We often think of information and learning in a pure sense as an absolute good, but there are certain things which merely knowing about them can make our lives worse. Have you ever gleaned information which made your life worse due to knowing it?
Seeing how much other countries litter and pollute.
I am not the most stringent environmentalist, but it heavily influences my decisions. Seeing Nepalis throw water bottles out bus windows, Albanians burn trash on a mountainside pile, Canadians idling their engine for 20 minutes to get coffee without leaving their car… it makes me wonder why I even bother.
This left me in a weird place where I can’t decide between partying before the end of the world, or do my bit however useless it is.
Just understanding the scope and breadth of the pollution issue, particularly plastics and PFAS. Even if we crack immortality via medicine, it does nothing for having microplastics in your heart tissues. You can't live in ignorant bliss forever but man that was a long ride down.
Probably after that is having my trust in professionals repeatedly broken. It's bad when you encounter people who you blindly trust to do the right thing and realize that they're not necessarily doing it. Healthcare professionals, who you unconsciously partitioned away from other jobs too. That maybe you, untrained as you are, can do it too with a little effort for a lot less money.
After that is the deep understanding that money doesn't buy quality generally, it can, but not as a rule, and that you can't pay people any amount to care about you or your things.
Maybe a lot of that is the eggshells of youth falling away leaving the cynicism of adulthood, but this knowledge and being constantly reminded of it has definitely made me less happy.
This is a great one. It’s crazy to think how little most rules matter.
I remember in high school chemistry class this kid pulled the emergency shower chain and flooded the room with disgusting rusty water. I vividly remember thinking, “wow he just ruined his life.” He’s a doctor now lol.
It’s also funny how I was a total stickler for the rules and my brother just disregarded them entirely. He enrolled into ROTC in high school and once he figured out the instructors couldn’t do anything but yell at him he just let them yell. They’d tell him to run a mile and he’d walk it as slow as he wanted while they screamed right in his face the whole time.
Now that I’m older I definitely don’t think about the rules as much anymore. Somebody at work said we “had” to do something and I was just like, “Who said that?” And they couldn’t figure out why they thought we had to do it. So we just did it.
There’s a line in the new Elon Musk book where he says something like, “The only rules are the laws of physics. Everything else is just a recommendation.” When I was younger I would’ve thought that was a terrible philosophy. Now it makes a lot more sense.
I worked with a guy called a Lau once for this semiconductor company.
There was an email about going to China and do some support which everyone answered but Lau. Everyone who answered went to China and hated it. It's a filthy place.
But Lau didn't because he didn't care and didn't answer the mail even when it told him to answer it.
So this is the Lau-method for me. Don't do anything your management thinks is important. It seldom is.
Permeating through all human activity are the varying but powerful laws of opinion, favor, desire, fear, and belief. The rule breakers you described simply poked at some imagined rule and discovered it wasn't among the ones that ended up making a difference. Still, to become a doctor one must submit themselves to years or trials, you must at the very least care for the rules crucial to that kind of success.
> Also rules like traffic laws certainly aren't "recommendations"
The point is that recommendations are exactly what they are.
The recommendation is "Drive no faster than 45mph on this road unless you want to risk getting a ticket (or killing someone or whatever)."
But who's physically preventing you from driving 60mph? If you were taking your dying relative to the hospital would you drive 45mph?
Perhaps a law of physics is involved and you are physically prevented from going over 45mph because of a governor on your engine, but you could pay someone to remove it (or do it yourself). Speedbumps may increase the danger and consequence of going 100mph and that is something of a physical limitation.
You can think it's asshole philosophy (and perhaps it is), but you're not seeing the world the way it really is, which I think is heart of the matter.
It's like the clip of the guy talking about the German who can't drive because they don't have a license:
By their very definitions, laws are not "recommendations". There's nothing deeper here. I can make this simpler using your examples: at the time, your school mate was an asshole for flooding the room and your brother was just a brat. Nothing more to it.
Laws can be broken, so why are they different than a recommendation?
I can tell you, "don't touch that hot pan" and it's a recommendation but you can still do it. The government can say "don't speed" and it's a recommendation but you can still do it.
This kind of thinking is how we arrive at a low-trust society. We could all be individuals indulging our inner-asshole, but it would quickly lead to the enshittification of what remains of communal life.
The 'Recommendation' quote just sounds typical of the edgy posturing we've seen Musk fall into. Once the pithy zing fades, we have an idea scales poorly.
There are a lot of dumb laws, but they are typically there to protect us and our fellow citizens from human beings (you and me) doing dumb shit. They are hardly recommendations. If anything, laws are the network protocol of society that allows us a semblance of reliability and stability in our operating environment.
