Ask HN: What’s the most outrageous belief you’re confident is true?
I was thinking through my 2022 predictions and one came to mind that I thought, “hmm… I’d better keep that one to myself.” Its further out than 2022, and hopefully it’s a never. But I am confident it’s coming, and I sure it’s a bad outcome for humanity: we become more and more influenced by learning systems that are goaled to drive behaviors that are not in our best interest, and, eventually lead to a virtual enslavement that leaves us with no free will.
I shudder at the thought.
What outrageous belief are you confident is true?
381 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadMeaning: some alien life ( bacteria) landed here on a comet and evolved.
See also this excerpt from Peter Watts: http://akkartik.name/post/2012-11-21-07-09-03-soc
I do think a lot of common cultural how-to knowledge was destroyed around the middle of the 20th century by the new corporate "mad men" advertising world. For example, complex knowledge of cooking was universal, passed from generation to generation from an early age, then along came heavily advertised processed foods and within a generation, vast swaths of the population have much less know-how being received from their parents, just favorite brands and how to boil the mac and cheese. So much cultural traditional knowledge was lost when it was replaced with mass manufactured "junk culture" and only later are their descendants slowly reaccumulating it.
It takes hard people to build a functioning society.
I always hoped 9/11 would rejigger us, but I guess it's too late for that.
While the world has improved our perception of the world has turned increasing negative. This is mostly because of the media and how the media uses fear to grab attention. But make no mistake, your children and you live in a world that is safer than it ever has been in the history of humankind.
I didn't find the main villain to be right wing. If anything, a BezosZuckerbergMusk conglomeration that acted pretty annoyingly progressive in mannerisms and requests.
To me the left was portrayed as social media addicted idiots, and the right as purposefully ignorant idiots(dont look up). In the end, I think someone on either side would end up offended.
From a zoomed out view, you're right. We've got it pretty sweet.
But between COVID, which to this day people can't even agree is a real thing...political divides, worker shortages, etc... it's been a tough year. Crime is up -hugely- this year, especially murders. I see people just routinely running red lights like they don't exist, going 120 down i95, and just don't see cops anymore.
I think it's probably a lot to do with media, social media, COVID restrictions and shutdowns, and housing becoming unaffordable... half the people are just at the breaking point all the time this year.
I came here interested in seeing outrageous beliefs and arguments that validate their beliefs enough for deeper examination.
I do not feel defeated, nor that I no longer believe what I wrote.
What I was trying to agree with is that if you step back and look at the good things, life doesn't seem so bad.
But at the same time, I still feel like -society- is crumbling. In the US, because I don't experience life in other countries.
Nobody knows how bad social media will end up being for society. For all the criticism of the news media, there are incidents all over the world of hate crimes being motivated by social media spreading rumours quickly and widely. The way that likes and retweets exploit the neurochemistry of our brains to make us produce increasingly incendiary content for people we've never met is going to be looked at like asbestos or leaded gasoline in a hundred years.
I'd much rather be poor today than 100 years ago.
I'd rather be a rich ancient Chinese emperor then a modern poor person even though a modern poor person has luxuries no ancient Chinese emperor can ever hope to have.
I feel comparing the US to all of civilization is a fair comparison.
This statement heavily depends on the definition of "war". I don't have the data, but yes, it might very well be true that we have less armed conflicts going on at the moment than any time before.
However, I am convinced that we are currently in an ongoing global war - but this war is very different from the "traditional" ones. Instead of being based on large-scale armed conflicts, it's mainly waging in media, courtrooms, governments, elections and online forums. And the sides in this war are less clearly delineated than we're used to.
But the effects of this war are no less real then those of other types of conflicts; just less obvious.
The greatest effect of war is mass slaughter and death. The actual effect of war is on a different level than even the "woke" movement.
A single man named "George Floyd," out of a population of millions dies and the accused officer (who is obviously a racist out to slaughter all black people) is sentenced to prison as a martyr. A lot of people would say from this that society is breaking down. I beg to differ. This is society confused and with too many first world problems to worry about.
This is on a very different scale than a machine gun mowing down an entire beach of soldiers on omaha during WW2.
Many find these statements outrageous and offensive. I didn't come up with them, just believe them.
Paul’s teaching here is that he’s not permitting women to be teachers in the church. That in God’s decreed order everyone has a role. Male and female have roles to fill and duties unique to their sex. This isn’t misandry or misogyny. Men and women complement each other. Male nor female, there is no difference in dignity and worth.
