Fwiw Stanford was basically a scam. The story as it’s usually told is a lie, and its results are in serious contention, even beyond the usual replication issues psychology studies have.

Milgram is a good study, and even seems to have survived multiple replication attenpts, but its results are often overstated in their broader applicability. Notably: there are issues around the idea that it is “authority” that causes people to comply, as is usually claimed, instead of a belief in “expertise” or trust in the system (e.g. that a university-authorised study is obviously not going to kill people). Still, the conclusions are good enough for the purposes of your comment here.

Ah, but postage stamps are completely fungible.

I was thinking of the HTTP verb, you’re right.

You forgot the third group, !fuckcars@lemmy.world

Some even have sinks in each stall so you can go from wiping your ass straight to washing your hands

See, I emphatically do not want that.

If I could rely on everyone else washing their hands properly it would be great. But I don’t want to have to touch the stall door that has Aleppo been touched by people who haven’t washed their hands after I’ve washed mine. I want the hand washing to be the very last thing I do before exiting, preferably via a push door that I can push with my foot or in a spot that fewer other people would push it.

Why would someone on a help desk be expected to know what POST is? A software engineer, sure, but helpdesk? If it’s needed knowledge…that’s what training is for. Businesses’ expectation that people will come into the job already knowing exactly how you do things and never require on-the-job training is absurd.

IMO a “simple browser” of this sort should display literally only the content in the HTML file itself. It shouldn’t even view CSS stored in a separate local CSS file, let alone reach out to the web to download more content.

Children dying of cancer is not “good”, and frankly the fact that you seem to think it is is fucking disgusting.

It’s not about “want” at all. It’s about figuring out what’s true. And what’s true is that the Abrahamic god, as understood by modern Jews, Christians, and Muslims, is very clearly impossible, unless you choose to define “good” as including children dying of cancer.

Hmm, I wonder…does “my favourite pirate streaming service” count as avoiding big tech?

First, you’ll note that I started this conversation by conceding free will and concentrating my discussion of evil on evils that are not performed by humans, but by the planet itself, or by fundamental biology.

But as for “the concept of life as a test”…why is something supposedly omniscient performing a test? It should already know the result of said test, thus making the test itself irrelevant. That’s what omniscience is.

If there is no evil how can there be good?

Easy. You take the world as it is right now…and then remove the evil things. Evil is a metaphysical concept. We often use analogies of light and dark, but it doesn’t literally work that way.

the Abrahamic trio, so God is supposed to be all powerful.

The funny thing is, the ancient Israelites almost certainly didn’t believe this. It was a more recent invention that’s obviously not supported by the old testament or the talmud.

Yeah, the average person gets a pass on this sort of thing because I generally assume they haven’t thought much about it. But it’s particularly galling when biblical scholars do it.

I saw one biblical scholar whose schtick was debunking things evangelicals believe about the bible. He would happily admit it’s written by a collection of authors over a long period of time, who were doing so not literally but in rhetorical styles popular in their day. Things like that.

Once, I saw him describe how the early Israelites did not believe in the three omnis. They may not have even believed in a monotheistic god, but it was certainly not omniscient and omnibenevolent. Then he went on to say that despite that—despite the fact that the authors of the religious text and the society that invented this god not believing in three omnis—he nevertheless did believe god was omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Wtf?

But why is that all good? Why couldn’t he have earth be good?

Not sure that’s true. Free will doesn’t mean anyone can do anything. It means any decisions a person makes are truly decided by them, and they actually could have made a different decision.

People who don’t believe in free will believe that the physical laws of the universe are deterministic. That leptons and quarks behave in ways determined by their state. That this is true even inside your brain, and thus decisions you make are actually just the result of particles interacting. Even quantum effects, though random, are not consciously decided and thus do not affect free will.

The circumstances you are in change the inputs to those equations, but they don’t change the fact that the equations exist.

I’m upvoting because I thought this was done good engagement with the premise and you don’t deserve to be downvoted for it.

But fundamentally, you’ve missed a pretty big step. What if god just…didn’t create a situation where children get diseases that can only be cured with one rare tree?

Or, more importantly, what about diseases that cannot be cured? What about natural disasters? Yes, some types of natural disasters have gotten more common and worse as a result of human action, but they still happened before climate change, and if anything were more disruptive to people before we had modern building practices.

We’re talking about a god that is literally capable of anything. It could just wave its hand and delete all disease from existence. It chooses not to.

Because one of the many inputs to people’s actions, if we assume that their actions are deterministic, is their knowledge of how other people will respond, and how they have responded to similar things in the past.

What shits me is Christians (and Jews and Muslims, but it’s mainly Christians who do this) who just handwave away the problem of evil. Like fine, I can accept that some evils might arise as a result of human decisions and free will. Things like wars and genocides are done by people. It’s difficult to swallow even that much with the idea of a god who supposedly knows all, is capable of doing anything, and is “all good”, but fine, maybe free will ultimately supplants all that.

But what I absolutely cannot accept is any claim that tries to square the idea of a god with the triple-omnis with the fact that natural disasters happen. That children die of cancer. You try telling the parents of a child slowly dying of a painful incurable disease that someone could fix it if they wanted, and they completely know about it, but that they won’t. And then try telling them that person is “all good”. See how they react.

I find religious people who believe in the three omnis after having given it any amount of serious consideration to be absolutely disgusting and immoral people.

My take is that there is no free will, but that this fact is irrelevant and we’re all better off just behaving as though we do.