My therapist said to me once: "I really like pessimistic patients a lot more than overly optimistic ones. A depressed, pessimistic person is judging the world very accurately and is not crushed by a negative outcome, as they have already thought about exactly that. They might even completely circumvent the negative outcome, because they thought about every possibility beforehand. Optimists on the other hand can be crushed and become very depressed when the positive outcome is not the result they are presented with."
Exactly; take every thing good or bad as a life challenge or experience to be fully engaged with and do not give up! Learnt the not giving up as a teen while race sailing; not giving up ever, resulted in a stack of trophies - but also a few submerged boats - in retrospect the submerged boats were more interesting. Winding years forward and experiencing many "challenges" I now have cancer that I am told cannot be cured - but its just another life challenge that I am experiencing and is quite interesting - like boats sinking, and I carry on doing what I like to do...
>A depressed, pessimistic person is judging the world very accurately.
Absolutely not. I've dealt with a lot of pessimistic, depressed people--I've been clinically depressed, as well, in the past--, and we can be the most closed-minded, whiny, oblivious people out there. I think that's exactly how depression actually works: one is enslaved, kept away from experiencing the world as it is, by their extraordinarily reduced perspective, which is seemingly unescapable to the depressed individual.
I don't think it's reasonable to conflate negativity--which leads to bad outcomes--with a realistic mindset--which takes into account potential bad outcomes. I find the opposite to be true, in my experience: the more positive and proactive a person is, the stronger they can become--and not crushed by a negative turn of events.
This is absolutely true in my experience. Going to my therapist I realized that I spent all my time focusing on negative outcomes for a given life problem of mine. So much so that the failure to imagine a more optimistic outcome left me paralyzed to act. This paralysis left me feeling hopeless and depressed. As I talked things over I realized that:
1) We have a perverse tendency to reinforce our existing views in new experiences. For example, if one believes he/she is not a very charming and likable persom, every opportunity to make a new friend may thrown away because the person doesn't have confidence to present themselves in an interesting way or the person may misinterpret another's neutral body language as a negative signal during a conversation.
2) Experience is the best teacher. Experience etches things into our subconscious. If negativity is etched in our brains then it takes a strong conscious effort to over turn it. This can potentially scary because the effort to experience a positive outcome may result is us being beat down further. But we have to see it for what it is, one experience, the next may end differently. Overcoming depression requires concious effort, hope and resiliencey. This is not something that happens overnight.
I can confirm. There are simply different ways how you can view life; positive, negative and probably many more. And all of those see only a projection of reality.
I have been mildly depressed in the past and sometimes it struck me how narrow my view of the world was in those days. Sometimes literally, it seemed as if I was looking through a tunnel and that I was more busy with all the negative thoughts that were going on in my head than with what was really happening around me.
There is a difference between predicting the odds of good and bad stuff accurately. If you take someone like Warren Buffett, he's known as a cheerful optimist and focuses on stuff like the economy making everyone richer over time but he's in the insurance business and better at figuring the risks of death, illness or a nuke taking out NYC more than most.
I find people who look at the world thru "shit colored goggles" tend to be self defeating and will often convince themselves it won't work before starting.
From what I have seen, it seems that the pessimistic person is likely to stay depressed even despite unexpected positive outcomes. It's easy for them to dismiss good things as a fluke. Meamwhile a truly optimistic person can rationalize any event as being for the best somehow and stay positive even if something negative happens unexpectedly.
My (very personal) differentiation of pessimism and depression - pessimism is focusing on anticipating potential negatives (what you described) and depression - is where one would get into the endless loop thinking over particular set of negative outcomes. First one can be practical, although tough. Second one is just harmfull, sorta like personal mini-hell. Would not wish it to even my enemies to get in such state ever.
> In fact, "some psychologists concede that an element of self-deception may be necessary for well-being," Feltham says.
I think about this every day, I thought it was an established fact for some reason. Perhaps I thought it was established since I know the saying "ignorance is bliss"
I'm not sure if self-deception is the correct word. People cannot fit much in their heads. There is too much good and too much evil in the world for a single person to truly percieve. I don't think it's self deception if one tries to focus on good things. It becomes self deception if a person thinks the world is completely good because all they see are good things, though.
Most drivers rate themselves as above average, when in reality only about half are.
I'm sure most people view themselves as nice, reasonable people. The presence of idiots should indicate they aren't all correct.
I know that I'm an attractive guy, who makes extremely well reasoned arguments on the internet, unfortunately it's everyone else that isn't enlightened enough to appreciate my true genius.
I suppose you could file it under cognitive dissonance, self deception seems reasonable too.
Illusion in the spirit is as nothing,
behold a world that runs on illusions!
Their war and peace are made upon illusion,
their glory and their shame are from illusion.
Just beautiful. We have our Baudrillard and The Matrix and think we are so different, modern, cutting edge, living in a 21st century hyperreality. Rumi saw it 800 years ago!
Isn’t it the other way around? The OP is making a causal claim (“depression causes realistic world view”). The parent is merely pointing out the room for selection bias. Burden of proof should be on the OP IMHO.
> Could it be that people who see the world Realistically, get depressed?
This fits my experience quite well.
To give a software development analogy:
The more you learn about deep, esoteric details of various parts of computers (i.e. you get to see computers more realistically than idealized), the more depressed you get about the current state of software development. And yes, late at night, I often work privately on how to improve this situation - but I talk to a brick wall.
> What's depressing about the current world of software?
For example the insanity that it is impossible to understand what actually happens below the surface. The ideal that I have in the back of my mind is that a highly gifted person who can afford to spend a few years of intensive study can really understand each individual line/byte of code that gets executed on the computer (i.e. all of the software that runs on it) completely.
---
An interesting lecture by Jonathan Blow:
Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization
I had this sentiment quit often in the beginning of my career. Now, I simply realize that my lack of understanding crosses every single piece of technology there is. Fridge? No idea. Cars? Well, I can drive it almost as well as I can open a fridge, everything else is magic. How about bicycle? That's easy, right? Well, I challenge you to just now sit down and write a detailed schematic, describing everything that is needed to make a bicycle what it is. Extra points if you can explain why driving on two wheels actually works out.
I know nothing about anything and almost don´t care anymore. The last bit of wanting to understand is bathed the absurdity of it all.
Fridge - well, the standard compressor powered refrigeration system is essentially a heat moving system. What we are doing is moving heat from the inside of the system (which is insulated and mostly "isolated" from the outside of the system) to the outside of the system. This is why you can't cool your house by opening your refrigerator's door, because the heat from the inside of the fridge is moved to the "outside" (the room it is in) - eventually, it would reach equilibrium (and the compressor would probably be overheated). So anyhow, how does this work?
Well - basically by compression and expansion.
A working fluid (the refrigerant - usually a gas in the low-pressure state, and a fluid in the high pressure state) is compressed using a compressor. This turns the gas into its fluid state, and also heats up the gas. It is moved (via the compressor) thru coils on the inside (insulated) of the system, where it is allowed to expand.
