Reducing human interaction to disingenuous, transactional terms like this one are the private-life version of "building a personal brand." It's evidence that you don't view other people, or even yourself, as having intrinsic value outside of what can be provided to others.
I fear sometimes that sociopaths have inherited the earth.
This is a very uncharitable interpretation. "to pull" is slang for being attractive to others (see latin "adtrahere"), and i didn't mean to imply more than that.
Sorry, I didn't meant to imply that it was a problem with you on a personal level. In retrospect I see why you interpreted it that way. My mistake.
I mostly meant to say that there seems to be something wrong with society at large and that it's leaking into our language. I view it in terms of psychological framing (or something like it). We use these very utilitarian and transactional phrases more and more frequently, and I suspect it may reflect a deeper change in the way we think about others.
This is no longer the case with 4k UHD Blu-ray. They CAN be region locked in a technical sense, but I believe that there have only been two ever released that utilized that functionality. For the most part you can just buy one without worry.
The flipside is they just price the discs so high that nobody wants to buy them in the first place. DVD boomed because they were reasonably priced, notably being cheaper than the VHS tapes they were replacing. Blu-Ray discs still tend to be priced as a "premium" product, even though the competition isn't an even more expensive physical medium but much cheaper streaming. There is really no mystery why the entire industry segment is dying. It is the same reason S-VHS and Laserdisc were flops while cheap DVDs sold in the billions.
Logic itself is a relatively new invention, and is symbolic itself. That is to say, logic is a map not the territory.
That said, if someone can't fathom the most widely used symbolic languages humans use (math, logic, language, etc) they probably do have a cognitive deficit of some sort when compared to those who can.
Languages were made up by mankind at some point. They are not backed by the rest of physical reality. They can only be learned by induction, and there is no guarantee that people will get the same "version" of it.
To speak in your analogy, people walk around with different maps of the same territory and realizing this is the self-awareness mjburgess is talking about.
It is less 'logic is new'... it more about abstract thinking is a skill that is more useful in societies that have complex social arrangements.
If you are a primitive farmer abstract thinking isn't really useful to you. Everything you deal with in your life, except religion, can almost entirely be dealt with absolutes with little in the way of abstractions.
If it rains at the right time then you can have a good harvest. If the weather is bad then it sucks. If there is animals threatening your crops or herd you need to take steps to deal with them.
There is a lot of logic in dealing with these things. You have to know the seasons, know the stars, know the dirt, etc. You have to understand the life cycle and manipulate the behavior and biology of plants and animals at the right stages in their lives. Things have a logical sequence and there are direct consequences that are predictable from events and your actions.
Where as in modern society you have been conditioned to think in terms of hypothetical and abstractions through being exposed to testing your entire life.
You first need to know how test questions work before you are able to answer them accurately.
For a person who isn't exposed to this then the whole affair of asking hypotheticals and assuming imaginary situations with specific rules that don't actually apply to the present reality is very confusing.
They don't even understand the question. So, of course, they are going to suck at answering them.
And ultimately that is all IQ testing measures.. your ability to take tests.
> They don't even understand the question. So, of course, they are going to suck at answering them.
I agree, but would also say that you should be capable of learning to understand those questions. For example, If you can't speak English, you'll be bad at reading books in English. If you were never taught math, you'll be bad at math. Similarly, If you never learned to reason you'll be bad at solving logic puzzles. It's almost tautological.
However, if a person is incapable of learning to do one of those things, despite the majority of the world being fully capable of doing it, they probably have a cognitive deficit.
> And ultimately that is all IQ testing measures.. your ability to take tests.
I disagree. I think it measures how well you've learned to reason, though I do agree that reasoning is a learned skill for most people.
By "relatively recent" I meant in terms of human evolution. We've had it for around 2400 of the last 300,000 years or so. So less than 1% of our species existence.
I used that phrasing to drive home the idea that logic is not some inherent aspect of nature, or even fundamental to the way humans perceive the world.
Also peer review in its current form was a postwar invention, meaning that for the majority its history it was not regularly employed, let alone considered to be a line of demarcation between science and non-science.
Having been on both sides of the peer review process many times, I can assure you that it does not pick out all and only “actual science”
It’s often unclear whether the decision to remove politically unfavorable content is a pure business decision or the result of informal lobbying of such companies by the government. The White House has often made requests about the removal of material about certain stories, including e.g. the Hunter Biden laptop affair, and it’s rarely clear whether these requests are entertained due to general political sympathy, the threat of unfavorable regulation, or what. If the government directly censors citizens’ speech that’s a 1st Amendment concern, but if they strongly insinuate that a company will face a hostile legal climate unless it censors a citizen’s speech, that is afaict not illegal.
