Humans aren't nearly as intelligent as they've come to believe themselves to be.
- PROT
Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?
11–20 of 52 posts
Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?
#12Nothing really matters.
My corollary is: Nothing matters unless we make it matter. The only place we can find meaning is if we create it. I call this the weird optimism of nihilism.
Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?
#13Humans aren't nearly as intelligent as they've come to believe themselves to be. - PROT
I've recently been making a study of misinformation and am forced to agree. The more I dig into how we as humans process and validate information the more I realize how bad we are at it. Myself included. As I've attempted to create formal methods for validating information I've had my confidence in my own rationality severely shaken.
Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?
#14Don’t have biological kids. Don’t eat meat. Don’t fly in planes. Don’t drive. Live in the smallest home you can in a dense city. Take action politically.
This is how you should live your life if you are worried/care about climate change.
Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?
#15Stop shaming kids for screen time and video games.
Related: video games have positive mental health benefits.[2]
As a parent, nothing seems to create more issues than screen time. Ive seen other parents get fairly harsh with extreme limits with their kids screen time consumption. It’s like abstinence education for sex: it just doesn’t work and ultimately backfires. Indeed research has shown kids have to get pretty extreme in their screentime usage for it to be harmful [1]
Better to let kids have screen time and teach them safe ways to use it and work with them to moderate their usage. It just so happens this is what treatment for “video game addiction” does - teaches moderation of the activity not abstinence.
1 - https://thenextweb.com/news/screen-time-doesnt-harm-kids-but...
2. - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0026...
Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?
#16Humans aren't nearly as intelligent as they've come to believe themselves to be. - PROT
We have obvious needs that are biologically embedded through the forces of evolution. Tracing back from that, actions in most situations, and pitfalls, are predictable.
Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?
#17Don’t have biological kids. Don’t eat meat. Don’t fly in planes. Don’t drive. Live in the smallest home you can in a dense city. Take action politically. This is how you should live your life if you are worried/care about climate change.
All of those were needed to get us to the point we are at now, where we can "solve" climate change but don't have the collective political will yet to do it.
What if we were stuck in an 1800's london type environment, just reproducing and burning stuff. Environment would be completely rekt.
Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?
#18The only true/intelligent thing Margaret Thatcher ever said was that there is no such thing as society, only individuals.
> I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?
#19Success is not the amount of stuff you have. It's about being content.
Capitalist culture is convinced that greed and desire and impatience is good, because it leads to more stuff being created and bought, and from some arbitrary standard, this "economy" is the golden standard of success.
And yet suicide rates and loneliness go up in these places, while family values go down. What are you really working so hard for?
Poverty is a problem, but most poor places are poor because of corruption. And corruption happens because some people think they need 8 cars or whatever to be content. And the reason they're not content is because they think contentment leads to complacency and poverty.
Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?
#20Nothing really matters.
My corollary is: Nothing matters unless we make it matter. The only place we can find meaning is if we create it. I call this the weird optimism of nihilism.
I'd say the world is a sandbox and we are all creators. Everyone can easily manipulate the world around them. Such is the sandbox.
But the cost is that the easier it is to manipulate worlds, the more temporal it is. Some talk about climate change and the extinction of humans and such. But IMO it doesn't really matter. Better civilizations have perished out there, millions of years ago.