Note that in this system there is also a series of check valves and such to prevent the fluid and gas from "moving backwards" in the system; there are also stages where the gas and fluid exist at the same time (like a fizzy drink if you could see it).
During this expansion, it absorbs heat and it also gains volume (turns from a fluid back into a gas). It continues to move (with it's heat content) from the insulated side of the system (inside) to the outside of the system, where it goes thru other coils (radiator), usually with a fan or other cooling system blowing over them to remove the excess heat from them, before the gas goes back to the compressor to be compressed and turned into a fluid again - to begin the cycle anew.
That's the basics of how a refrigerator work. Now - usually, if there's a freezer section, the freezer is where the heat exchange really happens, and cold air from the freezer is periodically circulated from the freezer to the refrigerator portion to keep that side at a cooler temperature.
Air conditioners work the same way - except the "inside" is the house and the outside is...the outdoors. Heat pumps can run in reverse, so to warm your house, heat is moved from the "outside" to the inside of the house, by the very same process (even when it is "freezing" outside - there is still a ton of heat energy available).
This cycle can also be done with heat alone, provided you have a working fluid (refrigerant) which is liquid at the "outside" temperature (under whatever pressure the liquid is at); add a check valve, heat the liquid up, it will expand and turn into a gas, feed it into the insulated part of the system to absorb more heat and then into some outside coils to be cooled down and turned back into a liquid. You can make a fridge where the refrigerant is gasoline (petrol) if you so wanted to. Ammonia is another alternative. LPG can also be used like this, too.
That's basically how a propane or solar powered refrigerator works (I won't go into how dark-sky refrigeration works, suffice to say it is another form of "solar" refrigeration, more of a "backwards" method).
Car? Well - a four-cycle engine is basically this: suck (intake), squeeze (compression), bang (ignition/power), blow (exhaust). Also, for an engine to run, you need fuel, spark, and air - miss any of those (or wrong timing or proportions) things won't work. I won't go into further detail - I really could, I'm sure you can see.
Suffice to say - I could also describe that bicycle very exactly, how it works, how it is steered (the whole "turn in the opposite direction of the lean" thing...), etc.
I've got a ton of this crap shoved into my head; I relish learning new stuff all the time, no matter what it is. Sometimes (most of the time) I don't absorb it all in one shot. But I usually retain enough of it to be able to understand more a second and third time around. Some things I will probably n...
Just finished the Youtube talk on degrading technology / knowledge. Really liked that perspective, although I disagree with quit a bit of Jonathan Blows points.
About the challenge: I had the feeling, that you and a good chunk of readers here could go explain good deal of it all. But my point goes further: We all hit the wall of understanding sooner or later and all what is truly required is to know how use the technology. And that's exactly the same in information technology. I use databases daily. Do I know how they work? A bit, just enough for work and that is all what is needed. That's why I like to disagree with Jonathan Blow. Some people abstracted a great deal of complexity away, because it's simply irrelevant. As a result, we've seen an explosion in tech, just not in the nieces where he's looking. The modern ecosystem in tech is the normal way of economics, where everyone specializes him or herself further and further, understanding the specific domain better at the cost of everything else. Today, the average Joe can code as a result of all this simplifications. But Jonathan Blow compares the elites of coding, people who build engines, with Joe. That's misunderstanding what has happened, the level of analysis is wrong. Also, people like John Carmack are not gone, they simply work on new problems.
And as you mentioned yourself, there is so much technology surrounding you that you have no idea of how it works, like chemistry. Still, you use it to your benefit because other people who know this stuff simplified its use. And not just for you and me, also for other chemist, like coder for other coders.
Now a bit of a rand, skip it if you like: The school system, including university, killed so much of my curiosity, it's insane. I had to learn so much bullshit that I'm almost glad for one of my least great attributes, my bad memory. Because there was really no point remembering most of it. It's just too bad that I can't control my own garbage collector. Last year, I learned a great deal about machine learning (again, as I did it in college, too) and now can remember almost nothing. Despite really enjoying the course and throwing myself into it. What I don't use, I forget and of course I use only a tiny bit of skills and knowledge at work. I'm not happy with the way it is, but it simply is. I also learned so much about databases and liked that subject, but the only thing I really retain is what I use in my work.
That brings me to my final thought tidbit: My brain obsesses with ideas that you would put more in the category of philosophy. It's what you think about when you have nothing to do or start daydreaming that's probably where your brain is best at. I never asked people in tech what they think about in those moments. I'm really, really curious about the answer.
> My brain obsesses with ideas that you would put more in the category of philosophy. It's what you think about when you have nothing to do or start daydreaming that's probably where your brain is best at. I never asked people in tech what they think about in those moments. I'm really, really curious about the answer.
My experience with these is: I often think that I have some deep mathematical insight. The problem with these insights is that they "partly right" - they are often based on a good mathematical intuition of mine. But unluckily the mathematical research typically has come a lot farther than my insight - i.e. my insight is actually a really old hat in mathematical research.
So instead of daydreaming about some clever mathematical insight of yours, better cram advanced math textbooks - they will teach you a lot more than what you will ever come up with by daydreaming.
For sure. Study the literature of your subject. The point is, what do you think about automatically when you don't focus on a specific task? My expectation is, that people who are great at what they do continue to think and daydream about their work. When I read about philosophy (or related subjects), I'm continuing to think about it for days or weeks. That doesn't happen with tech, although that's my daily business.
I wouldn’t call it depressing but I think for example, when you look at even the most fundamental types, for example in c#, they have difficult problems.
For me it's the amount of bloat and too many levels of not so good abstraction. It's not really depressing yet, but more irritating to me. And I take it as an opportunity.
> esoteric details of various parts of computers (i.e. you get to see computers more realistically than idealized), the more depressed you get about the current state of software development.
Honestly the most depressing part is hearing all these older guys talk about the really cool problems they worked on during the dawn of modern computing, knowing I'm just gonna be writing shitty business apps till I retire
> Honestly the most depressing part is hearing all these older guys talk about the really cool problems they worked on during the dawn of modern computing, knowing I'm just gonna be writing shitty business apps till I retire
You can do this cool stuff at night and weekends (I do!).
I just learned about King Leopold and what he did to the people of Congo [1]. How anyone can be at all educated about the world and not be depressed is beyond me.
It's not "dying out" -- people are working very hard to reduce it.
Sometimes we say things like "the world has changed" but the truth is that people have changed the world, through tremendous efforts.
It's easy for a bystander to say "the problem just seemed to go away!" when the people who are doing the work can stare at them and say, "Ahem... it didn't just go away."
I don't deny that. Atrocities have reduced partly because people have worked hard to reduce them. Also technology has helped - you do bad stuff now and someone will film it on their phone, upload to youtube and the whole world can see and make a fuss.
1. The world is, in fact, pretty messed up a lot of the time.
2. There are different ways to deal with it:
2a. Don't deal well with it; get depressed
2b. Denial: Refuse to face up to how messed up the world is.
2c. Deal with the world in some other way that is neither denial nor depression.
Presumably in their study 2a and 2c would both score more "realistic" and 2b would score less "realistic"; but 2b and 2c would be grouped together in the study, causing the "not depressed" group as a whole to score lower on the "realistic" axis.