Do you mean the Biden campaign rather than the White House? Twitter was fielding requests from the Trump White House at the same time since Trump was president then.
And of course we know this, and you probably got your slightly skewed take, from a supporter and member of the incoming President's team now owning Twitter.
> Do you mean the Biden campaign rather than the White House? Twitter was fielding requests from the Trump White House at the same time since Trump was president then.
lambdaphagy said "the White House". You seem to be arguing that it wasn't one specific occupant of the White House but more a property of the office.
It seems a bit weird to question whether lambdaphagy meant what they said when you seem to be trying to argue that what was said is literally correct. It is one of the most disagreeable supportive comments I've ever seen. Am I reading it right or have I misinterpreted you?
Of course it is. Knowing the events shaping your world have repercussions on your personal decisions. What should I eat? What should I learn? What career should I embark upon? What should I invest in?
To think that you can shield yourself from the world is one of the biggest yet most foolish ideas of individualistic cultures
I mostly agreed with your first paragraph, but then the examples killed it for me.
Especially the second one: what a profoundly sad existence that someone would define their learning interests by what their boss recommends, with the sole goal of advancing one’s career. It isn’t even guaranteed the advice would be useful—bosses can be incompetent and petty too. And pray tell, if your boss follows that same advice, where does it stop? When does anyone have one original thought to pursue?
Food in the grocery store is stocked by corporations who have no concern for your health and want to fill you up with addictive fat and sugar. Eat instead natural ingredients, preferably from local growers or a farmer’s market.
Don’t limit yourself to local careers if nothing calls to you. Dare to dream even just a big bigger.
401k is a US concept. Most of the planet doesn’t live there.
Most people don’t consult their family doctors when food isn’t available or when they are confronted with a variation in recipe. It isn’t the case that most people blindly follow their boss’ advice. Most people don’t decide their careers based on short-term local availability. And almost no investor who’s financially literate enough to consider an index fund would consider volatility as a metric of attractiveness of the fund.
I was going to say that your arguments only hold so long as you oversimplify what are inherently complex decisions that require multiple and current information sources, but the very foundation of your line of questioning is just plain wrong.
I'm going to disagee with you there. You are seeing the world through a different lens driven by constant churn in the tech industry.
In many industries if you are just a drone that does their job reasonably well, will work overtime every now and then when it's available and have shown willingness and ability to improve, management will make sure you stay at that company. Your only actual fear would be that the company fails but then very likely you are on the shortlist for that same management at their new company.
Assume incompetence not malice, people aren't out to get you and trying to get the worst for you, they want to best for themselves and if you make it so that making you comfortable also makes them comfortable then you aren't at risk.
Regarding food... Buy what's on the shelf, nobody needs their special kale only diet or whatever is the trend. What the parent was saying is follow general food guidelines, avoid excessive meat, keep portion sizes reasonable, half you plate should be vegetables etc...
Same with the index fund thing, if you start investing with a reputable investor when your are in your 20s even if it doesn't beat the market you will retire comfortably.
You don't need to minmax life. You can hit autopilot and just go where life takes you while just make small course corrections every now and then and you will be fine. You wont have a great life or a bad one. You will fall close to the middle of the bell curve and that's actually good enough.
Focus on the things that are important, spend time with your loved ones etc.
Trust me I understand your point of view as well, that's me I can't be vanilla with these things, my mental health doesn't allow it. I need to shoot for the moon and do it as efficiently as possible. I just know that's not necessary.
You nailed my intent here, although I wasn't really advocating for it either. More just reminding HN readers that we aren't representative, and that (as the replies here confirm) we seem to forget that.
The world is filled mostly with people who read below the 6th grade level. Those people have average life expectancies, average local jobs, and will retire with average savings if they retire at all.
I'm not judging those average lives, just trying to encourage the high achievers here to consider the way the 24 hour news cycle impacts the average, barely literate, person who just wants to survive their day without falling down either slope of the bell curve.
> Whichever index fund option in your 401k is least volatile.
That would be a govt bond fund or, worse, a money market fund. That is no different than telling retail investors to avoid equities, and only buy bonds. That is a terrible investment strategy. Literally: I have never seen an investment professional recommend such a portfolio for any one of working age.
Better advice would a broad based US/Europe equity index, e.g., S&P 500 or FTSE 100 or EuroSTOXX 600.
