You may have some trouble with a question like this outside of HN ;-)
I tried this question on a dating site as an experiment for one day... and then forgot I had it up. It generated nearly no responses other than jokes except for one person that was very flustered and was intimidated by it (perhaps unsurprisingly).
As for one thing that I think is true and that most others don't.... well the thing that seems to clash the most is that I find "bad" things funny, regardless of my personal beliefs about them. People really tend to be more of a straight man than you'd think.
The question as written works a little better -- it makes it clear it is more like a college essay where you are required to write about one thing (for 1000 words) and do it in a way that makes you look interesting.
"Tell us one thing about the world that you strongly believe is true, but that most people think is not true."
The first things that come to mind are all things you can't say, and about those I generally follow my own advice, and don't say them. But I'll try to think if there are any that are uncontroversial.
To be honest, I mean everything relating to the conscious control of reproduction. Both on an individual level and a social level.
Individual: Abortion, genetic modification of fetuses, aborting sick fetuses, etc
Social: Overpopulation. The fact that the poor and stupid significantly outbreed the intelligent leading to all kinds of downward spirals. The welfare system that encourages it's beneficiaries to breed as much as possible - and even to induce disorder into their children to maximize revenue. For instance moms on welfare who have produced several kids with fetal alcohol syndrome, not even to bring up issues like nutritional deficiency.
There are welfare moms who literally have bred 10 children with induced mental handicaps - and they are financially rewarded by society the more they do this.
On a wider but less extreme level, there are psychologically dysfunctional parents who breed at a higher rate than the psychologically sound.
I've spoken with many social workers and teachers and others on the front line of this issue and there is a silent but taboo agreement - the use of force in controlling breeding is essential to the future of humanity.
There is also the wider point that the stupid and poor propagate themselves while the intelligent and wealthy prefer not to. This comes down to economic incentives.
Society would benefit from eugenics programs that specifically encourage successful people to breed and discourage unsuccessful people. Right now the incentives are literally opposite of this.
Anyway this is a big topic with many many facets. But speaking to domain experts and reading widely on the topic, it is very clear that some form of what has classically been described as eugenics is necessary for the success of society.
I disagree, because the "poor and stupid" who reproduce a lot are not necessarily genetically poor and stupid. Education, socialization, lack of opportunity, and environmental effects such as drugs and alcohol play a far bigger role in what you see as "poor and stupid" than genetics do.
I see no reason why a healthy infant from 10 generations of white trash has any less genetic potential than an infant from 10 generations of people who attended Ivy leagues.
Even if it was a good idea, considering the pace of technological development today do you see more benefit in one generation of practiced eugenics versus the advances in technology during that generation?
Also, which of your arguments still apply to the world's most populous country?
Barring rms's answer being correct, the same people who do now: the people willing to do a good job for the least money. One likely economic outcome of a successful eugenics effort would be that tedious, mindless jobs would be among the best-paying rather than the worst.
As the department I work for is currently on a big ramp up of staff, I do a lot of interviews. If somebody told gave me that as an answer or told that to me when describing themselves I doubt I could keep a straight face. It's never happened that I didn't keep professional with an applicant - but in this case I think I would not be able to control my laughter.
No harm intended, I have my own pretty borderline views, just that one of my "character traits" is that I find radical views that are beyond my comprehension (in this example, very right wing views) absolutely hilarious. Another example would be extreme free marketeers.
Would you laugh at someone who thought that it was a good thing for humans to selectively breed plants and animals? We certainly couldn't maintain our population without them. Would you laugh at someone who had a preference for a desirable spouse? That's a common form of eugenics: people prefer healthy, sane, productive mates.
There's obviously a difference between preference and policy. But my guess is that you're willing to reap the benefits of eugenics without considering the ethical implications.
I don't believe that climate science is 'settled'.
