Post a controversial opinion

I mean, yes, 'somewhere I would never have expected them to be' usually = Chicago in my case so maybe not that strange but also I can go years without running into people I know who live in the city so it's still pretty damn strange.

Glad you’re on board with the truth

I walked up to a train stop in Chicago once and there was exactly one other person waiting for that particular train -- and it was someone I knew from Iowa

Dude my randomly assigned roommate in copenhagen—a city in finland—was, back at UVA, college roommates with my friend from high school in new jersey.

The day before thanksgiving i was taking a train home—packed train, stops at newark airport not just my hometown—and the person in front of me was someone I used to lifeguard with.

On and on

I had a layover in an airport in some state I don't even remember but that I'd never been to before and haven't been to since and, oh hey, what's up daughter of my mom's good friend who is also hundreds of miles away from home.

(I hope everyone is appreciating these top-notch controversial opinions.)

if someone posted an obviously embarrassing photo, of course i would always think that was out of line/mean

What if every photograph of you is embarrassing?

Nothing short circuits my brain quite like randomly running into someone I know somewhere I would never have expected them to be. It seems statistically impossible that it happens as often as it does

This actually happen to me in Copenhagen, bizarrely enough.

small world conspiracy

You can't take a train from Copenhagen to New Jersey...

Unless...

i was in whole foods in vancouver a year or two back, i walked past a couple, the man looked like a high school friend of some of my childhood friends, who had lived in the suburb of glasgow i lived in during my teenage years, about half a mile from where id lived. i'd last seen him when i was 17 or 18 and he was 20 or 21 respectively. so it had been over a decade. i didn't think much of it til i was walking home and came to think it was almost definitely him, this was confirmed by a whatsapp exchange with a friend who had last heard from him when he was moving to vancouver to work at UBC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZvChurdd_w

the thanksgiving anecdote was this year. i was going from new york city to new jersey for thanksgiving.

I usually discount most transportation coincidences if you share an origin or destination. I've been on planes to and from my city that happened to have people I know on them (and got nachos with a friend-of-friends at the Denver airport once) because there are only so many planes to and from here tbh

i was on a megabus from boston to new york city and my cousin was on the bus! forgot about this one

i've got more of these. but seriously, there are not that many people per megabus.

At O'Hare, I once ran into 3 people, separately, that I knew.

yeah, seriously. and do you really think that would happen if, as they say, 215,000 people pass through that airport every day? *source: wikipedia

You guys need to remove yourself from the paradigm that there are billions of people in the world. I run into people all the time. There is like 100k people max. This is my controversial opinion.

― Trϵϵship, Thursday, December 6, 2018 9:01 AM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm adopting this worldview

I’m finally spreading confusion and magical thinking around the world, exactly as I intended when I first got my teacher certification

wouldn't it be more likely to run into someone you know if there were *more* people passing through?

o'hare's one of the largest transport hubs in the world. it'd be weird if I ran into someone I knew at, like, the burlington, vermont airport and we were there for completely different reasons

large population hoax for sure. we're all at the mercy of all that large pop $$$ out there.

Trϵϵ word username

you're more likely to both be at the same airport if it's a super busy one but I would think you'd be less likely to ~encounter~ the person(s) when they're one among thousands.

but probability and stats can be very counterintuitive so wtf do I know

it just never seems like there is as many people around as they say

My ~controversial~ extrapolation from the small world conspiracy: they want us to think that it's currently 2018 CE and so the world has 7.7 billion people. It's really 30,000 BCE.

i think it's about making people feel that they are insignificant, causing them to undervalue their own labor power and accept low wages

So I know that there's probably like +/- a dozen people who basically share my exact same schedule and commute and who I probably only notice maybe a couple of times a week because, y'know, multiple trains, multiple cars, lots of variables that keep the same people from running into one another all the time even under those circumstances. And yet I've still somehow randomly run into at least four different out-of-town friends on the train.

There seriously can't be more than like 400 people in the world, I'm now convinced.

so, the under-1000 people contingent of small worlders are considered lunatics by the main flank of the community FYI

they're like the no plane 9/11 guys

some opinions and intuitions i have had lately that i have not been able to reconcile with some other opinions and intuitions i have:

there are no objective truths
value is something we ascribe to things and is not inherent to any one thing
the number of things which are out of our control is so vast and so completely outweighs the small number of things that appear to be in our control to such an extent that i think determinism is probably true and free will/moral responsibility is mostly an illusion

i am not a clear or intelligent enough thinker to really hash any of these things out or think in great detail how they conflict with other basic assumptions i have and practices i engage in. i know philosophers have articulated and refuted these statements to such a fine degree of precision over thousands of years but i find it truly overwhelming to get far into these readings

3% of earth's population died in 9/11

the empire never ended

Not fuggin' Star Wars again.

marcos your observations are mostly otm imo and not at all controversial.

Yep

I actually believe in free will, controversially. All sorts of external factors limit out actions, but given all that we still make choices so determinism is not true imo.

xp Yep. And fairly easy to support with logical exercises I would think.

but things lead you to make one choice over another! def a topic for another thread tho huh.

for anyone not grabbing the reference, I'm wrapping up Treeship's observations and marcos's disconnect w/Philip K Dick's theories

obviously we're all starting to see the black iron prison here

https://images.gawker.com/18odwyjcs21z3gif/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_470.gif

(except that that's probably too big)

im way behind on this but related to tuomas/finland/small world conspiracy, are any of you familiar with the "finland doesn't exist" conspiracy?

it is silly but man it is legit one of the best-written conspiracies i've seen in a while, an endlessly fascinating idea where japan and russia secretly invented it. there's secretly just a giant sea full of fish they use there, ppl who think they live in finland actually live on the shore of russia or sweden or whatever, nobody has ever been inland because it doesn't exist, the language is an invention co-created by japan and russia ("which is why it sounds like those languages mixed together") etc. it's very very good

ok then where did Aki Kaurismaki come from

The burden of proof is clearly on Finland to prove it exists.

They would have done it already if they could.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4uiEvOun40

"1- What about Finnish people? Are they all in on the conspiracy?

A. No. People from Finland genuinely believe they're from Finland. In reality they are from small towns on either the Eastern part of Sweden, the Western part of Russia, or the Northern part of Estonia."