
Ask HN: The one thing you believe is true, but most people think is untrue? - rahooligan
This is apparently how Peter Thiel finds talent.
======
iuguy
I don't believe that climate science is 'settled'.

To clarify I'm neither religiously pro or anti global warming (although I do
believe that climate change should happen as a byproduct of a chaotic system
with high entropy) - to me the question of whether or not it's solely man made
is irrelevant. The questions of importance to me are:

Is it possible to sufficiently geo-engineer the Earth's climate to counteract
climate change?

If it is possible where's the cost/benefit analysis (i.e. how much do we spend
on geo-engineering to achieve the best 'payoff' in terms of success)?

What's the cost of adaptation (i.e. accepting that the change will happen and
adapting ourselves to the changing environment)?

Those questions are relevant regardless of whether or not the world is getting
hotter or colder. For me the political muddying of the waters makes it
impossible to engage in rational debate with either side. It's become a
religion, but unless you're a climate scientist (and I'm not) you
realistically only know what you've consumed from others, and there's a lot of
people on all sides who are more interested in moulding facts to fit a
political argument than identifying what's really happened.

~~~
hfinney
Those are indeed interesting and relevant points but they don't have much to
do with climate science per se. Climate science is about understanding how
climate works, not costs of adaptation or geoengineering.

~~~
iuguy
You make a good point, I was referring to climate change and the claim that
'the science is settled'. Apologies for any confusion.

------
pg
Surely there wouldn't be just one. If you started with a list of common
misconceptions, presumably a well-informed person would not have most of them.

e.g. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions>, which is
quite interesting, though it's missing the first two I thought of: gods and
the Monte Carlo fallacy.

A more interesting variant of the question might be, what do you believe that
most well-informed people don't? That's harder.

~~~
revorad
So what _do_ you believe that most well-informed people don't?

~~~
pg
The first things that come to mind are all things you can't say, and about
those I generally follow my own advice, and don't say them. But I'll try to
think if there are any that are uncontroversial.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
"The age of consent fluctuates like hemlines"

------
lotharbot
Here are two things I believe are true that most well-educated people think
are untrue. Among those who think one of these is true, a large percentage
think the other is false.

\-----

Most people (who accept evolution) claim there's a definitive evolutionary
tree for all species.

I believe there is no _single, definitive_ tree, but rather, several trees.
Depending on which feature or gene sequence you're studying, and what method
you use to construct a tree, you'll get slightly different trees. Sometimes
this is just statistical noise, but other times it's due to different traits
actually having different lineages, as a result of events like recombination
(say, when a virus injects a fragment of DNA into another creature's genome)
or horizontal gene transfer [0]. If you build a phylogenetic tree that covers
whole genomes for multiple species, it will typically end up being a
phylogenetic network [1] rather than a simple tree.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer> [1]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_network>

\-----

I also believe the original language text of the Bible has been very reliably
preserved since antiquity. There's a surprising amount of crossover between
the subject of textual criticism [2] and phylogenetics -- comparing manuscript
variants (between millions of pages across several centuries) is not that
different from comparing DNA mutations. There are very few parts of the
Biblical text that are seriously disputed by the legitimately well-informed.

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_Criticism>

~~~
notahacker
Doesn't the position you take on [2] depend very heavily on how you define
"original"?

I was under the impression that there was very little dissent between
believers and critically-minded scholars alike over either: (i) the texts that
compose the New Testament (in particular) of the Bible have been well-
preserved and accurately replicated with very few claims of interpolation or
revision (ii) The Synoptic Gospels were heavily influenced by at least one
common source document which appears to be totally lost.

------
byrneseyeview
Conservatives say they don't believe in evolution, but act like they do (in
the sense they tolerate "animal spirits" in economics, a sexual division of
labor, and racial disparities which may be genetic in origin). Liberals say
they believe in evolution, but act like they don't. And our most destructive
policies happen at the intersection of these two forms of hypocrisy.

A runner-up: "social security" is not the exact nature of the problem we face.
Instead, the problem is the dependency ratio: old people can live off of
million-dollar 401K portfolios and the proceeds from selling million-dollar
houses, or live off of social security--in either scenario, the working
population will be forced to accept lower available consumption (and low
returns on their savings) for a given level of income.