Most people accept that 2 + 2 = 4 is true. But this is only accurate within the math realm, which is a purely abstract concept. There's no such thing as "2" in the physical world.
I view most religions in a similar way, they are a form of truth, that exist within their abstract realm.
I read a fantasy novel once that had a character that believed in religion. All of them. At the same time. Sincerely.
I always admired him.
…wat.
ಠ_ಠ
At this point, society has quite a lot of science and engineering relying on the fact that numbers have objective meaning in the physical world.
Similarly, according to QM, the number of fundamental particles in any system is not well-defined. They’re constantly appearing and disappearing.
How do you count “people”? Easily and consistently? What about conjoined twins? Still doable? What if the twins are highly asymmetric with one twin just a bump on the head of the other? Just a few cells? Shared brain but seperate bodies? Still easy to “count”?
Zero functioning engines will not.
Yeah, pretty easy to count.
Etc…
Reality is much more squishy than you might think.
If there is indeed a point you’re trying to make, I think it’s lost on me.
People like their idealised models of the world, but they're fundamentally still just idealised and models.
It's somewhat illuminating to learn that all abstractions are leaky.
For example, you can't reliably represent "sex" using a "bit" type in a database. It's not just "M" or "F". You can have "unknown" (of course), "known but not willing to say" (whatever), intersex of all sorts, transexuals, genetically XY but physiologically female, etc...
The world is complicated and messy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis
Similarly, there's no clear demarcation between species in many cases.
There's no such thing as a "tree" either: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
I could go on and on.
You appear to be presenting these ideas as though they would be new to me, which they aren't. In fact, these ideas are essentially pop-science[0].
Incidentally, the rhetoric you are employing is also used by Flat Earthers[1], so well done for that, I suppose.
> For example, you can't reliably represent "sex" using a "bit" type in a database
This example you've swiftly jumped to is a little too on the nose for me to not read it as bait. Did you think you'd found a bible-bashing Trump-voting conservative to argue against?
> I could go on and on.
Yes, I can see that. I will however once again invite you to try and articulate a point that you're trying to make.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhwcEvMJz1Y
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnwTtr_JYCM
Sounds like, just your opinion, man.
There are other things in the Bible that challenge me more than textual criticism.
On the flip side, I'd say the core "rationalization" I have for my belief is what the Bible teaches about sin. It's obvious to me something is very wrong with with the world we live in. I think the Bible explains convincingly both what's wrong and what the fix is.
Do you instead mean that you believe that the broad themes are true, but that there are lots of details written by authors that are flawed?
To believe that it is "utterly" true indicates to me a capacity for doublethink bordering on total insanity.
If not, maybe try it. :) IMO there are reasonable and even compelling arguments about why the Bible is both inerrant and trustworthy.
I spent five years in seminary and believe, after significant investigation, that the Bible is utterly true.
Probably my favorite bit is when Genesis says that god decided people could not live longer than 120 years, then later goes on to name a ton of people who lived for hundreds of years. We also know today that there is at least one person who lived longer than 120 years, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment .
And of course I won't even get into just how fantastically contradictory every gospel is with the others over quite a startling array of details of the story of the death and ascension of Jesus.
Yah, some of that stuff is admittedly hard, the different gospel narratives are right up there with the best of them. Although, I do believe they can be reconciled.
My apologies for assuming you were just parroting common internet wisdom.
Do miracles still happen or have they conveniently stopped happening in the modern world? If anything it would be easier to prove nowadays with most people walking around with cameras.
For example, I could ask: "How does the Bible help me be a better Python developer?" The most direct answer is, "It doesn't."
Biblical wisdom, in response, might say something like: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world (e.g. be the best Python developer) and forfeit his soul?" And, if you believe that's a better and more important question, then the Bible starts to have value and insight.
I only have anecdotes regarding miracles. Usually from missionary settings. But, I've also realized that while miracles are frequent in the Bible particularly because they are extraordinary, most of the biblical timeline unfolds without mention of any miracles. I think it's probable miraculous signs are not nor expected to be commonplace.
At that point, one might as well turn to Buddhism or the wisdom in Hindu texts, which is as good as, if not better than wisdom in the Bible. The Bible would only be special if it was the word of God, but if it cannot give us any more insight into understanding our world than science can, it's a lost cause.
