Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What kinds of pets do you all have? And why are dogs the best?
Dog culture is just a unique form of brood parasitism. They are like any other superstimulus. What porn is for sex, what streamers are for friendship, what dramas are for romance, etc. That is what dogs are for raising children. They grab the relevant hardwired reward systems without any of the messy complications of dealing with actual people who can have their own lives and develop their own agency. Nothing more than a low-stakes, ersatz sense of fulfillment.
Objectively, I can't feel much more than disgust for dog culture when I see the shit and piss covering my city, the daily cacophony of barking, the glimmer of slobber residue lining products in grocery stores, the stories of bites and maulings. Dog ownership is easily one of the highest negative externality hobbies that society just accepts without question (see even this thread: "And why are dogs the best?" "Literally nobody can raise an ethical objection to giving dogs healthier, longer lives, right?"). I would put so much money on the table to live in a city that completely bans dogs and actually enforces it.
More importantly, dogs have evolved their behaviors and appearances to most effectively hijack our instincts. You look at a golden retriever and it looks like it's smiling. It hops around and wags its tail and it looks like it's happy. But is any of that actually a reflection of its internal mental state or are these just behaviors we subconsciously selected for because it's pleasant to us. Do they play with us because they enjoy it or because we programmed them to obsessively need it? Maybe it's both, but if they were actually miserable on the inside because we bred them to crave human attention the way an addict craves heroin there's no way for us to know.
To me it seems akin to a putting a smiling face on a robot or setting ChatGPT to max sycophancy. We are just more susceptible to projecting human assumptions onto dogs because on some level we know that we made robots and LLMs, but we rarely think about what we've done to dogs. They seem constantly anxious and bored, because we wanted them to always be willing and able to play whenever we feel like it. We've stripped away so much of their basic instincts they don't even realize it's not the best idea to eat their own shit or lap up their own vomit. In some cases we've actively bred for deformities because some find them "cute."
They are craven, pathetic creatures that only exist to feed into our narcissism. It would be hard to convince me that the world wouldn't be better if dogs never existed. For us, and maybe even for them.
This is a very impoverished way of seeing the world. You could use the same reductionist logic to say that love is nothing but chemicals firing in the brain, or that morality is nothing but dressing on cold, utilitarian game theoretical outcomes to push cooperation.
It's one way of looking at life, that has perhaps some truth to it, but is ultimately deeply flawed.
Seconded. If you break everything down to its molecular structure, then yeah life is pretty goddamned stupid and no one should try for anything. "The only philosophical question is suicide" and all that.
Sometimes you just have to let fun, stupid things be fun and stupid. I do this all the time with sports, Christmas, raising kids, etc.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link