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Extinction does not drive evolution, reproduction does, and if a species' food goes extinct, they reproduce less, not more.

Secondly, these animals aren't abandoning their niches, they're losing them due to human activities. There is no room for another species to adapt to it, because there is nothing there to adapt to anymore.


The problem with urban insurgencies is the people who don't carry firearms, not the ones that do. If you can identify the combatants, it is much easier to kill them.


That's a self-defeating argument. Your objection to the concept of ownership would apply to just about every concept, including your own morality, which leaves your thoughts about what _should_ be a little out of place. That is, unless you think there's something very special about ownership in the grand scheme that is not true of other abstractions...


> That's a self-defeating argument.

I don't think so.

> Your objection to the concept of ownership would apply to just about every concept,

Except he constrained it to specific concepts. How you interpret those is likely different, but you didn't really ask as much as define and declare an outcome. That's not constructive.


You seem to be satisfied to do the same.

I at least explained what the problem was with the argument. "I don't think so" is not any kind of improvement there.


> "I don't think so" is not any kind of improvement there.

"I don't think so" is not about the core discussion, but a reflection of different interpretations to how you interpreted the statement. I then went on to explain what I meant, including how to bring the discussion back to concrete arguments, rather than making up my own interpretation (I don't like the term straw-man, which implies a bad-faith argument). You have a specific set of assumptions, which I take to be in good faith. I read the arguments and understand that there are a different set of assumptions to make (vis a vis different interpretations).

I'm sorry if you don't find it constructive in whole or in part.


I don't agree with the GP's point but I do agree with the defence against your counterargument. The GP clearly stated "owning land" - you might consider other forms of ownership a logical extension but that wasn't the context of the GP's point and thus you're being a little disingenuous to argue it in that way (one could even say you presented a "straw man argument").


I have the opposite problem: I don't know what anxiety is. Supposedly it's an emotion people have (and it's certainly possible I feel it too,) but I have no way to identify my feelings as anxiety because nobody has ever expressed the meaning of that term in a way the conforms to any feeling I have ever had.


I originally glossed over your comment pretty quickly, but the more I think about it, the more I realize this is true in practice for me as well. I know what it feels like to feel joy or sadness, but for me anxiety is more often a collection of things I observe about myself than something I feel. This is partly because my anxiety is so often coupled with depression, and partly because anxiety pushes your brain into a fight/freeze/flee trichotomy, and the "freeze" and "flee" responses can feel pretty emotionally blank when the fear is distant or ill-defined (like a deadline or social rejection as opposed to a grizzly bear.)

Again depending on the fight/freeze/flee response, my anxiety can manifest as stiffness in my body, requiring special concentration to force myself to do normal things, or it can manifest as a jitteriness, like when you drive a car with a lot more power than you're used to and every time you touch the accelerator it surges forward in an alarming way. It can be accompanied by elevated body temperature, even sweating.

The way I differentiate the paralyzing kind of anxiety from depression is that depression paralyzes with lack of energy and an inability to believe that anything you do will come out well. Anxiety paralyzes with stiffness and a blank mind that is too twitchy to make plans.

Paralysis is the flight/freeze response to anxiety, but it also has a fight response, where I single-mindedly execute the next thing to do. I can get a lot of things done this way, and sometimes this is the only thing that snaps me out of procrastination, but sometimes the "clear next step" I'm unthinkingly executing is not the right thing. And when it becomes unclear what the next thing is, I'm back to being paralyzed.

Likewise, in social situations, anxiety can make me talk a lot (for me) and become much more open and engaging, and it can be a great thing to get me over the hump to knowing someone well, but more often it just makes my mind blank and makes me so slow to say the things I want to say that the moment passes. From the point of view of my social anxiety, I guess that's a win, preventing me from engaging more than superficially.


One of the few times in my life where I have palpable anxiety is when I go for on-site interviews. Most other things I'm a cool cucumber. I think there is something to having feelings but not recognizing what they are, but there is also the other side which is people are different and different people feel things more keenly than others.


Yea. There a lot of flavors to anxiety, and the word itself is almost too generic to be meaningful. I experience it as a kind of "wiredness" or "on edge" feeling. The somatic experience tends to precede the mental one too. So, I'm with you, I think people tend to oversimplify "anxiety" and that it's actually a complex of zillions of little micro-disorders that share some rough features.


What I’ve heard from my therapist is that anxiety is often a cloud that covers the real emotion underneath. I experience anxiety when I’m really upset because I don’t know how to express anger. But sometimes it is sadness or fear. Anxiety is basically an evolutionary adaptation — we no longer are being hunted or having to hunt for survival, but our minds still think danger is present.


The fact that I like cake is not a conscious decision. My decision is whether I will eat it or not. You don't actually have to be with the people you're attracted to. (We all get old and ugly eventually anyway.)


> You don't actually have to be with the people you're attracted to

For that matter, you don't have to be with anybody at all, which may be why you see women rather be alone than follow parent's suggestion!


You are probably going to spend more energy than that just lugging around solar panels.


Under any practical consideration, free will is nothing more than an emotion; it offers you no capabilities, only a propensity to respond to things in a certain way. Without a useful definition of free will that offers something different to this, you won't have a key to anything.


Why it has to be useful? We try to understand countless things without have a use case in mind at the time of study.


So you're fine with a key that doesn't open anything? How will you know it is a key at all then?

>We try to understand countless things without have a use case in mind at the time of study.

You're making a pretty clear reference to mathematics & science here, but in those disciplines we study things with well-defined structures. We don't study flighty nonsense because it's not ever going to be useful. You shouldn't invoke this phrase to excuse a lack of precision and clarity.


Calling it a key is your own reframing, implying a use case.


You called it a key. I said it is not unless it has a useful purpose.


A key to understanding free will, not a key to using this understanding in any particular way.


What understanding? If you can't do anything with it, what do you understand?


Why must understanding be conflated with utility?


Lots of people will question this stuff, but they definitely won't bring up their objections. People are incentivized to collect their paychecks and do what they're told, not to point out the absurd thinking of the managers and executives above them. Nobody is thinking they'll save their company those millions and get an recognition/reward for it. Even the professional risk assessors got ignored.


I'm not really that cynical. But a lot of people do have their jobs to do, may even appreciate that they may not be aware of all the context fo some given decision, and just aren't inclined to fight battles over things that aren't their department at the end of the day.


So you're not really protesting unless you light yourself on fire? You understand that if everybody who protested the "big stuff" did so by doing extremely risky things, you're going to end up with nobody left with the will to protest?


Sure, if you assume the only purpose of fingers is for counting.


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