IOW, the simplistic conclusion of this study would be, "The only way to avoid being depressed is to go into denial"; but the study may also be consistent with, "One way people avoid being depressed is to go into denial; but there may be ways to avoid depression other than denial".
The two (realism/knowledge and depression) seem to be in a feedback loop. Probably children are happier because they dont know enough yet. And fools/ignoramuses - that conventional wisdom has some merit. It's a question though why humans would evolve to become inert in the face of knowledge. Who knows, it may be an advantage.
This statement is way too sweeping... Some forms of pessimism probably reflect that, I'm an optimistic, not-depressed person who sees things that way - but I know plenty of often-depressed people who fail to see their circumstances clearly, and spiral because as a result of it.
Friend: "I'm such a failure and my future is definitely going to be horrible!"
Me: "So, who's judging you as a failure, why does such judgments even matter, and how exactly do you have no options or influence over your future?"
I've had this dialog plenty, and it has little to do with realism.
Or they realistically assume that they have average ability but they have above average expectations. Most people will have to face the reality that they will never be special in some way, so if you aren't fine with just being another face among the masses you will be depressed. Or someone they care about just died, their expectations was that they would have this person for most of their life is now broken and nothing they can do can fix this, unless they believe in spirits and ghosts and ouija boards of course.
It's my operating hypothesis that people's abilities are generally limited mainly by their ways of being. Except for the few with physical and biochemical disabilities. And with general human limitations.
I mean, we're all familiar with "math anxiety". And the argument that women have generally been conditioned to think that they're bad at math. Or bad at spatial reasoning. Or that men are less empathetic, or better with tools, or whatever.
Consider scientific thinking. Based on my admittedly limited experience with young children, I believe that they're all scientists. For children in the "why phase", when I've actually taken time to help them consider how one might answer their questions, I've consistently been impressed.
Also, it's clearly not so much about having answers. Indeed, focusing too much on answers tends to stifle creativity.
Correlation is not necessarily causation. Unless they have scienced the causation it might be quite possible for people who see the world more realistically to be at greater risk for depression.
I see this as sort of the main riddle (or catch-22 if you're the pessimistic type) of life. The semi-unrealistic hope of optimism is what motivates us to get things done.
For the HN crowd, consider startup founders. The vast majority of startups fail, yet virtually all founders go into it overestimating their chances of success. After all, if they were realistic about their chances, they'd find the whole business too crazy to begin with.
There are lots of ways to decrease risk in a startup, and if the founder is not seeing this realistically, s/he can get caught up in the details of the startup instead of looking at the fastest way to decrease the risk of failing.
Most startup founders are rich, they are just gambling with some money they have. Akin to a salaried worker gambling a small amount of their salary in a night at the casino.
Do you have any references for most startup founders being rich? Qualitatively this does not align with my experiences at all with almost any founder of a company I’ve ever met. Almost all of them risked everything.
Having a house and a car, or even retirement savings, that can be risked on a startup makes you rich.
Even if that is everything you have, you are still rich.
Find me the startup founder who has less than $100 in savings, no car, no house, no retirement funds, less than $1k in total assets, and whom is the richest persons in their family and network of friends.
I didn´t meant Gates or Jobs rich but wealthier than average. For them an startup is just a gamble they can afford to do comfortably.
For example: a couple of months ago I talked to a guy that was trying to decide between founding an startup or going to India to study yoga/meditation for a year (and he was not going to travel on the cheap, believe me). For him failing meant going back to work in his fathers company for a while until he gets motivated to start some other company again (or quit an go to India).
I am pessimistic by nature + I've seen and experienced a lot of failures. I still go into startups, but I account for likely failures by allocating resources in a way where I will not be wiped out in case of likely failure.
I guess such optimism/pessimism can be different on different levels? I.e. "Chances of that idea to work out are nearly nil, but if I allocate a non-critical amount of resources it is worth a try as if it will work out - it will be great"? Basically I am pessimistic about the chances of a startup working out, but I am very optimistic about upside if, in a very unlikely event, the idea does work. Optimistic - because idea can work, but still be a crappy result, which honestly, did happen. I.e. it sorta works, but not quite big enough payoff, requiring me to maintain it without a clear path forward. In such scenarios, I usually just slowly cut resources to it as my interest wanes over time, but I still have quite a few websites/domains from 10+ years ago which I can't push myself just to not renew one day...
EDIT: and as another person mentioned, as I accumulate more wealth, I try out more ideas indeed. But honestly, I am no more optimistic about these. Just the ability to invest allows me to try more things without jeopardizing future of my family. The toughest limit is time, unfortunatelly I still clueless how to leverage wealth to acquire time resources (so far I am very bad at hiring, no matter if it is helping to clean the house or to write code).
Take a moment and consider this quote by the late Amos Tversky about his view on pessimism:
"When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,' Amos liked to say. 'Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens."
This is a rational explanation for why anyone ought not succumb to pessimism.
This is not black and white. Often we are optimist and we ignore the suffering of the ones closest to us because we simply don't believe they are suffering.
That doesn't have anything to do with being optimistic, as far as I can tell. Dismissing others' suffering is caused by a lack of empathy or by selfishness--the two go hand in hand. It can certainly seem to a depressed person that an optimistic one is oblivious to their suffering, but it is not always the case. I think the best you can do with negative people is make it absolutely clear that you acknowledge their pain while getting them to progressively come out of it.
If another person's internal mental state isn't visible, so we have to work it out from things that are visible, there might be a wide range of possible guesses and so being optimistic or pessimistic might produce very different results.
Has my friend Joe stopped coming out with us because he's busy with a great new girlfriend he just hasn't told us about yet - or because depression means he can barely get out of bed in the morning let alone leave the house?
> 'Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens."
I have solve that long ago. Something bad will happen. If I can prevent it, I will and only live it once. If I can't prevent it, why should I be worried ? I make preparation for after it happen.
Tversky was big on measuring things, and I wonder if he ever measured this theory. Measuring happiness is difficult, but I don't necessarily buy the idea presented here that it's simply a matter of totting up the number of negative events.
I have arrived at what I consider a rational level of pessimism about some things. When they occur, it bothers me, but not for very long. I shrug and don't dwell because for me, it was just what I expected. Sometimes good things happen, and I can't quantify that those outcomes are "better" for being unexpected, but I wonder if Tversky would.
This is incorrect. When you take realistic (some people call it pessimistic) view on situation, you are disappointed initially, but when it finally happens, you are already fine - "told ya so!" and move on.
That seems reasonable to me. I've often found optimism in others to be foolish. And for bipolar me, extreme optimism is a sign of hypomania.
But there's a lot more to depression than seeing the world realistically. There's a tendency to feel inadequate, hopeless and disempowered. And there's more to that than seeing oneself and ones capabilities realistically.
One aspect is failing to break out huge problems into manageable pieces.
One aspect is failing to break out huge problems into manageable pieces.
This is the main problem I have had with depression. Beeing overwhelmed by the smallest problem because the consecquences of all actions that has to be taken to solve it.