The Bible says that it is the divinely inspired word of God, that Jesus himself is the exclusive way to heaven and that all other religions are fabrications and devotion to them leads to hell. Hell is a real place, with real suffering brought on from disunity with God. Quite the wager imo.
> but if it cannot give us any more insight into understanding our world than science can, it's a lost cause
It’s surprising to me that especially in this year alone people cling to science as their religion. Modern medicine is effectively still alchemy in light of comprehensive knowledge of the human body. No scientist can recreate the human hand, eye or ear in perfect authenticity to all of its intricacies. It’s trite at this point to even mention all that we do not know of our own humanity. We can’t even fix depression with SSRI’s! We have no clue the true mechanism of action as it interacts with brain chemistry.
The Bible declares that in every individual, God created the very last detail of their existence. That before time began he knew you and I as individuals. Jesus came and rebuked fevers. Literally spoke to a fever to tell it to leave. He told bacteria or viruses to leave another humans body and it did. She was saved. Jesus can do that because he’s God. He can do that because he has comprehensive, complete, understanding of the human body. He designed it. He made it.
And if you truly believed that science were as flimsy as you appear to suggest, next time you fly somewhere, ask for a priest to fly the plane, not a pilot.
Science has its use, but in the grand scheme of things, science only helps us see the mirror dimly.
Textbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
I haven’t been able to find a single contradiction that hasn’t been answered by a cogent explanation that includes the surrounding context, intertext references and ties to larger overarching themes. And believe me, I love and enjoy peering deeply into those holes.
Perhaps the beauty is that those 66 books written over centuries tell a continuous and noncontradicting story.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t difficult sections of scripture. There are things that come off as quotes that are actually paraphrases. There are different point of views between the gospels that insist 1 person was there when 2 people were in another account of the same situation. These are easily remedied when you consider the focus and theme of the book and the clear intentions of the author.
The authors are indeed flawed (as humans, standing in the pages of history), but they write with the inspiration of God himself and make no error in recording their account.
Happy to help with other concerns.
https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/accounts.html
The animals were created globally first. Once Adam was created, God created animals again so Adam could see the process, understand that God is Creator, and participate in ruling over God's creation.
Interesting website choice. I spent a year as an agnostic because of that website before I started to realize there must be another perspective to consider.
I believe there are resources out there that can help someone to faithfully interpret. And the converse also. The skeptics annotated Bible being in the latter category IMO.
A: everything in this book is literally true
B: what about this passage where it says 3+4=9?
A: my interpretation of that passage is that the 9 represents a 7 in that particular context
The salient point being: that even if A has arrived at a literally true interpretation of the passage, the truth came from A, not from the passage. Further, although A believes they're arguing that the book is inerrant, what they're effectively claiming is that their interpretations are inerrant.
> what they're effectively claiming is that their interpretations are inerrant.
I don’t think A is claiming that, as the most basic understanding of Christianity understands that the individual is terribly flawed and errant.
If your presupposition for this conclusion is based on your earlier point might have either misstated something or you’re claiming a conclusion without an expressed premise.
Humans aren't rational beings that form conclusions by logically composing facts into a singular point. Instead humans are more prone to construct a scaffold of logic in order to support and existing belief. That site is picking and choosing passages in order to support a misguided belief.
Instead a person must start with no beliefs and formulate a conclusion from the facts. If you do this, it is undeniable that the bible is real.
I once told this to an atheist and he was astonished because my description of his subconscious behavior and lack of awareness was 100% what he thought I was doing.
This makes me wonder do atheists even realize how unscientific and illogical they are? Are they constantly thinking that I'm the one that's illogical? Are humans so unaware of their own biases that we can never ever truly determine what is real and what isn't?
I also think you are being quite uncharitable to most atheists. The majority of us grew up in the church, have read the bible, utterly believed the bible was true, were devout believers, and generally were at some point quite indistinguishable from you or any other truly intellectual believer in terms of worldview.
It really was the kinds of contradictions the comment you replied to indicates, along with hundreds of others, and the absolute mental knots that had to be constructed in order to justify them that set me on the path of disbelief. This is the path for millions of people as they take a serious reckoning of their beliefs and with their holy books and do a fundamental reexamination of their entire worldview and belief structure.
I don't think that either of us is being disingenuous in our portrayal of our beliefs. That said, I really do think that your interpretation of what people are doing when they examine these contradictions and draw the conclusion of disbelief is, in fact, the theological equivalent of p-hacking is fundamentally untrue.