To clarify I'm neither religiously pro or anti global warming (although I do believe that climate change should happen as a byproduct of a chaotic system with high entropy) - to me the question of whether or not it's solely man made is irrelevant. The questions of importance to me are:
Is it possible to sufficiently geo-engineer the Earth's climate to counteract climate change?
If it is possible where's the cost/benefit analysis (i.e. how much do we spend on geo-engineering to achieve the best 'payoff' in terms of success)?
What's the cost of adaptation (i.e. accepting that the change will happen and adapting ourselves to the changing environment)?
Those questions are relevant regardless of whether or not the world is getting hotter or colder. For me the political muddying of the waters makes it impossible to engage in rational debate with either side. It's become a religion, but unless you're a climate scientist (and I'm not) you realistically only know what you've consumed from others, and there's a lot of people on all sides who are more interested in moulding facts to fit a political argument than identifying what's really happened.
Those are indeed interesting and relevant points but they don't have much to do with climate science per se. Climate science is about understanding how climate works, not costs of adaptation or geoengineering.
Here are two things I believe are true that most well-educated people think are untrue. Among those who think one of these is true, a large percentage think the other is false.
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Most people (who accept evolution) claim there's a definitive evolutionary tree for all species.
I believe there is no single, definitive tree, but rather, several trees. Depending on which feature or gene sequence you're studying, and what method you use to construct a tree, you'll get slightly different trees. Sometimes this is just statistical noise, but other times it's due to different traits actually having different lineages, as a result of events like recombination (say, when a virus injects a fragment of DNA into another creature's genome) or horizontal gene transfer [0]. If you build a phylogenetic tree that covers whole genomes for multiple species, it will typically end up being a phylogenetic network [1] rather than a simple tree.
I also believe the original language text of the Bible has been very reliably preserved since antiquity. There's a surprising amount of crossover between the subject of textual criticism [2] and phylogenetics -- comparing manuscript variants (between millions of pages across several centuries) is not that different from comparing DNA mutations. There are very few parts of the Biblical text that are seriously disputed by the legitimately well-informed.
Doesn't the position you take on [2] depend very heavily on how you define "original"?
I was under the impression that there was very little dissent between believers and critically-minded scholars alike over either:
(i) the texts that compose the New Testament (in particular) of the Bible have been well-preserved and accurately replicated with very few claims of interpolation or revision
(ii) The Synoptic Gospels were heavily influenced by at least one common source document which appears to be totally lost.
Transcendental infinities and infinitesimals - many different types of infinity exist, both countable and uncountable.
Most people tend to stop at the standard infinity that lies at the top end of the real number line - "bigger than the biggest number you can think of, and then some, plus one."
Never mind that there's another infinity, just as big, at the far end of the negative side of the real number line, and further infinities in all directions when you bring in complex numbers, quaternions, infinitesimals, the uncountable infinities lying between any two arbitrarily chosen adjacent real numbers and so on.
Also, the "Arabic" number system was invented in India. It was only introduced to the West by the Muslims.
Yes, America, if not for Muslims you'd still be counting in Roman numerals.
Just one? Thiel chose a great question. As an aside, maybe it should be considered for next round's yc application?
Some number of my possible responses, although admittedly I would use none of these for Thiel's essay:
* Modern running shoes increase one's tendency to injury.
* Free will can exist in a fully deterministic universe.
* Saturated fat and cholesterol are not the primary causal factors behind heart disease.
* Keynesian economic reasoning has few virtues in its own right, but is leveraged as a rationalization for policies convenient to those with political power.
I'm not an expert on it, but that position's sometimes called "compatibilism", if you're looking for a keyword. This Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article's a decent starting point, if a bit academic: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
The really short answer is that it boils down to a disagreement over what "free will" means. Compatibilists dispute the claim that free will is definitionally equivalent to something like a videogame with multiple endings, where your actions can change which endings you get (the "garden of forking paths" model of free will).
