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Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

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Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#31

Post by paulcole »

gameman144 wrote: post #30
paulcole wrote: post #14

Don’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.

I'm curious your take about serious climate interventions, i.e. geoengeering. I hear some people with the viewpoint of "we don't need to do anything, the future will be fine" and others, similar to you, who hold more of a "we need to do as much as we can to prevent/correct climate change". I'm curious how these are balanced in your mind. For instance, if we could solve global warming by activating a load of fusion re…

It's a bit more ideological than practical. But there's just not really going to be a pleasant way out of climate change. If people won't stop eating burgers, they're really not going to like what comes next. Although they'll be dead and their kids will probably be dead before the bill comes fully due, so it really doesn't matter anyway.

Honestly, I believe that the effects of climate change are going to be way worse than anyone alive today can begin to imagine.

The way climate change will "fix" itself is through a massive population reduction and adaptation to an (as of today) unimaginable way of life over the course of a few centuries.

People alive today (and at pretty much any time in history) will do whatever they want and rationalize whatever actions they take in whatever way lets them sleep at night.

If there was some magic way to fix climate change that allowed us to keep living the way we are, sure go ahead and do that. It's not like we're going to change anyway.

Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#32

Post by kleer001 »

blazeWayne wrote: post #9

Nothing really matters.

At a large scale that's unarguably true. But that's as such a coarse resolution as to be less than useless. At higher resolutions, the scale of a human life, there's a nearly boundless fabric of meaning and mattering to be had.

Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#33

Post by kleer001 »

"...the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts... It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person."

~ Solzhenitsyn

Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#35

Post by giantg2 »

d--b wrote: post #25
dragonwriter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any election's outcome will be the same whether I vote or not. Tied and one-vote margin elections are not at all unheard of.

Do I really have to make a likeliness calculation?

You could also perform a systems thinking analysis looking at the n-order impacts and game effects of your decision. It might be a larger impact than your single vote.

Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#36

Post by giantg2 »

fairity wrote: post #29
muzani wrote: post #19

Success 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?…

Few people agree with you on this? I doubt it. Most people would agree — they just allow countervailing values drive their actions.

I don't agree with the corruption statement. There is tons of corruption in the US yet it is generally, comparatively rich.

Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#38

Post by stretchwithme »

gerardnico wrote: post #2

Your children don't need good grades to be successful.

Better to learn to explore and build knowledge from the ground up than to repeat it back.

It is still good to know what's already known. But the teacher isn't the source for that. Google is. And there are skills for getting the most out of Google.

Those skills are teachable, as is the fact that Google isn't reality either.

Re: Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

#39

Post by stretchwithme »

dragonwriter wrote: post #23
d--b wrote: post #22

Any election's outcome will be the same whether I vote or not. It can't be truer, but somehow people get really mad at me when I say it.

> Any election's outcome will be the same whether I vote or not. Tied and one-vote margin elections are not at all unheard of.

This is only a concern with electoral systems that deny the losing group representation. Like winner-take-all.

It wouldn't make any difference at all with proportional representation. And PR can even be implemented in the executive branch, as the Swiss have demonstrated.

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