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Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

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Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#121

Post by supernova87a »

There is really something to the idea that despite the daily news and political doomsaying that goes on every day, it's hard for people to remember or celebrate the long progression that we've experienced towards living in the most peaceful, materially prosperous, and positive trajectory time in the history of humanity.

(I think there was a podcast on Hidden Brain about this. Also video like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU).

It's really good to periodically think about how much we benefit from, say, the miracles of air conditioning, available infrastructure and cheap travel beyond your town, clean water and air, medicine, vaccines, public health -- and reset what you're grateful for. And stop making every little transgression of modern life feel like a disastrous setback.

But of course it's very unfashionable to point this out when someone's cause is being neglected, or is in the news and everyone is outraged. Of course when you make such comparisons you get hissed out of a room for being so callous, because anyone's relative suffering is supposed to be treated with utmost respect. And the short, acute, headline making problems are always louder than the long progression of gradual improvement.

But taken in perspective, by intelligent people who can discuss such things, we've really reached the age of 1% problems. (which are being exposed because our huge disastrous human-generated conflicts, etc. are decreased compared to 100 years ago). Health, social issues, etc. are such luxuries to have problems about now (and glad to have them discovered and debated), but remember how wonderful a time we live in. We aren't generally dying of terrible diseases during childhood, etc. or because of world wars. More people are living longer to experience the wonders of humanity than ever before. Although, things like climate change we'd better allow to rise to the top of our list of problems, soon...

Anyway, definitely very thankful for all these things, and all the daily unsung people who make our humanity's progress possible.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#122

Post by notfed »

supernova87a wrote: post #121

There is really something to the idea that despite the daily news and political doomsaying that goes on every day, it's hard for people to remember or celebrate the long progression that we've experienced towards living in the most peaceful, materially prosperous, and positive trajectory time in the history of humanity. (I think there was a podcast on Hidden Brain about this. Also video like this https://www.youtube.…

Related: a TED talk by Steven Pinker about his analysis on whether the world is getting better or worse: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting...

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#123

Post by tejohnso »

arduinomancer wrote: post #106

#5 is actually pretty amazing if you think about it If zero-calorie sweeteners didn't exist I feel like we would view discovering one as a holy grail/miracle drug I bet a ton of obesity has been prevented just due to diet soda Imagine if the same thing existed for carbs

I wonder why #5 singles out aspartame though.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#124

Post by Kranar »

brink wrote: post #53
seba_dos1 wrote: post #37

> meaning that people with a sweet tooth can avoid the large, known harms of sugar with minimal exertion of willpower Aspartame tastes so awful I can't see how that's going to make me thankful.

On top of it tasting bad, it gives me migraines. The only theory I have for why that is is that I'm allergic.

Another more plausible explanation is that it's psychological. It's common among many who believe aspartame is unhealthy that it gives them migraines or headaches, but in a double-blind study, every single person who self-reported adverse reactions to aspartame were unable to do so over the course of the study. On the other hand, those who claimed sensitivity rated very high on various psychological metrics such as perceived stress and anxiety:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4364783/

This is not to say that you don't genuinely feel something and are just making it up, but that it's not a consequence of aspartame and is rooted in an entirely different phenomenon that you've associated with aspartame for one reason or another.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#125

Post by lenkite »

blackbear_ wrote: post #2

I actually wondered why the industrial revolution didn't happen in China, great to see one possible explanation menioned in the article [1]. Does anybody know other theories about this? [1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2017/03/book3.htm

Same reason it didn't happen in the Gupta Empire in India

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#126

Post by bluishgreen »

"That other animals have more cone cells than humans, e.g. birds with four and shrimp with up to 16, and so probably see colors we can’t even conceive of which, yeah, that limitation of our minds is frustrating, but it also hints that there are huge unseen dark continents of qualia lurking out there which someday we might find a way to visit."

This is based on a misunderstanding regarding the rise of qualia. It is processing power and not sensor capacity or at least both together in some combination with processing power doing the heavy lift. Humans have less cones but several OOM more neurons to make sense of what we have. So no - the shrimp doesn't see in spectacular color.

Experimentally proved:

https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2015/12/mantis-shrimp-...

https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1245824

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#127

Post by bckr »

victorcharlie wrote: post #86
dgb23 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I‘m thankful for nerds who make corrections so I can learn some interesting fact.

Actually, yeasts are unicellular fungus. I believe that fungus are the most important life-form in this planet by far . Pretty cool, huh? :)

> unicellular fungus

Belongs under the Eurkaryote heading, no?

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#128

Post by wintermutestwin »

cgriswald wrote: post #110
k8sToGo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this sounds too much like the daily scrum meetings or stand ups where you have to come up with something just so you can say something and, in this case, go to bed. But I only mean this as a joke. I think it is great to have "rituals" that help us look and appreciate more stuff what we have already or where we are and where we came from.

Maintaining sleep hygiene takes precedence to me over essentially anything else and coming up with four things before sounds anxiety-inducing. We do this type of thing before our evening meal, instead. For me, anyway, this is much lower stakes and so there is less anxiety. Which results in it just sort of flowing out—especially after doing it for awhile—but not in an 'autopilot' sort of way.

Part of the point of our bed time ritual is to look for and accumulate "gratefuls" throughout the day. In this way, I am training my pattern recognizing CPU to spot the positives rather than the negatives that it tends to focus on.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#129

Post by uwagar »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #94

I'll take this space to mention two simple life changing gratitude practices that I have habitualized: 1. Every morning, before I allow myself to look at email/news/etc, I think of three things that I am grateful for. 2. Every night at bedtime, my partner and I tell each other three things we are grateful for about each other and one thing that we are grateful for about ourselves. I find that bookending my days with…

i hope ur life gets less boring and more adventurous ;)

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#130

Post by soheil »

I think it's important to be thankful only about stuff that are not descriptive but took some agency to make happen. To keep rehashing that we should be thankful that sun exists or that earth has a magnetic core to shield us against the nasty solar flares, etc. fall in the first category and devalue the idea of thankfulness. Because you wouldn't be here to talk about it otherwise.

So let's show thankfulness for things that took agency to make happen so we learn to do more of those things.

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