It's actually usually taken as an alternative to dualism, because if humans are 100% made of physical matter that's bound by the usual laws of physics, and we think something called "free will" is meaningful to talk about, then they must somehow be compatible. The alternatives are: 1. dualism, claim that some part of human thought/action takes place outside of the laws of physics; 2. deny that free will exists; or maybe 3. somehow deny that the laws of physics exist, or at least claim they exist in some different way than usually understood.
Daniel Dennett is probably the best-known-among-the-general-public proponent of compatibilism.
I propose the following strategy for you to try to clarify your thinking on the fourth statement:
1) Rewrite it as:
(fill in the blank) economic reasoning has few virtues in its own right, but is leveraged as a rationalization for policies convenient to (fill in the blank).
2) Ask yourself how much political power Keynesians have if they don't even have the power to impose Keynsian solutions.
3) Fill in the blanks for the statement in (1) as it actually applies for those with political power.
I'll admit that my formulation of the fourth statement was a bit ambiguous, but you missed the point. For what its worth, I agree it should be rephrased, if only to avoid such confusion.
If you attempt to read it with the (perhaps generous) assumption that I'm not proposing a tautology, than you might see what I mean.
A Keynesian ideology provides justification for the use of state power that differing economic ideologies do not. It would seem rational (warning: assumption of self-interest) that, holding everything else constant, politicians have a tendency to endorse Keynesian thought.
That scientific questions exist that humans "by nature cannot" or "will never be able to" understand. (Due to our brains being too unsophisticated or unimaginative, etc., or due to a projection from our current inability to observe.)
It's not that strange if you think of it in terms of improvements of models. For instance, I'm sure religion based civilizations are more civilized than cavemen, but at the same time, our standards improve as we acquire better models.
Yes; and I rather wish every college graduate would be required to take one semester of the philosophy of ethics so they can avoid the circular fallacy of psychological egoism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism
Whether from unquestioning faith in mere assumptions of classical economics, or some clinging to ideology, a disappointing number of people-who-think-themselves-smart still believe selfishness explains everything.
In a broad sense, it's very hard to argue that selfish genes don't explain most human behavior. Certainly, I would spend my time differently if I weren't the result of a couple billion years of brutal gene-versus-gene competition.
Genes might be selfish, but that doesn't mean the organisms that they create will be. Selfish genes also created the ant colony, where it doesn't make much sense to talk about an ant's individual behavior as self-interested. I'm only suggesting that we are more like ants than educated people currently believe.
Furthermore, humans have language, and can even ask themselves questions like "what would so-and-so do?" Our minds are filled up, it seems to me, mostly with the thoughts and data supplied by others. So I wonder if it makes sense to say that we are all individual minds.
Okay, that's what I suspected. At the right level of abstraction, you can certainly find non-selfish activities. But a gene's-eye-view is the most significant view, because in the long term anything that doesn't adhere to that view is extinct.
Certainly a complete sociopath will still have non-selfish internal organs. But it's highly reductionist to claim that a sociopath is not sociopathic because his heart generously pumps blood to his other organs.
What looks like generosity generally falls into a few categories of gene-level selfishness, e.g. kin altruism, in-group altruism, reciprocal gifts, etc. Our evolutionary inheritance doesn't allow for pure altruism; that's a bug that gets fixed by selfish groups out-reproducing.
You're arguing against a point I didn't make. I'm not arguing for the existence of pure altruism, or denying the importance of genes. I'm saying that selfishness doesn't explain human behavior very well. It's an argument against the common model of human beings as rational economic actors. For the most part our motivations lie elsewhere, and we don't behave as homo economicus unless we are in weird and artificial situations.
I'm also making a more subtle point about the difficulty of delineating where a person ends and society begins. This is a much fuzzier concept for me, but I have a hunch that it doesn't make sense to say that a human personality is entirely contained in the body that we normally associate it with, any more than crashing waves are contained within a rocky shore. The body gives rise to this funny thing called a mind, and yet minds don't seem to be stored just in one brain.