BTDT and I'd say no, it's a psychological effect of being overwhelmed mentally, even if you could handle it in better circumstances. Even the most trivial problems become crushing. Even imagined problems.
Nah. I’ve had trouble convincing myself that doing dishes wasn’t an insurmountable task. Depression messes with your perspective. Basic, easy tasks seem impossible.
But I've learned that dirty dishes stabilize if you let them air dry. They don't even smell bad. Or get moldy. And after soaking an hour or two in hot water with detergent, they're easy to wash.
So then I just need to wash whatever I need for the next meal. And of course, leave enough clean for my wife to use.
I think you're missing the point, it is foolish, it doesn't map to reality, but that doesn't make it maladaptive. The point here is that the maladaptive group, depressed people, see the world closer to its real state, clearly it is advantageous for humans to see the world through rose colored glasses to some degree.
My basic understanding is that Steve Jobs was a manipulative, mentally ill child abuser who gets a pass because he made the iPod. Everyone has their own perspective, but I’d rather not be those things than do them and make a difference by manufacturing popular consumer goods. But this is of course not an argument for depression.
From my own experience I'd agree with this - I can feel down, certainly, but I'm nowhere near the non-functioning, clinically depressed state I was in for 4 years a few years back.
I don't think the "realistic" vision I had of "the world" has really changed, just the attitude: I'm still "stupid as f*ck" and observing "person X I knew in high school totally has such a better life than I do" - but now, it's about interpreting it as a reason that things should probably change, whether it's the perspective ("So what?") or the action ("Are you not even going to try doing something about it?").
OTOH, it really doesn't help that there are so many more things to be depressed about pretty much all the time - abuses of social media, pornography, addiction, fracturing social structures. I ask, incredulously, how can anyone read this [1] and NOT want to die, or at least profoundly sympathize? People haven't evolved "rosy enough glasses" to mask these symptoms of modernity - of course there are problems, both with "the world" and our abilities to get by.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?"
I'm reminded of the 'ultimate perspective vortex' from the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a terrifying execution device that showed people exactly how significant they were in the grande scheme of things for an instant. Sounds a bit similar to what you're describing.
That’s exactly it and I imagine a big piece of what actually makes a depressed person more tuned to reality. I’m not sure which is the cause exactly, but I could imagine a person depressed spending more time ruminating about their place and deferring to the external for answers versus trusting one’s own feelings or perspectives by default.
The world is really going down right now and just following news what's going on is reason enough to cry like a baby or lose it completely.
That's one of the main reasons why many people take drugs - it helps to forget what's happening around us and it makes us numb enough to stop feeling the constant pain when we think about the things happening to our brothers and sisters who aren't lucky enough to be born in the right place, to have the right parents or live in the "right" place etc.
Too much information on how the people are screwed every minute may be reason enough to be depressed if you don't shut those thoughts out in the long run.
I hate to break it to you, but if the news is affecting your mental health you should realize that that is by design. The world may or may not be in a good state of affairs in an absolute sense, but it is better than it has ever been, and insofar as the news seems worse now than in the past, that has more to do with those in charge of the news media and their incentives and biases than actual changes in the state of the world getting worse.
Ok I will stop it right here but of course there are many more tendencies that would speak against a too optimistic view on the world at the moment in my opinion.
Of course there is enough media, drugs and be-happy-every-day-mantras etc. to disturb your thoughts and allow to ignore all this.
I don't see how he arrives at the conclusion there would be less pollution. Compared to when? What exactly would he define as such?
I could counter all the stuff he proposes now with bringing in more of the bad news but I've already done that in another answer if you are interested.
He can be optimistic as he is a white male with prosperity. This group is the one with the best conditions on earth - it's easy to enjoy life if you can be a part of that.
The people who suffer the most don't even have the luxury to think about global concerns and inequality. They have to fight to survive every day and they have to feed their families and escape the next war to finally arrive in the West where he will be treated worse than a dog.
Please ask these people how they cannot share his positive view on our planet.
The non white third world has been on a roll the last 30 years - China is way richer like 10x and even Africa is growing quickly now. Life expectancy way up.
Re pollution I imagine he's referring to urban air pollution which has got better since coal burning days. Not quite sure on that one.
One can see the world more realistically without being depressed. Depression IMHO isn't necessarily a byproduct of a pessimistic worldview. If anything, nihilism (if we consider it a pessimistic worldview) had helped me to be more realistic. To accept that there is no intrinsic meaning in my life. If anything, it has brought me down to earth.
Not every form of depression is pathological. I think our current culture doesn't really provide many avenues to express sadness, so people probably don't tell the truth when they have doubt. And doubt is an uninvited guest for business.
Not directly applicable to the article though, that is probably a completely different effect.
Real_ism_ can mean passivity, and a lack of creation. If seeing things as they are means paralysis, how does it help us? Not being realistic can help make things happen.
I think it can be valuable to see things realistically, and then rejecting what you see.
Not being realistic can also mean that you are creative on false premises, and that the result might fail because of it. By being realistic about the world and the environment surrounding you be it work-, political-, economical- or otherwise you can see actual problems plaguing others, and _maybe_ you can generate something that solves a tiny part of what people struggle with.
Perhaps if so many of us are depressed then that is the natural reaction to the environment we have been placed in, which is why it takes some level of delusion to be happy.
That's right, because when you are depressed,you will be aware to make new friends, you will judge them by reality, and any situation you will face, you will judge it by reality. Emotion doesn't work that much for depressed people.
It depends on whether you're talking about actually depressed people, or people just "feeling a bit down". It seems like you're referring to the latter.
Depression is a very serious medical condition, often leading to suicide, and involves mostly just sleeping, crying in bed, and not wanting to do or see anything.
To my mind, depression is basically a feeling of being powerless. When lab researchers want to see if a mouse is depressed, they pick it up by the tail. The normal mice struggle, however uselessly, the depressed ones just hang there.
In my experience though, The worst is being powerless and not knowing why. If you can gain understanding of the world, even though your situation might not change right away, it still helps.
Let's be realistic: there are only humans with subjective narrow view of the world out there. And whoever will tell you that you are more/less realistic than some other category of people are judging you by their own narrow opinion of what is the ultimate-true-real-reality™.
I use their model of reality all the time when arranging things in my house. Like Newton's formulae it works well in certain contexts, even though Einstein proved Newton wrong.
This is a bad analogy that makes it sound like you're defending flat-earthers.
It's like saying you use Hermeticism's Principle of Rhythm to build a pendulum-powered clock...
And unlike both Flat-Earth theory and Hermetics, Newton was actually demonstrably right. Flat-earthers and Hermeticists spin their theories out of whole cloth.
The shape of the Earth is just a model [1] - an approximation. All models have margins of error. All models are wrong, some are useful [2]. The map is not the territory [3]. All scientific models are scale variant [4] e.g contextual.
Scientific models are pragmatic at best. Useful for a particular purpose within some domain of applicability
When last did you take the curvature of the Earth into account when arranging your furniture?
Of course, you can always dismiss my perspective as "Just another nihilistic, depressed anti-realist"
> When last did you take the curvature of the Earth into account when arranging your furniture?
