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All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

theguardian.com

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Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#311

Post by Bakary »

tylerjwilk00 wrote: post #214
Bakary wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which deity do you pick in that case? There are many of them.

If you strip away the dogma and cultural "decorations" of most religions the foundations are all mostly the same.

That doesn't have much to do with the wager itself as it is concerned with a potentially infinitely negative or positive outcome seen through the lens of belief in an afterlife of some sort.

If we are merely concerned with life in itself, then religious belief is redundant: you can indeed strip its useful aspects through careful study but leave the actual belief aside

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#312

Post by tectonicfury »

state_less wrote: post #308
tectonicfury wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pascal is throwing light and expounding upon a weakness found in (most) people, that of depending on distractions to prevent themselves from dwelling on thoughts which remind them of their mortal nature. I didn't read his works enough, none apart from the above quote in fact, to comment on whether or not he recommends acknowledging our inner thoughts and contemplating on them. As for me, I feel real and lasting relie…

I feel I’m already in paradise, and I didn’t have die to get here.

You have to die one day in your paradise, and the Paradise I am talking about, you don't die after entering it.

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#313

Post by tharkun__ »

mobilemidget wrote: post #241
hilbert42 wrote: post #235

"Modern humans spend virtually no time on "inward-directed thought", and not solely because we're too busy: in one US survey, 95% of adults said they'd found time for a leisure activity in the previous 24 hours, but 83% said they'd spent zero time just thinking." I think Pascal was correct because at least those people I know well enough to discuss such matters with tell me they don't spend much time thinking or cont…

I always find this percentages puzzling. I reckon people busy thinking are too busy, or simply never get requested to fill in surveys about how they spend their idle CPU brain time. Thinking is the last remaining freedom, as long as you don't say all the things you think of out loud. :)

My mom really liked this song. She grew up in East Germany until the fled.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Gedanken_sind_frei

Also check out the author and what other things he wrote.

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#314

Post by jhedwards »

I really liked Konrad Lorenz's explanation of this. He said that every innate ability to learn has a corresponding innate "teaching mechanism".

For example, an animal like a duck won't necessarily reason "hmm, is this a safe spot? Maybe I should find an area with more protection from [predator]", instead it will have an innate anxiety that it feels when it is in an unsafe place, and that anxiety will drive it to find a different spot.

This was really an a-ha moment for me. Where I previously thought that anxiety and "depression" (not clinical depression) were mysterious unexplainable side-effects of evolution, now I see that they are probably innate mechanisms that spur us to go out, learn more, find opportunity, exercise, meet people etc. Our bodies know when we are stagnating before our minds do.

The fact that we can override those innate mechanisms and sit alone in a quiet, empty room at all is what is really impressive.

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#315

Post by mickof »

"All problems"? I suppose you could argue if everyone suddenly became aware of the causes of problems (such as world hunger, climate change, wealth inequality, wars, propaganda, etc.) then we could just easily solve them, by just not doing the thing. But this is such a naive and childish concept, the world is doomed in a much more permanent, irreversible way. If everyone were to think hard about the world, they would still come to vastly different, diametrically opposed conclusions. Pascal believed that everyone would believe in (his particular version of) god if people only sat alone in a room for once and thought about it.

He also thought that we ought to believe in (his particular version of) god since we have everything to gain and nothing to loose. The logical counter argument of which particular god we are supposed to chose to worship on the off chance they are the real thing, is not something Pascal even could contemplate rationally about:

> As far as Pascal is concerned, the demise of the pagan religions of antiquity speaks for itself. Those pagan religions which still exist in the New World, in India, and in Africa are not even worth a second glance. They are obviously the work of superstition and ignorance and have nothing in them which might interest 'les gens habiles' ('clever men')

So yes, indeed you could solve all problems if you just label everyone opposed to your views as subhumans, conquered and culturally/religiously cleansed them from the earth.

Just so people understand where this guy is coming from.

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#316

Post by MaxBarraclough »

gambiting wrote: post #246
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason It encourages and prominently displays good quality comments, and discourages and buries poor quality comments. It's not a perfect system as a lot of people vote based on whether they happen to agree rather than based on a comment's quality, but it's much better than nothing.

The same effect would be achieved without showing the numbers though. That's where the addiction comes in.

There's still value in knowing the scores though. When it works, it encourages better conversation, and this effect might be weakened if you couldn't see your comments' scores.

Slashdot's approach is to have different kinds of upvote (Insightful, Funny, etc) and different kinds of downvote (Off-topic, Flamebait, etc), and scores are clamped, iirc the lowest value is -1 and the highest is +5.

https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#317

Post by intrasight »

gambiting wrote: post #237
wpietri wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How helpful to have a person who knows nothing about my situation police my behaviors because of a vague congruence and an apparent desire to score internet points. No, for the purposes of what I'm doing, HN was not included in that. From my perspective, HN isn't really designed for addiction in the same way. No personalized, UAM-optimized algorithmic feed, no infinite river of small content bites, no rich mechanisms…

"From my perspective, HN isn't really designed for addiction in the same way." I mean, it's fine that you feel this way, and you are probably correct - it wasn't designed for it. But I suspect for a lot of us , me included, it serves that exact purpose. I post so that strangers on the internet read it and give me likes. I compulsively check my comments section on my account to see how many upvotes my comments have. E…

HN is for me in a sense the "front page" of the internet. I'll call it the thinking persons social media. Social? Check. We are here interacting. Media? Check. It's HN's raison d'être. Additive? Check. I check my up-vote score several times a day.

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#319

Post by wrycoder »

raziel2p wrote: post #250
INTPenis wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their whole model is built around getting people's attention by making them addicted to notifications. If you disable the notifications, that's good for you. But you're a small exceptional minority. HN afaik has no such feature at all.

How did you know that XorNot replied to your previous comment? Notifications, addictive design and gamification are really bad practices that we should try to avoid - but the underlying drug of social media is that someone noticed and reacted to your content, and HN provides that just like Facebook or Twitter.

You check the Threads link in the HN header.

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#320

Post by birdsbirdsbirds »

Aeolun wrote: post #253
birdsbirdsbirds wrote: post #236

Where can I apply for that room? For virtually everybody, that quiet room is not a given, but has to be acquired and maintained. How can you sit in that room and give yourself to silence if you know deep down that the silence is a temporary illusion? You have to leave that room and either defend your wealth or acquire the means to be able to return. Additionally, the experiment doesn't measure what it wants to measur…

> Sitting in silence for somebody else is not the same as sitting in silence. I don’t see the difference? If some researcher asks me between sitting in silenceand getting an electric shock, I know what I’d pick.

We know it, too: According the the research, it's the electric shock.

The difference is the alignment with your desires. If somebody else tells you to sit in silence then it is most likely not the activity you would choose on your own. So you have an inner conflict which you have to handle in one way or another. Distracting yourself with some pain is an option.

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