~~~
bokonist
I'll go one step further than you on social security, and argue that even your
take is not quite correct.

The so-called dependency ratio is not a real problem because most people in
the economy no longer do productive work. Our standard of living is not bound
by labor, but by resources (oil, lumber, arable land, etc). As 60 year old
workers start to retire, no fewer resources will be produced, we're not going
to produce less oil because 60 year olds retire. But we may consume less
resources because fewer people are commuting to work and occupying climate
controlled office spaces.

------
Deejahll
That scientific questions exist that humans "by nature cannot" or "will never
be able to" understand. (Due to our brains being too unsophisticated or
unimaginative, etc., or due to a projection from our current inability to
observe.)

------
SapphireSun
You may have some trouble with a question like this outside of HN ;-)

I tried this question on a dating site as an experiment for one day... and
then forgot I had it up. It generated nearly no responses other than jokes
except for one person that was very flustered and was intimidated by it
(perhaps unsurprisingly).

As for one thing that I think is true and that most others don't.... well the
thing that seems to clash the most is that I find "bad" things funny,
_regardless_ of my personal beliefs about them. People really tend to be more
of a straight man than you'd think.

------
unignorant
Just one? Thiel chose a great question. As an aside, maybe it should be
considered for next round's yc application?

Some number of my possible responses, although admittedly I would use none of
these for Thiel's essay:

* Modern running shoes increase one's tendency to injury.

* Free will can exist in a fully deterministic universe.

* Saturated fat and cholesterol are not the primary causal factors behind heart disease.

* Keynesian economic reasoning has few virtues in its own right, but is leveraged as a rationalization for policies convenient to those with political power.

~~~
jokermatt999
> * Free will can exist in a fully deterministic universe.

Would you mind going further into this one? Barring belief in dualism, I don't
see how this can be possible.

~~~
_delirium
I'm not an expert on it, but that position's sometimes called "compatibilism",
if you're looking for a keyword. This Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
article's a decent starting point, if a bit academic:
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/>

The really short answer is that it boils down to a disagreement over what
"free will" means. Compatibilists dispute the claim that free will is
definitionally equivalent to something like a videogame with multiple endings,
where your actions can change which endings you get (the "garden of forking
paths" model of free will).

It's actually usually taken as an alternative to dualism, because _if_ humans
are 100% made of physical matter that's bound by the usual laws of physics,
_and_ we think something called "free will" is meaningful to talk about, then
they must somehow be compatible. The alternatives are: 1. dualism, claim that
some part of human thought/action takes place outside of the laws of physics;
2. deny that free will exists; or maybe 3. somehow deny that the laws of
physics exist, or at least claim they exist in some different way than usually
understood.

Daniel Dennett is probably the best-known-among-the-general-public proponent
of compatibilism.

------
mark_l_watson
The USA will suffer an Argentina-like economic crash in the next 10 years.

I spend real effort trying to talk family and friends into making reasonable
preparations, but I run into a lot of skepticism.

------
cperciva
I believe that eugenics is a good idea.

~~~
konad
When everyone is a superman, who will clean the toilets?

~~~
dfranke
Barring rms's answer being correct, the same people who do now: the people
willing to do a good job for the least money. One likely economic outcome of a
successful eugenics effort would be that tedious, mindless jobs would be among
the best-paying rather than the worst.

------
rms
>99% chance we are living in a simulation

------
revorad
There is no God.

There must be a cure for death.

------
throwaway_troof
Religion and civilization are ultimately incompatible.

One day, psychiatrists will routinely prescribe touch, including sex, as an
intervention against depression.

In our lifetimes, the USA will experience economic or political collapse, and
maybe even break apart into different regions.

9/11 wasn't an inside job, but the anthrax scare was.

~~~
forensic
>Religion and civilization are ultimately incompatible.

That's a strange thing to say considering that, in the past, religion was the
defining aspect of civilization.

It was religion that civilized the barbarians.