What verifiable facts are in the Bible?
Can any of the claimed miracles be replicated today? Say handling snakes or drinking poison, which has resulted in multiple deaths of believers.
Two religious people can't agree which parts of the Bible are literal and which are just a story, so it's funny to see accusations at the other side.
Lack of the ability to replicate something means that it is just hard to prove that something is true. Not being able to prove something to be true via replication does not mean it is not true.
You think I’m illogical. I think you’re illogical. In the end we’re just two Spidermans, pointing at each other.
>This makes me wonder do atheists even realize how unscientific and illogical they are? Are they constantly thinking that I'm the one that's illogical? Are humans so unaware of their own biases that we can never ever truly determine what is real and what isn't?
You're an atheist too, towards other religions like Islam, Hinduism etc. When you truly understand that your arguments against those religions go against Christianity too, you will understand atheists.
I don’t think you should be so confident that everyone else sees it this way.
If what everyone else thinks is a factor, than the majority of the world is not atheist.
Just using the linguistics of the word, "Atheists" are definitively people who do not believe in a theos, ie: a g/God. It would be nonsensical to call a polytheist or monotheist an atheist.
> When you truly understand that your arguments against those religions go against Christianity too...
Christianity is relatively unique[1] in the sense that it claims exclusivity to salvation through Jesus Christ. As it relates to your argument, this tenant allows Christians to make claims to spiritual supremacy. Interreligious comparisons are moot at that point.
[1] Conditioning that statement here, I can't keep up with all the world's religions
But you’re proceeding to form a logical, rational argument in saying this. How are we to ever understand what you’re intending?
A person born into atheism isn't just going to change sides as soon as he's presented with evidence that Christianity is real. Rather he will twist and bend the existing evidence in a way so as to support is current world view.
When you do place together all the facts, logically speaking, what follows is that the bible is real.
Atheism is non-belief.
I do think it’s useful to highlight here though that the difference between belief and non-belief is not pedantry, and it’s not inconsequential.
The entire scientific method is about challenging ideas to discover the truth. When a scientist makes a claim to another scientist, the default position is “I don’t believe it. Please show substantial evidence to support your claim.”
This is different from faith-based scientism, which is more similar to any other faith-based ism in that the method is to protect ideas from challenge in order to preserve the “truth”.
>I do think it’s useful to highlight here though that the difference between belief and non-belief is not pedantry, and it’s not inconsequential.
If you don't wish to continue arguing with me why the heck are you still highlighting things? The difference is pedantic. It's like talking about the difference between adding a negative number and subtracting a positive number.
These are linguistic phenomenons and you are just adding negative qualifiers to words thinking that it has a profound affect on meaning. It is 100% pedantic. Additionally my religion is not a belief. It is a logical conclusion built from the composition of facts.>The entire scientific method is about challenging ideas to discover the truth. When a scientist makes a claim to another scientist, the default position is “I don’t believe it. Please show substantial evidence to support your claim.”
The scientific method cannot ever discover the truth. Proof is the domain of math and logic. In science and therefore the real world, nothing can be proven. To quote Einstein: "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
Science is not about proving things to be true. The entire endeavor of science is an attempt to prove something false. Repeated failures to prove something false only indicates that something "might" be true.
This coupled with the fact that all observations tools in science have limited accuracy and limited precision makes it such that even the act of disproof is done through the lens of probability. Or in other words, nothing can really be disproven either. This is a bit philosophical and a bit too pedantic but the point is to illustrate that I understand the scientific method to a degree greater than even most atheists.
>This is different from faith-based scientism, which is more similar to any other faith-based ism in that the method is to protect ideas from challenge in order to preserve the “truth”.
Let me reiterate my point. My stance is not faith-based. It is self-evident logic. Every religious person you talk to parrots the buzz word of "faith" but really what they are saying to you is that their "belief" to them is as logical and rational as science is to you.
For example, I don't lack a belief that an elephant is in my living room, I have a positive belief that there is no such elephant.
You must willfully ignore all the hard questions you can't answer.
But the "teachings" basically boil down to "treat others how you would like to be treated. There is nothing god like in that... its pure evolutionary pragmatism.
The egyptians kept stellar records and there's no record of 100k people wandering the wilderness of a 20 mile stretch of land for 40 years. It's hard to fathom that'd go unnoticed.