Given how terrible that advice is, it makes you reconsider the other items. The whole post might be clever satire: "Don't just do what you're told. Don't just eat the crap pushed by Big Ag. Do think."
That seems unwise. The comparison point for me would be 1920s Europe - in hindsight it seems likely they'd have had a lot of telegraphing in advance that things were about to go really badly wrong - disasters of the magnitude that engulfed them aren't easily missed. The average person wouldn't have been aware of it because the lack of an internet would have resulted in an insanely biased view of the data being presented that probably obscured just how bad things were getting. Today we have a much better level of information access available.
The answer in the 1920s if you can see the 1930s and 1940s coming wasn't go local, it was some combination of fortify, fearmonger and/or flee. People needed to be alerted that the situation was really bad and immediate action was required at all levels to avert disaster - but action wasn't taken and we saw an economic crisis unfold, followed by a military one.
The point appears to be that even if most people in 1920's Europe could have seen all the telegraphing, how many of them could have done anything to make a difference for their given situation? How many people do we think were realistically in a position to make a change to the economic conditions and still uninformed? How many were in a place to make a change to the military conditions and similarly uninformed?
Hind sight is 20/20, and its easy knowing a massive war was coming to say people should have been getting the hell out of Dodge. But moving your entire family to a new country let alone a new continent is a massive undertaking. How many people even if they had the warnings would have pulled the trigger on that move rather than wait and see? What sort of huge, global war scale negative things are being telegraphed today and what major life altering decisions on the magnitude of leaving your entire community and extended family behind and seeking asylum in a foreign country do you foresee yourself undertaking to address them in response to your unprecedented levels of modern awareness?
Or does your unprecedented access to that information simply make you feel helpless and hopeless? Are you actually better equipped to attend to the impending doom or do you just know that it's there. One wonders if we had the ability to know the exact month and year we were going to die, would we think our lives were made better by knowing that, or would we find that having that knowledge does little to change the quality of the life we live in any positive way, and largely adds stress or other negative experiences. There's a balance to be struck with any amount of being informed, but like everything else in life, I suspect moderation is the key.
> how many of them could have done anything to make a difference for their given situation?
Lots of them. Pretty much all the major players were democracies and it isn't that unreasonable to think that democracies can be persuaded to do sensible things. It is hard to evaluate counterfactuals but it is certainly plausible that if they'd actually understood how dire the situation was from better information the course of events was changeable. There are a lot of 1/10,000 people out there. It really is just a game of convincing a few of them to behave sensibly and they move mountains politically.
I'd suggest that from your perspective it isn't the information making you feel hopeless, your starting point is that of helplessness and hopelessness and the information is just making that more apparent. The world is hardly hopeless and the people in it are not helpless. Just ineffective on average and very poorly informed - problems that can be minimised by lots of information.
> Pretty much all the major players were democracies and it isn't that unreasonable to think that democracies can be persuaded to do sensible things.
Again though, how many people were actually in a position to direct that democracy to do something different than it did, but were unable to do so because they were not sufficiently informed with available information for their position? I'm not suggesting that if people who were in power knew different things than they did that things couldn't have been different. I'm arguing that it wasn't a lack of reading available news by every day people not in power that allowed things to get to where they were.
> The world is hardly hopeless and the people in it are not helpless.
I wholeheartedly agree, I just think people vastly overestimate how important "being informed" is over just actually doing something about a local problem. How many things do you read in your daily feed that fundamentally alter or make a difference in the things you plan to do? Let's say you're interested in helping make a change with regards to child abuse. A noble and worthwhile cause. Who is actually helped by you spending even an hour every day scrolling "child abuse tik tok"? Or reading through a daily list of updates on child abuse cases and statistics nation wide? In my opinion almost any time you spend being "informed" about child abuse by mass media would be better spent actually volunteering for local abuse shelters and safety organizations. And the little actual good you or anyone else gains from you scrolling through mass media coverage could be gained in much shorter and more sporadc review of recent events rather than a daily firehose of news.
The "events shaping your world" are a handful of currently trending narratives promulgated by an engagement-optimizing algorithm or a literal popularity contest, not an epistemologically meaningful sample of reality.
Making quality decisions with incomplete information is a higher order operation than
(as this study shows) surfing whatever has a compatible emotional valence.
I am keeping up with my steady tide pod diet, learning about how much God loves me, training to be a YouTube influencer to make thousands of dollars per month without leaving my home and investing in helping a Nigerian prince move his funds out of the country. Yet I still feel there is something missing. Which Gab group would you guys recommend for knowing the truth about the events shaping my world that they are hiding from us?
