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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Proofreading your own work without a significant time gap is pretty useless. You’ll catch a few obvious errors, but approaching the same problem in the same mental space tends to lead to the same thought patterns, tends to lead to making or overlooking the same mistakes.

    You’ll do a bit better reapproaching the subject a few days later. It’s almost, but not quite, like reading a new piece of writing. In my experience, comments are set and forget, unless you’re obsessive like me and enjoy rereading your old shit.

    By far the most effective proofreading, though, is an Editor. There’s a reason it’s a paid position for anyone who makes a living writing. A completely different person will read the text more as-is, without accidentally interpreting it how they INTENDED it to be written. This will catch far more errors, but isn’t really practical for shit posting in social media. The closest you’ll get is someone calling out a typo or grammatical error.

    As long as the intent of the message is clear, it passes the bar for acceptable social media content. We’re not writing PhD theses, we’re just having fun discussions. We’re not writing a paper meant to be readable to someone independently, we’re engaging in dialogue and can easily ask the other person to clarify.

    TL;DR high-level proofreading and error correcting isn’t really as viable on social media as it is formal writing, nor is it really necessary as long as the message received is the message intended.



  • Not who you replied to, but your arguments remind me of Peter Singer. Basically, that none of us live ethical lives because of exactly the first problem you mentioned. If we CAN donate to a cause we know will do good with the money, more good than we could do ourselves, then we MUST do so. Failing to do so is a moral failing.

    It’s definitely an appealing argument, and I enjoy exploring the limits of such philosophies. To me, it’s about immediacy, guarantee, and proximity. I see something that has a shorter timeline as something that must be acted on with higher priority. Something that’s guaranteed is higher priority than a slim chance. And I’m more likely to help those closer to me than across the world.

    We’re all limited in our capacity to know and to do. I don’t have to be perfect, I can accept that some of my actions are less moral than they could be. I just aim to be as above the line, so to speak, trying to bring more positive than negative. I think the comment you initially replied to is a pretty good heuristic to follow to do so.






  • Ookami38@sh.itjust.workstoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldWhat's your religion?
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    2 months ago

    If you had asked me 10 years ago, it’d be a firm “atheist”. A year ago, “agnostic”. Today, I don’t identify with a religion, but I think there’s a lot of interesting things within them. Given a charitable interpretation of any of them’s texts, as well as looking at the parts where a large number of religious systems agree you can arrive at some pretty profound pieces of wisdom.

    I don’t necessarily think these things tell us much about our origin, or what happens after death, or speak to any kind of deity. What they do speak a lot on is the human condition. What we value, what themes and motifs speak to us.

    I don’t really like the terms “religion” and “religious”. To me, those are the organized, preachy kinds of almost-cults most of us here have problems with. I prefer referring to my own personal beliefs as spirituality. Where the two differ, in my mind, is that religion is found externally. Someone converts you, or you’re born into it. Spirituality is found through self-reflection. Some of the self reflection processes involves talking to and learning from others, but it ultimately comes back to a deeply individual assimilation of this new knowledge with the unique lived experiences you’ve had.