I don't do that, but neither do I assume that the entire earth is flat just because my living room is. Saying that all theories are born equal is nonsense, some things are more correct than others.
It doesn't matter what we SAY about the shape of the Earth though, does it?
It only matters how we use/apply those theories in practice.
Practical errors have consequences.
Theoretical errors don't. It's just lip service without follow-through.
I can SAY that the Earth is triangular and nothing will happen. Q.E.D If you insist that it is in (some way) wrong or incorrect for me to say that the Earth is triangular. Well. The best I can do is to tell you to mind your own business.
I can't remember the last time the Earth's shape mattered to my practical, decision-making process.
But when you go out and try to spread your gospel that the earth is triangular then people will correctly tell you to shut up and read some books before arguing further.
Not necessarily. David Deutche argues that theories can be argued as having merit based upon if they are good or bad explanations, regardless of application. A good explanation is one that fits the data and is hard to vary. The flat earth theory fails on both.
Given a finite data set, an infinite number of functions/curves can explain it. This is curve-fitting 101 stuff.
All explanatory models are either an over-fit or an under-fit to the data. With the fine print being "acceptable error rate". "The Earth is flat" may be wrong, but it could be acceptably wrong to me.
Your false dichotomy is that sure, your flat-earth approximation is fine, but only on basically personal scales (up to a few miles or so).
You can't charactierize your loacl approximation as a general theory because it will fail as soon as you scale up to horizon effects, and breaks completely when reaching planetary scale.
If you want to keep your flat theory in its applicable scale, fine. Just don't expect to project it outside of its useful scale.
Just like the Newtonian model works well until you reach the scales where relativistic effects demand the shift to relativity.
You seem to be agreeing with me in a disagreeable tone. Instrumentalism [1] is precisely what I am rooting for.
That's exactly what I said in my OP: "All scientific models are scale variant e.g contextual."
>You can't charactierize your loacl approximation as a general theory
The exact same criticism can be laid upon your local approximation.
You have chosen precisely the scale at which your 'general model' works.
And you have ignored all other scales at which your 'general model' doesn't work.
You are chery-picking your scale - the domain of applicability of your model.
>Just like the Newtonian model works well until you reach the scales where relativistic effects demand the shift to relativity.
And what if you go the other way? At quantum scale neither Newton nor Einstein works.
>Just don't expect to project it outside of its useful scale
That's exactly what I said also: "Scientific models are pragmatic at best. Useful for a particular purpose within some domain of applicability."
So I don't see how you could possibly be appealing to any notion of a 'general theory' without also coming up with a 'general and objective utility function'.
What may be a useful to a Quantum Physicist needs not be useful to a Cosmologist.
The only hope for a 'general theory' is the Theory of Everything. We don't have one of those. Well, physicists don't - theists do.
>Neither party seems to want to acknowledge that the other party's model works just fine within its domain of applicability.
There are two very different points here.
Yes you can make most of your daily actions with a "flat earth" model. Actually, this is even an overkill model for most daily actions. A first person video game generally don't include such a model, so you can extrapolate that a "sight sized box model" is enough, and that any concept of earth is superfluous.
Then you have the part of you that seek to find a model of the world through concordant items of evidence, be it for practical reasons or simply for the matter of trying to make sense out of them.
You can use a GPS without any specific opinion on physical models. But you won't even send a satellite in space with an attitude stuck into a "my flat earth model is true" belief. That doesn't mean physical models that are used to put satellite on orbits are true, but at least they proved accurate enough to lead to that kind of exploits.
The curvature of the Earth is already accounted for; my house sits upon a foundation of poured concrete which is leveled off and flattened locally. In this way, we also accounted for the gravitational geoid variation around the house. Honestly, I have to compensate more for the curvature of the floorboards!
To be clear, the flat earth theory is wrong, I don't subscribe to it, and yes I'm defending flat-earthers. I reserve the right to defend people I disagree with, and to point out ways that wrong ideas can occasionally translate into useful interactions with reality.
Yep. Our cognitive deficits and delusions are just normalized in society EG; "Meritocracy" and the American Dream. Theirs are sensationalized and mocked not because it's wrong but because it's not normalized.
The problem is that knowledge at foundation is axiomatic and circular. When we discuss science, we agree to do it in the good faith and subscribe to certain undefined concepts and (unproven by definition) axioms: what it means to know, what are basic established facts, scientific method, logical reasoning, Occam's razor, 1 + 1 = 2, and countless others.
Flat-earthers are just biological computers like the rest of us. But there is no path to reconciliation because they were not imprinted with our axiomatic system early enough. They happily do their computing (aka thinking) like the rest of us, but their world view is wrong in our perspective, only because we subscribe to different axiomatic system.
I am depressed by objective things like the die off of birds and bees and acidification of the oceans and temperature rises. I am depressed by the state of humans and their behaviors which are observable if harder to quantify.
And as I've gotten older I realize I have a pretty solid grasp on things and the sort of woo-woo model of reality you propose "everything is relative" is eminently ignoreable.
> The people most likely to experience depressive realism? Introverts, males, and people with high IQs
I cringe every time I see Vice on the front page. To be "depressively realistic", I think they care less about scientific accuracy, and more about making their introverted, male, mildly-depressed audience feel smart.
There's a little more on the subject of realists vs non-realists in the book "Thinking Fast and Slow" if the topic interests you. He doesn't link it to depression, but it's still quite an interesting read.
I had hoped to see a comment like this about Vice higher up. I find that their content is usually insubstantial, and when it is otherwise, facts are presented or omitted staggeringly skewed fashion for maximum emotional engagement. In short, if you want to feel strongly about misinformation and partial-truths, Vice is the outlet for you.
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[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 554 ms ] threadAbsolutely not. I've dealt with a lot of pessimistic, depressed people--I've been clinically depressed, as well, in the past--, and we can be the most closed-minded, whiny, oblivious people out there. I think that's exactly how depression actually works: one is enslaved, kept away from experiencing the world as it is, by their extraordinarily reduced perspective, which is seemingly unescapable to the depressed individual.
I don't think it's reasonable to conflate negativity--which leads to bad outcomes--with a realistic mindset--which takes into account potential bad outcomes. I find the opposite to be true, in my experience: the more positive and proactive a person is, the stronger they can become--and not crushed by a negative turn of events.
1) We have a perverse tendency to reinforce our existing views in new experiences. For example, if one believes he/she is not a very charming and likable persom, every opportunity to make a new friend may thrown away because the person doesn't have confidence to present themselves in an interesting way or the person may misinterpret another's neutral body language as a negative signal during a conversation.
2) Experience is the best teacher. Experience etches things into our subconscious. If negativity is etched in our brains then it takes a strong conscious effort to over turn it. This can potentially scary because the effort to experience a positive outcome may result is us being beat down further. But we have to see it for what it is, one experience, the next may end differently. Overcoming depression requires concious effort, hope and resiliencey. This is not something that happens overnight.
I have been mildly depressed in the past and sometimes it struck me how narrow my view of the world was in those days. Sometimes literally, it seemed as if I was looking through a tunnel and that I was more busy with all the negative thoughts that were going on in my head than with what was really happening around me.
