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You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#221

Post by jasode »

keiferski wrote: post #168
y04nn wrote: post #25

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…

This is pretty trite if you stop to think about it. “Everything in your life that you experience has an effect on your experience of life.” We all exist in the world, not apart from it, and no amount of exclusion or creation of “sterile spaces” will change that.

>We all exist in the world, not apart from it, and no amount of exclusion or creation of “sterile spaces” will change that.

The surrounding reality in the world doesn't change but the gp was talking about deliberate curation of that reality.

Maybe another example using advertising to help highlight the difference:

- block ads during web surfing with PiHole and uBlock. "I am more meticulous when choosing what I do and don't do, there is no going back.

- no amount of blocking ads will change the fact that ads exist in the world Yes, you're correct that "ads still exist" but browsing the web without it is still a nicer experience.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#222

Post by blackoil »

somenameforme wrote: post #140
blackoil wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These tribes aren't isolated in true. Over 1000s of years, they have interacted with world outside and formed a generational wisdom and values. If 100 years back British/French came and enslaved some members, the behavior is expected.

No true Scotsman, eh? There's no reason to think these groups have had any contact with the outside world, beyond the fact that at some point they obviously diverged from whatever common ancestor we all share. Both are extremely small groups living in similarly extremely isolated locations - Sentinelese in an isolated island, Nukak deep in the Amazonian interior, far from rivers. And the Nukak's population has been d…

I am not a historian. Andaman and Nicobar (neighbor of Sentinelese) is occupied / use as naval base by outsiders for >1000 years. None of the Cholas, Europeans, Japan ever contacted/impacted them seems highly unlikely.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#223

Post by throwawaylolx »

Not really buying it. I mostly liked the same type of books all my life. I read a lot out of my comfort zone and I never particularly enjoyed it, nor do I think they impacted me much. I read what I am, not the other way. Maybe others are more influenceable.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#225

Post by lotsofpulp »

verisimi wrote: post #116
sublinear wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will. Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)

Lots of answers about free will. My criticism is that they all seem to make the same error, in treating the existence of free will as some sort of binary decision. My view is that the more one's model is coherent with the underlying reality, the more options are available to the individual. The greater the selection, the more free will you have. Eg, if someone pulls a gun on you, you may think you have no free will.…

> Eg, if someone pulls a gun on you, you may think you have no free will. However, if you have a gun of your own, you have a different set of options. Similarly, if you are a trained martial artist or hostage negotiator, you will evaluate your options differently - you have more options.

In movies. In real life, 99% of the time if someone pulls a gun on you in close range with the intent of harming you before you have your gun pointing at them, then you are going to be harmed and your martial arts or gun is going to be useless.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#226

Post by vasco »

Terr_ wrote: post #184
vasco wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's easy to make a strong argument when it's also woefully incomplete. :P If all advertising were just abstract economic information that a service or product existed with certain features at a certain price-point, then we're left with a whole bunch of inexplicable mysteries , including-but-not-limited-to: * Why would there be some expensive messages that lack any of that economic information, such as those which sh…

You can answer all the questions with the same answer (quoted from my comment above):

> Advertising exists (..) for other people to know what you can do for them in exchange for something.

Your questions are just requiring more sophisticated answers that will all boil down to that. What you say is "unnecessary funny mascots or catchy music" is brand awareness which is still "letting other people know I exist and I can sell them stuff - I hope they look me up later or remember me when they are at the shop". The others are similar. One might have distaste for the manipulation but then your problem is with people, not advertising. A slimey sales guy does as much or more manipulation without needing to buy ads.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#227

Post by vijucat »

This is why I don't read.

Try writing a poem. Mine were so obviously regurgitations of past material consumed that I realized that to output anything original, I had to develop an individuality by starving the creative neurons, so to speak.

Of course, this is only restricted to fields where one would like to produce novel output. You're free to read academic papers, etc; But if you want to write original sci-fi, start by not reading sci-fi.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#228

Post by air7 »

sublinear wrote: post #39
y04nn wrote: post #25

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 don't think the blog post necessarily supports this view. You still have your free will. Your past experiences also teach you what to ignore. You are free to do that to my comment. :)

I don't know to reconcile the idea that Free Will as a concept obviously cannot exist (because the omnipresent Laws of Physics govern the movement of the particles inside my skull as they do all other particles), with the fact that it just feels so real...

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#229

Post by graycat »

jll29 wrote: post #181
graycat wrote: post #82

Common current computing can greatly ease the effort to "remember" what have read, written, thought, learned, etc. E.g., to help "remember" I have a general purpose file that I read/write with my favorite text editor and with some surprising statistics: Date started: September 2nd, 2005 Number of entries: 8412 Number of lines: 60,436 Number of bytes: 4,736,380 Really simple. Works really well. A little laptop compute…

Plain text is the most durable medium for knowledge management. Let everyone else commit knowledge suicide by PowerPoint, SharePoint and such.

I agree. As I explained to my sister in law, I try to stay with just plain text. Pushed to something else has me tempted to scream, say loudly enough to blow down trees for a radius of 20 miles.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#230

Post by fransje26 »

affgrff2 wrote: post #87
somenameforme wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This thought experiment is deeply flawed as it assumes that what you propose is possible and the outcome would be as you suggest. I am not convinced that people can bootstrap themselves like this and that language itself does not contain views, values and perspectives.

> that language itself does not contain views, values and perspectives.

Language itself does, in fact, very much contain views, values and perspectives. As an example, there are population groups that do not have a word for the color blue, and that cannot, in consequence, distinguish between green and blue objects. [0] [1] And that's an example that has been noticed throughout the world.

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-didn-t-even-see-the-colo...

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2023/how-blue-and-green-appeared-langua...

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