this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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As a society, for instance, we tend to think that telling kids that Santa Claus exists is unproblematic, because doing so protects certain values – such as children’s innocence and imagination.
Santa Clause may be a fun myth, especially if kids receive presents from Santa for Christmas. But it does not protect children's innocence and imagination.
Though this raises a question if kids received mischief-enabling presents from Jesus (A Red Ryder BB Gun comes to mind) that might improve their take on their personal Jesus.
I hate myths, even ones with good intentions. Things like "Santa" are just teaching kids to be disappointed and that their parents are full of shit.
As a side comment, what in the actual fuck is the tooth fairy?
None of this stuff makes any sense to me, whatsoever.
It may be related to all the trolling we do to each other, such as deckpeckers, left-handed smoke shifters, snipe hunting and soft-punching contests.
It may not make reasonable sense at all, but humans are silly muppets.
It's why I hypothesize that teapots in space (between the Earth and Mars, orbiting the sun) would be almost certain evidence that time travel to the past becomes possible and cheap, and if we ever attain the capacity to detect distant teapots and don't find any, that may be evidence that time travel is not possible, or at least cannot be made cheap enough to be used for practical jokes.
A hypothesis is absolutely fair game. I am not going to spend the time to prove it right or wrong in this case, but it's still 100% legit in my book.
(Just don't go telling your child spawn that space pot... err.. space teapots are definitely the reason that time travel could be possible.)
The logic is that if we should be able to detect orbital teapots but can't find any that it may indicate time travel is not possible, or at least never readily available for MIT students to engage in practical jokes. Because they totally would.
Like Roko's Baskilisk it relies on a lot of presumptions that we cannot immediately make. We still struggle to detect teapot-sized satellites in the inner solar system. Time travel may exist but may never be freely accessible. There may even have been a task force to intercept all the teapot-placement missions before they launched, or a good reason not to frivolously drop objects into the past such as teapots. We might even have evolved to where we just don't consider trolling each other as appropriate behavior.
As with many of my hypotheses, it's more of a thought experiment than an actual conjecture of the real world.
Our culture is obsessed with lies.
It's obsessed with fantasies as an escape from the dystopia it creates in reality. A better world is actually possible.