This can get out of hand when circumvention becomes a lifestyle.
I think about this every day, I thought it was an established fact for some reason. Perhaps I thought it was established since I know the saying "ignorance is bliss"
Most drivers rate themselves as above average, when in reality only about half are.
I'm sure most people view themselves as nice, reasonable people. The presence of idiots should indicate they aren't all correct.
I know that I'm an attractive guy, who makes extremely well reasoned arguments on the internet, unfortunately it's everyone else that isn't enlightened enough to appreciate my true genius.
I suppose you could file it under cognitive dissonance, self deception seems reasonable too.
[1] https://bit.ly/31jwRUb
This fits my experience quite well.
To give a software development analogy:
The more you learn about deep, esoteric details of various parts of computers (i.e. you get to see computers more realistically than idealized), the more depressed you get about the current state of software development. And yes, late at night, I often work privately on how to improve this situation - but I talk to a brick wall.
For example the insanity that it is impossible to understand what actually happens below the surface. The ideal that I have in the back of my mind is that a highly gifted person who can afford to spend a few years of intensive study can really understand each individual line/byte of code that gets executed on the computer (i.e. all of the software that runs on it) completely.
---
An interesting lecture by Jonathan Blow:
Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk
---
Also read some texts of Alan Kay's STEPS project:
For a well-readable overview, consider https://blog.regehr.org/archives/663
Some progress reports:
> http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf
> http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf
Lots of additional papers about STEPS (and other topics): http://www.vpri.org/writings.php
(I want to make it clear that I consider what came out of the STEPS project to be very disappointing :-( ).
I know nothing about anything and almost don´t care anymore. The last bit of wanting to understand is bathed the absurdity of it all.
Thanks for the links, sounds interesting.
Fridge - well, the standard compressor powered refrigeration system is essentially a heat moving system. What we are doing is moving heat from the inside of the system (which is insulated and mostly "isolated" from the outside of the system) to the outside of the system. This is why you can't cool your house by opening your refrigerator's door, because the heat from the inside of the fridge is moved to the "outside" (the room it is in) - eventually, it would reach equilibrium (and the compressor would probably be overheated). So anyhow, how does this work?
Well - basically by compression and expansion.
A working fluid (the refrigerant - usually a gas in the low-pressure state, and a fluid in the high pressure state) is compressed using a compressor. This turns the gas into its fluid state, and also heats up the gas. It is moved (via the compressor) thru coils on the inside (insulated) of the system, where it is allowed to expand.
Note that in this system there is also a series of check valves and such to prevent the fluid and gas from "moving backwards" in the system; there are also stages where the gas and fluid exist at the same time (like a fizzy drink if you could see it).
During this expansion, it absorbs heat and it also gains volume (turns from a fluid back into a gas). It continues to move (with it's heat content) from the insulated side of the system (inside) to the outside of the system, where it goes thru other coils (radiator), usually with a fan or other cooling system blowing over them to remove the excess heat from them, before the gas goes back to the compressor to be compressed and turned into a fluid again - to begin the cycle anew.
That's the basics of how a refrigerator work. Now - usually, if there's a freezer section, the freezer is where the heat exchange really happens, and cold air from the freezer is periodically circulated from the freezer to the refrigerator portion to keep that side at a cooler temperature.
Air conditioners work the same way - except the "inside" is the house and the outside is...the outdoors. Heat pumps can run in reverse, so to warm your house, heat is moved from the "outside" to the inside of the house, by the very same process (even when it is "freezing" outside - there is still a ton of heat energy available).
This cycle can also be done with heat alone, provided you have a working fluid (refrigerant) which is liquid at the "outside" temperature (under whatever pressure the liquid is at); add a check valve, heat the liquid up, it will expand and turn into a gas, feed it into the insulated part of the system to absorb more heat and then into some outside coils to be cooled down and turned back into a liquid. You can make a fridge where the refrigerant is gasoline (petrol) if you so wanted to. Ammonia is another alternative. LPG can also be used like this, too.
That's basically how a propane or solar powered refrigerator works (I won't go into how dark-sky refrigeration works, suffice to say it is another form of "solar" refrigeration, more of a "backwards" method).
Car? Well - a four-cycle engine is basically this: suck (intake), squeeze (compression), bang (ignition/power), blow (exhaust). Also, for an engine to run, you need fuel, spark, and air - miss any of those (or wrong timing or proportions) things won't work. I won't go into further detail - I really could, I'm sure you can see.
Suffice to say - I could also describe that bicycle very exactly, how it works, how it is steered (the whole "turn in the opposite direction of the lean" thing...), etc.
I've got a ton of this crap shoved into my head; I relish learning new stuff all the time, no matter what it is. Sometimes (most of the time) I don't absorb it all in one shot. But I usually retain enough of it to be able to understand more a second and third time around. Some things I will probably n...
About the challenge: I had the feeling, that you and a good chunk of readers here could go explain good deal of it all. But my point goes further: We all hit the wall of understanding sooner or later and all what is truly required is to know how use the technology. And that's exactly the same in information technology. I use databases daily. Do I know how they work? A bit, just enough for work and that is all what is needed. That's why I like to disagree with Jonathan Blow. Some people abstracted a great deal of complexity away, because it's simply irrelevant. As a result, we've seen an explosion in tech, just not in the nieces where he's looking. The modern ecosystem in tech is the normal way of economics, where everyone specializes him or herself further and further, understanding the specific domain better at the cost of everything else. Today, the average Joe can code as a result of all this simplifications. But Jonathan Blow compares the elites of coding, people who build engines, with Joe. That's misunderstanding what has happened, the level of analysis is wrong. Also, people like John Carmack are not gone, they simply work on new problems.
And as you mentioned yourself, there is so much technology surrounding you that you have no idea of how it works, like chemistry. Still, you use it to your benefit because other people who know this stuff simplified its use. And not just for you and me, also for other chemist, like coder for other coders.
Now a bit of a rand, skip it if you like: The school system, including university, killed so much of my curiosity, it's insane. I had to learn so much bullshit that I'm almost glad for one of my least great attributes, my bad memory. Because there was really no point remembering most of it. It's just too bad that I can't control my own garbage collector. Last year, I learned a great deal about machine learning (again, as I did it in college, too) and now can remember almost nothing. Despite really enjoying the course and throwing myself into it. What I don't use, I forget and of course I use only a tiny bit of skills and knowledge at work. I'm not happy with the way it is, but it simply is. I also learned so much about databases and liked that subject, but the only thing I really retain is what I use in my work.
That brings me to my final thought tidbit: My brain obsesses with ideas that you would put more in the category of philosophy. It's what you think about when you have nothing to do or start daydreaming that's probably where your brain is best at. I never asked people in tech what they think about in those moments. I'm really, really curious about the answer.
My experience with these is: I often think that I have some deep mathematical insight. The problem with these insights is that they "partly right" - they are often based on a good mathematical intuition of mine. But unluckily the mathematical research typically has come a lot farther than my insight - i.e. my insight is actually a really old hat in mathematical research.
