I also agree that there is something that superficially seems to be supernatural. However, I believe that the reason things appear to be supernatural is because all supernatural-looking events (i.e. all correct predictions about a room) are being presented as supernatural despite random guesses accounting for a lot of these. Whether or not these events are actually supernatural may be checked by the experiment I proposed in another reply. Please do tell me your thoughts on that experiment.

Claims of the supernatural are a subset of correct claims. We can’t comment on the supernatural aspect if all we know is that a claim is correct. This is affirming the consequent.

This can be verified by asking people who have had near-death experiences whether or not they experienced something correct in their near-death experiences. Obviously, such experiences are traumatic, and multiple studies show that people can hallucinate due to the release of various neurotransmitters associated with the same.

We want to calculate the probability that someone manifested as a ghost given that they had an interesting near-death experience. We assume that anyone having a true supernatural experience experiences visions that are absolutely true. For each person, there are two possibilities (we’ll calculate the probability of each later).

The first possibility is that a person, in fact, experienced hallucinations. The second possibility is that a person experienced a ghostly manifestation.

Now, we further give people an objective multiple-choice quiz about the positions of various objects in an environment. To generate this quiz, we ask each person to choose the environment they believe themselves to have manifested in. We verify that they have never been to this environment before and did not have any method of knowing about this environment (e.g., if a subject saw a person going into a room and later gave an exact description of the person in the given room, it will be disregarded). We only test people who believe that they experienced a supernatural event. All options are framed in an equivalent manner and are presented in a randomized order to remove cognitive biases and implement double-blind protocols. We further use questions with non-obvious answers such that they differ from previous implementations (e.g., a vision of a surgery table with an overhead light is obvious, and by itself, not indicative of supernatural phenomena).

If the subject hallucinated, we assume that they have a random chance of predicting the positions of various objects. We now repeat this quiz a large number of times in accordance with the law of large numbers. If, after many repetitions, we find a sufficient deviation from the expected result (e.g., if each question had one correct answer and three incorrect answers, with the observed rate of correct answers being 50% instead of 25%), then we would have evidence supporting the existence of ghosts.

If, however, the results show no sufficient deviation from the expected results, then we would find that the probability of a perceived encounter being supernatural is approximately zero.

In this way, we can use scientific methods to test claims of ghost-like phenomena.

NOTE: If we only focus on the 25% of the cases as mentioned in the above example, we find that we are not focusing on the remaining 75% of the cases. Presenting only 25% of the cases, without giving any thought to the remaining 75% of the cases is an incorrect method of analysis as explained above.

I assume good faith unless clear evidence indicates otherwise. I try to adopt a more general version of WP:AGF in life.

If you mean an anonymous account from an email service trusted by other online service providers, it’s not possible to get one for free. Even among paid email providers, very few accept anonymous payment methods such as cash or XMR.

Excess opioid use can cause dependence and increase tolerance to the painkilling effects faster than tolerance is built to the effects it has on respiration. As such, certain types of opioids are exceptionally dangerous when abused without mechanisms to deal with overdoses. Therefore, we say that abusing opioids is bad for health.

On the other hand, we can take the example of the early human who found joy in gathering food. Similar to the argument about “pathways being influenced”, we see that neural pathways are reinforced because of repeated concentration on the same goal. However, treating this as an addiction means that once this “addiction” is cured, humans will no longer want to get food. That means that humans will suffer adverse effects due to giving up the desire to gather food. Someone particularly ignorant could even extend this argument to call water and oxygen addictive.

Clearly, a line must be drawn to distinguish between things that are addictive and those that are not. You gave the example of reading and said that excessive concentration causes reading to behave in mechanisms similar to drugs and I totally agree with that statement. However, the fact remains that reading does not cause negative impacts on health despite repeated exposure to reading whereas the same is not true for drugs.

Since you asked for a narrower and non-speculative explanation of the fact that drugs do damage and books do not, let me ask a concrete question in reply. You stated that you have taken psychedelics in the past. Do you feel that if you had encountered a bad episode, you would have had the ability to leave the episode immediately? Would there have been a way to flush all psychedelics from your body? Clearly, with books, you can just stop reading the book, throw it in a paper shredder, or burn it to ash. Can you do the same with all drugs? Is reversibility really that easy for every single drug?

One could argue that binge reading is harmful and I totally agree. But the overall benefits of reading are sufficiently powerful as compared to the extremely low rate of addiction.

In fact, if looking at DSM-5 criteria, we can almost entirely ignore all points related to social impairment as reading is a major social obligation in a lot of places. Similarly, tolerance does not build up when reading. Another example of DSM-5 criteria we can ignore is the fact that physical and psychological problems do not occur. In fact, we can say that the only meaningful criteria are those related to withdrawal and those related to impaired control.

In books, the rate of impaired control is generally negligible as is the rate of withdrawal. Similar to how someone who drinks fifty litres of water a day is generally considered addicted to water, so is a person who reads instead of eating, taking care of personal hygiene, and sleeping. Yet the general rate of both water addiction and reading addiction is absurdly low when compared to the benefits.

Generally, books are considered non-addictive because they enhance one’s quality of life without causing negative health effects. It is a non-speculative fact that books have very little adverse effects. Requiring concentration alone is not sufficient to call something addictive. While it is true that anything done in excess is bad (e.g., getting too much oxygen or water), most people read in moderation. Something addictive needs to be damaging to the general quality of life. That is precisely why all pharmaceutical drugs given for medical purposes are given with one question in mind: will taking a given drug increase or decrease the quality of life in the short and long term.

NOTHING IN THIS REPLY CONSISTS OF MEDICAL ADVICE

I have not added inline citations as I do know which of these points are likely to be challenged. For further reading, please read about the DSM-5 criteria.

If I understand correctly, you said that jobs should be mandatory even if they serve no purpose. However, Marxist theory argues differently. It calls for work that contributes to human betterment. When implementing this, some Soviet policies took an extreme approach. Authorities often prioritized statistics (for example, full-employment targets) and sometimes created make-work or nominal positions.(as mentioned in the messages above) As a result, policy often prioritized employment statistics over the actual human and social benefits of work.

Even if one assumes the Holodomor was not man-made, it was certainly worsened by government inefficiency and poor decision-making.^[1] The government’s intentions may have been benign, but the result was the same as if they had been malicious.

^[1]Mentioned in some of the sources you cited and in your post.

Could the app be using cell tower data to bypass mock location settings? The Github repository says it identifies a user’s location using cell tower data.