This is Goodbye, but I don't want to leave you with nothing and I guess I can explain why, but if you don't care why than just skip to the advice portion of this.
Why
The site doesn't serve me anymore. MY goals aren't aligned with the site. This is essentially a social media site. I am no longer getting anything from it. I can divert my attention to another social media or different social media sites where I can accidentally pick up knowledge in areas better suited to improving my life.
Advice
This is just a handful of things that can help you. Use this site correctly to improve your thinking. The point of threads that you create isn't to get your point of view across or to defend a point. The purposes of engaging in a thread or engaging in one is to look at your logical process. Unfortunately people too often will look at your conclusion and argue with that instead of looking at your argument and how you made it. I would urge you to help the site and others by avoiding debating the conclusion of the creator of a thread and by helping them improve their logic whether you agree or disagree with their conclusions. When you create a thread it shouldn't be a thread about the views you are most certain about. It should be threads where you have an intuitive sense that there is something wrong with your logical process. It's occasionally fine to post what you know about if you want to educate people on a topic you are an expert in, but it shouldn't be your main focus. For example there is real weak areas on the site currently where you have a lack of expert level knowledge on foreign policy or economics. Sometimes I get in the mood where I just force myself to read through 100 studies on a topic and have made myself an expert on energy policy through this method as well as through police tactics and yet you rarely if ever see me share knowledge on these things unless I actually see somebody say anything explicitly incorrect. The reason is because I gain nothing by sharing this knowledge.
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Now that we have discussed how you should use this site I want to share a tool with helping your thinking, more specifically in regards to building a personal philosophy that can survive even when the world changes.
This mental trick is called "Least convenient world". Say for example that you believe that freedom of speech is inherently good. This probably comes with some parts of a world view that you aren't consciously aware of. SO how do you create a world that would make that belief extremely inconvenient. What comes to my mind is the existence of "cognito hazards" . These are essentially ideals that maybe if you thought them would result in extreme damage Maybe the thought itself could make your head explode, maybe the thought is very memable and could result in expanding indefinitely until a nuclear war happens. So then I have to ask myself, how would I have to change my view if there is a world that exists where free speech could pose an existential threat? My first instinct is that we would then have to regulate speech at some level just to ensure our continued existence. Now this doesn't mean I have to change my beliefs but it does allow me at least to create a way to falsify my belief in free speech. It can be falsified by showing me a belief that if spread through speech is truly an existential risk.
Let's try a second belief just to see the process again and this is a very important tool to have. I believe that warning labels on shampoo bottles are stupid and pointless. In the most inconvenient world possible we have a significant portion of the population who thinks eating shampoo is harmless and would do it for shits and giggles not thinking of the consequences. This means that a warning label could in this universe could save lives. So now I have to ask myself if perhaps there are actually people stupid enough to do this in the real world and is it a moral obligation to prevent their deaths by letting them know the risks of their behavior?
Please use this tool because a lot of you think extremely rigidly and are stuck in ideologies and if you continue without these tools to stretch you, you'll just continue to have dumb beliefs that progressively become more sophisticated and harder to get rid of.
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Don't take things so seriously. Your personal life is what matters. No your vote doesn't matter nothing outside of your immediate circle of influence actually matters, do not waste your time debating or getting worked up over stupid shit unless you are actually doing that to really improve your thinking skills. For a short amount of time you guys will be able to keep up with me on Discord a bit but even that time is limited, at least in it's current form. If I do more youtube videos they will likely be to try and build my credibily as an expert in cyber security and be boring to those who have no interest in that.
I hope you gained something from this. I hope new users are encouraged to use the site correctly as outlined in my first piece of advice and if the site is useless at sharpening your thinking than hopefully you can utilize the tool I have taught you.