Exactly. Use less plastic for food containers. Don’t use plastic cooking utensils, filter your water, etc. This is one you do have some influence over.
Go to a blood donation center. You'll notice the blood bags say "VOLUNTEER" on them. Not because some people are getting their blood stolen. The alternative is "THERAPEUTIC". We still bloodlet today.
Every hotel I visit in town is a 5 star hotel in that you can at most see 5 stars from the hotel. A hotel at the edge would hopefully have many more stars visible
It's really not, since if there aren't any hills you can watch distant things come into view over the horizon. I believe the standard example is ships.
The Romans didn't need to get it from the water, they directly used it as a flavoring called "sapa." Apparently it was one of the first artificial sweeteners and is actually pretty delicious.
No idea if that's true, but I've heard that's also why the absurd (and terrifying) seeming "children eating paint chips containing lead" is an actual occurrence. Because those lead chips taste sweet.
I didn't know about this, so had a quick look. It seems like they didn't deliberately add it, but boiled the grape syrup in lead containers which leached the lead into the sapa. However, copper cookware was more common, so it's likely that lead aqueducts probably caused more lead poisoning than the sapa. (Sapa is the name for the grape must reduction which may or may not contain lead depending on how they made it).
I only have a vague memory from school, but I believe that we were taught it was not only deliberate (the lead made it taste sweet whereas copper reacted with the acids and made it bitter) but that they would sometimes dry it to make a sort of crystalline salt that was basically concentrated lead acetate and sprinkle it on food.
There's evidence that the educated were aware of lead being poisonous back then, but the chances are that most of the population wouldn't have known. Reading some more, it seems like the lead pipes probably weren't a big problem as calcium carbonate would form over most of the lead surface and as the water was flowing, it wouldn't pick up too much lead. The lead containers though would be more of a problem.
Those sociological factors aren't complex, and don't require an explanation of any real depth.
The entire problem is this: Fifty four percent of Americans read below the 6th grade level, which means that the simple majority of Americans don't understand the world they live in and never will.
why is this the case? From what I know, it's a lot tougher to tease out the cause of this malfunction in our society. Do we have an undereducated populace because of poverty? Lack of school funding? (if so, why do we underfund schools? is it because we don't have the money? greed? is there a concerted effort to suppress an educated populace for political reasons?) Is there a cultural reticence built into us that resists scientific thought?
My kneejerk analysis boils down to "it's the economy, stupid" and that a substantial portion of our population lives below the poverty line (which itself isn't defined particularly well and probably misses a bunch of folks who ought to qualify for 'living under distressed economic conditions'). It's tough to care about education when you struggle to keep a roof overhead.
It's the old dream of the information era. We were going to cure all of the worlds ills by fixing the problem of unequal access to information. Surely people would all perform equally, when given equal opportunity?
Not only didn't it work, it made the world a far worse place. I think Occam's razor tells us why: Forty nine percent of people will always be of below average intelligence.
Average intelligence currently seems to mean understanding the world at the 6th grade level. Maybe we can raise that to the 7th grade level with a concentrated effort, but that will also raise the performance of the top fifty percent.
There will always be a bottom half and they will always struggle to understand the world the top half build.
> Forty nine percent of people will always be of below average intelligence....
> There will always be a bottom half and they will always struggle to understand the world the top half build.
Before you spend too much time patting yourself on the back for being so superior, it's important to keep in mind that "intelligence" isn't all it's cracked up to be. "Intelligent" people do a lot of stupid shit, not listen, get deceived, and deceive themselves, etc. Hell, I've even heard "intelligence" describe as effectively a superior ability for post-hoc rationalization.
When you find yourself trying to understand the world by dividing it into dumbasses and "smart people like me," you should stop and remember to count yourself with the idiots.
> Before you spend too much time patting yourself on the back for being so superior... dividing it into dumbasses and "smart people like me,"
I didn't say anything like that, or even adjacent to it. I didn't imply any judgement at all, other than to acknowledge that we're not all born the same.
That said, tall people will always be better at basketball on average than short people. Raising the average height doesn't really change that, and trying to pretend that if everyone were provided with the same opportunities they would achieve the same outcomes in basketball, or in intellectual pursuits, is dishonest and actively harmful to those born at a disadvantage.
> ...and trying to pretend that if everyone were provided with the same opportunities they would achieve the same outcomes in basketball, or in intellectual pursuits, is not only dishonest, it's actively harmful to those born at a disadvantage.
Cultivating an us/them distinction is also actively harmful, more harmful I'd say. But if you can't help yourself, count yourself with them and do your best to avoid condescension.
