
Reckoning with Our Mistakes - bookofjoe
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reckoning-with-our-mistakes/
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op03
Kudos to them. Good to see consciousness rising.

Expectations need to be realistic.

If you have spent your life painting with your right hand and suddenly
something makes you conscious that you have a left hand and you want to use it
too. That is no easy thing.

It will take Time.

It will take lot of practice and repetition.

It will take the right environment without people walking in interrupting,
distracting, mocking, provoking.

It will need patient teachers who don't use guilt and shame, blame and
judgment as their tools.

It will be annoyingly uncomfortable and easy to give up on.

It will tempting to take shortcuts that cause more issues than solutions.

etc etc etc.

And that is just for an individual to go from realization to action and
positive outcome. Getting teams, groups, orgs and entire populations to do the
same will take similar amounts of Time and Discomfort too.

As connectivity increases consciousness will increase.

But going from consciousness to painting with the left hand. And then painting
something beautiful will take time.

The challenge to the technical crowd is to develop an awareness of what the
psychological/sociological blockers are and to chip away through new info
architectures at the amount of time it takes to go from consciousness to
healthy outcomes.

~~~
mistermann
On the bright side, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that psychedelics
can massively accelerate this learning process. And with the foolish
restrictions on (and falsified reputations of) these mysterious compounds
finally relaxing, I see the possibility that a phase of massive advancement of
humanity could materialize.

But then if that did start to get underway, the old guard could assert its
control just as easily as it did last time. In my estimation, Communist Russia
was a "reasonable" excuse for that unfortunate decision, and China seems like
at least as good a reason this time around. Freedom of communication afforded
by the internet could have been our saving grace this time, but as luck would
have it we happen to be well into an era of that freedom becoming more
censored as time goes on.

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stakkur
A very good article on a topic rarely faced head-on.

Science is not truth; science is the neverending pursuit of truth. It reminds
me of a Carl Sagan quote:

“Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes
in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say
it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.”

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iamwpj
Excellent article. We would all do well to routinely practice coming to terms
with a past full of errors. It's the most human thing to do.

~~~
082349872349872
Hein, "The Road to Wisdom":
[https://i.stack.imgur.com/AvEKp.jpg](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AvEKp.jpg)

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projektfu
I like the histograms at the end. Is there a good name for those plots? They
help you see the valence of the use of the terms.

~~~
petrocrat
I quite like them as well. They are just time series smoothed line charts with
a pleasing. but nonessential gradient. But they do bear a strong resemblance
to a graph type called "sparklines." Sparklines usually dispense with the
axes, so these graphs have a minimalist x-axis of sorts, which distinguishes
them from true sparklines, but not by a lot.

