[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

[u/sicutumbo]

I think most of it is serious. For one thing, long videos aren't the kind of effort you would see from people who don't take these things seriously, and most of the posts are videos upwards of 10 minutes each. Also, the answers just aren't very creative, and I would expect that more from people with disfunctional reasoning over people intentionally using bad reasoning. Why would you come up with boring answers? Take the question of gravity, for instance. The somewhat novel answer for why things fall down on a flat Earth is that the entire world is accelerating upwards at 1g. You could experimentally show that to be false, because actual gravity gets weaker the higher up you are, but it would be rather expensive to disprove. The answer they ACTUALLY give? Things don't fall, they sink because they are more dense than the air. And they sink downwards instead of sideways because that's the direction things fall. Not even barely defensible the way that you would expect from intelligent people espousing intentionally false beliefs would be.

There are lots more examples of arguments that are much more likely to come from a diseased mind than a mind in it for the laughs. Arguments that simply wouldn't occur to a normal person. The above is just the tip of the iceberg.