Ask HN: What do you believe that most people don't?

Believe is the death of intelligence

It's 2018. We are all believing many many things. Doesn't make you wrong though.

I strongly agree with this. It irks me that doctors often prescribe drugs first without seeking to find the root cause of a problem. But I guess such is the culture these days. People want a quick fix without being told to change their lifestyles.

That the majority of high school seniors would benefit more from trade school, apprenticeship, and small business entrepreneurship programs than four additional years of formal classroom education.

I may be preaching to the choir here (because this is largely a tech audience) but I don't buy into the stereotype that gamers play videogames (video games?) because of laziness or sloth or some other unfairly negative characteristic misattributed to them.

I saw a post on Reddit where a group of gamers had recreated King's Landing, the main city from Game of Thrones, in Minecraft. The entire project looked like it took years to complete. It was something of an architectural marvel and a sight to behold.

The reason I bring that up specifically was because it was not the work of a lazy and apathetic group of people. I would imagine the entire project took more hours than I spent studying for much of my undergraduate degree. Not to mention the collaboration involved. The entire project was a collective team effort towards a goal that the group deemed meaningful. I have seen multiple projects of this scale on Minecraft. If the people involved were lazy and slothful, where would they muster up the energy to work on such an endeavor? A project like this involves a certain level of planning and discipline to see to completion.

I have felt the same way about competitive games like Starcraft in that I'm amazed at how much effort people put forth to obtain proficiency and competency. There are thousands of hours of YouTube videos online dissecting every aspect of that game, not unlike the way a football quarterback might analyze game film. Again, there is nothing particularly lazy about this. I see it no differently than I would see a chess player studying old chess matches and strategies to improve their skill.

My preliminary thoughts are that video games offer a fair simulation of perfect competition in a world that is otherwise devoid of fairness. Reality is messy. Much of it, maybe most of it, depends on where you started out economically, who your parents were, and what kind of people were around you while you grew up. It's easy to fall into patterns of thought that resemble a "Why Me?" view of the world. I suspect a lot of gamers fall under this umbrella. I'm not making a moral judgement here. Instead, the way I see it is: If the real world has been disappointing to you for whatever reason, why wouldn't you seek out a more "perfect" world in a simulation? Especially when the simulation offers you what you crave in the real world: status, competency, hierarchy, friendship, community, etc. All of those can be found in video games. To me, many of them resemble a sort of perfect and fair world where one lives and dies by their own merits. I see the appeal of disappearing into one of these.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this. I was thinking about this recently and I am still hashing out my thoughts.