~~~
SapphireSun
It's not that strange if you think of it in terms of improvements of models.
For instance, I'm sure religion based civilizations are more civilized than
cavemen, but at the same time, our standards improve as we acquire better
models.

------
CallMeV
Transcendental infinities and infinitesimals - many different types of
infinity exist, both countable and uncountable.

Most people tend to stop at the standard infinity that lies at the top end of
the real number line - "bigger than the biggest number you can think of, and
then some, plus one."

Never mind that there's another infinity, just as big, at the far end of the
negative side of the real number line, and further infinities in all
directions when you bring in complex numbers, quaternions, infinitesimals, the
uncountable infinities lying between any two arbitrarily chosen adjacent real
numbers and so on.

Also, the "Arabic" number system was invented in India. It was only introduced
to the West by the Muslims.

Yes, America, if not for Muslims you'd still be counting in Roman numerals.

~~~
dfranke
Please define "exist" as you've used it in your opening sentence.

------
fanboy123
That use of capitalistic/libertarian ideals for efficiency in business would
lead to major social unrest. Keeping dead weight (much of society) working
keeps the masses and their pitchforks away from the houses of the ruling
class.

------
neilk
Selfishness doesn't explain very much of human behavior.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Define "Selfishness" in this context.

In a broad sense, it's very hard to argue that selfish genes don't explain
most human behavior. Certainly, I would spend my time differently if I weren't
the result of a couple billion years of brutal gene-versus-gene competition.

~~~
neilk
Genes might be selfish, but that doesn't mean the organisms that they create
will be. Selfish genes also created the ant colony, where it doesn't make much
sense to talk about an ant's individual behavior as self-interested. I'm only
suggesting that we are more like ants than educated people currently believe.

Furthermore, humans have language, and can even ask themselves questions like
"what would so-and-so do?" Our minds are filled up, it seems to me, mostly
with the thoughts and data supplied by others. So I wonder if it makes sense
to say that we are all individual minds.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Okay, that's what I suspected. At the right level of abstraction, you can
certainly find non-selfish activities. But a gene's-eye-view is the most
significant view, because in the long term anything that doesn't adhere to
that view is extinct.

Certainly a complete sociopath will still have non-selfish internal organs.
But it's highly reductionist to claim that a sociopath is not sociopathic
because his heart generously pumps blood to his other organs.

What looks like generosity generally falls into a few categories of gene-level
selfishness, e.g. kin altruism, in-group altruism, reciprocal gifts, etc. Our
evolutionary inheritance doesn't allow for pure altruism; that's a bug that
gets fixed by selfish groups out-reproducing.

~~~
neilk
You're arguing against a point I didn't make. I'm not arguing for the
existence of pure altruism, or denying the importance of genes. I'm saying
that selfishness doesn't explain human behavior very well. It's an argument
against the common model of human beings as rational economic actors. For the
most part our motivations lie elsewhere, and we don't behave as _homo
economicus_ unless we are in weird and artificial situations.

I'm also making a more subtle point about the difficulty of delineating where
a person ends and society begins. This is a much fuzzier concept for me, but I
have a hunch that it doesn't make sense to say that a human personality is
entirely contained in the body that we normally associate it with, any more
than crashing waves are contained within a rocky shore. The body gives rise to
this funny thing called a mind, and yet minds don't seem to be stored just in
one brain.

I did not understand your point about the sociopath; it seems to be making my
argument for me, that the driving forces at one level of organization tell you
little about the next level up.

------
cromulent
Jimmy Carter was once attacked by a giant rabbit (whilst he was President).

~~~
venkat01
I suppose that depends on how you define "attacked" and "giant".

------
JesseAldridge
I'm not sure if I _really_ believe this, but...

[http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/The_God_Emperor_Come...](http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/The_God_Emperor_Cometh)

------
CarlSmotricz
There is no God.

(revorad almost got it right but blew the "the one thing" requirement)

------
konad
The Big Bang didn't happen.

Climate change is natural.

The top rate of income tax should be 90%.

Root is a design fault.

~~~
noodle
there's no doubt that climate change is natural, but isn't the climate change
"issue" about the notion that we're speeding it up?