I did not understand your point about the sociopath; it seems to be making my argument for me, that the driving forces at one level of organization tell you little about the next level up.
Conservatives say they don't believe in evolution, but act like they do (in the sense they tolerate "animal spirits" in economics, a sexual division of labor, and racial disparities which may be genetic in origin). Liberals say they believe in evolution, but act like they don't. And our most destructive policies happen at the intersection of these two forms of hypocrisy.
A runner-up: "social security" is not the exact nature of the problem we face. Instead, the problem is the dependency ratio: old people can live off of million-dollar 401K portfolios and the proceeds from selling million-dollar houses, or live off of social security--in either scenario, the working population will be forced to accept lower available consumption (and low returns on their savings) for a given level of income.
I'll go one step further than you on social security, and argue that even your take is not quite correct.
The so-called dependency ratio is not a real problem because most people in the economy no longer do productive work. Our standard of living is not bound by labor, but by resources (oil, lumber, arable land, etc). As 60 year old workers start to retire, no fewer resources will be produced, we're not going to produce less oil because 60 year olds retire. But we may consume less resources because fewer people are commuting to work and occupying climate controlled office spaces.
That use of capitalistic/libertarian ideals for efficiency in business would lead to major social unrest. Keeping dead weight (much of society) working keeps the masses and their pitchforks away from the houses of the ruling class.
61 comments
[ 180 ms ] story [ 1460 ms ] threadI tried this question on a dating site as an experiment for one day... and then forgot I had it up. It generated nearly no responses other than jokes except for one person that was very flustered and was intimidated by it (perhaps unsurprisingly).
As for one thing that I think is true and that most others don't.... well the thing that seems to clash the most is that I find "bad" things funny, regardless of my personal beliefs about them. People really tend to be more of a straight man than you'd think.
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions, which is quite interesting, though it's missing the first two I thought of: gods and the Monte Carlo fallacy.
A more interesting variant of the question might be, what do you believe that most well-informed people don't? That's harder.
"Tell us one thing about the world that you strongly believe is true, but that most people think is not true."
Link to application: http://www.thielfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&...
FYI http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-important-misconcepti...
http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/The_God_Emperor_Come...
Everyone knows the current breeding situation is a problem.
Everyone knows they aren't allowed to talk about solutions.
Individual: Abortion, genetic modification of fetuses, aborting sick fetuses, etc
Social: Overpopulation. The fact that the poor and stupid significantly outbreed the intelligent leading to all kinds of downward spirals. The welfare system that encourages it's beneficiaries to breed as much as possible - and even to induce disorder into their children to maximize revenue. For instance moms on welfare who have produced several kids with fetal alcohol syndrome, not even to bring up issues like nutritional deficiency.
There are welfare moms who literally have bred 10 children with induced mental handicaps - and they are financially rewarded by society the more they do this.
On a wider but less extreme level, there are psychologically dysfunctional parents who breed at a higher rate than the psychologically sound.
I've spoken with many social workers and teachers and others on the front line of this issue and there is a silent but taboo agreement - the use of force in controlling breeding is essential to the future of humanity.
There is also the wider point that the stupid and poor propagate themselves while the intelligent and wealthy prefer not to. This comes down to economic incentives.
Society would benefit from eugenics programs that specifically encourage successful people to breed and discourage unsuccessful people. Right now the incentives are literally opposite of this.
Anyway this is a big topic with many many facets. But speaking to domain experts and reading widely on the topic, it is very clear that some form of what has classically been described as eugenics is necessary for the success of society.
(I'm kissing my karma goodbye right now.)
I see no reason why a healthy infant from 10 generations of white trash has any less genetic potential than an infant from 10 generations of people who attended Ivy leagues.
It's not only about genetics, it's also about upbringing.
