151–160 of 466 posts
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Unless they grew up in a culture of oral history, in which case they may know a great many things.
i don't mean to alarm you, but i think you're failing the literacy test
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"Sure, we're trying to hack your brain to enrich ourselves at your expense, but it's traditional. "
Without advertising in the world, it'd be a much poorer place. Advertising exists for more than a thousand years and it's the only way for other people to know what you can do for them in exchange for something.
The short version is this: there’s nothing inherent about the format of a book that makes it ideal for learning. It is mostly a historical consequence of the fact that scratching symbols onto stone or paper, then replicating that paper/stone is easier to develop than recording and playing back audio or video. Human beings spent thousands of years using languages that were purely spoken ones, and writing is a fairly recent thing historically speaking.
If somehow it became possible to record and play back spoken language thousands of years ago, writing might have never become a widespread thing at all. Even today, speech is how the vast majority of the world uses language. Let’s not forget how influential the book form has been on thought, from the Bible to the Quran, etc.
And so if you brush away the mystique and legacy of books and think about what an ideal learning format would be, I think it would be quite different from a book. Probably it would incorporate audiovisuals, spaced repetition, and some form of storytelling.
All of this is about reading for information, not for pleasure. But I don’t primarily read fiction for information in the first place.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20940944, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319599, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38095507, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39521964
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I'd challenge this with a thought experiment. Imagine we put a group of toddlers on an island and somehow give them knowledge of language (and enough sustenance to survive), but absolutely 0 external input otherwise. These people, as they grow, would gradually develop their own views, values, and perspectives. Do the exact same thing on another island and you'd get entirely different results! One can see this very th…
You're rolling a die and claiming the result was dictated by the die. All outcomes are probabilistic. Though there's a shocking amount of convergent evolution.
Humans, relatively to most animals, also have an extremely slow generational time, which I think also further emphasizes this divergence. If we assume a low end generational time of just 20 years, even that is as few 2,500 generations, hardly a blink in time on a normal evolutionary scale.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder...
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You can’t choose what you will think about? How do you get through the day? Are you just frequently blindsided by random non-sequiturs that derail you for hours? I routinely chose things to think about or things to concentrate on. It’s not like all thoughts leap into my mind fully formed either. Hell, I edited this message before hitting reply.
Choosing is not free will. You choose based on your past experience. If you know doing A is better than B, you didn’t choose A, it’s just that your brain already knows that A is the best option based on past experience or knowledge or beliefs. Even if you choose the seemingly "worst" option B, it’s just that you know that new experiences can be rewarding so your brain is ok to try it. And there is the extreme example…
Typing out such a long rambling reply was itself a choice.
Don't forget that you are the result of all the past sensory interactions that you experienced in your whole life, people you interacted with, books you read, advertisements, songs, news headlines, etc. Even if you think you don't remember them, at one point in your life it was processed by your brain and may have changed some posterior decisions you made, thus making you what you are now. Since I realized this, I am…
I'd challenge this with a thought experiment. Imagine we put a group of toddlers on an island and somehow give them knowledge of language (and enough sustenance to survive), but absolutely 0 external input otherwise. These people, as they grow, would gradually develop their own views, values, and perspectives. Do the exact same thing on another island and you'd get entirely different results! One can see this very th…
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This reads like a scene from Silicon Valley. Good for you my man, but what does that have to do with being shaped by one’s experiences?
The TL;DR would be that you can regulate-manage how, how much, or if you are shaped by an experience. And understanding this and factors that help or factors that may make you more prone or fragile, make it more difficult to regulate, is valuable knowledge as well - such as if you're high in conscientiousness and/or negative emotion ["neuroticism"] - and further knowing if that's the case it usually merely means it w…
There is sure an inate part and I don't intend to redo a nature vs nurture debate, but you still need an environment even to express your nature, so I'm not sure what you are really getting at.
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My Diogenes answer would be to walk across the room and slap you: “if I didn’t chose to do it you cannot be angry at me.” That’s tongue and cheek sure, but the point I feel stands. Free will is certainly constrained, and our material and biological conditions do matter - there’s no amount I can will to make myself fly, but they are not necessarily as rigid of constraints as many would have you believe. We can overcom…
> We can overcome our biology, our predilections, and many of our shortcomings. We have to consciously choose to do so though. Hmm, no we can't. And the few people who seemingly can do that, it's because their biology/environment allowed that. So kind of circling back to determinism. Free will is a myth that's used to lock people up. If you slap someone in the face, we'll lock you up somewhere because we don't know i…
If someone can't "decide" to slap their neighbor in the face and is determined to do that, why can't the same reasoning be applied to society? Society didn't freely choose to lock someone up, it was determined to do so.
Reminds me of an old Arab tale (paraphrased, from memory, translated): Once upon a time a man wanted to be handed the title of a poet, so he went to the king of poets at his time, and asked him to give him the title of a poet. The king of poets asked the man, "Do you memorize tens of thousands of the best poetry?", the man said "I do not", the king of poems asked of him: "go memorize them then come back to me". The m…