It's also a fact that the books of moses were first written down about 800 years after he would've lived...so how can that be infallible if it's passed by word of mouth.... Ever play the telephone game?
The best evidence is that the egyptians were very biased in what was recorded in ways that would be likely to have survived (triumphs, yes, defeats, not so much) and that even when things were recorded, events and persons who later fell into disfavor were actively eradicated from the kind of durable, monumental records that would be most likely to survive.
> and there’s no record of 100k people wandering the wilderness of a 20 mile stretch of land for 40 years.
What 20 mile stretch of land are you talking about? With the classical (but probably wrong) association of the Yam Suph with the Gulf of Suez, the “wilderness” would have been (or at least started) on the Sinai Peninsual, which is more than 20 miles in either dimension. (There’s a number of other interpretations of the Yam Suph, including the Gulf of Aqaba, which would have put the wilderness in (again, starting in) Arabia. (There’s good reasons to doubt the Exodus story, but you’ve completely missed the real ones: while the absence of records of the actual Exodus is much less surprising than you make, the absence of evidence of anything like the population that supposedly took part in it ever existing in Egypt at any time in order to leave in the Exodus is the big one.)
> It’s also a fact that the books of moses were first written down about 800 years after he would’ve lived…so how can that be infallible if it’s passed by word of mouth.... Ever play the telephone game?
Societies with high literacy may not be good at maintaining stable oral traditions, but those without it are known to be. Even if that weren’t true, mundane written documents aren’t infallible either, believing in infallible writing usually involves invoking a special divine gift of inspiration. But if that works for writing, there’s no reason it can’t work for oral tradition, or for writing that is remote from events.
Well, you wanted outrageous didn't you?
One of them is "The Egg" by Andy Weir, where everyone on earth is a single entity at different parts of its life.
But I truly believe that we are the universe experiencing itself. Observation and matter are inseparable, and that consciousness isn't required for observation, but is useful for it.
Thanks for the rec.
But I do believe in consciousnesses at different levels, like you mention. Also, at different time scales. For example, some systems may only appear conscious to us when considering 100 years of their time as 1 second of our time. The complexity of the system probably has some direct correlation to the "amount" of consciousness that can emerge from it over some time scale.
After sobering up, I’m 99% sure this is a delusion, that my brain is just running wild and inventing the experience. That other 1%, though…
Well, you wanted outrageous didn't you?
Do you know if this idea/theory has a common name?
Maybe panpsychism?
I've only heard the term used in recent physics discussions, but apparently it has a longer history of usage in philosophy, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
I’ve met all sorts of people socially - surgeons, cleaners, plumbers, Pilates instructors, farmers, barristers, drivers etc.
But I’ve never met a dentist anywhere other than at their surgery practice. I’ve heard dentists often marry other dentists as well. They charge an extortionate amount of money for doing very little compared to many other similar professions. They must be a cult.
Some people who have had low chronic infections i.e. feeling sick while there has not been anything wrong recognized by the traditional medicine (i.e. infection not even showing up in the blood samples) have found relief after removing all teeth with root canals. My dentist has also done some published research on this subject, but it is not knowledge mainstream dentists are familiar with.
However, it is probably not enough to remove the tooth, it must be cleaned properly as well, so you better talk to a natural dentist. Regular dentists think infections heal themselves, and sometimes they do, but apparently not always.
In any case, you should not take medical advice from random internet person and I am not qualified to give any, so the above is not medical advice.
I have not read it myself, but the book Accidental blow up in medicine has been recommended to me on this subject.
Yes, we have a number of doctors, lawyers, a number of farmers including many active ones, pilots, lots of programmers, sysadmins, a few kids (I think) and from time to time some homeless here on HN but I cannot remember a single person admitting they are a dentist.
I sometimes hear people say it's a matter of how you define words like "believe" but to me, that only to complicates the matter.
I think almost all if not all of our serious problems can be traced to this kind of discrepancy. Maybe that's my outrageous belief, heh :S
Yes, it is possible to play with the words like redefine ”belief”, but does not get us any closer to the truth.
I was amazed that (1) there are many of them and (2) they can still run successfully for several years.
The tie between intelligent design and Christianity isn't a necessary one. Deists could believe in intelligent design and be consistent; Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Jews as well.
Furthermore, not all Christians would subscribe to "free will" (as in libertarian free will, the flavor that most people subscribe to). A lot of more conservative traditions would affirm soft-determinism or even fatalism.
