I’ll tell you why I say the answer is no to whether or not the occult, demons, or ghosts exist. There’s a phenomenon in statistics where if you were to select a random element from an infinite set of equally probable elements, the probability that a specific element will be selected is 0%. Not close to 0, literally 0.

These kinds of supernatural phenomena that have no evidence belong to an infinite set of equally unlikely phenomena with no evidence. Their likelihood of being real is 0%. Only when phenomena has some tangible evidence explaining it can we elevate it to a finite set with a non-zero likelihood of being real.

Sorry but I’m going to call out what I see as some pretty blatant motte-and-bailey argumentation by the OP and their offense taken to people trying to nail down the definition of supernatural is illustrative.

They have their bailey, belief in things like the occult, ghosts, demons, etc, that are almost certainly bullshit. To the extent that they can be falsified, they have been. This is the typical definition of what people think when you say “supernatural” and people are right to answer “no” when asked if they believe in it.

But then you have OP falling back on their motte when this happens, asking philosophical questions about reality, perception, and the unknown. The fallacy is that these questions do nothing to strengthen or refute the original argument about the supernatural.

Nobody is here to argue that nothing is unknown and even unknowable but that doesn’t make the things that people typically call “supernatural” any less bullshit. Demons and ghosts are just not the kinds of things that are waiting around to surprise us. And shifting the conversation from your bailey to your motte to protect your feelings on the former is not a good way to have a friendly debate.

All that aside, if you are interested in expanding your understanding of the universe then I’d really encourage you to divert the effort you’re putting into the “supernatural” into learning about the actual natural universe instead. Our universe really is fantastic on its own. There’s plenty of interesting, wacky, and unknown things happening all around us that you can learn about without resorting to magic. If anything, magic is the boring answer imo.

It can’t be expressed in any integer-based notation without an infinite number of digits. Only when expressed in some bases which are themselves, irrational. It’s infinity either way.

The number which famously has an infinite number of digits? I thought we were arguing against the real-ness of infinity.

Also note: the method I was describing is one of the ways in which pi can be calculated.

It destroys meaningful operations it comes into contact with, and requires invisible and growing workarounds to maintain (e.g. “countably” infinite vs “uncountably” infinite) which smells of fantasy, philosophically speaking.

This isn’t always true. The convergent series comes to mind, where an infinite summation can be resolved to a finite number.

It’s quite useful, though, to understand a curve or arc as having infinite edges in order to calculate its area. The area of a triangle is easy to calculate. Splitting the arc into two triangles by adding a point in the middle of the arc makes it easy to calculate the area… And so on, splitting the arc into an infinite number of triangles with an infinite number of points along the arc makes the area calculable to an arbitrary precision.

I think the context matters. Just reading the paper and ask someone what their sign is so you can laugh at the horoscope section? Not really a huge deal. First date and using it as an ice breaker to get someone to talk about themselves? Mayyyyybe. Treating it with any actual level of seriousness is definitely a danger zone.

Is enshittification the scummiest thing you can think of? While other multinationals are paying for goon squads that kill people in other countries? While banks reorder daily transactions from largest to smallest so they can charge more overdraft fees, literally stealing from poor people? Even if enshittification is literally your biggest problem, you’d have to be living under a rock to think Google’s products are the most enshitified of all the garbage out there. You’ve never heard of anything from Meta? Amazon? Netflix? Microsoft?

I don’t know man. There’s a lot shittier business practices out there than paying to be the default search engine - which is laughably easy to change on any browser. Like marketplaces and services that pay to be exclusive sources of content and then use the fact that they’re the only source for most content to force extortionate deals on content creators and enshitify every aspect of the end user experience. Just to name one.

Thing is, normalizing stupidity and shitiness doesn’t help anything either. It actively makes things worse. I don’t know what the actual answer is to improving things with that kind of person though. I just think pretending that being a shitbag is acceptable behavior ain’t it.

Social media is where most of the blatantly false propaganda lives. Getting all of your news from it makes you more susceptible to propaganda, not less. These are people who have nothing to form an opinion with except for what the loudest people around them are complaining about most. And propagandists are the loudest ones, complaining about made up bullshit.

When fully capable adults do stupid things, like voting for an man with as many very serious faults as Trump, I blame them for doing it. That Democrats were ineffective at convincing people (or inspiring them) not to do something stupid doesn’t make the thing any less stupid to do. Inspiration is not required to avoid being idiot.

They voted for a con man, a fascist, a criminal, someone who tried to steal the last election. Kamala could be a bowl of day old warm potato salad and voting for him would still be one of the dumbest things imaginable.

I think also one thing to remember is that phonics and word sounds are not reading either due to the fact that English is a Frankenstein language where any letter or combination of letters often has a myriad of ways of being pronounced. You cannot learn to read without a healthy dose of memorization and contextual cluing. Letters are, at best, just another clue as to what the word could be.

I have a son that’s learning to read right now so I’ve got some first hand experience on this. This article is making a lot out of the contextual clues part of the method but consistently downplays or ignores that phonics is still part of what the kids are taught. It’s a bit of a fallback, sure, but my son isn’t being taught to skip words when he can’t figure it out.

He’s bringing home the kinds of books mentioned in the article. The sentence structure is pretty repetitive and when he comes across a word he doesn’t know he tries to look at the picture to figure out what it is. Sometimes that works and he says the right word. Other times, like there’s a picture of a bear and the word is “cub” (but I don’t think my son knew what a bear cub was), he still falls back on “cuh uh buh” to figure it out.

So he still knows the relationship between letters and sounds. He just has some other tools in his belt as well. I can’t say I find that especially concerning.

Eh, not really then. If you have some behavior in those 50 copy/pastes that needs to be deleted, you’ve got to delete it 50 times. That’s not easier at all.

If every young person voted, the Republican party would collapse until it took a hard left turn. This is not a paradox.

Because even if it winds up being a bad study, it still evokes a deeper, more important “truth.”

I’m being sarcastic but that’s actually what’s going on here.

I feel that they would at least change the framing instead of directly mirroring the OP. “Hating people for no reason but their race” is pretty clearly the definition of racism. Usually racists reframe their argument as actually being about criminality or at the very least some fear of cultural change.

I was seriously considering adding a /s but I was like nah, that’s lame it should be obvious.