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Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

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671–680 of 946 posts

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#671

1. Everyone is the main character in their own story. This manifest in all sorts of ways - from people not being there when you need them the most, from friends dying off as soon as proximity changes, to how and why get people get promoted in jobs. This isn't necessarily bad, but if you don't know how to navigate this it can be quite painful and confusing. 2. Representation matters. I knew this for a long time, but i…

> Everyone is the main character in their own story

For those with anxiety, one of the best pieces of advice I ever received (that also took me years to internalize!) was the corollary to this: nobody is thinking about you in a critical way, at the level that you are criticizing yourself, because they are their own main character. Which is incredibly freeing, because the anxious person’s assumption that one embarrassing moment will turn into them obsessing about your failure… is absolutely nonsensical, because the only person they are obsessing about is the main character to them, themself.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The better question to ask yourself (you the white guy), is would you join a group [insert som hobby like hiking] composed 100% of Cholitas. If yes, are you sure? if not, why not? *Not singling out Cholitas, but it's a group that may feel "other" to you.

As I stated, I've had the experience of feeling self-conscious in a group where I was the only white person (or one of just a few). That never happened when I was a kid, but it has happened a few times as an adult. With regard to the Cholitas thought experiment, I think my major source of discomfort is that at least one of them would look at me and think to herself "he's a patriarchical colonizer" and feel hostility…

I strongly agree. Trading in the "shared humanity" approach for one where we self segregate and pre-emptively expect and search for discrimination at all moments seems like the opposite of progress.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You might be well-intentioned and surrounded by people who you believe are well-intentioned, but not everyone is, and plenty of the people who talk and act as if they're well-intentioned will turn around and betray those purported intentions when you aren't paying attention. Yeah I totally buy that. >With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ig…

> "talk about race less" (as a way to treat people more equally, and reduce discrimination) seems like a reasonable hypothesis to test. This was the status quo for a very long time. Mentioning people's race was like mentioning people's weight. It didn't work. > I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s. The 2005 study "Are Greg and Emily More Employable T…

I'm not sure the 2005 study tells us much. Our question is which strategy works best for reducing discrimination. To answer that, we'd want to measure the level of discrimination over time to estimate the trend.

Imagine we found an identical study from 1995 that showed that white people received 100% more callbacks at that time, and a study from 1985 that found that white people received 200% more callbacks at that time. And then imagine that when subgroup analysis was done on the 2005 study, it was determined that most of the effect was from older hiring managers who were about to age out of the population. In this hypothetical, the study would strongly validate the strategy being used in the 90s and the 00s.

>This idea that we can have equal opportunity by deliberately avoiding intervention is a proven fallacy.

I didn't claim that. I just want interventions that don't backfire.

For example, how about removing the name from the resume?

With modern technology, it would be easy to conduct interviews remotely over screenshare with a voice changer.

80/20 rule, 20% of the discrimination probably causes 80% of the harm. As you imply, hiring discrimination is one of the most harmful types of discrimination. So anonymized interviews could put a serious dent in racial inequality. As the technology matured, we could hit firms which didn't anonymize interviewees with a punitive tax.

Would certainly be an interesting study, at least. Run it every few years to measure the trend in discrimination, as discussed previously.

>The increase in political tension our culture has seen in the past decade plus is vastly more complex than the most visible catalyst of any given moment.

If political tension is a complex phenomenon, isn't it possible that racial discrimination is also a complex phenomenon, which won't be solved effectively using the social equivalent of a sledgehammer?

>Blaming social progress for the increasing resistance to social progress doesn't make sense.

Imagine a cop responded to criticism by saying: "Blaming crime fighting for the increasing resistance to crime fighting doesn't make sense." Would you find that persuasive?

It's possible to "solve" a problem in a way that superficially looks like progress, but actually makes the underlying issue worse. And if you can find a way to get paid money to do that, you'll never be out of a job. (Trump may not be good for America, but he's good for CBS. NY Times subscriptions exploded in the wake of Trump's election, IIRC.)