You can sit here and say how things should be all day long. But it doesn’t change how things really are. If you want to delude yourself for the alleged betterment of society, go nuts.
If those recommendations (laws) mattered so much wouldn’t there be serious consequence to the insouciance?
Laws are just recommendations that some people see as more serious than others. If you’re willing to take the risk and accept the consequence, it’s your choice.
I got a disappointing score on mensa norway[1] and boy, that made a lot of things suddenly click for me. I have yet to exploit this information for my benefit, as far as I'm aware.
I think this concept is called an information hazard[2][3]
I wasn't trying to rub it in, I'm sorry. What did you get for real? I can make you feel better probably but I'd need to know more of your situation, ie, what you got, and why it bothers you (and trust me I can relate).
The KT Chicxulub impact ending the dinosaurs. As I was coming of age in the 1980s I was coming down from Cold War anxiety I had experienced as a teenager, for I had come to believe that Mutual Assured Destruction had actually 'worked' to tide us over what Carl Sagan had referred to as a 'nuclear adolescence'. When the Berlin Wall came down I felt that the tense period was over.
But I had been following the theories of Alvarez et. al. from 1980 and I fully accepted that the KT Boundary must be the remnant of a major impact event associated with the dinosaurs' global mass extinction. I reasoned at the time that the actual crater need not even be found to jump start the human race to action. I reasoned wrong.
It would be ~2013 before the available evidence was generally accepted.
Since ~1985 when the KT boundary's full implications have been known, I have felt that the whole human race has had one single job, to leverage our 'space race' and weapons technology to deliver a credible planetary defense from asteroids and comets. Soon, already. To launch on short notice from the Moon as an armada of kinetic impactor rockets with a mass-payload of lunar dust to deflect and divert the imminent impact of an object with the greatest level of assurance possible. By definition, one off the plane of the ecliptic that we found only yesterday that would hit next month. As you can imagine, I have little patience for wasteful discussions about 'deploying solar sails on an object'.
This should have pre-empted the Cold War. It (with hindsight) should have been the focus of the space race from day one with all countries participating. Getting lead out of gasoline and keeping CFCs and bromides away from the ozone layer was nice, but when I see the global resources that have been devoted to 'climate' and the abuse of statistics applied to existential threats (as in it's so 'unlikely' so we have no need to plan for it with any urgency)... and exploration of Mars over bases and planetary defense on the Moon, it makes my blood boil. As a parent.
A recent letter to Goldfein ( https://archive.org/download/20180227-david-l.-goldfein-lett... ) was just the latest in a series. Knowledge of KT impact has affected and colored my thinking as an adult to a much greater extent than fear of nuclear war ever did.
you mention climate being a waste, but one of the only extinction events bigger than KT was the permian triassic, and that was caused by high atmospheric CO2. We're already on track for a pretty bad time (if all current government climate commitments are met, we're still on track for 3.8 degrees of warming by 2100, which is already a mass extinction), I would put climate induced mass extinctions above asteroid induced ones, just because we are in one now, and it is guaranteed to get worse.
I am a citizen of the %countryname% and I have seen a lot of that kind of information in school while studiyng the history of the %countryname%. What do you expect to learn on these lessons except of bigotry, propaganda and other flag-waving bullshit?
In the short term, discovering I have a dissociative disorder was very difficult, and the discovery rendered me unable to maintain my job. Cue a massive amount of reading into some of the darker parts of humanity to try to explain what happened to me in my childhood. I’m still in the middle of it. I’m thankful for the information and it’s changed my life, but there are some doors you can’t walk back out of.
I see it as opening my eyes to the complexity we've all gotten used to, not necessarily a harbinger of doom, just a necessary wake up call.
When I was young, I thought that newer was better, I learned across the years that a more conservative approach is a wiser course. Progress is something that happens when the forces permit it, and the people push hard for it. There's nothing permanent about it, though.
In my view, Linus Torvalds was wrong in his debate with his teacher, Andrew Tanenbaum[1]. We're still a decade out, hopefully not more, from a move to capability based operating systems. These will be more secure, and should provide some actual improvements in stability as a side effect.
We may be nearing peak silicon, but its really hard to say for sure. The ability to mass manufacture chips has a very high barrier to entry, but doing it at a lower scale, or lesser density, has fallen quite far thanks to all the lessons learned on the way.
I am not the most stringent environmentalist, but it heavily influences my decisions. Seeing Nepalis throw water bottles out bus windows, Albanians burn trash on a mountainside pile, Canadians idling their engine for 20 minutes to get coffee without leaving their car… it makes me wonder why I even bother.
This left me in a weird place where I can’t decide between partying before the end of the world, or do my bit however useless it is.