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Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
111–120 of 349 posts
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#112Thank you, a lovely list. 7, 23, 24 were driven by the common unusual political occurrence of fair economic opportunity. These rare times where a balance of power occurs, by special circumstances, between the former autocratic rulers and everyone else. In Britain (7), domestic Royal monopolies were abolished etc creating an economic and legal environment where entrepreneurs would be rewarded. So people started invest…
To be picky, the timescale/locations of #23 is way off: Socrates (Athens= 470–399 BC Plato (Athens) 423-348 BC Aristotles (Athens) 384–322 BC Archimedes (of Syracuse) some 2-3 centuries later 287-212 BC Euclid (of Alexandria) was active in Alexandria around 300-270 BC Hyppocrates (of Kos) 470-360 BC Pytagoras (of Samos) 570–495 BC Thucydides (Athens) 460-400 BC Herodotus (of Halicarnassus) 484-425 BC Aesop (?) 620-56…
Plus, Archimedes not only was from Syracuse (Italy) but flourished under a complete (even if benevolent) monarch.
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#113> Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”
Imagine if it actually was! That'd be pretty funny I think.
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#114I'm thankful that the freak accident of multicellular life happened, possibly once ever, billions of years ago.[1] The near impossibility of that momentous event happening could be The Great Filter that explains the Fermi Paradox.[2] Thanks for being here, fellow multicellular friends.
[1] (Start at 2:15) https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/cellm...
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#115I like this more unusual list of things to be grateful for, as it complements well what one is usually reminded to be grateful for. I'd like a more fundamental point there, though: Gratefulness seems to be primarily a ternary operator: " is grateful to for ." (like "a ? b : c" in C). That second SOMEONE is the one that the being grateful is directed at, as they are responsible for things being the way they are. (Bein…
> That second SOMEONE is the one that the being grateful is directed at, as they are responsible for things being the way they are. (Being grateful to anyone not causally connected to what one is grateful about seems most weird.)
How does one go about (accurately) decomposing causality in a system this complex and poorly understood though?
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#116I’m thankful for yeast. It’s so, so convenient that we have a non-pathogenic bacteria which will eat pretty much any simple sugar, can be found on the surfaces of most fruits, and is essentially effortless to cultivate, which also does a bunch of useful things like leaven bread and make a bunch of delicious short chain fatty acids (both in bread and on their own, like in marmite) and make alcohol (although that one m…
I had this same exact thought the last time i was making bagels. What an absolute miracle it is! And whoever came up with using it to fluff and soften bread through some natural symbiotic reliance of raw nature is just such an incredible step it seems utterly designed from above. Yes, I’m saying maybe a god exists and loves us because they gave us bread.
Benjamin Franklin thought beer was enough proof that there is a God who loves us and wants us to be happy :-)
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#117I'm thankful that the freak accident of multicellular life happened, possibly once ever, billions of years ago.[1] The near impossibility of that momentous event happening could be The Great Filter that explains the Fermi Paradox.[2] Thanks for being here, fellow multicellular friends. [1] (Start at 2:15) https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/cellm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
When we understand that life is an opportunity rather than a given, it really changes our perspective on life.
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#118> That the Earth hasn’t recently been hit by a solar flare as powerful as the 1859 Carrington event Is anyone thinking about what to do? It's only a matter of time before we have another flare 2X or 3X the magnitude of the Carrington event.
If it really would set power lines alight, there isn’t a hell of a lot you can do aside from going off the grid and having a small warehouse full of electrical wiring. Emergency and catastrophe planning has to happen at the national level. I would like to see more leaders (especially these days) come into office with ideas about how to recover from catastrophic events quickly.
> Emergency and catastrophe planning has to happen at the national level. I would like to see more leaders (especially these days) come into office with ideas about how to recover from catastrophic events quickly.
Me too. I'm hoping we'll get lucky and a relatively small-scale catastrophic event will occur, demonstrating to us how ill prepared we are both materially and socially/culturally/cognitively/etc, and that lesson will provide the incentive for us to launch a serious project to get our act cleaned up.
And in the event that no political leaders rise to the occasion, I am hoping that normal civilians realize there is a problem and begin seriously discussing the risks we are running, perhaps eventually leading to some sort of a plan that our leaders do not have the ability to formulate, or perhaps even realize we need.
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#119Most items are speculative, subjective or even historically inaccurate.
Maybe that's why I found this article kind of weird or off-putting. A lot of these things, if they happened or didn't happen, would have meant I wouldn't be alive and thus I wouldn't know to be unhappy about it.
Many things we are traditionally thankful fit the same criteria. I'm thankful for my business partner who I may never have met under different circumstances. Just because something could not have been, doesn't mean you can't be thankful it did.
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#120Thank you, a lovely list. 7, 23, 24 were driven by the common unusual political occurrence of fair economic opportunity. These rare times where a balance of power occurs, by special circumstances, between the former autocratic rulers and everyone else. In Britain (7), domestic Royal monopolies were abolished etc creating an economic and legal environment where entrepreneurs would be rewarded. So people started invest…
Also #23 is mostly based on slavery. It's easier to have smart elite when nobody really works
Slavery was widespread.