I suppose so. As far as I’m aware, it grew out of a need for Christians to present a scientific-seeming theory to explain the evidence supporting evolution, without supporting evolution. I imagine other religious groups might have a similar need, but Intelligent Design is one that Christians came up with.
> Furthermore, not all Christians would subscribe to "free will"
This I don’t understand at all. You may be correct, but I don’t see how it makes any sense. Without free will how could there be sin, and without sin what did Christ die to save us from?
There are various parts of the Bible which suggest free will does not exist, and belief in predestination has a long history in Christianity. This verse in Romans is a good example:
-----
Not only that, but Rebekah’s children were conceived at the same time by our father Isaac. Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad—in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls—she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” Just as it is written: “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”
What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! 15 For he says to Moses,
“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”
It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. For Scripture says to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.
Romans 9:10-21-----
Of course, there is also plenty of evidence for free will in the Bible, the Genesis account being one example. And trying to square that circle can get complicated[0,1].
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_in_theology#In_the_B...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination
Also what if there is overwhelming evidence that something is untrue. You trust the evidence but you still "believe" the thing the evidence contradicts?
How do you explain this? I cannot identify with this interpretation of the world. Say I'm looking at a rock and you're looking at a rock. But despite All evidence on the contrary I "believe" the rock doesn't exist. How would I explain my reasoning?
I think all beliefs must come from some nonzero amount of evidence. They seem absurd when evidence from one domain is transferred to a different domain in order to support some statement.
I think everything is deterministic because I can't imagine true randomness. It's a concept we use to represent lack of information.
I don't have a good grasp of quantum physics and I think every process described as random is like a coin flip: the outcome seems "random", but in reality you would be able to predict it if you had 1. enough information about the initial conditions 2. sufficiently accurate knowledge of the presumably deterministic physical laws governing the process.
It seems simpler to assume we just don't know, rather than attributing it to the unusual property of true unpredictability. We already know that a chaotic dynamic system is difficult to predict, and even encryption algorithms we conjure up have very high entropy. So why isn't that enough here?
TLDR: "Not only can we experience, for example, falling, but we can also reflect on that experience and create change based on that reflection.... This implies that human free will is the sole known entity in the universe capable of eliciting change based on conscious reflection."
(Funny article, anyway!) [https://thenextweb.com/news/theoretical-physicists-think-hum...]
What is "conscious" reflection? I think "consciousness" is another one of those terms that masks our fundamental misunderstanding of how things work.
Nothing good comes out of thinking free will doesn't exist. It is just a massive cop-out.
Furthermore a lot of history cannot be properly explained without it.
Last, even if it somehow was true and every act of defiance was just a mental illness everyone would be better of not being aware of it.
In fact anyone that mentions that free will doesn't exist actually makes me appreciate even more that I have one and also to embrace the opportunities it gives me.
There, see you later :-)
"Mensch kann zwar tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will."
I agree.
The biggest difference between this factor and the others is this one is genuinely new and sudden, a jump discontinuity of a change in the last few years. And there is a strong profit motive for the addictive app makers, and there are incentives for teachers and administrators to turn a blind eye.
(Source: worked in a classroom for a semester. It's really, really bad. I encountered kids who would come up to ask a question, then get distracted by their own phones and lose interest before being able to listen to my reply to the question they themselves chose to ask, as if they forgot why they were even standing)
I ofc have had one as an adult , and while I don’t feel like I’ve become dumber (mostly thanks to aggregating experience), I’m almost certain my ability to do many things, including learn has been significantly throttled.
But I help my friends and wife with them all the time! After several decades of IT and being on-call 24x7 with one or more devices, most interfaces are easy to decipher.
You're likely far better off because you were not brought up in a smartphone environment.
It partly comes back to parents: if parents won't support a rule, it isn't practical for the school to enforce it. Sometimes what the kids are distracted by on their phone is a non-urgent text from their parents! (Not that there is such a thing as an urgent text... that's what phone calls are for, and parents can always call the main office if an urgent message needs to be conveyed)
Tbh - I’d say we’re over educated even if it seems like the basic systems are not doing well. People are persevering anyway.
What’s not working? We don’t have much funding for academic research that allows people to get paid a reasonable wage that is comparable to private industry (or a change in profession). That’s the only issue and you really just have a capitalistic government to blame for that. If they actually paid well and gave good wages to researchers - we’d have lots more research done. Instead - the research is done for cheap/free by a bunch of shmucks doing their PhDs. The system is working in the capitalists favor.