>You could just as easily blame fascism or any other activist end of a political blob.

I do in fact blame fascism. Historically speaking, it seems fairly normal for right-wing extremism and left-wing extremism to arise at the same time in the same society. The left-wing extremism is strengthened by the right-wing extremism, and vice versa.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#675

1. Everyone is the main character in their own story. This manifest in all sorts of ways - from people not being there when you need them the most, from friends dying off as soon as proximity changes, to how and why get people get promoted in jobs. This isn't necessarily bad, but if you don't know how to navigate this it can be quite painful and confusing. 2. Representation matters. I knew this for a long time, but i…

2. Hits home for me as I’ve begun to realize the same thing. Not seeing any person of color in an activity makes it’s so I don’t want to be the first.

Sounds like a good enough reason to mandate quotas for everything everywhere. Anything else on your wish list?

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#676
post #631
post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only this, but also the impact having to read something has on enjoyment. There are books like To Kill A Mockingbird that I didn’t care for in high school simply because I had to read it. When I revisited it years later of my own volition, I enjoyed it greatly.

I don’t think this is always true. I enjoyed reading before school forced me to, and while I mildly resented being forced to read something I didn’t particularly want to read, it never made me enjoy reading less. I also read a few books I otherwise would’ve never picked up that ended up very interesting.

I don't think they're saying they disliked reading totally, but that they disliked books they were forced to read. Although, if that happened to be every single book in the syllabus, then sure, someone might mistakenly think they don't actually like reading.

Ultimately, sacrifices get made to try and get mass education working; the current system is barely scalable, so anything even more personalized is pretty much out of the question.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most educators and teachers know that students won't get the classics. The goal is to at least make the students comfortable with the difficult language of the classics, and make them realize that analysis of these books yields deep insights. If they instead taught students easier books in schools, student would never develop the reading skills to tackle the classics, and a much smaller percentage of adults w…

That's also true. To be honest, I don't know what the midpoint should be. For Shakespeare, we watched movie adaptations which made a lot more sense than just reading a somewhat dry play.

For plays, performance is an important part of what they are, so a theater program is also good.

The issue is that performance arts, or the arts in general, usually are the first on the chopping block at schools that are either facing budgetary pressures or need to improve standardized test scores.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#678
post #576
post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sapiens by Harari covers this extensively. So much of human development is our ability to ascribe fictive boundaries and definitions to things. Rules, authorities, myths, money, culture, countries, companies. What are any of them? They're all made up. We could just stop believing in all of them tomorrow.

But it’s all fictive boundaries. Don’t stop at countries and companies -nothing exists until it’s named.

Indeed, except conceptually, there is no actual separation between "things."

See: quantum mechanics.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point 3 also hit me a few months ago during a Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast about Rome. Caesar got back from his conquests and half the senate wanted to punish him for crimes against humanity that he conducted during his wars. However, he also claimed massive amounts of land for Rome. Long story short: he wasn’t punished. And this happened 2000 years ago.

Napoleon wasn't roman. Do you mean a caesar?

Yes. Well spotted. Thanks.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting when people come from a long family line of narcissists (not uncommon) that they often attribute it to a cycle of being raised by a narcissist making you into a narcissist. it seems more likely that there is a genetic/biological basis for this personality trait

or it could be a biological disposition to developing it as a response to the trauma of being raised by a narcissist

I've come to believe that a deep childhood wound (parental divorce, neglect, abuse, or being adopted, etc.) predisposes one to become a narcissist when combined with the message that you are special, different from others, etc.

Steve Jobs, for example. He wasn't as malevolent as Donald Trump, but both have both factors: the childhood trauma + the message that they were special. I have several acquaintances who are narcissists and have both factors as well.

I think that the trauma without the message that you are special and different predisposes someone to become a hyper-achiever, where ambition is a channel for the pain. See: Elon Musk, Tim Ferris, etc.

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