Having said that though, it's pretty clear that IQ is related to parentage.
Also, which of your arguments still apply to the world's most populous country?
Right now it seems we can't account for unintended consequences.
No harm intended, I have my own pretty borderline views, just that one of my "character traits" is that I find radical views that are beyond my comprehension (in this example, very right wing views) absolutely hilarious. Another example would be extreme free marketeers.
There's obviously a difference between preference and policy. But my guess is that you're willing to reap the benefits of eugenics without considering the ethical implications.
To clarify I'm neither religiously pro or anti global warming (although I do believe that climate change should happen as a byproduct of a chaotic system with high entropy) - to me the question of whether or not it's solely man made is irrelevant. The questions of importance to me are:
Is it possible to sufficiently geo-engineer the Earth's climate to counteract climate change?
If it is possible where's the cost/benefit analysis (i.e. how much do we spend on geo-engineering to achieve the best 'payoff' in terms of success)?
What's the cost of adaptation (i.e. accepting that the change will happen and adapting ourselves to the changing environment)?
Those questions are relevant regardless of whether or not the world is getting hotter or colder. For me the political muddying of the waters makes it impossible to engage in rational debate with either side. It's become a religion, but unless you're a climate scientist (and I'm not) you realistically only know what you've consumed from others, and there's a lot of people on all sides who are more interested in moulding facts to fit a political argument than identifying what's really happened.
Climate change is natural.
The top rate of income tax should be 90%.
Root is a design fault.
-----
Most people (who accept evolution) claim there's a definitive evolutionary tree for all species.
I believe there is no single, definitive tree, but rather, several trees. Depending on which feature or gene sequence you're studying, and what method you use to construct a tree, you'll get slightly different trees. Sometimes this is just statistical noise, but other times it's due to different traits actually having different lineages, as a result of events like recombination (say, when a virus injects a fragment of DNA into another creature's genome) or horizontal gene transfer [0]. If you build a phylogenetic tree that covers whole genomes for multiple species, it will typically end up being a phylogenetic network [1] rather than a simple tree.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_network
-----
I also believe the original language text of the Bible has been very reliably preserved since antiquity. There's a surprising amount of crossover between the subject of textual criticism [2] and phylogenetics -- comparing manuscript variants (between millions of pages across several centuries) is not that different from comparing DNA mutations. There are very few parts of the Biblical text that are seriously disputed by the legitimately well-informed.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_Criticism
I was under the impression that there was very little dissent between believers and critically-minded scholars alike over either: (i) the texts that compose the New Testament (in particular) of the Bible have been well-preserved and accurately replicated with very few claims of interpolation or revision (ii) The Synoptic Gospels were heavily influenced by at least one common source document which appears to be totally lost.
Most people tend to stop at the standard infinity that lies at the top end of the real number line - "bigger than the biggest number you can think of, and then some, plus one."
Never mind that there's another infinity, just as big, at the far end of the negative side of the real number line, and further infinities in all directions when you bring in complex numbers, quaternions, infinitesimals, the uncountable infinities lying between any two arbitrarily chosen adjacent real numbers and so on.
Also, the "Arabic" number system was invented in India. It was only introduced to the West by the Muslims.
Yes, America, if not for Muslims you'd still be counting in Roman numerals.
Some number of my possible responses, although admittedly I would use none of these for Thiel's essay:
* Modern running shoes increase one's tendency to injury.
* Free will can exist in a fully deterministic universe.
* Saturated fat and cholesterol are not the primary causal factors behind heart disease.
* Keynesian economic reasoning has few virtues in its own right, but is leveraged as a rationalization for policies convenient to those with political power.
Would you mind going further into this one? Barring belief in dualism, I don't see how this can be possible.
The really short answer is that it boils down to a disagreement over what "free will" means. Compatibilists dispute the claim that free will is definitionally equivalent to something like a videogame with multiple endings, where your actions can change which endings you get (the "garden of forking paths" model of free will).