Questioning probability – Controlled probability theory
https://paradite.com/2014/10/23/questioning-probability-cont...
Extinction is Natural, So is Global Warming
https://paradite.com/2018/11/06/extinction-is-natural-so-is-...
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Design: Modern design sucks. Everything after 1990, especially after 2000 is completely shit. I truly mean all design. Industrial Design to Architecture to the garbage you see in the browsers today. We threw away physical controls, can't even find them. Alps catalogue is dwindling and toggle switches are no more. Go explore how things used to be done, look up advertisements from 1970's. Also, the Big Tech design monoculture is shit. Everyone suddently in 2020 decided to add rounded corners. It happened almost overnight like a meme spreading through the design circles.
Globalisation: Imagine if you were to travel to Japan in the year 1890. Everyone wore kimonos. It was a prestine, isolated and incredibly rich culture. Same with France or US or any nation. It is fun to explore how US and USSR had invented stuff during the cold war. Russia had their own mechanical watches to titanium alloys. When large groups (millions of people) are isolated, they can create some amazing stuff on their own. Connecting the world with wires was a bad idea. It destroyed cultures into a giant globalised culture. I wish Globalisation didn't happen and the internet was never invented except for highly controlled and regulated uses.
Masks: Facial expressions are key to communication and we've just defaced our selves in public settings, possibly forever. This is not good. Humans evolved to look at faces and see expressions.
Edit: Interesting to see downvotes in a thread about outrageous ideas. It only confirms it!
It goes roughly like this: the designers would always advocate for a redesign, as it is more exciting, and also because it creates more new tasks/jobs for them.
But improving things is hard, and entropy is not on our side. So, it is quite possible that the new grand redesign will be less functional than the battle-tested old one.
If we are lucky, the new design might be at least more aesthetically pleasing. [1]
[1]: Perhaps in part just because aesthetics are a function of fashion, and the new design can be up-to-date with the current trends.
But I get your point. What we now understand as "globalism" is ideologically and aesthetically revolting. I don't think this ugliness is rooted in diversity, however. On the contrary, it's a product of a monopolistic and imperial form of liberalism. Resisting this drudgery will require more international solidarity against rootless "thought leaders" beholden to no organic culture.
No, because leetcode at least superficially seems like it might have some positive connection to performance. The point is for the age discrimination to be covert.
Unix, and everything modeled on it assumes competent users running applications they wrote for their own use. Anything that follows this model can't ever be made secure without rendering it useless well before then.
Capability Based OSs can be just as easy to use as Unix, except for the core assumption that code is to be trusted. When I say capabilities, I mean fine grained ones, like access to a file, which could then even be filtered down to access to part of a file, or read-only, etc.. then passed on to other tasks that require it. It makes permission composable, like being able to make $16.23 from exact change, instead of handing your wallet to the cashier and hoping for the best.
Until Capability Based Security becomes the norm, no nodes on the internet are safe, and it will always be an excuse to clamp down on freedoms. If we are to have freedom, we have to migrate to Capability Based Systems, and then continue on to win the war for general purpose computation, which most people don't even realize is already in play.
If you're old enough, remember shareware and dual floppy drive PCs? You could try out anything, and not worry a bit, because you didn't risk everything to the code you picked up for $2 on a shareware disk, you could always return to a known state. Capability Based Security makes that possible, even with mobile code on the internet.
I think the former is the system dialog that comes up when the app officially requests the capability, while the latter is an app dialog—which they pop up instead of officially requesting the capability because if you say "no", that setting is saved, and the app can't officially ask again.
This way, they get to bug you every single time until you say "yes".
I have seen applications that also say it in their own UI, but Apple does display a specific dialog telling you that it was blocked, and if you want to enable it, you need to go to the settings and do so.
And it is even document on official Apple pages, so I doubt this is application code: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...
From https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...
Capabilities is about associating the permission to do a thing with the handle you'd do it through; unrelated parts of the program don't know how to talk about the thing so can't do it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitfrost
Imagine instead, your text editor called the system to get a capability, which then opened the same dialog, and gave a capability (like a file handle) to the text editor for its use. If it got confused, or subverted, the only thing it could mess up would be that one file.
