to it because i get annoyed when other people don't do that: this is a subtweet, but i have tried to mostly focus on what i want to see more of and hopefully i mostly succeeded
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Ppl who are real into astrology/conspiracies/woo beliefs *really* trigger me, but it's not because of the beliefs themselves, it's what it indicates about the person.
To me, it implies a profound lack of curiosity in checking to see if their beliefs are true. 1/
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as you can see my pov is almost the exact opposite of the above: "aren't you *curious* what's going on with all this woo stuff, which has been happening uninterrupted to our species this whole-ass time we've been around, several times longer than science has?"
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i really like this question because it seems genuinely curious. i replied with five possibilities: wind currents, electrical / magnetic currents, smells, facial expression, body language. there’s a lot of information potentially available if you learn how to sift it
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wind currents is maybe surprising but go into a building (say a gym) where there are people moving around but no windows open or AC so the air is still by default. close your eyes and see if you can notice changes in the air currents produced by other people’s movements
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this is relevant to understanding experiences like knowing somebody is behind you even if they haven’t made any obvious sounds. we are probably sensitive to movements of the air below the level of conscious auditory perception. very sensible thing for an animal to be capable of
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in case it wasn't clear, the sort of inquiry you describe sounds great to me; the astrologers swamping my mentions almost entirely are approaching this from a "no the planets literally physically predict things and I actually believe this" direction unfortunately
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i mean i didn't really make explicit what i thought the plausible mechanism of astrology is from this pov but that is consistent with it. a thing can predict another thing without a direct causal relationship between the two
we know the moon influences a lot of animal behavior, it's very bright and visible in the sky and its behavior is cyclic so that makes sense, you can set a biological rhythm to match it. the planets are distinguished from the other stars by being the "wanderers"
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so, again, the raw sensory data is there for organisms to, gradually over evolutionary timescales, set biological rhythms to match the planets as well. i suspect this would be more obvious to us if more of us lived in places with zero light pollution
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