It's actually usually taken as an alternative to dualism, because if humans are 100% made of physical matter that's bound by the usual laws of physics, and we think something called "free will" is meaningful to talk about, then they must somehow be compatible. The alternatives are: 1. dualism, claim that some part of human thought/action takes place outside of the laws of physics; 2. deny that free will exists; or maybe 3. somehow deny that the laws of physics exist, or at least claim they exist in some different way than usually understood.
Daniel Dennett is probably the best-known-among-the-general-public proponent of compatibilism.
1) Rewrite it as: (fill in the blank) economic reasoning has few virtues in its own right, but is leveraged as a rationalization for policies convenient to (fill in the blank).
2) Ask yourself how much political power Keynesians have if they don't even have the power to impose Keynsian solutions.
3) Fill in the blanks for the statement in (1) as it actually applies for those with political power.
If you attempt to read it with the (perhaps generous) assumption that I'm not proposing a tautology, than you might see what I mean.
A Keynesian ideology provides justification for the use of state power that differing economic ideologies do not. It would seem rational (warning: assumption of self-interest) that, holding everything else constant, politicians have a tendency to endorse Keynesian thought.
There must be a cure for death.
(revorad almost got it right but blew the "the one thing" requirement)
I spend real effort trying to talk family and friends into making reasonable preparations, but I run into a lot of skepticism.
One day, psychiatrists will routinely prescribe touch, including sex, as an intervention against depression.
In our lifetimes, the USA will experience economic or political collapse, and maybe even break apart into different regions.
9/11 wasn't an inside job, but the anthrax scare was.
That's a strange thing to say considering that, in the past, religion was the defining aspect of civilization.
It was religion that civilized the barbarians.
Whether from unquestioning faith in mere assumptions of classical economics, or some clinging to ideology, a disappointing number of people-who-think-themselves-smart still believe selfishness explains everything.
In a broad sense, it's very hard to argue that selfish genes don't explain most human behavior. Certainly, I would spend my time differently if I weren't the result of a couple billion years of brutal gene-versus-gene competition.
Furthermore, humans have language, and can even ask themselves questions like "what would so-and-so do?" Our minds are filled up, it seems to me, mostly with the thoughts and data supplied by others. So I wonder if it makes sense to say that we are all individual minds.
Certainly a complete sociopath will still have non-selfish internal organs. But it's highly reductionist to claim that a sociopath is not sociopathic because his heart generously pumps blood to his other organs.
What looks like generosity generally falls into a few categories of gene-level selfishness, e.g. kin altruism, in-group altruism, reciprocal gifts, etc. Our evolutionary inheritance doesn't allow for pure altruism; that's a bug that gets fixed by selfish groups out-reproducing.
I'm also making a more subtle point about the difficulty of delineating where a person ends and society begins. This is a much fuzzier concept for me, but I have a hunch that it doesn't make sense to say that a human personality is entirely contained in the body that we normally associate it with, any more than crashing waves are contained within a rocky shore. The body gives rise to this funny thing called a mind, and yet minds don't seem to be stored just in one brain.
I did not understand your point about the sociopath; it seems to be making my argument for me, that the driving forces at one level of organization tell you little about the next level up.
A runner-up: "social security" is not the exact nature of the problem we face. Instead, the problem is the dependency ratio: old people can live off of million-dollar 401K portfolios and the proceeds from selling million-dollar houses, or live off of social security--in either scenario, the working population will be forced to accept lower available consumption (and low returns on their savings) for a given level of income.
The so-called dependency ratio is not a real problem because most people in the economy no longer do productive work. Our standard of living is not bound by labor, but by resources (oil, lumber, arable land, etc). As 60 year old workers start to retire, no fewer resources will be produced, we're not going to produce less oil because 60 year olds retire. But we may consume less resources because fewer people are commuting to work and occupying climate controlled office spaces.