I can appreciate your perspective, but I also think the populist notion that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" (to paraphrase Asimov) has already done even greater damage to our society.
It must be stopped, and that can't happen if we're pretending that all people being worthy of respect also implies that all opinions are.
He's right though. People have cultural knowledge which can lead to better outcomes than "correct" reasoning even when those cultural beliefs are factually wrong. The scientific approach has blind spots where it hasn't reached, especially regarding sociology which is something long-lived cultures excel at but modern science falls flat. "intelligent" understanding has blind spots where things are too complicated to study so we pretend they don't matter. For example, do you count all religious people in your ignorant group? Even when they're having happier lives than comparable atheists?
Here's a thought. Animals often kill their own unhealthy babies but educated people much less so, and even demand that parents use technology to save them otherwise they're bad uneducated unintelligent people. Are those animals doing it wrong because they're too stupid to use medicine? Or are people doing it wrong? I'd say people have a non-scientific culture of minimizing of death even if it harms long-term evolutionary success of the species.
We're really far off topic here, but I'll bite because I'm bored.
Firstly though, we need to agree on what "good" and "bad" mean, in a moral sense. To me "good" is anything that helps humanity thrive, and bad is when something does the opposite. If you have a different definition, this conversation will be a waste of both our time.
> He's right though.
He is not only wrong, he is dangerously wrong. Reason is mans only natural defense. We were born without tooth and claw or even fur thick enough to survive a winter. We must use our minds to survive in this world, or perish as a species. To reject that isn't just a rejection of our nature, it is a form of suicide for our species.
Are you aware that the vast majority of the humans on this planet would not exist today without science? For example, the Haber-Bosch process allows for something like 90% of the worlds food to be grown. Much of the remaining 10% couldn't exist without genetic manipulation, or at the very least selective breeding. To reject science would be to accept a world where at least 90% of us starved and the remaining 10% led short, violent lives filled mostly with unending misery and toil. I'm deeply opposed to that and consider it "bad."
> The scientific approach has blind spots
Yes, that's how science works. We form hypotheses and test them. If those theories turn out to match the evidence we keep them, if they don't we abandon them. That's the truly great thing about science, science can be wrong, but it can never STAY wrong when done properly.
> Religion, euthanasia, etc...
All of those questions depend on culturally defined norms and taboos that may change from person to person or region to region. As long as a persons cultural, spiritual, or philosophical thinking is still "good" (based on my earlier definition) it can coexist with reason, and it's irrelevant. Science does not demand that you put no other god before it, that's religion.
I object only when another system becomes "bad", and in this context that happens whenever someone decides that their ignorance should be valued more than the science that keeps us all alive. It should not, and there are very good reasons for that.
> bad uneducated unintelligent people
I never said, or implied this, or many of the other things you insinuate here. Stating it yourself, and then arguing against it is a form of logical fallacy called a "strawman argument", and it's not just irrational, it's more than a little rude.
> To me "good" is anything that helps humanity thrive, and bad is when something does the opposite.
I agree with that definition. However, it leads to a trade-off between short term thriving of individuals and long term thriving of humanity. We could pour all our resources into supporting every living person but would cripple our future development. Or we could go the other extreme and violate all the human rights to develop a more resilient long term society. Islam, for example, is very robust for thriving of humanity (no population collapse happening there) but very poor for thriving of all individuals within it (severe penalties for seemingly harmless "crimes", women's rights, etc.).
You don't actually know that, because you keep missing the point. How do you know I'm wrong if you can't seem to grasp what I'm talking about?
I don't think you're as clever as you seem to think you are. Maybe you should consider the possibility that the advice I gave up-thread is literally true in your case, and not just a reminder to take a position of humility.
> We know that proofs and reading are required. They do not.
In the context of you saying this after sharing a link to an article around difficulties at HBCUs, I'm trying to find some charitable way to interpret your statements as something other than horrendously racist. Can you please expound on this, or am I taking this correctly?
You do notice that it is the HBCU student who drags race in ("white male professor teaching at an all women’s HBCU").
Math education in large tracts of the country is not good, more so in areas plagued by rural and urban poverty, but that's no excuse to continue in the same way at college. It's sadly common that incoming students have no clue what a proof is and that mathematics isn't plugging numbers into formulas, but there's no excuse continuing that at college level, especially when it's an elite college.
But the kid who wrote the article disagrees, she demands spoonfeeding. Give me my economics degree, but it mustn't have math in it!
I fear sometimes that sociopaths have inherited the earth.
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