The reasons we're "stuck" are multifaceted: sheer volume of code, unsafe languages, monolithic kernels, poor UX of security features, and inadequate automated testing (especially of kernel code).
seL4 solves the message-passing performance problem of microkernel designs and offers strict capabilities. One major gotcha in most microkernel designs is the need for multi-process side-effect locks, transactions, and rollbacks for mutating hardware state coherently.
MINIX 3 made some progress by implementing a NetBSD userland.
PS: It's a shame USB didn't include a write-protect tab by default.
It was easy to quantify your risk, as it only had write capabilities to the floppy disks without write-protect tabs.
That is what made it possible to just try anything, and not worry about it.
This is obviously only true of MS-DOS on purely floppy-based systems.
Years ago, it really saddened me to realize that a Dual Floppy IBM PC running MS-DOS was actually the high water mark of secure general purpose computing for the masses.
It will never happen. We’re simply not smart enough to create such a system that won’t be too much of an inconvenience for developers and users.
And the underlying cause is that “too much of an inconvenience” is any inconvenience at all.
The Bloodstream Sermon[1] is literal and true.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_DzXYI7xRU
I’ve felt like Capt. Obvious since then. I don’t understand why people are shocked about anything.
He's right when he says that the people who don't believe in religion are the outrageous ones.
If it were just a power grab thousand years ago, how or why did others around the world get the same idea?
2) A lot of people need something external to believe in, it gives them a sense of purpose and an explanation for what are essentially random lucky/unlucky events. It also gives political power.
Strongly agree it's not just a power grab.. I think the power grab comes after rituals emerge and become common.
The fact that it's completely ubiquitous indicates that religious practices among societies is not a coincidence. The only commonly shared attribute among all civilizations that have existed throughout time is biology and religion.
Such a correlation indicates that religion is highly, highly likely to be biological in origin.
Sadly, the equipment was not sophisticated enough to handle the situation yet (the headsets are pretty finicky, and using them while moving around like that, even though it's supposed to be part of their use case, just doesn't give good results yet), so their results were inconclusive. It's definitely an interesting direction, though.
In no way do I feel like it’s telepathic. People are clearly communicating in physical form. I’d just say that as you get better with dancing - you just get more in tune with what emotions are aligned with what type of movement.
I think many people are not very much in their head about it when they’re dancing either. If you’re in your head - actually analyzing what someone is doing physically then you’ll understand where the feeling of telepathy comes from. Dancing is one of those things where I think people who are in their heads a lot can manage to be not in their heads and suddenly - they’re like, “wow, it’s like we telepathically are speaking to one another. I know what they feel and think a bit! But I wasn’t totally in my head analyzing them - how could it be?!” But it’s really that you’ve turned off your speaking mind and just let your brain do the rest.
If you kept the analytical mind on - you’d know what physical cues to read to understand when someone feels happy/sad/safe/uncomfortable.
What you are describing I call kineetetic connection, and that is what many dancers, even dance teachers think is the only connection that exists. It is practically the only kind is taught in formal dance schools.
I have trained kinestetic connection a lot as well, and really I am talking about very different kind of connection.
Apparently this something else is something that kinestetically gifted people sometimes might have trouble experiencing, because of their strenghts.
You could think that it is as challeging for kinestetic people to dance from the heart as it is for head-people to dance kinestetically. As a head-person I have had to learn everything the hard way.
Lack of nuance in discussion and simple video explanations about complex issues will lead us down a dark path unless the trajectory changes soon.
Then either the scholars become disproportionately more powerful or are stoned for not having simplistic views.
In sociology, it’s evidently the latter.
I’ve given my two kids, now older teens, pretty much free reign to watch what they want and use the Internet as they want.
I was certainly gifted with nice and precocious kids, but still: they both really like watching educational videos. They spend hours every day doing that. The quality and number of these videos is now utterly amazing.
They both have a much greater level of general knowledge than I did at their age. They have a much wider set of interests, a greater awareness of possibilities and opportunities, and correspondingly greater opportunities than I ever did, too.
But I didn't mean giving people cash to spend on random goods. It would have to be a system that prevents them from using it on personal projects and probably something organized more like kickstarter, where projects have funding goals and you have to allocate a portion of your budget to them.
I'd imagine type 1 diabetics would allocate a large portion of their funds to cheaper insulin alternatives. Software engineers to open source projects that they depend on.
I think many here overestimate the working ethic and adventurous spirit of the average American. From the people I’ve seen - they’ll just spend it on a fancy car.