So instead of daydreaming about some clever mathematical insight of yours, better cram advanced math textbooks - they will teach you a lot more than what you will ever come up with by daydreaming.
Floating point numbers for example. Or date times. Egad! Or strings. There’s a Jon Skeet talk that covers this very well. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l3nPJ-yK-LU
Honestly the most depressing part is hearing all these older guys talk about the really cool problems they worked on during the dawn of modern computing, knowing I'm just gonna be writing shitty business apps till I retire
You can do this cool stuff at night and weekends (I do!).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free...
Sometimes we say things like "the world has changed" but the truth is that people have changed the world, through tremendous efforts.
It's easy for a bystander to say "the problem just seemed to go away!" when the people who are doing the work can stare at them and say, "Ahem... it didn't just go away."
1. The world is, in fact, pretty messed up a lot of the time.
2. There are different ways to deal with it:
2a. Don't deal well with it; get depressed
2b. Denial: Refuse to face up to how messed up the world is.
2c. Deal with the world in some other way that is neither denial nor depression.
Presumably in their study 2a and 2c would both score more "realistic" and 2b would score less "realistic"; but 2b and 2c would be grouped together in the study, causing the "not depressed" group as a whole to score lower on the "realistic" axis.
IOW, the simplistic conclusion of this study would be, "The only way to avoid being depressed is to go into denial"; but the study may also be consistent with, "One way people avoid being depressed is to go into denial; but there may be ways to avoid depression other than denial".
People who see the world realistically while living in a "positive thinking" society often feel like there something wrong in them.
Friend: "I'm such a failure and my future is definitely going to be horrible!"
Me: "So, who's judging you as a failure, why does such judgments even matter, and how exactly do you have no options or influence over your future?"
I've had this dialog plenty, and it has little to do with realism.
I mean, we're all familiar with "math anxiety". And the argument that women have generally been conditioned to think that they're bad at math. Or bad at spatial reasoning. Or that men are less empathetic, or better with tools, or whatever.
Consider scientific thinking. Based on my admittedly limited experience with young children, I believe that they're all scientists. For children in the "why phase", when I've actually taken time to help them consider how one might answer their questions, I've consistently been impressed.
Also, it's clearly not so much about having answers. Indeed, focusing too much on answers tends to stifle creativity.
For the HN crowd, consider startup founders. The vast majority of startups fail, yet virtually all founders go into it overestimating their chances of success. After all, if they were realistic about their chances, they'd find the whole business too crazy to begin with.
Find me the startup founder who has less than $100 in savings, no car, no house, no retirement funds, less than $1k in total assets, and whom is the richest persons in their family and network of friends.
Then you may have a point.
I'd say most are rich - false. Tend to come from wealthier than average backgrounds - true.
For example: a couple of months ago I talked to a guy that was trying to decide between founding an startup or going to India to study yoga/meditation for a year (and he was not going to travel on the cheap, believe me). For him failing meant going back to work in his fathers company for a while until he gets motivated to start some other company again (or quit an go to India).
Way above most people possibilities.
I guess such optimism/pessimism can be different on different levels? I.e. "Chances of that idea to work out are nearly nil, but if I allocate a non-critical amount of resources it is worth a try as if it will work out - it will be great"? Basically I am pessimistic about the chances of a startup working out, but I am very optimistic about upside if, in a very unlikely event, the idea does work. Optimistic - because idea can work, but still be a crappy result, which honestly, did happen. I.e. it sorta works, but not quite big enough payoff, requiring me to maintain it without a clear path forward. In such scenarios, I usually just slowly cut resources to it as my interest wanes over time, but I still have quite a few websites/domains from 10+ years ago which I can't push myself just to not renew one day...
EDIT: and as another person mentioned, as I accumulate more wealth, I try out more ideas indeed. But honestly, I am no more optimistic about these. Just the ability to invest allows me to try more things without jeopardizing future of my family. The toughest limit is time, unfortunatelly I still clueless how to leverage wealth to acquire time resources (so far I am very bad at hiring, no matter if it is helping to clean the house or to write code).
"When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,' Amos liked to say. 'Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens."
This is a rational explanation for why anyone ought not succumb to pessimism.
Has my friend Joe stopped coming out with us because he's busy with a great new girlfriend he just hasn't told us about yet - or because depression means he can barely get out of bed in the morning let alone leave the house?
I have solve that long ago. Something bad will happen. If I can prevent it, I will and only live it once. If I can't prevent it, why should I be worried ? I make preparation for after it happen.
I have arrived at what I consider a rational level of pessimism about some things. When they occur, it bothers me, but not for very long. I shrug and don't dwell because for me, it was just what I expected. Sometimes good things happen, and I can't quantify that those outcomes are "better" for being unexpected, but I wonder if Tversky would.
But there's a lot more to depression than seeing the world realistically. There's a tendency to feel inadequate, hopeless and disempowered. And there's more to that than seeing oneself and ones capabilities realistically.
One aspect is failing to break out huge problems into manageable pieces.
This is the main problem I have had with depression. Beeing overwhelmed by the smallest problem because the consecquences of all actions that has to be taken to solve it.
Isn't this rather a sign that the world is simply too complex and should be simplified?
But I've learned that dirty dishes stabilize if you let them air dry. They don't even smell bad. Or get moldy. And after soaking an hour or two in hot water with detergent, they're easy to wash.
So then I just need to wash whatever I need for the next meal. And of course, leave enough clean for my wife to use.
>That seems reasonable to me. I've often found optimism in others to be foolish.
"Stay hungry, stay foolish",- Steve Job's commencement speech at Stanford.
Sometime foolishness is what make a difference. It is really all about timing and context.
But then there's hypomania.
PS in psychology they have a concept called appropriate affect. Its kind of the opposite of cognitive dissonance.
I don't think the "realistic" vision I had of "the world" has really changed, just the attitude: I'm still "stupid as f*ck" and observing "person X I knew in high school totally has such a better life than I do" - but now, it's about interpreting it as a reason that things should probably change, whether it's the perspective ("So what?") or the action ("Are you not even going to try doing something about it?").
OTOH, it really doesn't help that there are so many more things to be depressed about pretty much all the time - abuses of social media, pornography, addiction, fracturing social structures. I ask, incredulously, how can anyone read this [1] and NOT want to die, or at least profoundly sympathize? People haven't evolved "rosy enough glasses" to mask these symptoms of modernity - of course there are problems, both with "the world" and our abilities to get by.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?"
1 https://incels.wiki/w/Scientific_Blackpill
The world is really going down right now and just following news what's going on is reason enough to cry like a baby or lose it completely.
That's one of the main reasons why many people take drugs - it helps to forget what's happening around us and it makes us numb enough to stop feeling the constant pain when we think about the things happening to our brothers and sisters who aren't lucky enough to be born in the right place, to have the right parents or live in the "right" place etc.
Too much information on how the people are screwed every minute may be reason enough to be depressed if you don't shut those thoughts out in the long run.
Just because bad things are happening and dominate news doesn't mean that's all that's happening or that the net is negative.
