this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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Asklemmy

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Heaven. Or just the idea that some part of the consciousness outlives the body. I really hate that this is all I get, there's so much I'll never get to do just because my parents decided when I was too young to decide for myself.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Spirits.

It'd be cool.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

That people are inherently good. This not being the case is reinforced near daily by people's behaviors.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 4 hours ago

Hanlon's razor. It's pretty clear some people can be stupid and malicious simultaneously, or will even feign stupidity to hide malice.

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 5 hours ago

The notion that "facts matter".

I've spent my entire life believing that facts don't care about feelings. That scientific truth doesn't require your belief in it in order to be true. That at the end of the day, reasoning will beat emotion...

By far the most dis-heartening thing about the last few years (to me) has been accepting the idea they "facts" are "whatever is shouted the loudest".

It, more than anything else, makes me feel helpless. If the enemy isn't even playing with the same fact-sheet... How do you even begin to fight that?

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 7 hours ago

Ghosts. My 18 year old cat passed end of last year and she was one of my best friends. I just wish that instead of me knowing that the shades of her I see are actively produced by my mind (i notice me doing them) that she'd really spook around me, that i could just embrace the little shade and show her that i still love her. Well now I'm crying at work

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 7 hours ago

The average person having empathy

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 10 hours ago

The revolutionary potential of the American people.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 20 points 12 hours ago

Trickle-down economics.

[โ€“] [email protected] 18 points 12 hours ago

U.S. democracy

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 14 hours ago

Material conditions will improve in my lifetime

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 14 hours ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 15 hours ago (1 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 48 points 15 hours ago

Karma - there are way too many shitty people who just continue to be shitty because nothing ever comes back to bite them. Meanwhile, people who actually try to help are kicked around the most.

[โ€“] [email protected] 34 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Showing people irrefutable proof of something will change their minds.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

There are only finitely many prime numbers and I will not hear otherwise.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

And your irrefutable proof is...?

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

If you want to show there are infinitely many primes, one way is to first note that every integer greater than 1 has a prime factor. This is because if an integer n is prime, n is a prime factor of itself, and if n is not prime then it must have a smaller factor m other than 1, 1< m < n. If m is also not prime, it too must have a smaller factor other than 1, and you can keep playing this game but there are only so many integers between 1 and n so eventually you'll get to a factor of n that has no smaller factors of its own other than 1, which means it is prime.

Let's now suppose there is only a finite number of primes, we'll try to show that this assumption leads to nonsense so can't be possible.

We can multiply any finite number of integers together to get a new integer. Let's multiply all of the primes together to get a new number M. Then M + 1 gives a remainder of 1 when you divide by any prime number. Since dividing by a factor will always give a remainder of 0, none of the prime numbers can be a factor of M + 1. So M + 1 is an imteger bigger than 1 with no prime factors. This is impossible, so there must be a mistake somewhere in this argument.

The only thing we said that we're not 100% sure is true was that there are a finite number of primes, so that has to be our mistake. So there must be infinitely many prime numbers.

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