HN Explorer

What fact do you wish everyone understood?

5 points by iambateman ↗ HN
For me, I wish everyone knew that a 2-lane road with a center turn lane has the same carrying capacity as a 4-lane road. There’s a lot of 4-lane road that could be a lot safer with no tradeoff.

What fact would you like to share with everyone to make the world a better place?

28 comments

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karma_7
Avoid cursing others—negative energy doesn't disappear; it must go somewhere, and often, it comes back to you, affecting your mind and body.
bigyabai
I wish people understood that America hasn't been an industrial economy for almost half a century, so comparing us to China et. al is like comparing the growth of a toddler to a 67-year-old pensioner.
tobinfekkes
The best metric to optimize for is not money
iambateman
What is the best metric to optimize for?
nis0s
Physics, it explains a lot about the natural world than people are willing to credit it, including aspects in neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
mathiaspoint
People aren't brains in jars connected to inconvenient bodies, humanity is inherently biological.
nis0s
That’s the gist of phenomenal consciousness, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the human body or the human brain is particularly important for creating consciousness, or aspects of humanity that we like. Though, it seems they work well together. The human brain, in particular, is the best tool we have at hand currently for understanding the universe and how it works. I hope that we create a better brain than ours to figure out things we cannot, for any number of reasons.
oriettaxx
that the whole idea of a Nation is not consistent (to be polite)

That humans are solving problems since the very beginning with no priests or government.

Trust your peers, your neighbour: trust even anybody in the street (even at night) but do start to doubt any 'government'

nis0s
Essentially, nations have solidified into what they are because different people have different cultures, while their initial formation was motivated by organizing productivity and easing commerce. Governments help implement useful tools for keeping a people or a nation alive, and highly individualistic societies may not like them to some degree, which is understandable. But the anarcho-capitalism philosophy always leads to city states, which eventually leads to nations.
unsupp0rted
The more you travel, the better you understand that there are differences between cultures and some cultures are better at specific things or worse at specific things.

Those specific things have such an outsized impact that it's obvious after living there for a bit that one culture is overall better or overall worse than another.

We're fine to compare company cultures and to insist that company cultures are decisive in company success. But when it comes to national cultures we pretend that they're all comparable and all equally good. They are not.

iambateman
Fascinating take. I’m American and have spent 4 months in Sweden, 2 months in Mexico, and weeks in a few other places.

A couple questions…

(1) How closely correlated is wealth to your cultural-quality opinion? (2) Sweden has generationally-better car culture than the US and it makes a difference. I believe that their sensibilities are worth learning from. Is that the kind of thing you’re thinking about?

I think it’s unfair to say that because place X has Y problem, it’s worse than place Z. But I do think that the world has a lot to teach our specific locality which can speed up improvement.

ompogUe
I agree with you, however, to me, the local language has often been what I saw as an important factor in this. Not just he semantic structure of adjectives/nouns/verbs, but what the parts of different words mean that were obviously glued together into neologisms. The German "kindergarten"="child garden" comes immediately to mind. While I don't have any examples, I've talked to several Innu about this aspect of their words, and found it both beautiful and enlightening.
freetinker
This is a largely correct, but incomplete take imo. Cultures are neither “good” nor “bad”. Some are better than others at optimizing different outcomes. Of course, culture A might be objectively better or worse for you vs culture B - depending on what you value or prefer optimizing.
nis0s
> But when it comes to national cultures we pretend that they're all comparable and all equally good. They are not.

I think it’s less about culture as people commonly think, i.e., dancing, music, food, clothes, stories, religion etc.

The cultural aspects which help or hinder societies are related to core beliefs (which religion may have some hand in forming, but not necessarily), philosophies and values passed across generations. Religion is the confounding factor of cultural impact, but notice there are countries with similar religions and histories, and dissimilar outcomes.

For this reason, I don’t blame the people who live in any one place because they were randomly born there without any choice. I blame the politicians and elites in their society who are responsible for shaping those parts of the culture which get distilled down to practical and actionable aspects on a day-to-day basis for other leaders, or people who are doing core work which impacts their economy.

Really, the development of such ideas and beliefs have all really been about how to deal with and navigate uncertainty. It also really doesn’t matter how conscientious your people are (they mostly are, almost everywhere) if the leaders are inept or incompetent or corrupt. But yes, there’s a baseline level of “corruption” in almost every country, what matters is where that baseline level is relative to other places.

gregjor
I wish everyone understood that they don't know very much.

At times, especially when I lived in Portland, I would wish people understood that not everyone likes dogs.

Ekaros
A long list, but maybe I would start with thermodynamics.
djoldman
Voting is required in Australia, and the participation rate is >90%.

There is a financial penalty for not voting.

pestatije
would u mind expanding on the 2-lane road vs 4-lane thing?
fuzzfactor
I've seen this written in centuries-old stone for all to see, so somebody must have wanted "everyone" to understand forever:

FRVGALITY is the Mother of all VIRTVES

Then there's some more things like that from previous centuries too, which can really stand the test of time, plus from a scientific point of view.

These may not be as many facts as they are "philosophies", but here the FACT is, these are some of the very most proven approaches that ACTUALLY DID make America great to begin with. Not many things come close.

Temperance

Silence

Order

Resolution

Frugality

Industry

Sincerity

Justice

Moderation

Cleanliness

Tranquillity

Chastity

Humility

https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page38.htm

>By design, Mr. Franklin originally laid out the list of virtues in the order that we have them today.

    “My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judged it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time, and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another… and, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate the acquisition of certain others.”
Anything less or in contradiction can do nothing other than stifle or reverse any greatness that remains.

No American president has ever been expected to be more advanced than the nation's top scientist was when it comes to building a great nation. And when you take a good look at what kind of shoes that takes to fill, the top advisors to the President better be able to demonstrate at least some accomplishment that would compare to 18th century progress.

If you're in a position of authority in government, or aspiring to that, and you can't bring yourself to build on the framework that people like Franklin laid down for you, you're just wasting space that would be better occupied by someone who is not so far out-of-the-league.

sexyman48
a 2-lane road with a center turn lane has the same capacity as 4 lanes

Wut?

iambateman
It’s not literally the exact same, but it’s closer than people think.

Many four-lane roads could be two-lane roads with a turn lane and not make any difference to traffic.