Let me bring in some of those facts:
1. "25.9 million refugees globally -- the highest level ever recorded" according to Amnesty International (https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/refugees-asylum-seeker...)
2. "Global emissions increased from 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 1900 to over 36 billion tonnes 115 years later" (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...)
3. "Plastic in the oceans" (https://ourworldindata.org/where-does-plastic-accumulate)
4. "52.4 percent decline in sperm concentration and a 59.3 percent decline in total sperm counts from 1973 to 2011 for men in the West" (https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/sperm-counts-in-the-w...)
Ok I will stop it right here but of course there are many more tendencies that would speak against a too optimistic view on the world at the moment in my opinion.
Of course there is enough media, drugs and be-happy-every-day-mantras etc. to disturb your thoughts and allow to ignore all this.
I could counter all the stuff he proposes now with bringing in more of the bad news but I've already done that in another answer if you are interested.
He can be optimistic as he is a white male with prosperity. This group is the one with the best conditions on earth - it's easy to enjoy life if you can be a part of that.
The people who suffer the most don't even have the luxury to think about global concerns and inequality. They have to fight to survive every day and they have to feed their families and escape the next war to finally arrive in the West where he will be treated worse than a dog.
Please ask these people how they cannot share his positive view on our planet.
The non white third world has been on a roll the last 30 years - China is way richer like 10x and even Africa is growing quickly now. Life expectancy way up.
Re pollution I imagine he's referring to urban air pollution which has got better since coal burning days. Not quite sure on that one.
Not directly applicable to the article though, that is probably a completely different effect.
>we tend to operate under happy delusions that lift away when we're depressed
Well this brings unhappy delusions in the same way. Just that it matches more with therapists world view and called "more real"?
I think it can be valuable to see things realistically, and then rejecting what you see.
You feel good, get too optimistic, things don't work out because you underestimated everything aaand you're back to being depressed.
Depression is a very serious medical condition, often leading to suicide, and involves mostly just sleeping, crying in bed, and not wanting to do or see anything.
In my experience though, The worst is being powerless and not knowing why. If you can gain understanding of the world, even though your situation might not change right away, it still helps.
I hope this helped you to feel more depressed.
It's like saying you use Hermeticism's Principle of Rhythm to build a pendulum-powered clock...
And unlike both Flat-Earth theory and Hermetics, Newton was actually demonstrably right. Flat-earthers and Hermeticists spin their theories out of whole cloth.
Scientific models are pragmatic at best. Useful for a particular purpose within some domain of applicability
When last did you take the curvature of the Earth into account when arranging your furniture?
Of course, you can always dismiss my perspective as "Just another nihilistic, depressed anti-realist"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_invariance
I don't do that, but neither do I assume that the entire earth is flat just because my living room is. Saying that all theories are born equal is nonsense, some things are more correct than others.
It only matters how we use/apply those theories in practice.
Practical errors have consequences. Theoretical errors don't. It's just lip service without follow-through.
I can SAY that the Earth is triangular and nothing will happen. Q.E.D If you insist that it is in (some way) wrong or incorrect for me to say that the Earth is triangular. Well. The best I can do is to tell you to mind your own business.
I can't remember the last time the Earth's shape mattered to my practical, decision-making process.
Because strictly and Mathematically speaking, Earth is NOT round. It's NOT spherical or oblate either.
Why do you selectively reject some approximations (models!), but accept others?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Terrestrial_Reference...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Geodetic_System
All explanatory models are either an over-fit or an under-fit to the data. With the fine print being "acceptable error rate". "The Earth is flat" may be wrong, but it could be acceptably wrong to me.
This is tackled by model-dependent realism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism ) and by this paper "To explain or to predict" ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.0891.pdf )
You can't charactierize your loacl approximation as a general theory because it will fail as soon as you scale up to horizon effects, and breaks completely when reaching planetary scale.
If you want to keep your flat theory in its applicable scale, fine. Just don't expect to project it outside of its useful scale.
Just like the Newtonian model works well until you reach the scales where relativistic effects demand the shift to relativity.
That's exactly what I said in my OP: "All scientific models are scale variant e.g contextual."
>You can't charactierize your loacl approximation as a general theory
The exact same criticism can be laid upon your local approximation.
You have chosen precisely the scale at which your 'general model' works. And you have ignored all other scales at which your 'general model' doesn't work.
You are chery-picking your scale - the domain of applicability of your model.
>Just like the Newtonian model works well until you reach the scales where relativistic effects demand the shift to relativity.
And what if you go the other way? At quantum scale neither Newton nor Einstein works.
>Just don't expect to project it outside of its useful scale
That's exactly what I said also: "Scientific models are pragmatic at best. Useful for a particular purpose within some domain of applicability."
So I don't see how you could possibly be appealing to any notion of a 'general theory' without also coming up with a 'general and objective utility function'. What may be a useful to a Quantum Physicist needs not be useful to a Cosmologist.
The only hope for a 'general theory' is the Theory of Everything. We don't have one of those. Well, physicists don't - theists do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism
What theist theory is supposed to provide a theory of everything[1]?
To my knowledge, theology don't bring any light on such a model.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything
Did you use a GPS lately?
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps....
Neither party seems to want to acknowledge that the other party's model works just fine within its domain of applicability.
There are two very different points here.
Yes you can make most of your daily actions with a "flat earth" model. Actually, this is even an overkill model for most daily actions. A first person video game generally don't include such a model, so you can extrapolate that a "sight sized box model" is enough, and that any concept of earth is superfluous.
Then you have the part of you that seek to find a model of the world through concordant items of evidence, be it for practical reasons or simply for the matter of trying to make sense out of them.
You can use a GPS without any specific opinion on physical models. But you won't even send a satellite in space with an attitude stuck into a "my flat earth model is true" belief. That doesn't mean physical models that are used to put satellite on orbits are true, but at least they proved accurate enough to lead to that kind of exploits.
In all the times I've used a GPS - the shape of the Earth mattered not one bit to me.
>some things are more correct than others.
On the relative scale of "very incorrect" to "very correct" descriptions of Earth's shape where does "real" start?
In relation to the geodesic systems (e.g ETRS89, NAD, WGS84 ) "round" is a very imprecise description of Earth's shape.
Is WSG84 more 'real' than ETRS89?
Flat-earthers are just biological computers like the rest of us. But there is no path to reconciliation because they were not imprinted with our axiomatic system early enough. They happily do their computing (aka thinking) like the rest of us, but their world view is wrong in our perspective, only because we subscribe to different axiomatic system.
And as I've gotten older I realize I have a pretty solid grasp on things and the sort of woo-woo model of reality you propose "everything is relative" is eminently ignoreable.
> It seems like the button is doing something, but actually it's not attached to anything
> Ask people if they felt like they had any effect on the world
> Depressed people say "nothing I do matters", non-depressed people say "Well, I'm not sure, but there might be some effect, yeah"
"DEPRESSED PEOPLE SEE THE WORLD MORE REALISTICALLY"
I cringe every time I see Vice on the front page. To be "depressively realistic", I think they care less about scientific accuracy, and more about making their introverted, male, mildly-depressed audience feel smart.